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Old 14-03-07, 11:01 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 17th, '07


































"It was just a complete, damn sellout of The Band - its reputation, its music; just as much disrespect as you could pour on Richard and Rick's tombstones." – Levon Helm


"As a nation, we’ve lost something that’s very hard to get back, which is the benefit of the doubt. It will be years before we restore our reputation for veracity, and the only way to do that is to reveal more about the sensitive information that underlies our policies." – Ashton B. Carter


"I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong." – Thomas Edison


"I gradually became obsessed." – Li Yanlin


"Viacom is so ticked off at YouTube. It’s just so obvious." – Nick Nocera


"If it's Un-American and "terroristic" to share files, just call me Alsama Bin Downloaden." – Dr. Avery


"I think the people who can’t afford movies deserve to be entertained just like more privileged people." – aXXo
































Wi-Fried

The DC power supply to my router conked out early one evening this week. A unique little item (5v-2 amps) that Linksys says they no longer carry (!) and for which tech "support" dryly recommends I substitute a universal unit (they're awfully helpful over there). So it was back to dial-up for me.

Later that same night the router itself fried because of that universal unit (go Linksys tech support!) although the router may have cooked the original power supply to begin with, I might never know, but I was now sol as it were and it was time for a new one.

The next morning when I couldn't get it locally I crawled over to Newegg and ordered a WRT54G*L*, which is basically the clone of my four year old original. Because new 54Gs from Linksys are not up to the standards they set with the first units, containing less memory, cheaper chips and dicey firmware that can't be flashed w/opensource, they made the new L model to satisfy discriminating users like moi. It comes with all the original memory, Linux software and is easily loaded with the good stuff.

The delivery guy knocks the next day, just 24 hours after I ordered it and with free shipping no less so ok UPS/Newegg! Installing it was simple and the cabled PCs lit up immediately but the wireless part was trickier, at least getting it going securely like it was before. It won’t take my last config file but I’ll get it running. I’m motivated.

Wireless really is the way to go. It’s changed the Internet for me. The big stranded boxes still do their things; stream music, serve the privatenets like Waste & Alliance and the open P2Ps like BT and Soulseek, and handle the important background stuff, but now I access the net from my living room couch, just like watching TV or reading a book, with a notebook resting comfortably on my lap.

Actually it's more like whittling or knitting in that I can be with other people, participate socially, talk, hang out and still do all my " 'netting." That's a big difference compared to when I was doing the stereotypical anti-social geek thing - removed to another room, chained to a desk, planted in front of a big monitor (not that there was anything wrong with that ).

Well, maybe there was a little. I know this Linksys and a Thinkpad have changed things for the better.
















Enjoy,

Jack

















March 17th, 2007






Viacom Sues YouTube Over Copyrights
Seth Sutel

MTV owner Viacom Inc. sued the popular video-sharing site YouTube and its corporate parent, Google Inc., on Tuesday, seeking more than $1 billion in damages on claims of widespread copyright infringement.

Viacom claims that YouTube has displayed more than 160,000 unauthorized video clips from its cable networks, which also include Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, marks a sharp escalation of long-simmering tensions between Viacom and YouTube and represents the biggest confrontation to date between a major media company and the hugely popular video-sharing site, which Google bought in November for $1.76 billion.

YouTube's soaring popularity has been a cause of fascination but also fear among the owners of traditional media outlets, who worry that YouTube's displaying of clips from their programs -- without compensation -- will lure away viewers and ad dollars from cable and broadcast TV.

Viacom is especially at risk because much of its programming is aimed at younger audiences who also are heavy Internet users. Your reaction?

Last month Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips after several months of talks between the companies broke down.

YouTube said at the time that it would comply with the request and said it cooperates with all copyright holders to remove programming as soon as they're notified.

In a statement, Viacom lashed out at YouTube's business practices, saying it has "built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google."

Viacom said YouTube's business model, "which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

Viacom said YouTube has avoided taking the initiative to curtail copyright infringement on its site, instead shifting the burden and costs of monitoring the video-sharing site for unauthorized clips onto the "victims of its infringement."

A representative for Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other media companies have also clashed with YouTube over copyrights, but some, including CBS Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, have reached deals with the video-sharing site to license their material. CBS Corp. used to be part of Viacom but has since split off into a separate company.

Universal Music Group, a unit of France's Vivendi SA, had threatened to sue YouTube, saying it was a hub for pirated music videos, but later reached a licensing deal with the company.

In addition to damages, Viacom is also seeking an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from using its clips.

Google shares dropped $4.82, or 1.1 percent, to $449.93 in Tuesday morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Viacom's Class B shares rose 43 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $40 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...p1=MEWell_Pos5





CBS in Ad-Backed Deal With YouTube for Basketball
Paul Thomasch

CBS Corp. has reached a deal with YouTube to show highlights, press conferences and other content from the NCAA basketball tournament on the video-sharing site, the broadcaster said on Thursday.

Unlike much of the video on YouTube, however, the CBS basketball clips will be sponsored by advertising from General Motors Corp.'s Pontiac.

The advertising deal, terms of which were not released, is part of a broader CBS strategy to receive payment for its content and shows, something it has become increasingly vocal about in recent weeks.

The CBS agreement with Google Inc.'s YouTube is also notable in light of the $1 billion lawsuit filed against the video-sharing site this week.

The suit by Viacom Inc. accuses Google and YouTube of "massive intentional copyright infringement." Up until a year ago, CBS and Viacom were part of the same company.

CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith declined to comment on the Viacom lawsuit.

Smith also declined to speak about CBS' discussions for a broader distribution and advertising deal with Google and YouTube. Recent press reports have said those discussions have stalled.

But Smith, in an interview, said the CBS deal with YouTube for the NCAA basketball content fits its strategy of monetizing its shows and broadcast material.

"From our perspective, we absolutely want to experiment and make sure we do things with as many online platforms as we can, but we need to get paid for our content," he said. "Not only do we need to get paid for our content, we need to learn about our community."

He added that a "naive move" would have been for CBS to bypass YouTube and build its own site "and have three people show up to enjoy some incredibly great content."

Instead, CBS and Pontiac reached the deal with YouTube under which game clips will be uploaded to the site in nearly real time. Users will be able to comment on the clips, rate them, recommend them and post their own video responses.

The YouTube channel will also include links to other CBS and NCAA sites.

While Smith did not disclose terms of the deal, he said: "All our partners get everything out of this deal."

He also said a record number of users has registered to watch the full basketball games live online through the CBS Webcast (http://www.ncaasports.com/mmod). Last year, CBS' online broadcasts marked one of the biggest Internet video events.

"We found a parade and jumped in front of it," Smith said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031501234.html





Google Confident Digital Liability Law Protects It
Eric Auchard

Google Inc. is confident its popular video-sharing site YouTube and other Web services Google offers have strong legal protections under current copyright law, company attorneys said on Tuesday.

Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. ended six months of thinly veiled threats of legal action against YouTube earlier on Tuesday with a $1 billion lawsuit that accuses Google and YouTube of "massive intentional copyright infringement."

But Google and YouTube lawyers said their actions are squarely within the protections offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 and they were prepared to defend the company aggressively.

The DMCA has served as the legal standard defining U.S. copyright law in the digital age. It limits liability for firms that act quickly to block access to pirated materials once they are notified by copyright holders of specific infringement.

"Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or... bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online ... the 'safe harbor' we need in order to be able to do hosting online," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property.

"We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis for operating," Macgillivray told Reuters in an interview.

Google's move to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in early October was preceded by a series of threats and at least one federal lawsuit filed against YouTube.

YouTube was sued in July 2006 by Los Angeles News Service operator Robert Tur for allowing YouTube users to upload and view his famous footage of trucker Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

In September, Doug Morris, chief executive of Universal Music Group, the world's biggest record company, accused YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace social network site of being "copyright infringers' at a Wall Street conference.

David Drummond, the executive who spearheaded Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube last November, serves as both its head of business development and chief legal officer.

Responding to Viacom's suit, which also seeks an injunction that could lead to a possible shutdown of YouTube, Macgillivray said Google had done its homework.

"This is an area of law where there are a bunch of really clear precedents, so Amazon and eBay have both been found to qualify for the safe harbor and there are a whole bunch more," Macgillivray said.

"We will continue to innovate and continue to host material for people, without being distracted by this suit."

The attorney noted Google previously won dismissal of a lawsuit involving copyright issues filed by Nevada attorney Blake Field. The judge used 'safe harbor" protections, among a series of grounds, in granting summary judgment to Google.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...16411620070314





American Studios' Secret Plan to Lock Down European TV Devices

EFF Exposes Standards Jeopardizing Innovation and Consumer Rights
Press Release

An international consortium of television and technology companies is devising draconian anti-consumer restrictions for the next generation of TVs in Europe and beyond, at the behest of American entertainment giants.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the only public interest group to have gained entrance into the secretive meetings of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), a group that creates the television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Asia and Africa. In a report released today, EFF shows how U.S. movie and television companies have convinced DVB to create new technical specifications that would build digital rights management technologies into televisions. These specifications are likely to take away consumers' rights, which will subsequently be sold back to them piecemeal -- so entertainment fans will have to pay again and again for legitimate uses of lawfully acquired digital television content.

"DVB is abetting a massive power grab by the content industry, and many of the world's largest technology companies are simply watching," said Ren Bucholz, EFF Policy Coordinator, Americas. "This regime was concocted without input from consumer rights organizations or public interest groups, and it shows."

Despite recent record profits, American movie and television studios insist that new technologies could ruin their industry. In past battles against innovation, these same studios sued to block the sale of the VCR and the first mass-marketed digital video recorder in the U.S. Having failed in those efforts, they have now turned to creating technical standards that, when backed by law, are likely to restrict consumers' existing rights and threaten the future of technological innovation.

With DVB, the plan begun by entertainment companies in the U.S. has now gone global. EFF's report is aimed at alerting European consumer groups and consumers about the dangers posed by the proposed standards and providing informational resources for European regulators.

"DVB members' active indifference, even hostility, to user rights is shameful," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. "When American studios ask for regulatory support for restrictions pushed through the DVB Project, public officials must stand up for consumer rights, sustain competition and innovation, and tell Hollywood to back off."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_03.php#005156





DSL Gateways Will Mark Video to Catch Pirates
Peter Sayer

Another role could soon be added to the many already performed by home gateway devices: identifying video pirates.

Home gateway manufacturer Thomson SA plans to incorporate video watermarking technology, which it also developed, into future set- top boxes and other video devices. The watermarks, unique to each device, will make it possible for investigators to identify the source of pirated videos.

By letting consumers know the watermarks are there, even if they can't see them, Thomson hopes to discourage piracy without putting up obstacles to activities widely considered fair use, such as copying video for use on another device in the home or while traveling to work.

"The idea is to slow down piracy without limiting the use of the consumer. They should not be upset about this unless they are widely redistributing content," said Pascal Marie, responsible for strategic marketing at the company's content security division.

Thomson developed the technology, NexGuard, to identify individual copies of the films distributed digitally to cinemas or on DVD as preview copies for reviewers and awards juries. In the past, pirated copies of films available over the Internet or in street markets have been traced back to such sources.

Now, the availability of high-definition video-on-demand services is multiplying the points at which high-quality video can be pirated.

Thomson's plan is to watermark video with a unique code before it leaves the home gateway or set-top box (STB). To do that, it is working with semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics to incorporate NexGuard into digital video chips. STMicro has already incorporated NexGuard into its 7100 series of chips for STBs. NexGuard can mark video encoded in MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and VC-1 formats.

At Cebit in Hanover, Germany, this week, Thomson is demonstrating how the chips might be used, and at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas next month, it will show prototype STBs incorporating the technology.

Also next month, the company will unveil system capable of directly watermarking content produced with Windows Media Video 9 codecs, Marie said. "We are able to process directly this format without the need to decode it, watermark it and re-encode it."

Thomson sells its gateways and STBs to network operators -- one of its biggest customers is Orange, the Internet access subsidiary of France Telecom, which packages the devices as the LiveBox, an all-in-one terminal for telephony, television, Wi-Fi and Internet access.

Thomson will apply the watermarking at two levels, Marie said. One watermark will identify the network operator distributing the content, while a second, carrying 40 bits of information, will identify the individual device, he said.

The watermarks are robust, Marie said. Films projected digitally and captured by a camcorder can still be traced, although "we need a longer period of detection to identify it," he said. Clips recorded directly from an STB, re-encoded at a lower bit rate and then posted to an online video sharing service might be identifiable after just a few seconds, he said.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1722391352





Sony's Grouper Picks On Searchles TV
pradeepe

"Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine, a cease and desist letter over Grouper videos being streamed through Searchles TV, "the Internet's first video player that empowers users to mashup videos back-to-back with one player using multiple sources like MySpace, YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Grouper." Grouper claims that Searchles has "effectively stripped away Grouper's extensive copyright protection system, including the 'Flag as Inappropriate' button and the link that appears on every single page of the Grouper website to allow copyright owners to report allegedly infringing material, in accordance with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/16/003224.shtml





Internet Radio Broadcasters To Take Legal Action Over Royalties
FMQB

Internet broadcasters are taking action against last week's proposed new, higher royalty rates. Lawyers for NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are planning legal action in Washington, D.C. to overturn the new rate hikes. "Right now the thought is that the initial response needs to be a legal response," WXPN/Philadelphia GM Roger LaMay told internetnews.com.

The suggested new rates would increase to $.0008 per-play for 2006 (retroactively), $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 in 2008, $.0018 in 2009 and $.0019 for 2010. "If this were to go into effect it's going to have public radio stations looking for ways to cut back what we do, as opposed to expanding. Now, there is significant dis-incentive when you're talking about services that are committed to public service," LaMay told the site.

A spokesperson for SoundExchange, which lobbied for the new rates, told internetnews.com that their intent is not to cripple Internet radio. "We're all fans of Internet radio. We don't want to see Internet radio go away. These are negotiations. We're not trying to stick it to anybody. In terms of what happens next? Either side could appeal to the U.S. District court," said spokesperson Wilhem Dicke.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=368205





Radio Chief Says Satcasters Cannot Be Trusted With Monopoly Power

Appearing alongside along Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin, National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) President & CEO David Rehr said Feb. 28 during a Congressional hearing called to review the proposed merger between XM and Sirius that neither company can be trusted with the monopoly power Rehr believes the combination would create.

Turning his attention to the familiar claims that both satellite companies' terrestrial repeaters cause interference to radio broadcasters, Rehr said, "Both companies routinely and regularly violate FCC technical rules. XM operated more than 142 repeaters at unauthorized locations and at least 19 repeaters without any FCC authorization at all. Sirius constructed at least 11 of its repeaters at different location from what they reported to the FCC, including one in Michigan 67 miles away from its reported and authorized locations."

Rehr also pointed to the two companies' own statements from 1997 - when they first applied for their licenses - where both insisted that having two separate satellite radio providers would keep the sector vibrant.

"Ironically, the argument for greater competition came from Sirius, then called CD Radio," said Rehr. "They argued that multiple providers were necessary to 'assure intra-service competition.' They said more players would have 'compelling market-based incentives' to differentiate themselves from competitors. Perhaps more telling, Sirius explicitly stated that no satellite provider should ever be permitted to combine with another provider because, 'such a development would have serious anticompetitive repercussions.'"

Firing back, Karmazin - who was still working in terrestrial radio in 1997 - said that the landscape was vastly different a decade ago, and argued that XM and Sirius couldn’t have imagined then the competitive challenges presented by things like HD Radio, iPods, and Internet radio. He also said that satellite radio must compete with thousands of terrestrial stations nationwide, while only commanding a small percentage of all radio listening. "XM and Sirius are relatively small players in that highly competitive and rapidly evolving audio entertainment marketplace," he said. "There are 223 million weekly AM and FM radio listeners in the United States. Contrast that to Sirius and XM. The companies currently have about 14 million subscribers. Satellite radio is a David operating in a land of Goliaths and is hardly a threat to controlling the audio entertainment market. We are absolutely not a monopoly."

Commenting after the hearing, NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton said, "NAB does not believe Mel Karmazin came even close to making the case for a government-sanctioned monopoly."
http://www.radioink.com/HeadlineEntr...&pt=todaysnews





The Band Drummer Helm Sues Over TV Ad
AP

Levon Helm, former drummer for The Band, is suing a Manhattan advertising firm over the use of the band's signature song, "The Weight," in a television commercial.

In a lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court in December, Helm asks for information about BBDO Worldwide's profits from the commercial for Cingular cell phone service and for financial compensation for the use of his performance.

Helm's attorney, Michael Pinsky, said state law prohibits the use of a celebrity's voice or likeness for profit without his prior written permission. The lawyer said Helm received a royalty payment from the use of the "The Weight" in the commercial, but does not feel he has been adequately compensated. According to an annual royalty statement from EMI Records, which owns Capitol Records, The Band's record label, Helm took home one-fifth of half of the licensing fee that BBDO paid to Capitol for the right to use the song, Pinsky said.

A BBDO spokesman declined comment.

"It was just a complete, damn sellout of The Band - its reputation, its music; just as much disrespect as you could pour on Richard and Rick's tombstones," Helm, a longtime Woodstock resident said.

Richard Manuel, vocalist and piano player for The Band, died in 1986. Rick Danko, who played bass, died in 1999. The Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





It’s Suit Man!

Stan Lee Media Sues Marvel: $5B

Back-from-the-dead dot-com files suit claiming ownership of superheroes.
Michael Cohn

Stan Lee Media sued Marvel Entertainment for $5 billion Thursday, claiming it co-owns Marvel’s superhero characters, including Spider-Man, X-Men, and the Incredible Hulk.

The company is no longer owned by Stan Lee, the comic book legend who more recently hosted the TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero? on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was produced by his latest company, Pow Entertainment.

In the suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, Stan Lee Media seeks to assert rights to the revenue generated by its superheroes that Marvel Entertainment is profiting from.

Mr. Lee formed Stan Lee Media during the dot-com boom as a way of bringing his superheroes online, but the company went bankrupt and produced a litany of lawsuits and criminal charges in its wake involving stock manipulation schemes against the other co-founders of the company.

Now the company is back from the dead, having been reconstituted by Jim Nesfield, who gathered a group of former investors, while he took charge as chairman, CEO, and president. He has now filed a lawsuit on their behalf.

He said Mr. Lee signed a contract in October 1998 that assigned co-creative interests to Stan Lee Media. Unfortunately for Stan Lee Media, the same rights were assigned to Marvel.

“Stan Lee is no longer with the company, but the contract remains intact,” he said. “He has signed it and the contract is still in force.” He added that Mr. Lee may be called to testify if the case goes to trial.

He said the contract had been hidden from the public and Mr. Nesfield has filed suit on behalf of the shareholders to assert their rights. He said they are entitled to 50 percent of all revenue going back three years and going forward 50 years. They can only go back three years by law, but not as far back as 1998.

A Marvel spokesperson declined to comment but later issued a statement from Mr. Lee: “I do not support this action and believe the suit to be baseless.” Mr. Lee currently serves as president emeritus of Marvel Comics. He and Pow Entertainment could not immediately be reached for comment. In January, he filed suit against Mr. Nesfield and two of his associates alleging they illegally took over his former company and infringed on his trademarks and copyrights.

Whistleblower History

Mr. Nesfield is a self-described whistleblower who assisted New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in his investigation of market timing by mutual funds when Mr. Spitzer was the state’s attorney general. He has also testified before the U.S. Senate, he said, about market-timing abuses, and appeared on 60 Minutes.

While he was not initially involved with Stan Lee Media, he said he has been a long-time observer ever since the company filed to go public in 2000. “I’ve been following the company since its initial flotation and its demise, and I specialize in bankrupts in distress,” he said. “I’m what they call a vulture.”

Ethan Horwitz, a partner at Goodwin Procter, who filed the complaint on behalf of Stan Lee Media against Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Enterprises, and Marvel Characters, said a settlement is possible.

“It’s very early in the case, but obviously in any case a settlement is possible,” he said. “Basically, Stan Lee assigned a lot of valuable rights to Stan Lee Enterprises. We are now the owner of those rights, and we go from there.”

He acknowledged that the history of the company has been messy, but he thinks much of it won’t be relevant to the main issues. He said he had not yet heard back from Marvel, and unlike his client Mr. Nesfield, he said he had no estimate of the damages.
http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...inmentAndMedia





Music Downloading Is Up, Both Legally And Illegally
FMQB

A new study from the NPD Group says that the number of songs downloaded online is way up, both legally and illegally. Specifically, about 5 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2006, far outnumbering the 500 million that were paid for. The number of U.S. households participating in illegal file swapping rose 8 percent to 15 million, says NPD, although the overall growth in the number of households involved did slow down from 2005. At the same time, legal online purchases of music jumped 56 percent and the number of U.S. households buying legally rose to 13 million.

"Legal a la carte downloads were the fastest growing digital music category in 2006, and it is likely that the annual number of legal users will surpass P2P users in 2007. Unfortunately for the music labels, the volume of music files purchased legally is swamped by the sheer volume of files being traded illegally, whether on P2P or burned CDs sourced from borrowed files," said NPD analyst Russ Crupnick, according to Bloomberg News. "Five billion files downloaded illegally clearly affect prospects for both CD sales and sales of digital song tracks online."

Though the growth rate of illegal file swapers is slowing, the number of downloads per user is rising. The average user of LimeWire, a major source of illegal sharing, downloaded 309 files last year, which marks a 49 percent rise from 2005, according to the NPD study. On the legal side, about 70 percent of households that bought songs online used Apple's iTunes service, but the average number of songs bought by each iTunes user fell 11 percent.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=368827





University Absent from Recent RIAA File Sharing Report
Miranda Byrd

Peer-to-peer, MP3, LimeWire. Sound familiar? These twenty-first century terms are now being paired with the existing terms piracy, copyright and lawsuit. Reality is setting in for many college students across the country who now find themselves tangled in the legalities of sharing music without permission.

In 2000, the rock group Metallica spoke out against the file-sharing program Napster and its users, blaming the MP3 service for acting as a conduit for copyright infringement.

This campaign turned into a movement within the recording industry to stop peer-to-peer file sharing of music. The Recording Industry Association of America has filed suits against individuals, and since 2003 over 18,000 people have been taken to court for illegal downloading.

Seven years after the initial uproar, the crack down continues on music pirates. Last week the RIAA began sending letters to college students at over three times the previous amount.

According to RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol, "The theft of music remains unacceptably high and undermines the industry's ability to invest in new music. This is especially the case on college campuses...We recognize that the nature of online music theft is changing, and we need to adjust our strategies accordingly."

As part of the battle against music piracy, RIAA released a new list of universities with the highest occurrence of illegal downloads. UWG was not on the list.

"Our work with college administrators has yielded real progress, and we're grateful for the help of those who have worked closely with us," says Bainwol.

UWG has implemented network security to make it more difficult for students within the network to share music with one another. Programs like iTunes allow students to listen to other students' music libraries, but prevent permanent file-swapping.

How difficult is it to get caught stealing music? Not very, thanks to the cooperation of colleges across the country. For more information on UWG's network security policies, visit the Information Technology Services website at www.westga.edu/~its.
http://media.www.thewestgeorgian.com...-2774389.shtml





RIAA Sues Stroke Victim in Michigan

The RIAA has now brought suit against a stroke victim in Michigan in Warner v. Paladuk:

Summons in Warner v. Paladuk

Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright infringement, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...-michigan.html





Interview: aXXo, The Most Popular DVD Ripper on BitTorrent
Ernesto

In real life, aXXo is just an average American teenager, but on the Internet he’s a celebrity, with over a million people downloading his DVDrips every month. The search term “aXXo” is among the top searches on every torrent site, and even anti-piracy organizations use his name to trap people into downloading fake torrents. We had the chance to ask him a few questions, and find out a little more about him.

For those of you who never heard of aXXo, he is responsible for hundreds of DVDrips that find their way to millions of PCs around the world. Most of the rips are 700MB, made to fit on a single CD. Some have criticized his preference for single CD rips because of the inferior video quality, but most pirates agree that he does a great job.

Earlier this year aXXo temporarily stopped uploading movies because axxotorrents.com was trying to profit from his name. After a few weeks that site went down, and aXXo continued releasing DVDrips.

Most of the time it is impossible to track down the source of DVDrips, especially with people from “the scene“. But aXXo is not a member of the scene, and although was not very talkative either, he was at least willing to answer a few questions.

TorrentFreak: What motivates you to share these movies?

aXXo: Not everyone can afford $8.50, or whatever it cost’s these days, to see movies.

TorrentFreak: Don’t you think that ripping and uploading these (copyrighted) movies is wrong?

aXXo: The movie industry loses only 1% of its yearly profits, in a multi-BILLION dollar industry. I think the people who can’t afford movies deserve to be entertained just like more privileged people.

TorrentFreak: Are you alone in this, Or do you get help from others?

aXXo: I have help, I could never do this alone of course.

TorrentFreak: What do you think of sites that (mis)use your name, like axxotorrents.com?

aXXo: They can go to Hell, we are here for the community, and will never ask anything in return.

TorrentFreak: How can people tell if the torrent is not a scam, or a fake torrent?

aXXo: aXXo torrents will never be a RAR archive, and the torrents will always contain 3 files.

TorrentFreak: Where do you get the movies, and do you use scene releases as well?

aXXo: …

TorrentFreak: Okay, perhaps this one is easier to answer. What is your favorite BitTorrent site?

aXXo: I like TorrentBox.

TorrentFreak: Anything you want to add to this?

aXXo: Just a quick note: I have been hearing cases of the people being tracked by downloading fake aXXo torrents, so please be careful! If you’re not sure if it’s legit, DONT DOWNLOAD.

TorrentFreak: Thanks!

aXXo: You’re welcome.

http://torrentfreak.com/interview-ax...on-bittorrent/





Writing a Peer-to-Peer Application Using .Net - Part 1

As per my last post, there is a new namespace (System.Net.PeerToPeer) available in the .NET Framework "Orcas" March CTP tailored to making it simple to write P2P applications using managed code. I have posted a write up (with code samples) on the P2P team blog which digs into Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP); one of the many technologies in the new namespace. PNRP is a cool new technology which provides a serverless name resolution solution tailored to P2P scenarios. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new features in System.Net......
http://blogs.msdn.com/wndp/archive/2...et-part-1.aspx





Content Protection Digital Rights Management Market Spending Exceeds $9 Billion Over Five Years, Says Insight Research Corp.
Press Release

Spending on digital rights management (DRM) software and hardware to protect entertainment, commercial software, and other information will exceed $9 billion dollars over the next five years, says a new market research report from Insight Research Corp. By the close of 2007, total worldwide spending on DRM will reach just over $1 billion, and by 2012 business spending is forecasted to grow to nearly $1.9 billion, according to the new research study.

According to Insight's newly-released market analysis report, "Wireline and Wireless Digital Rights Management: Securing Content Distribution 2007-2012," DRM involves the combination of software and hardware technologies that enable the content owner and distributors to assign and control rights and conditions for viewing, listening, and employing the content present in digital media and applications -- be it a song, a movie, a medical or financial record, or a software game. The study focuses on the use of DRM by wireline retail users, wireless retail users, TV and home entertainment network (HEN) users, software application retail users, as well as software application corporate users. The report notes that as the value of digital content increases, applications of DRM will increase, though at a slower rate than the value of content based on the fact that DRM pricing is not tied to the value of the protected content.

"DRM evolved over the last two decades to serve corporations that needed a means to deal with information piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing, and various regulatory requirements. So in a sense DRM did not arise to meet the needs of end users, and in fact, it may be said to have evolved to spite the end user," says Robert Rosenberg, President of Insight. "While organizations like Creative Commons have emerged to balance the respective -- and sometimes conflicting -- rights of artists and creators, media companies, and individuals who share content, by and large the focus of the DRM industry is to protect the rights of the owner of the content, not the end user," Rosenberg concludes.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...4546196&EDATE=





DMCA Abuser Apologizes for Takedown Campaign

Michael Crook Agrees to Stop Attacks on Free Speech
Press Release

Michael Crook, the man behind a string of meritless online copyright complaints, has agreed to withdraw those complaints, take a copyright law course, and apologize for interfering with the free speech rights of his targets.

The agreement settles a lawsuit against Crook filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of Jeff Diehl, the editor of the Internet magazine 10 Zen Monkeys. Diehl was forced to modify an article posted about Crook's behavior in a fake sex-ad scheme after Crook sent baseless Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, claiming to be the copyright holder of an image used in the story. In fact, the image was from a Fox News program and legally used as part of commentary on Crook. But Crook repeated his claims and then attempted to use the same process to get the image removed from other websites reporting on his takedown campaign.

"Crook's legal threats interfered with legitimate debate about his controversial online behavior," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "Public figures must not be allowed to use bogus copyright claims to squelch speech."

In addition to withdrawing current complaints against Diehl and every other target of his takedown campaign and taking a copyright law course, Crook has also agreed to limit any future DMCA notices to works authored or photographed by himself or his wife, or where the copyright was specifically assigned to him. All future notices must also include a link to EFF information on his case, as well as the settlement agreement. Crook has also recorded a video statement to apologize and publicize the dangers of abusing copyright law.

"We're pleased that Crook has taken responsibility for his egregious behavior," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Hopefully, this will set a precedent to prevent future abuse of the law by those who dislike online news-reporting and criticism."

The settlement with Michael Crook is part of EFF's ongoing campaign to protect online free speech from the chilling effects of bogus intellectual property claims. EFF recently filed suit against the man who claims to have created the popular line dance "The Electric Slide" for misusing copyright law to remove an online documentary video that included footage of people trying to do the dance.

For the video statement from Michael Crook:
http://blip.tv/file/169553

For more on Diehl v. Crook:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/diehl_v_crook/

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_03.php#005161





Victims Fight Back Against DMCA Abuse
Nate Anderson

DMCA takedown notices: sure, they provide an easy way for companies or individuals to get copyrighted information pulled from sites like YouTube, but what happens when the process is abused? The DMCA does require takedown notices to be made under threat of perjury, and damages are possible against those that abuse the takedown process by using it for frivolous or fraudulent purposes. The EFF has recently filed two cases against alleged DMCA abusers, and may be prepping a third against Viacom.

First up is the case against Michael Crook, a guy who thought it would be a worthwhile use of his time to respond to Craigslist personal ads, extract personal details from those he dubbed "perverts," then post this information online. Not surprisingly, this practice provoked a fair amount of controversy and commentary, and a picture of Crook (from a Fox News appearance) was posted on several prominent blogs. Crook issued DMCA takedown notices which demanded that the images be pulled and that he owned the copyright to them.

He did not, of course, but "fair use" would have allowed the pictures in any event. The EFF stepped in after 10 Zen Monkeys received a takedown request. In a settlement, Crook agreed to stop using such takedown notices and was forced to record a public video apology.

The EFF is also challenging Richard Silver, the creator of popular wedding dance the "Electric Slide," who claims that his copyright was violated by a clip uploaded to YouTube. In that clip, a California man records people dancing at concert by the band Sublevel 3; as part of that video, "one group perform[s] a set of line-dancing steps for just over 10 seconds," according to the EFF complaint. That 10 seconds of footage apparently contained steps that resembled the Electric Slide, and Silver sent a takedown notice to YouTube.

In taking the case to court, the EFF claims that Silver "knowingly" and "materially" misrepresented his own copyright claim; the EFF says that the dance steps are not suitable for copyright at all. Furthermore, Silver's claim to have copyrighted a single video performance of the dance does not prevent others from filming the same steps. The case is still pending in a California court.

Finally, a Viacom executive admitted last month that less than 60 of his company's 100,000 takedown requests to YouTube were invalid. John Palfrey of Harvard's Berkman Center wonders what rights those 60 people have?

We may find out. The EFF called for people who had videos pulled inappropriately to contact the group, though the EFF tells The National Law Journal that it cannot comment on its future legal plans.

The EFF has also gone after non-DMCA claims, such as the copyright action against the SpankMaker and a trademark claim against an environmental group that hoped to shut down the Chicago Auto Show.

Nothing new under the sun

While it's heartening to see a group stand up to these sorts of pressure tactics, the problem of illegitimate copyright complaints is an old one that shows no sign of withering away. Companies routinely use copyright claims to demand the removal of material they simply dislike, as Best Buy did when it claimed that its prices were under copyright and could not be posted on the Internet.

A report on the subject from the Brennan Center for Justice contains an anecdote from the 1940s, when Warner Brothers threatened to sue Groucho Marx for a parody film called A Night in Casablanca. Marx's response: "Up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers." When the movie was eventually released, the studio did not sue.

In the 1990s, another bizarre copyright claims surfaced when Republicans attempted to stop the sale of Contract with America underpants, but the prize for sheer hilarity goes to a recent complaint from The National Pork Board. On January 30, 2007, the Board send a cease-and-desist letter to the Lactivist blog, which was using the phrase "the other white milk" on its site and merchandise.

The National Pork Board believed that this was too similar to its own phrase, "the other white meat," and told the Lactivist to stop using it. "In addition," said the letter, "your use of this slogan also tarnishes the good reputation of National Pork Board's mark in light of your apparent attempt to promote the use of breast milk beyond merely for infant consumption."

One of the reasons companies misuse the DMCA and cease-and-desist copyright letters is that the tools can quickly accomplish what they want to have happen; stuff they don't like goes bye-bye in a hurry. When the other option is slogging slowly through the court system, letters look like an excellent alternative.

The DMCA makes it simple to fire off these letters like cannonballs, flattening critics or parodists. The DMCA does contain a few safeguards against making fraudulent threats, but most ISPs and companies like YouTube will immediately pull the listed content, and they generally don't look into the issue of whether such content truly was infringing. Instead, they rely on users to rebut the allegations, which many users don't know how to do or don't bother to attempt.

Giving companies a reason to think twice before pulling the trigger on a takedown notice is good for free speech, and we applaud groups like the EFF that are doing something about the problem.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...mca-abuse.html





Walmart Sends Us DMCA Takedown Letter For Slideshow

Walmart's lawyers issued a takedown notice for the market research we posted on March 6.

The letter, posted inside, is dated for March 8th, the same day the AP article confirming the data published. That's what we like to see, synchronized watches.

To see the slides, go the original post or download from one of these two sites:
http://rapidshare.com/files/20790789/walmart.rar.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IBCTP2LY
http://consumerist.com/consumer/walm...how-243645.php





EU Commissioner Criticizes iPod-iTunes Tie-In
Eric Bangeman

European pressure on Apple to open up its iPod-iTunes ecosystem is growing, as EU Commissioner for Consumer Protection Meglena Kuneva has spoken out against the tie-in between the iPod and Apple's iTunes Store. Speaking on the topic of DRM, Commissioner Kuneva says in comments reported in German-language magazine Focus that she believes consumers shouldn't be locked into the iPod by music they purchase from Apple's iTunes Store.

"Do you find it reasonable that a CD will play in all CD players, but an iTunes song will only play on an iPod?" asked Kuneva. "It doesn't to me. Something must change."

Kuneva also said that the industry needs competitive pricing and uniform sales contracts, in addition to a "cooling-off" period during which consumers could "return" downloaded music. She plays to discuss these initiatives in Brussels later this week.
Europe and the closed ecosystem

Apple has come under increasing of criticism in Europe over the past year or so over its music-hardware ecosystem. Pressure has been increasing from Norway and a few EU member countries for Apple to open up its DRM so that consumers would be able to play iTunes music on any device of their choosing.

Early in 2006, the Consumer Council of Norway filed a complaint with the country's Consumer Ombudsman, accusing Apple of violating Norway's Marketing Control Act. At issue was Apple's FairPlay DRM, which locks consumers into the iPod and iTunes, as well as the lack of a cooling-off period and the company's disavowal of any responsibility for damage that may be caused to users' computers by iTunes.

The Norwegian Ombudsman ordered Apple to change its terms and conditions for the Norwegian version of the iTunes Store, and other Scandinavian countries began investigations of their own. Apple has engaged in dialogue with the countries, but no changes have been made.

Just a couple of months ago, Germany and France joined the Scandinavian countries in asking Apple to open up FairPlay to allow other digital audio players to play iTunes tracks.

Harmonizing consumer protection laws

Lurking in the background is a wholesale EU effort to rewrite the Union's consumer-protection laws. The laws vary between member countries, and the EU would like to standardize them. One issue being discussed is whether the cooling-off period should apply to digital content, with the European Commission looking at the possibility of using the lack of interoperability between the iPod, Zune, and other digital audio players as a way to force online music sellers to accept "returns."

Kuneva appears intent on going a step further and forcing Apple to open up its ecosystem, a move that would make the consumer groups pressing for a change happy.

Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs has said that his company would make everybody happy by selling DRM-free music if only the record labels would agree to it. Color some Europeans unimpressed: a spokesperson for the Norwegian Consumer said that while Jobs' comments were welcome, they don't address the underlying problem of interoperability. It's going to take concerted government action or a truly unlikely change of heart on the part of the music industry to accomplish that.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...es-tie-in.html





'Casino Royale' Blu-Ray Cracks Amazon Top Ten

In another high-def first, the Blu-ray edition of 'Casino Royale' cracked the top ten on Amazon's DVD top sellers list upon its release Tuesday, peaking late in the evening at #8.

Updated hourly, the Amazon list tracks all video disc sales at Amazon, including standard-def DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. And while the top of the list is usually dominated by standard-def DVD releases, some early adopters have made sport out of tracking how next-gen releases on both formats stack up in Amazon's overall rankings, spawning at least two frequently updated head-to-head charts (at HdGameDb and eProductWars ), and countless posts on our own Smackdown Forum.

The strong performance for 'Casino Royale' at Amazon would seem to back up predictions that the latest Bond flick would score record-breaking overall first-week sales for a next-gen disc. The current record holder is the Blu-ray edition of 'The Departed,' which as we reported last week is said to have sold a total of 20,000 units in its first week out last month.

Lest anyone misunderstand this news and start sounding the death knell for standard-def DVD, it should be noted that two other editions of 'Casino Royale' (both standard-def DVD) also cracked the top ten yesterday -- the wide screen two-disc version (at #1) and the full screen two-disc version (at #10).

Still, it is a milestone, and the forums are already abuzz with predictions of which next-gen title might be next to meet or beat 'Royale' on the Amazon chart.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/518





Popularity Might Not Be Enough
Dan Mitchell

LET’S say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

Probably too many for most people to even try, if the numbers run by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, are accurate. On his blog (lsvp.wordpress.com), Mr. Liew determined that even the type of site that can get the largest advertiser payments per user would have to be immensely popular before it made that kind of money.

The analysis is “sobering,” wrote Tim O’Reilly, the chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books. “This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don’t need an exit but provide ‘lifestyle businesses’ for their owners,” he wrote on Radar, his company’s blog (radar.oreilly.com).

That is, rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.

But to make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated.

A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.

And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million — about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web.

All of which is to say that even though advertisers are flocking online, there is still a long way to go before they start paying the kind of rates they pay to traditional media outlets.

There are other options, of course, including charging for subscriptions, or, as Mr. O’Reilly pointed out, aggregation. He noted how outfits like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media create multiple sites, “publishing blogs like they were books, with some expected to succeed and others to fail.” And independent sites can be brought together in a network, like FM Publishing, which sells ads for dozens of sites.

Stemming the Video Tide Online video may soon overwhelm the Internet, creating problems for Internet service providers and potentially for users. Help could come from new technology being developed for peer-to-peer networks, according to Wade Roush, writing for Technology Review (technologyreview.com).

I.S.P.’s are wary of peer-to-peer networks not only because of their use for piracy, but also because they hog bandwidth and turn users into distributors of content who don’t pay anything extra for the burdens they place on the system. But Mr. Roush examines new technologies that could make such networks more efficient and could allow I.S.P.’s to identify the biggest bandwidth users and charge them accordingly.

That second idea might make advocates of “network neutrality” a little nervous, since it would let I.S.P.’s favor some content providers over others. But Hui Zhang, the computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who developed the technology, says such concerns are overblown.

“Of course, we don’t want the service providers to dictate what they will carry on their infrastructure,” he said. “On the other hand, if P2P users benefit from transmitting and receiving more bits, the guys who are actually transporting those bits should be able to share in that.”

Super Suers It became even clearer this week that the Recording Industry Association of America isn’t overly worried about the public relations aspects of its fight against file-sharers. In one case, according to court papers, five big record companies are suing a Florida man who is largely paralyzed from a stroke (recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com). In another, record companies are suing a Georgia family who say they cannot possibly have downloaded any music because they don’t own a computer (vnunet.com).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/bu.../17online.html





Surveillance

Don't Like ID Cards? Hand Over Your Passport
James Slack

The first ID cards will be issued in 2009

Anybody who objects to their personal details going on the new "Big Brother" ID cards database will be banned from having a passport.

James Hall, the official in charge of the supposedly-voluntary scheme, said the Government would allow people to opt out - but in return they must "forgo the ability" to have a travel document.

With one in every eight people saying they will refuse to sign-up, up to five million adults could effectively be refused permission to leave the country.

Campaigners reacted to Mr Hall's remarks with fury, saying they were yet more evidence of the lurch towards "Big Brother" Britain.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID group, said: "The idea that ID cards scheme is voluntary, and people can opt-out, is a joke.

"There are all sorts of reasons why people need to travel, not just for holidays. There is work, visiting relatives.

"What are these people supposed to do? It stretches the definition of voluntary beyond breaking point. They will go to any length to get personal information for this huge database. Who knows what will happen to it then?"

Mr Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, delivered his warning during a Downing Street "webchat".

One concerned member of the public, Andrew Michael Edwards, asked what would happen to people who refuse to join the £5.4 billion scheme.

Mr Hall replied: "There is no need to register and have fingerprints taken - but you will forgo the ability to have a passport".

Officials later explained the meaning of his remark.

The first ID cards will be issued in 2009, to anybody who applies for a passport.

People will be required to give fingerprints, biometric details such as a facial scan and a wealth of personal details - including second homes, driving licence and insurance numbers.

All will be stored on a giant ID cards Register, which can be accessed by accredited Whitehall departments, banks and businesses.

While The ID Cards Bill was going through Parliament, peers agreed an "opt out" with Ministers for people who needed a passport, but did not want to participate in the ID cards scheme.

It was the only way the Lords would accept the legislation, amid howls of concern that it represents yet another move towards a surveillance society.

But, as Mr Hall's comments this week make clear, the opt-out only applies to being physically issued with a card.

In order to get a passport, people will still have to hand over all their personal details for storage on the ID cards Register - where they will be treated in the same was as those who agreed to sign-up.

They simply avoid getting the card - even though they will have to pay the full combined price of £93 for an ID card and passport.

It means that, despite the Government repeatedly insisting the scheme is voluntary, the only way to avoid signing-up is to never obtain or renew a passport.

Therefore, anybody who objects to ID cards on principle and wants to keep their personal details private must remain in the UK for the rest of their lives.

Critics said it was clear ID cards were being made compulsory by stealth.

Some 6.6million people apply for travel documents each year.

Mr Booth said legal challenges were inevitable, as restricting the right of free movement is a grave breach of human rights law.

A YouGov survey, published three months ago, found 12 per cent of Britons would refuse to take part in the scheme, even if it meant paying a fine or serving a prison sentence.

Mr Booth predicted many of this group would be prepared to bring test cases to challenge the Government's position in court.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said: "This comment confirms long standing suspicions that the government's claim that the ID database will be voluntary is simply not true. The voluntary claim is serving as a fig leaf for a universal compulsory system.

"Once again the government's ID card plans are being pursued behind the backs of the British people."

Labour has become increasingly obsessed with the introduction of ID cards, claiming they will help to beat fraud and illegal immigration.

But both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have fiercely opposed the scheme, amid concerns costs could spiral out of control.

Academics have predicted the final bill could reach up to £20 billion.

There are also concerns Ministers could be tempted to strike financial deals to pass on personal details, in a bid to recoup some of the enormous costs.

If the Tories win power, it will be scrapped immediately.

Mr Hall's comments will fuel the suspicion that Ministers are involved in a desperate race against time to get the project off the ground, and get as many people's details as possible before the next General Election.

The Home Office said it had never hidden the fact anybody refusing to give their biometric and other personal details to the ID cards database would not be eligible for a passport.

A spokesman said it was more cost effective to link the issuing of passports and ID cards, rather than allow people to register their details for one but not the other.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...70&ito=newsnow





Spying Too Secret For Your Court: AT&T, Gov Tell Ninth

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself -- even by showing a signed order from the government -- without endangering national security.

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T's claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

Because plaintiffs' entire action rests upon alleged secret espionage activities, including an alleged secret espionage relationship between AT&T and the Government concerning the alleged activities, this suit must be dismissed now as a matter of law," the government argued in its brief (.pdf).

The telecom giant and the government are appealing a June ruling in a federal district court that allowed the suit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the telecom to proceed, despite the government's invocation of a powerful tool called the "states secrets privilege," which allows it to have civil cases dismissed when national secrets are involved.

California Northern District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled, however, that since the government had admitted it was wiretapping Americans without a warrant and that AT&T had to be involved, the case could go forward tentatively. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the government and AT&Ts' appeal in the coming months.

"This case cannot and should not go forward where AT&T is disabled from responding to allegations or evidence tendered by the plaintiffs, and is therefore deprived of the ability to defend itself against potentially massive liability," AT&T's lawyers wrote in a brief (.pdf). "Moreover, as this Court has explained, although a dismissal in contexts like this one may appear 'harsh' for the individual plaintiffs, the 'greater public good,' and "ultimately the less harsh remedy," is the protection of military and intelligence secrets the release of which could harm the public's safety."

The suit, which relies heavily on documents provided to the rights group by former AT&T employee Mark Klein, alleges that AT&T helped the government spy on internet communications, data-mine domestic call records and listen in on phone calls without a warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The government, which says it has inherent constitutional powers to wiretap in the time of war, said in January it would stop the warrantless wiretapping of certain overseas phone calls and get warrants from the court it evaded.

AT&T also argues that all of lawsuit needs to be thrown out because the government has never admitted to spying on internet traffic and getting phone records. It has only admitted to wiretapping overseas communications where one end of the communication belongs to a person suspected of terrorist links. Since the EFF defendants say they aren't terrorists or communicate with terrorists, the only part of the spying that has been admitted -- and thus admissible in court -- doesn't apply to them, AT&T argues. Since the rest of the purported surveillance is thus secret the case has to be thrown out.

As to Plaintiffs' claims of harm from untargeted content surveillance, the government has not acknowledged the existence of any such program, and any information about the methods or targets of alleged government surveillance is unquestionably covered by Director Negroponte's invocation of the state secrets doctrine.

AT&T furthermore argues that the lower court's ruling that AT&t had to be involved due to the width of the surveillance program and the size of AT&T was an uninformed guess:

The district court used a chain of conjecture, hypothesis, and unwarranted inference to suggest that AT&T's alleged participation in these programs was not in fact a secret. The court, for instance, relied on its own unfounded and inexpert speculation that content surveillance requires the cooperation of a telecommunications provider.

EFF will file its response later this month, and will likely argue, as it already has in the district court, that Congressional officials have admitted that some of the nation's largest telecoms did turn over call record databases to the government, so that is not a secret either.

The appeals court has not yet set a date for oral arguments.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...o_secret_.html





Connecticut Regulators Conclude They Can Probe Phone Records Issue
AP

The state Department of Public Utility Control has concluded that despite federal government objections, it has the authority to investigate the release of thousands of phone records to the National Security Agency.

The DPUC, in a draft decision Monday, said that it determined it has jurisdiction to look into the charge that AT&T and Verizon turned over thousands of Connecticut phone records to the NSA without warrants.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut filed its request for a probe with the DPUC in May 2006 after news reports that telecommunications companies turned over calling records of millions of Americans without subpoenas or court order.

In September, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against the DPUC, saying it cannot force two telecommunications companies to answer questions about whether they provided customer records to the federal government.

The lawsuit, which is still pending, claimed the DPUC overstepped its authority when it ordered the two telecommunications companies to answer questions from the ACLU.

According to several media reports last year, the NSA was assembling a massive data base to analyze calling patterns to detect terrorist activity.

Renee Redman, of the ACLU of Connecticut, said the DPUC is the first state regulatory agency to indicate it has jurisdiction; Vermont denied a motion to dismiss and ordered that discovery go forward, but has yet to rule further.

The state DPUC rejected the arguments of the utilities as well as the federal government that the state agency was seeking "to intrude on foreign intelligence-gathering and military activities."

The state agency said it was only interested in whether the two companies violated Connecticut customers' rights by illegally releasing the information, something that is within its jurisdiction. It also found it has a remedy in the form of monetary fines, if it determines AT&T and Verizon violated privacy rules.

David Goldberg, an attorney with the DPUC, said Monday the agency will take written exceptions to the ruling by March 20, with oral arguments on April 19 and a final ruling expected by April 25.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-13-10-07-14





Patriot Act Games

Gonzales Says ‘Mistakes Were Made’ in Firing of Prosecutors
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jeff Zeleny

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, insisted Tuesday that he would not resign, but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.”

The mea culpa came as Congressional Democrats, who are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons, demanded that President Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, explain their roles in the firings.

With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president’s role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs and who stepped down in January.

“The White House did not play a role in the list of the seven U.S. attorneys,” said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush’s counselor, referring to a roster of those who were fired.

Mr. Bartlett said it was “highly unlikely” that Mr. Rove would testify publicly to Congress about any involvement he might have had. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t find other ways to try to share that information,” he said.

With Democrats vowing to get to the bottom of who had ordered the firings and why, the White House scrambled to put its own spin on the controversy by releasing a stream of e-mail messages detailing how Ms. Miers had corresponded with D. Kyle Sampson, the top aide to Mr. Gonzales who drafted the list of those to be dismissed.

Mr. Sampson resigned Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, at a press conference in an ornate chamber adjacent to his office, Mr. Gonzales pledged to “find out what went wrong here,” even as he insisted he had no direct knowledge of how his staff had made the firing decisions. He said he had rejected an earlier idea, which the White House said was put forth by Ms. Miers, that all 93 of the attorneys, the top federal prosecutors in their regions, be replaced.

“I felt that was a bad idea,” he said, “and it was disruptive.”

With Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, insisting that Mr. Gonzales should step down, his appearance underscored what two Republicans close to the Bush administration described as a growing rift between the White House and the attorney general. Mr. Gonzales has long been a confidant of the president but has aroused the ire of lawmakers of both parties on several issues, including the administration’s domestic eavesdropping program.

The two Republicans, who spoke anonymously so they could share private conversations with senior White House officials, said top aides to Mr. Bush, including Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, were concerned that the controversy had so damaged Mr. Gonzales’s credibility that he would be unable to advance the White House agenda on sensitive national security matters, including terror prosecutions.

“I really think there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now,” one of the Republicans said.

Already, Democrats are pressing the case for revoking the president’s authority, gained with the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year, to appoint interim federal prosecutors indefinitely, without Senate confirmation. The administration has argued that such appointments are necessary to speed the prosecution of terrorism cases. After the dismissals became a big political issue last week, Mr. Gonzales signaled that the administration would not oppose the changes being sought by the Democrats.

“We now know that it is very likely that the amendment to the Patriot Act, which was made in March of 2006, might well have been done to facilitate a wholesale replacement of all or part of U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “Who authorized all of this? Who asked for that change?”

Questions about whether the firings were politically motivated have been swirling through the administration since January. But they reached a fever pitch on Tuesday with disclosures by the White House that Mr. Bush had spoken directly with Mr. Gonzales to pass on concerns from Republican lawmakers, among them Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, about the way certain prosecutors were handling cases of voter fraud.

The White House took the unusual step of having Mr. Bartlett conduct a hurried briefing with reporters in Mérida, Mexico. He said the president had “all the confidence in the world” in Mr. Gonzales and traced the idea for the firings to Ms. Miers, saying she had raised the question of whether the Justice Department should clean house in Mr. Bush’s second term, as is common when a new president comes into office.

“What Harriet Miers was doing was taking a look and floating an idea to say, ‘Hey, should we treat the second term very similar to the way we treat a first term?’ ” Mr. Bartlett said.

White House officials reiterated Tuesday that Mr. Bush had not called for the removal of any particular United States attorney and said there was no evidence that the president had been aware that the Justice Department had initiated a process to generate a list of which prosecutors should lose their jobs.

But inside the White House, aides to the president, including Mr. Rove and Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff, were said to be increasingly concerned that the controversy could damage Mr. Bush.

“They’re taking it seriously,” said the other of the two Republicans who spoke about the White House’s relationship with Mr. Gonzales. “I think Rove and Bolten believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties expressed anger about the administration’s handling of the matter. While Democrats voiced the loudest criticism, several leading Republicans — among them Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and George V. Voinovich of Ohio — said Tuesday that they also had concerns.

Mr. Ensign, ordinarily a strong supporter of the White House, said he was “very angry” at how the administration had handled the dismissal of the prosecutors, particularly Dan Bogden, the United States attorney in Nevada. Mr. Ensign said he had been misled or lied to last year when he asked the Justice Department about the firing of Mr. Bogden and was told that it had been connected to his job performance.

“I’m not a person who raises his voice very often,” said Mr. Ensign, who is also the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate. Of his decision to speak out, he said, “I think there are times where you just have to do what you feel is right, and this is one of those times.”

Mr. Coburn said the firings had been bungled, calling them “idiocy on the part of the administration.”

Mr. Specter, in a speech on the Senate floor, referred to another of the dismissed attorneys, Carol C. Lam, who prosecuted Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman now serving an eight-year sentence in a corruption case.

Mr. Specter raised the question of whether Ms. Lam had been dismissed because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful,” and he questioned the Justice Department’s initial explanation that those who had lost their jobs had received poor performance evaluations.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may need to do more by way of inquiry to examine what her performance ratings were to see if there was a basis for her being asked to resign.”


David Johnston, Eric Lipton and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Washington, and John Holusha from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/wa...4&ei=508 7%0A





The Failed Attorney General

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.

He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

The F.B.I. has been using powers it obtained under the Patriot Act to get financial, business and telephone records of Americans by issuing tens of thousands of “national security letters,” a euphemism for warrants that are issued without any judicial review or avenue of appeal. The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.

But like so many of the administration’s promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.

It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way. Mr. Gonzales was disdainful of any attempt by Congress to examine the spying program, let alone control it.

The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration’s assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.

His Justice Department has abandoned its duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights. It approved a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a poll tax, a case in which Mr. Gonzales’s political team overrode the objections of the department’s professional staff.

The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.

We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/op...25f&ei=5087%0A

Politics, Pure and Cynical

We wish we’d been surprised to learn that the White House was deeply involved in the politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, but the news had the unmistakable whiff of inevitability. This disaster is just part of the Bush administration’s sordid history of waving the bloody bullhorn of 9/11 for the basest of motives: the perpetuation of power for power’s sake.

Time and again, President Bush and his team have assured Americans that they needed new powers to prevent another attack by an implacable enemy. Time and again, Americans have discovered that these powers were not being used to make them safer, but in the service of Vice President Dick Cheney’s vision of a presidency so powerful that Congress and the courts are irrelevant, or Karl Rove’s fantasy of a permanent Republican majority.

In firing the prosecutors and replacing them without Senate approval, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took advantage of a little-noticed provision that the administration and its Republican enablers in Congress had slipped into the 2006 expansion of the Patriot Act. The ostensible purpose was to allow the swift interim replacement of a United States attorney who was, for instance, killed by terrorism.

But these firings had nothing to do with national security — or officials’ claims that the attorneys were fired for poor performance. This looks like a political purge, pure and simple, and President Bush and his White House are in the thick of it.

Earlier, the White House insisted that it had approved the list of fired United States attorneys after it was compiled. Now it admits that White House officials helped prepare it. Harriet Miers, the White House counsel whom Mr. Bush tried to elevate to the Supreme Court, originally wanted to replace all 93 attorneys with Republican appointees.

The White House still says Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings, but newly released documents show that he personally fielded a senator’s political complaint about David Iglesias, who was fired as United States attorney in New Mexico. The papers suggest that the United States attorney in Arkansas was fired just to put a Rove protégé in his place, and a plan was mapped out by administration officials to “run out the clock” if lawmakers objected.

Among the documents is e-mail sent to Ms. Miers by Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, ranking United States attorneys on factors like “exhibited loyalty.” Small wonder, then that United States Attorney Carol Lam of San Diego was fired. She had put one Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, in jail and had opened an inquiry that put others at risk, along with party donors.

More disturbing details have come out about Mr. Iglesias’s firing. We knew he was ousted six weeks after Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, made a wildly inappropriate phone call in which he asked if Mr. Iglesias intended to indict Democrats before last November’s election in a high-profile corruption scandal. We now know that Mr. Domenici took his complaints to Mr. Bush.

After Mr. Iglesias was fired, the deputy White House counsel, William Kelley, wrote in an e-mail note that Mr. Domenici’s chief of staff was “happy as a clam.” Another e-mail note, from Mr. Sampson, said Mr. Domenici was “not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool” before getting his list of preferred replacements to the White House.

Given what’s in those documents, it was astonishing to hear Mr. Gonzales continue to insist yesterday that he had no personal knowledge of discussions involving the individual attorneys. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, was right on the mark when he said that if Mr. Gonzales didn’t know what Mr. Sampson was doing, “he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on” at his department. Fortunately, last year’s election left Democrats like Mr. Schumer in the majority, with subpoena power. Otherwise, this and so many other scandals might never have come to light.

Mr. Gonzales, who has shown why he was such an awful choice for this job in the first place, should be called under oath to resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies in his story. Mr. Gonzales is willing to peddle almost any nonsense to the public (witness his astonishingly maladroit use of the Nixonian “mistakes were made” dodge yesterday). But lying to Congress under oath is another matter.

The Justice Department has been saying that it is committed to putting Senate-confirmed United States attorneys in every jurisdiction. But the newly released documents make it clear that the department was making an end run around the Senate — for baldly political reasons. Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure — or kept on because they did.

There was, for example, the decision by United States Attorney Chris Christie of New Jersey to open an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez just before his hotly contested re-election last November. Republicans, who would have held the Senate if Mr. Menendez had lost, used the news for attack ads. Then there was the career United States attorney in Guam who was removed by Mr. Bush in 2002 after he started investigating the superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor was replaced. The investigation was dropped.

In mid-December 2006, Mr. Gonzales’s aide, Mr. Sampson, wrote to a White House counterpart that using the Patriot Act to fire the Arkansas prosecutor and replace him with Mr. Rove’s man was risky — Congress could revoke the authority. But, he wrote, “if we don’t ever exercise it, then what’s the point of having it?”

If that sounds cynical, it is. It is also an accurate summary of the governing philosophy of this administration: What’s the point of having power if you don’t use it to get more power?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/opinion/14wed1.html





80% of Federal Agencies Flunk E-FOIA Test
Jay Savage

According a report published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, only one in five government agencies complies with the 1997 law that requires them to make much public information available on the web and clearly post procedures for obtaining information and making so-called "sunshine requests" under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Some highlights include:

• Only one in five federal agencies (21 percent) posts on the Web all four categories of records that the law specifically requires;
• Only one in 16 agencies (6 percent) posts all ten elements of essential FOIA guidance;
• Only 36 percent of agencies provide the required indexes of records;
• Only 26 percent of agencies provide online forms for submitting FOIA requests;
• Many agency Web links are missing or just wrong - one FOIA fax number checked in the Knight Survey actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital.

The Departments of Defense, the Interior, and Veterans' Affairs, Homeland Security, and the CIA, among others, were particularly low-scorers. No shocks there. Bright spots, on the other hand, included "E-Stars" such as NASA, the FTC, and, surprisingly enough, the Department of Justice.

Anyone whose ever tried to get information from a government website probably won't be surprised by the results. The best results come from agencies who are either small or see their missions as serving the public interest. The worst results are from agencies who thrive on secrecies and/or bloated bureaucracies, which , unfortunately includes most of them.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03...k-e-foia-test/





Huntsman to Sign Anti-Porn Resolution
Nathan Johnson

A government study last year showed about 1 percent of Web sites are dedicated to it, but more and more employees -- and children -- are stumbling across it, and looking for it.

On Tuesday, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. will hold a ceremonial signing of House Concurrent Resolution 3, which urges the U.S. Congress to step up and join the fight in keeping Internet pornography away from children and out of workplaces.

The measure stresses technology-based solutions to keep porn out of the hands of children and off work computers, though the idea is not without its critics.

The resolution states that current filtering technologies cannot do enough to stop access to porn, as some employees and children actively seek ways to bypass filters on their computers.

Instead, lawmakers have suggested that Congress work to change the nature of the Internet and allow for an "adult content channel" and a "family content channel", which would separate out the different types of content and allow filtering at its source.

The CP80 foundation, a longtime Internet pornography foe, was directly involved with the legislation. Its Internet pornography solution is part of the resolution.

Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the idea of two channels has been brought up several times in the past 10 years, but hasn't happened because "it's a bad idea."

Jeschke said that the problem comes down to what content will be considered adult, what won't be, and who gets to make those decisions.

"There's always situations where an art site or a history site gets blocked," she said. Her group referees to the channel idea as a form of censorship, one that Jeschke thinks is very dangerous.

Both Rep. Brad Daw, R-Orem, the sponsor of HCR 3, and Matt Yarro, of the CP80 foundation, say they are not set on any one particular solution.

"We're interested in whatever works," Daw said. Yarro echoed a similar sentiment, saying that whether or not the solution he suggested gets implemented, it will at least "get the debate going."

Daw pointed out that this resolution has no legal effect, but is instead designed to put pressure on national lawmakers. He said he has spoken with some of Utah's congressmen, but said more can be done with the resolution in hand.

According to Yarro, the key part of this resolution is that it shows more than just a few groups are pushing to address the problems of Internet pornography. Yarro said that the goal is to let legislators know "that people are crying out. ... That this is the community."

"There is this assumption that you can't control it (the Internet)," Yarro said. "It's a toaster, we made it, we can fix it. ... We can solve the Internet pornography problem tomorrow if we decided to."

The movement to block the Internet porn seems to be gaining traction, with 13 other states, according to Yarro, putting forth similar resolutions.

Daw hopes that a ceremonial signing will encourage federal leaders to begin making changes.

Though Daw says that this will be an ongoing fight without an end in sight, he intends to find a way to "put another arrow in people's quivers."
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/213120/





No Regulations Planned for Radio ID Tags, EU Says
Kevin J. O'Brien

The European Commission said Thursday that it would not curb the growth of the tiny radio transmitter tags that transportation companies, retailers and manufacturers use to track goods and purchases, saying it was confident that the RFID tags could be designed to protect consumer privacy.

"I know that most of you are wondering what new regulation I am going to propose today," said Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for Internet and communications, at a news conference at the Cebit technology convention in Hannover. "Well, today I am here to tell you that on RFIDs, there is not going to be a regulation," she said, referring to radio frequency identification tags.

The announcement by Reding, who has taken an aggressively pro-consumer attitude since she took office in 2004, signaled to businesses that the development of the tracking devices would not be hindered in the European Union.

Instead, Reding said she planned to create an advisory group of industry representatives, privacy advocates, consumers and scientists to determine whether changes were needed to the EU's existing electronic privacy directive to accommodate RFID use while protecting personal privacy. The group is expected to make a recommendation by the end of this year.

Some privacy advocates criticized the decision. They have expressed fears that the tags could be used by marketers and retailers to surreptitiously track consumer health data, financial information and buying habits. The tags, which are based on microchips, emit radio signals over a short range that carry more information than do bar codes.

"This is a reckless decision that squandered a great opportunity," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a London-based watchdog group. "Government regulations would have helped embed privacy into the very structure of RFID themselves."

He said the potential for abuse could have been curtailed by limiting the range of chips to 6 inches, or 15 centimeters, to prevent long-range scanning and by restricting the embedding of personal information on chips.

"Very light legislation would have benefited the industry by giving a baseline for using the technology across Europe," Davies said. "Now the industry runs the risk of national legislatures passing laws country by country."

According to the commission, the RFID market in Europe, worth €500 million, or $662 million, this year, will grow to €7 billion by 2016. Worldwide, more than one billion RFID tags were sold in 2006.

Reding said the full commission had endorsed her decision. Last year at Cebit, she raised the possibility of RFID regulation, citing "a future of ubiquitous surveillance, identity theft and low trust."

But Reding said she had grown confident that the tags could be designed to meet privacy concerns. Companies like Philips, for example, now make RFID tags for consumer goods that buyers can deactivate at the cash register after the purchase.

The legal status of RFIDs was uncertain because of European privacy laws, which are stricter than those of the United States.

Reding said the technology needed to be encouraged because of its potential to cut government administrative costs and to make entire sectors of the economy more efficient. "We must provide industry with the certainty they need to use this technology," Reding said.

Robert Cresanti, a U.S. under secretary of commerce for technology who met with Reding at Cebit, said he was relieved that the European Commission was not going to regulate RFIDs, which he said would have slowed their diffusion and added costs.

"No regulation, in my point of view, is a victory," he said.

In the United States, RFID use is largely unencumbered by national and state law, and the chips must only respect restrictions on dissemination of health and financial data, Cresanti said. "In the EU, there is a broader privacy protection, and our concern was that existing laws could have been used to the detriment of RFID technology," he said.

Reding said she would continue urging businesses in the EU to use the recommended radio spectrum frequencies set aside last year for RFID use. She said she was also working with the authorities in the United States, Russia and Japan to coordinate standards and frequencies so that the simplest possible chips could be designed to work globally.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...iness/rfid.php





Mumbai Police Can Now Nail Web Offenders

Landmark deal signed with Orkut to share ip addresses and help arrest those posting objectionable content
Sagnik Chowdhury

Shivaji forums or anti-Ambedkar postings or “hate India” campaigns on Google’s social networking site, Orkut, have been confounding our authorities for quite sometime now. Other than blocking the objectionable forums, the Mumbai Police could do little—except wait for the next one to pop up on the web, say, a “fan club” of wanted underworld dons like Dawood Ibrahim or Chhota Shakeel.

But not any more. The Mumbai Police is finally equipped to track down such offenders and bring them to book. A single e-mail between the DCP in charge of the Enforcement Branch and the California-based company will now nail such persons.

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

“Early February, I met three representatives from Orkut.com, including a top official from the US. The other two were from Bangalore. We reached a working agreement whereby Orkut has agreed to provide us details of the ip address from which an objectionable message or blog has been posted on the site and the Internet service provider involved,” said DCP Enforcement, Sanjay Mohite.

That the measure is fool-proof is evident from the fact that an encrypted code has also been agreed upon for such communication to prevent people from posing as the Mumbai Police and laying their hands on such information from Orkut.

“I am also going to hold a meeting with all Internet service providers to stress the need to share information. We are also hoping to rope in U Tube in the future,” said Mohite.

Earlier, if a complaint regarding objectionable content was received, the police would contact the computer emergency response team, a government body based in New Delhi, and ask it to block the concerned web page. They did not have any way to track down the culprits.

“It was almost out of the question to track down the person who posted the material as we would have to go through the CBI to get basic information from Orkut as they are based in the US. The entire process of letter rogatory would come into play. But now we can take action on any content posted on the site from India,” he explained.

Mohite talks of a citizen who had complained to the police in November regarding a photograph of her posted on Orkut, along with derogatory text.

“She provided us the name of a suspected, but we did not have any proof. After the new agreement was reached, we asked Orkut for the details of the concerned ip address. They replied instantly and we nailed the culprit, who turned out to be the suspect,” said Mohite.
http://cities.expressindia.com/fulls...?newsid=226058





Egypt Court Rejects Blogger Appeal
Ines Bel Aiba

An Egyptian court on Monday upheld a four-year sentence against a blogger convicted of insulting religion and defaming the president, a verdict condemned by rights groups as a threat to free speech.

The court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria rejected the appeal by 22-year-old Abdel Karim Suleiman who was sentenced last month, lawyers Gamal Eid and Ahmed Seif al-Islam told AFP.

"The verdict was not handed down on the basis of the law," said Eid, who is also the head

of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. "It is a religious verdict similar to those of the Inquisition."

The decision was seen by international rights groups as an attempt to intimidate Egypt's burgeoning blogging scene.

Elijah Zarwan, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Cairo, said the verdict was a "chilling precedent" which "might close crucial the doors to free expression."

"We are dismayed that the judge rejected the appeal. (The blogger) should have never been imprisoned in the first place," Zarwan added.

His view was echoed by the Paris-based international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

"It is a very bad sign for the freedom of expression in Egypt," said Julien Pain, the group's Internet Freedom desk chief. "It sends an extremely threatening message to other Egyptian bloggers."

Suleiman, who blogs under the name Karim Amer, was sentenced to three years in prison in February for insulting religion and a year for defaming President Hosni Mubarak after posting an entry on his blog lashing out at Cairo's Al-Azhar University -- the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam.

"I say to Al-Azhar and its university and its professors and preachers who stand against anyone who thinks differently to them: 'You are destined for the rubbish bin of history, where you will find no one to cry for you, and your regime will end like others have'," he wrote.

Despite worldwide appeals for his release, the court ruled that the young Muslim blogger should be jailed for insulting Islam in his writing.

"The Moharram Beik criminal court has sentenced the blogger after he created a website through which he attacked Islam," Judge Ayman Okkaz said. "On his site, he claimed that Islam incited terrorism, hatred and murder."

The conviction was based on a series of vaguely worded articles in the penal code that forbid the spreading of false information, insulting Islam or other revealed religions, and "affronting the President of the Republic."

Egypt has thousands of bloggers, although only a few discuss political issues. Recently some have been shedding light on alleged torture by security services.

Suleiman's arrest came on the same day last November that Reporters Without Borders published a new list of 13 countries it described as "enemies of the Internet" -- and included Egypt for the first time.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/12032007/32...er-appeal.html





"Disaster for privacy"

Google Sets Long Limits on Records Retention
Miguel Helft

Web search companies collect records of the searches that people conduct, a fact that has long generated fears among privacy advocates and some Internet users that valuable personal data could be misused.

Now Google is taking a step to ease those concerns. The company keeps logs of all searches, along with digital identifiers linking them to specific computers and Internet browsers. It said Wednesday that it would start to make those logs anonymous after 18 months to 24 months, making it much harder to connect search records to a person.

Under current practices, the company keeps the logs intact indefinitely.

"We have decided to make this change with feedback from privacy advocates, regulators worldwide and, of course, from our users," said Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel.

But it is unclear whether the change will have its intended effect.

Privacy advocates reacted with a mix of praise and dismay to the decision.

"This is really the first time we have seen them make a decision to try and work out the conflict between wanting to be pro-privacy and collecting all the world's information," said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group. "They are not going to keep a profile on you indefinitely."

Others were less enthusiastic.

"I think it is an absolute disaster for online privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Rotenberg said his organization has been trying to combat efforts by law enforcement officials to require online services to retain search records for long periods of time. He said that 18 months to 24 months was too long, and added that because of Google's dominant position, it would most likely set a de facto standard for data retention.

Wong said Google uses the search data internally only to improve its search engine and other services. She added that Google would release search data only if compelled by a subpoena. Even so, Google was the only major search engine to resist a U.S. Justice Department subpoena for vast amounts of search data last year — a move that drew praise from privacy advocates.

Just how personally revealing such data can be became evident last year, when AOL released records of the searches conducted by 657,000 Americans for the benefit of researchers. While AOL did not identify the people behind the searches, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down some of them quickly through their search requests.

The ensuing flap caused AOL to tighten its privacy policies. The company now keeps search histories for only 13 months.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ess/google.php





Your ISP May be Selling Your Web Clicks
Jeremy Reimer

David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete Incorporated, raised eyebrows at the Open Data 2007 Conference in New York when he revealed that many Internet service providers sell the clickstream data of their users. Clickstream data includes every web site visited by each user and in which order they were clicked.

The data is not sold with accompanying user name or information, but merely as a numerical user value. However, it is still theoretically possible to tie this information to a specific ISP account. Cancel told Ars that his company licenses the data from ISPs for millions of dollars. He did not give a specific figure about what this broke down to in terms of dollars per ISP user, although someone in the audience estimated that it was in the range of 40¢ per user per month—this estimate was erroneously attributed to Cancel himself in some reports on the event. Cancel said that this clickstream data is "much more comprehensive" than data that is normally gleaned through analyzing search queries.

The revelation brings to mind the minor scandal that erupted when AOL was found to be giving away its search results to researchers—this was discovered only after a large sample of data was accidentally released to the public. Clickstream data is, as Cancel admitted, much more interesting to marketers than search engine data.

There is some evidence that the data traditionally gathered by market research firms such as Compete may not be as accurate as the companies had hoped. Establishing "ISP relationships" helps to augment that data—traditionally gathered by user-installed toolbars—but may not be, strictly speaking, an ethical practice.

Of course, it's an established fact that if you surf the web, your surfing habits can be tracked by any site you happen to visit. The expectation of privacy while surfing isn't necessarily a reasonable one, but ISPs that expect to profit from this data should at the very least inform their users that they are doing so. Some US Congressmen are calling for new laws to be enacted to protect the privacy of Internet users.

For his part, David Cancel told Ars that he "strongly supports an increase in the methods and degree to which disclosure is communicated," not only for clickstream data but for any kind of data collected on users' personal surfing habits. He stated that "all users should be informed explicitly when their data can be sold to a third party."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...eb-clicks.html





How to Surf Anonymously Without a Trace
Preston Gralla

The punchline to an old cartoon is "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but these days, that's no longer true.

It's easier than ever for the government, Web sites and private businesses to track exactly what you do online, know where you've visited, and build up comprehensive profiles about your likes, dislikes and private habits.

And with the federal government increasingly demanding online records from sites such as Google and others, your online privacy is even more endangered.

But you don't need to be a victim. There are things you can do to keep your surfing habits anonymous and protect your online privacy. So read on to find out how to keep your privacy to yourself when you use the Internet, without spending a penny.

What they know about you

Whenever you surf the Web, you leave yourself open to being snooped upon by Web sites. They can track your online travels, know what operating system and browser you're running, find out your machine name, uncover the last sites you've visited, examine your history list, delve into your cache, examine your IP address and use that to learn basic information about you such as your geographic location and more. To a great extent, your Internet life is an open book when you visit.

Sites use a variety of techniques to gather and collate this information, but the two most basic are examining your IP address and placing cookies on your PC. Matching your IP address with your cookies makes it easier for them to create personal profiles.
If you'd like to see what kind of information sites can gather about you, head to these two sites, which peer into your browser and report what they find.

Privacy Analysis of Your Internet Connection gathers and displays basic information, such as your operating system, screen resolution, what site you previously visited, general system setup and so on.

BrowserSpy delves even deeper into your system and even reports on whether you have certain software on your system, such as RealPlayer and Adobe Acrobat, including version information.

Protect yourself: Surf anonymously

The best way to make sure Web sites can't gather personal information about you and your computer is to surf anonymously by using an anonymous proxy server that sits between you and the Web sites you visit.

When you use an anonymous proxy server, your browser doesn't contact a Web site directly. Instead, it tells a proxy server which Web sites you want to visit. The proxy server then contacts the Web site, and when you get the Web site's page, you don't get it directly from the site. Instead, it's delivered to you by the proxy server. In that way, your browser never directly contacts the Web server whose site you want to view. The Web site sees the IP address of the proxy server, not your PC's IP address. It can't read your cookies, see your history list or examine your clipboard and cache because your PC is never in direct contact with it. You're able to surf without a trace.

There are three primary ways to use anonymous proxy servers. You can configure your browser to use a such a server (or get software to do it for you); you can visit an "anonymizer" Web site, which does the work of contacting the server; or you can download software that will ensure your anonymity when you use the Internet. We'll look at how to do each.

Keep yourself anonymous with Tor

The best free software you can find for being anonymous when you use the Web is to use the free Tor. When you use Tor, all your communications -- not just Web surfing, but also instant messaging and other applications -- are in essence bounced around a giant network of Tor servers called "onion routers" until it's impossible for sites or people to be able to track your activities.

Setting up Tor is straightforward. Download a package that includes not just Tor, but other software you need to work with it, such as Privoxy, a proxy program. All the software is self-configuring, so you won't need to muck around with port settings or the like. Tor runs as a small icon in your system tray. To start Tor, right-click it and choose Start from the menu that appears; to stop it, right-click it and choose Stop.

Once it starts, simply use the Internet as you normally would. If you're superparanoid, you can regularly change your Tor "identity" to make it even harder for anyone to track your travels. Right-click the Tor icon, and select "New Identity." That's all it takes.

Tor also includes a nice bandwidth tool that has nothing to do with anonymity but that graphs your bandwidth use. Right-click the Tor icon, and choose Bandwidth Graph. You can see it in action, along with Tor's right-click context menu, in the nearby figure.

Firefox users will want to download the Torbutton, which will let them turn Tor on and off from directly within the browser.

I've found only one drawback to Tor: At times, I've noticed a slowdown in surfing when using it. But that comes and goes, and slowdowns aren't that extreme. So if you're worried about your privacy when you surf, it's a great bet.

Web sites that let you surf anonymously for free

A number of free Web sites offer free anonymous surfing via proxy servers. The benefits of these sites are obvious: When you surf, you're anonymous. But there are some drawbacks as well. Surfing tends to be slower -- and in some cases very slow. And when you use these Web sites, some sites you visit from them don't display properly.

The sites all work pretty much the same. Head to them, and in a box, type the Web site you want to visit. From that point on, you'll be surfing anonymously; the site does the work of using an anonymous proxy server for you.

The Cloak is one such service. It lets you customize exactly how anonymous you want to be and what surfing technologies you want to leave on or off. It goes beyond providing anonymity and can protect you in other ways -- for example, by turning off Java and JavaScript or even blocking banner ads. As you can see in the nearby screenshot, you can configure all that yourself before you start to surf.

Once you do that, you type in the address you want to visit, and you're off. As you browse in your browser's address bar, you'll notice an odd URL that contains the Cloak's URL as well as the site you're visiting. For example, if you visit CNN, you'll see something like this:
http://www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/+cf...//www.cnn.com/

Note that if you want to remain anonymous during your surfing session after you visit the first Web site from The Cloak, you'll have to only click links. If you type a URL directly into the address bar, the Cloak will no longer work.

The Cloak is free, but it has some limitations. You'll surf more slowly than normally, and the slowdown may become noticeable. One reason is that the site also offers a for-pay service, and so it throttles down free users, while letting those who pay surf without a throttle. And the site may also limit the amount of time you surf anonymously as well, depending on whether many users are logged in simultaneously.

Use your browser with an anonymous proxy

If you don't like the limitations imposed on you by sites like the Cloak or would simply prefer to configure anonymous surfing yourself, you can easily set up your browser to use an anonymous proxy server to sit between you and the sites you visit.

To use an anonymous proxy server with your browser, first find an anonymous proxy server. Hundreds of free, public proxy servers are available, but many frequently go offline or are very slow. Many sites compile lists of these proxy servers, including Public Proxy Servers and the Atom InterSoft proxy server list. To find others, do a Google search.

I prefer Atom InterSoft proxy server list because it provides more information about each server. It lists server uptime percentage and the last time the server was checked to see if it was online.

Find the server with the highest percentage of uptime. Write down the server's IP address and the port it uses. For example, in the listing 24.236.148.15:80, the IP address is 24.236.148.15, and the port number is 80.

In Internet Explorer, select Tools-->Internet Options, click the Connections tab, and click the LAN Settings button. Check the "Use a proxy server for your LAN" box. In the Address field, type in the IP address of the proxy server. In the Port field, type in its port number. Check the "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" box; you don't need to remain anonymous on your local network. Click OK and then OK again to close the dialog boxes. Now when you surf the Web, the proxy server will protect your privacy. Keep in mind that proxy servers can make surfing the Web slower, depending on the proxy you're using.

In Firefox, select Tools -->Advanced, click the Network tab, and click the Settings button. Choose "Manual proxy configuration," enter the proxy information (IP address and port number), and click OK and then OK again

Problems with anonymous proxy servers

If you set up your browser to use anonymous proxies, as I just outlined, you need to keep in mind that there's one potential danger: Theoretically, a hacker could set up a proxy server, and then use it to capture information about the Web sites you visit. And if you type in user names and passwords, he could steal those as well.

I haven't heard of this actually happening in the real world, but you should be aware that it's a possibility. Using software like Tor or a free proxy server like the Cloak won't expose you to this danger; only the use of public proxy servers does.

How can you protect yourself against this? Before using a proxy server, do a Google search on its name and address to see if there are any reports about hackers using it. And it's also a good idea to only use a server that you notice have been on the lists a long time, because hackers are not likely to keep a server running a long time without being caught or shutting it down.

What else you can do

There are other ways to help protect your anonymity online. If you're worried that your searches may be used by search engines or government agencies to invade your privacy or create a profile about you, see Seven ways to keep your search history private.
If you want to be able to send e-mail anonymously so that no one can find out that you sent it, you can use an anonymous remailer such as the Web-based Anonymouse's AnonEmail or the downloadable QuickSilver.

There are also plenty of for-pay anonymity services, such as the Anonymizer, and the Anonymizer's new Nyms service, which uses utilizes disposable e-mail addresses to protect your true e-mail identity.

Finally, for a very good all-around resource about how to protect your privacy online, check out the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Online Guide to Practical Privacy Tools. It has plenty of links to software and sites to help protect your privacy.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9012778





Seagate Ships Hard Drives With Encryption
Joris Evers

Seagate Technology on Monday plans to announce the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with Seagate's new hard drive that has built-in encryption technology.

Fremont, Calif.-based ASI Computer Technologies will start selling computers equipped with Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drive next month, Seagate said in a statement. The computers, called ASI C8015, will be sold through a number of ASI's partners, including Newegg.com, PowerNotebooks.com and ZipZoomfly.com, an ASI representative said.

In addition to an 80GB Seagate drive, the ASI machine will feature a fingerprint reader, 15.4-inch display, Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile 2.0GHz processor, Nvidia graphics with 256MB memory, 1GB RAM and a DVD rewritable drive, according to ASI. The price is expected to be about $2,150.

The Seagate drives are equipped with the company's new "DriveTrust" technology, which the company promotes as a simpler way to safeguard data stored on laptops. The encryption technology is designed to make life tougher for computer thieves and to prevent embarrassing breaches.

ASI is a small player among notebook makers. It ships "whitebook" computers that don't carry a name brand and are sold by resellers who sometimes put their own names on the hardware.

Seagate is also in discussions with major, brand name laptop makers and expects to announce more deals for its new hard drive midyear.

"We will obviously be selling this to worldwide resellers," said Michael Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

Seagate pitches its encrypting hard disk as an alternative to full-disk encryption software, such as products sold by PGP and PointSec Mobile Technologies. Additionally, high-end editions of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system include an encryption feature called BitLocker.

The Momentus 5400 FDE.2 offers up to 160GB of capacity, a Serial ATA interface, and hardware-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, according to Seagate. ASI will ship its laptop with Wave Systems' management software to simplify enterprise use of the computers, it said.
http://news.com.com/Seagate+ships+ha...3-6166180.html





AMD's Well May Be Running Dry
Jordan Robertson

The high-flying Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) of 2006 has given way to a company in financial peril, saddled with debt and bleeding from a brutal price battle with its larger and suddenly resurgent Silicon Valley archrival, Intel Corp. (INTC)

AMD finds itself the subject of rumors of a possible takeover or private-equity cash infusion. While it wasn't long ago that AMD was stealing a big slice of the microprocessor market and emerging as a long-term threat to Intel, those very gains may have left AMD's well running dry.

Though the price competition has cut into both chip makers' profits, Wall Street has punished AMD's stock particularly hard.

Its shares have plunged more than 60 percent over the past year on fears about the company's ability to continue gaining share without hurting profit margins. Meanwhile, Intel's stock is down just 4 percent.

Investors are concerned AMD is spending too heavily to keep up with Intel's aggressive transition to next-generation manufacturing technology.

AMD's fall has wiped out about $10 billion in shareholder wealth. Analysts say the exodus will likely continue until the company rolls out its new chips this year and resolves fears about its dwindling cash reserves and high capital expenditures.

The shifting fortunes highlight the challenges facing AMD as it squares off against a company with seven times its annual revenue and a history of spending heavily on breakthrough technologies.

"AMD, as a company, has enough strong parts that it will survive, but I think it's going to be a rough couple of years for this organization," said Stephen Kleynhans, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. (IT) "They've got some very solid technology, but technology can be very fleeting. A technology lead today can just disappear in just a matter of quarters."

Both Intel and AMD are adept at weathering the boom-and-bust cycles of the volatile semiconductor industry. But they are still adjusting to AMD's newfound competitiveness across a range of products, from desktops to laptops to servers.

AMD stole about 4 percent of the overall processor market from Intel in 2006, according to Mercury Research. AMD scored a particularly big victory by partnering with Dell Inc. (DELL), once an exclusive Intel client.

But Intel, which still controls about three-quarters of the total market, has roared back with a lineup of powerful and energy-efficient processors that appears to be slowing AMD's offensive.

While AMD continues to gain market share in desktops and laptops, its growth in the lucrative server market has stalled. In 2006, AMD siphoned about 5 percent of the server market from Intel, but leveled out at 22 percent share during the second half, according to Mercury Research.

Last month, Intel scored a high-profile victory of its own, announcing an alliance with server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW) The partnership will put Intel chips back in Sun servers and workstations after several years of AMD exclusivity.

AMD is banking on regaining momentum with the mid-2007 launch of its new server chip, code-named Barcelona, which has four computing engines and an updated design. The company acknowledges that Intel beat it to market with four-core chips that launched in November. But AMD insists its design for getting the cores to communicate with each other will serve as a key advantage.

"Five years ago no one knew who we were in the server space, now we're a player," said Mario Rivas, AMD's executive vice president for the computing products group. "This will allow us to be a serious contender in the server space and regain the performance crown. There is a halo effect that goes with that."

But analysts are not optimistic about a quick turnaround for AMD.

The company swung to a $166 million loss for fiscal 2006 and disappointed investors by offering little clarity on how it intended to differentiate its products from Intel's and improve profitability.

This week, AMD warned it was unlikely to meet its first-quarter revenue guidance of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion.

"Our view is that this will get worse before it gets better," said Christopher Caso, a senior analyst with Friedman Billings Ramsey. "This quarter's performance is evidence that it did get worse."

Wall Street is worried that AMD is in dire need of cash after its $5.6 billion acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc. and heavy spending on factory upgrades. AMD bought ATI last year under the philosophy that combining traditional processing chores with graphics capabilities in one chip would give AMD a long-term advantage over Intel.

But the deal reverberated through AMD's finances. At the end of 2006, AMD was sitting on $1.5 billion in cash but had $3.8 billion in debt, including $2.2 billion associated with the ATI acquisition. In 2005, AMD had $1.8 billion in cash and a total debt load of $1.4 billion.

AMD said in its annual report that the big debt may crimp its ability to borrow more money and pay for $2.5 billion in capital expenditures planned in 2007.

"It's a dilemma - we believe AMD needs to spend the money to build the fabs (chip factories), but they may have to find some additional financing to achieve those goals," said analyst John Lau of investment bank Jefferies & Co. "We believe investors need to see some resolution of these issues before they start to get back into the stock again."

Intel ended 2006 in a healthier financial position: $10 billion in cash and $2 billion in total debt. Intel's net income dropped 42 percent last year - hurt by price-cutting and extensive factory upgrades - but analysts are bullish the company is quickly recouping its investments and improving profitability.

Intel is known for its heavy research-and-development spending even during lean times. In 2006, the company said it was eliminating 10,500 positions in a massive restructuring. But it still spent $5.9 billion on R&D - about 17 percent of overall revenue - up from $5.1 billion in fiscal 2005.

By comparison, AMD plowed $1.2 billion - more than 21 percent of its revenue - into R&D last year.

The expenditures have helped Intel pull ahead of AMD by at least a year in producing chips based on 65-nanometer and 45-nanometer technology, which shrinks chip circuitry to 65- and 45-billionths of a meter. The smaller scale allows more transistors to be crammed onto the same piece of silicon.

AMD said it is closing the gap with Intel and believes its partnership with IBM Corp. makes rolling out the technology more cost-efficient.

"We believe we're putting the right capacity in at the right time, and we're immediately getting the benefits," said Tom Sonderman, AMD's director of manufacturing technology.

Industry analysts said both companies are suffering from the need to balance the near-term goals of shareholders and the huge expenditures required to stay competitive.

"What this comes down to is the companies are playing a long-term game," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "The financial people would be delighted to hear AMD would not be investing in any factories. They would be delighted if Intel would not compete on price to gain market share and would focus on margins. That's great for the next three quarters, but a train wreck for both companies."

Perhaps one lifeline for AMD will come from none other than Intel itself.

AMD is suing Intel for antitrust violations, claiming that Intel undercut AMD by forcing customers into exclusive deals and offering secret rebates. Trial isn't due to begin for two more years, but there's precedent for a settlement. In the mid-1990s, AMD and Intel agreed to resolve several legal claims against each other, and one result was that AMD won the right to keep producing chips on the x86 design architecture - which both companies still use today.
http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D8NPUI7G0.html





Data Show How Electronics Mix With Medical Devices
Nicholas Bakalar

If a halogen lamp causes static on a nearby radio, the problem is probably not serious. But what if the electronic antitheft device in the department store makes a heart pacemaker malfunction, or a cellphone used in a hospital interferes with a blood pressure monitor?

Two reports published in the March issue of The Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggest that the dangers of radio wave interference with implanted medical devices are real but modest, and that cellphones in hospitals present no danger at all.

One study, both of whose authors have received research financing from manufacturers of medical equipment, describes two cases in which antitheft devices, sometimes called electronic article surveillance, or E.A.S., systems, apparently caused medical devices to malfunction.

A 71-year-old man with an implanted defibrillator was shocked and staggered by an electronic antitheft system, and a 76-year old woman with a pacemaker collapsed while standing near one of the devices. Seated leaning against the machine, she passed out and was revived five times before store employees moved her away from the device.

Neither person was seriously harmed. The authors said both episodes happened in spring 2006 at large retail stores, but did not identify them.

“There is no problem in having E.A.S. systems,” said Dr. J. Rod Gimbel, a co-author of the study and a cardiologist at East Tennessee Heart Consultants in Knoxville. “But it would be good practice to educate the staffs of retail stores about the problem.”
Jim Vanderpool, product health and safety director for Sensormatic Electronics, the manufacturer of the surveillance machines involved in both incidents, said in an e-mail message that the company had “no independent information regarding the two specific cases,” but that the article reinforced the scientific consensus “that patients with medical implants like pacemakers and defibrillators should simply walk through electronic antitheft systems at a normal pace.”

The Food and Drug Administration advised the industry in 2000 to label surveillance devices with warnings not to linger near them or lean on them. “That recommendation still holds true,” said Mitchell Shein, a senior reviewer in the agency’s device center. “But if a person is exposed to an E.A.S., as long as they move through at a normal pace, the likelihood of a negative outcome is very limited.”

Another article in the same journal describes an experiment testing cellphones at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., over a four-month period in 2006. The researchers used various phones and wireless handheld devices in 75 patient rooms and the intensive care unit, where patients were nearby or connected to a total of 192 medical machines of 23 types.

In 300 tests of ringing, making calls, talking on the phone and receiving data, there was not a single instance of interference with the medical apparatus. For many of the tests, the cellphones were working at lower received signal strengths — that is, showing fewer bars on the screen — which means they were operating at the highest power output levels. The authors conclude with a recommendation to relax existing cellphone rules.

But Mr. Shein said changing hospital cellphone regulations on the basis of these findings might be premature. “I think it’s dangerous for someone to go around doing ad hoc testing and conclude that it’s not going to be an issue for others,” he said. “There was no result, but there may have been if the circumstances had been slightly different.”

Dr. David L. Hayes, the senior author and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, disagreed. “Cellphone technology is the same throughout the country,” he said, “and hospital equipment is similar. I don’t think that testing in another part of the U.S. is going to have different results.

“I’m advocating based on this testing that we should change the rules,” Dr. Hayes continued, “and in fact many people ignore the rules anyway. In a way, the policy is already antiquated and violated de facto.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/health/13cell.html





Chinese Boot Camps Tackle Internet Addiction
Ian Ransom

Combining sympathy with discipline, a military-style boot camp near Beijing is at the front line of China's battle against Internet addiction, a disorder afflicting millions of the nation's youth.

The Internet Addiction Treatment Center in Daxing County uses a blend of therapy and military drills to treat the children of China's nouveau riche addicted to online games, Internet pornography, cybersex and chats.

"I gradually became obsessed," said Li Yanlin, a university student whose grades plunged after he became addicted to Internet games. But after several weeks at the Daxing facility, the 18- year-old said he "recognized the falseness of online gaming."

Concerned by a number of high-profile Internet-related deaths and juvenile crime, the government is now taking steps to stem Internet addictions by banning new Internet cafés and mulling restrictions on violent computer games.

The government-funded Daxing center, run by an army colonel under the Beijing Military Hospital, is one of a handful of clinics treating patients with Internet addictions in China.

Patients, overwhelmingly male and aged 14 to 19, wake up in dormitories at 6:15 a.m. to do morning calisthenics and march on the cracked concrete grounds wearing khaki fatigues. Drill sergeants bark orders at them when they are not attending group and individual counseling sessions. Therapy includes patients simulating war games with laser guns.

The center's tough-love approach to breaking Internet addiction is unique to China, but necessary in a country with over two million teenage Internet addicts, according to the facility's staff.

"Many of the Internet addicts here have rarely considered other people's feelings. The military training allows them to feel what it's like to be a part of a team," said Xu Leiting, a psychologist at the hospital. "It also helps their bodies recover and makes them stronger."

The center has treated 1,500 patients in this way since opening in 2004, and boasts a 70 percent success rate at breaking addictions.

A stay costs about 10,000 yuan, or $1,290, a month, nearly a year's average disposable income in China. But the center takes on pro bono cases for poor families, said Tao Ran, its director.

"There is no trend for Internet addiction as far as social or economic status, or geography, are concerned. So long as they can get access to a computer, there will be addiction," Tao said.

At the end of 2006, China had 137 million Internet users, an increase of 23.4 percent from the previous year.

Of users under 18, an estimated 13 percent, or 2.3 million, are Internet addicts, according to a 2006 study by the China National Children's Center.

Internet addiction rates posted in Western studies vary wildly, with little consensus as to what constitutes addiction and whether the concept exists.

A Stanford University School of Medicine report issued in 2006 said that one in eight adults find it hard to be away from the Internet for several days, but the report was inconclusive as to whether excessive use could be defined as an addiction.

China's health authorities, however, have few illusions about placing Internet addiction on a par with alcoholism, drug-taking and gambling.

"The effects are the same," Tao said. "Some addicts drop out of school, some mug people for money, steal and sell their families' things to keep playing games. Some end up killing themselves because they feel life has no point."

The social consequences of addiction had caught the government off guard, as had the Internet's explosive growth.

"Suddenly, from a handful of users in 1997, China now has over 130 million. People can get online in the most remote places. The legal system did not have time to develop," Tao said.

Addiction to the Internet is blamed for most juvenile crime in China, a number of suicides, and deaths from exhaustion by players unable to tear themselves away from marathon game sessions.

In 2005, a Shanghai court handed a life sentence to an online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword — a virtual prize earned during game-playing.

The rising tide of Internet-addicted youth prompted the government this year to ban new Internet cafés, which are seen in China as breeding grounds for social delinquency.

Delegates at the National People's Congress, China's annual session of Parliament, have proposed stricter criminal punishments for Internet café operators who admit minors, and have flagged restrictions on violent games.

"Even President Hu Jintao talked of developing a scientific and civilized Internet environment recently," Tao said.

But China's Internet addiction is not merely a product of an imperfect regulatory system, Xu Leiting said.

"The main cause of Internet addiction is that parents' expectations for their children are too high," said Xu.

With education perceived by many parents as the only means of advancement in an ultracompetitive society of 1.3 billion people, some lock their children up to study and ask teachers to assign extra homework. The pressure can be too much for some children, Xu said, especially if they fail.

"Then they escape to the virtual world to seek achievements, importance and satisfaction, or a sense of belonging."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031200073.html





After False Claims, Wikipedia to Check Degrees
Noam Cohen

After an influential contributor and administrator at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was found to have invented a history of academic credentials, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and globetrotting advocate, has called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees, like a Ph.D. or M.D.

The details of how the system would work are still being bandied about, and include the idea of having users fax copies of their diplomas to Wikipedia's offices, or relying on a "circle of trust," whereby a trusted individual would be in charge of verification. Wales said he thought that some version of his proposal would begin on the site "in a week."

But reaction within the fiercely egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many writing on Wales's user page seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia spending its time to verify academic authority when the site's motto is "the encyclopedia anyone can edit."

Florence Devouard, Wales's successor as the head of Wikimedia Foundation board, the parent of the many Wikipedias in scores of languages, said she was "not supportive" of the proposal. "I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as 'cite your source,' not the quality of credentials showed by an editor," she added.

Wales was reacting to the public fallout from the revelation last week that a contributor and Wikipedia administrator named Essjay who claimed to be a tenured professor in Catholic canon law was in fact Ryan Jordan, a 24-year- old man from Louisville, Kentucky. Wales said that the Essjay controversy was evidence of "growing pains" for the site, a worldwide phenomenon that has become a default research tool for nearly everyone who uses the Internet.

And while he said "the moral of the story is what makes for a good Wikipedian is not a good credential," he added that it was important that the general public not think that Wikipedia is "written by a bunch of 12-year-olds."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...iness/wiki.php





History, Digitized (and Abridged)

In the Internet age, historical records that have not been converted to digital form could vanish from the nation's memory.
Katie Hafner

The National Steinbeck Center, at the top of Main Street in this farming community, exhibits an array of artifacts from John Steinbeck's life and works: family memorabilia, a passport from the 1960s and movie stills from "The Grapes of Wrath." Downstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, is the original manuscript of "The Pearl," his novella published in 1947. There is also an exuberant letter that Steinbeck wrote to a distant relative when he was a teenager, as well as rare footage of him on 16-millimeter film, introducing a 1961 movie, "Flight."

Steinbeck aficionados wishing to examine the manuscript of "The Pearl," which he wrote in pencil in small, precise handwriting on a yellow legal pad, have to travel here — after making an appointment with a part-time archivist, who is in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The center takes great care to preserve these relics of Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate, yet it has no plans to take the collection a step further, to adapt to a digital age. As a result, the manuscript of "The Pearl" is no more likely to be digitized than is the camper with the canine-motif curtains that Steinbeck immortalized in his book "Travels With Charley," and that is parked in perpetuity in the center's main exhibition hall.

These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.

"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."

To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing "Gimme a Pigfoot," the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.

It is not for a lack of trying.

At the Library of Congress, for example, despite continuing and ambitious digitization efforts, perhaps only 10 percent of the 132 million objects held will be digitized in the foreseeable future. For one thing, costs are prohibitive. Scanning alone on smaller items ranges from $6 to $9 for a 35-millimeter slide, to $7 to $11 a page for presidential papers, to $12 to $25 for poster-size pieces. (The cost of scanning an object can be a relatively minor part of the entire expense of digitizing and making an item accessible online.)

Similarly, at the National Archives, the repository for some nine billion documents, only a small fraction are likely to be digitized and put online. And at thousands of smaller, local collections around the country, the bulk of the material is languishing on yesterday's media: paper, LPs, magnetic tape and film.

Strapped for money, archivists around the country are looking to private partners for help. Google has donated $3 million to help start an effort led by the Library of Congress that will digitize and share materials around the globe, and has also provided technical resources for digitizing various printed materials at the library. Google, on its own, is digitizing books at the Library of Congress, which has its hands full with other items. And a number of other companies and foundations, including Reuters, IBM and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, have financed digitization projects around the world.

Even with outside help, experts say, entire swaths of political and cultural history are in danger of being forgotten by new generations of amateur researchers and serious scholars.

Consider the Library of Congress archive of one million photo prints from The New York World-Telegram & Sun; only 5,407 have been digitized. Of the 1.2 million images from U.S. News and World Report, the library has digitized only 366. Its collection of five million images from Look magazine, spanning the period from 1937 to 1971, creates what Jeremy Adamson, director of collections and services at the library, calls "a fascinating portrait of America through photo stories on social and political subjects, personalities, food, fashion and sports." Yet only 313 of those images have been digitized.

"It's a crying shame," Adamson said, "as today's public is acutely visually literate and comfortable with pictures as a means to understand the past and experience for themselves the direct look and feel of history."

The reason for not digitizing these collections? "Not enough money," Adamson said.



THE decision to put off digitizing a significant collection is seldom easy, archivists at the Library of Congress say. Plans to digitize The National Intelligencer, a newspaper published in Washington during much of the 19th century and filled with Colonial script not easily recognized by digitizing equipment, eventually had to be put on hold because of the high expense.

"If researchers conclude that the only valuable records they need are those that are online they will be missing major parts of the story," said James Hastings, director of access programs at the National Archives. "And in some cases they will miss the story altogether."

Maritime buffs, for example, hoping to use the Internet to piece together the story of the Silenus, one of the finest ships ever built in North America, will find a spotty narrative. The papers of its captain, Joseph King, who lived a brief but adventurous life, from 1782 to 1806, can be found courtesy of the Mellon Foundation, in a digitized archive from the Mystic Seaport's collection. Researchers will see how much Captain King paid for "1 potte lijn oli" in 1803, when the ship was in the Netherlands.

What they will not see is that two years after King's death, at the Cape of Good Hope, the ship itself was advertised for sale on May 4, 1808, in Calcutta. This clue remains paperbound, on the front page of The Asiatic Mirror, an English-language newspaper published in Calcutta during that era, whose only known remaining copies now reside in large bound volumes in a remote storage room outside Washington. The relative obscurity of the newspaper, and its odd size, make it impractical to digitize.

A Google search will pick up the next chapter of the story at the Princeton University's special collection, which includes the papers of James and Dolley Madison. It reveals that in 1817, President Madison signed over the ship's papers to William Gallup.
"The story of what happened to the good ship Silenus between 1806 and 1817 will never be complete," said Adamson of the Library of Congress, "but what happened in 1808 in Calcutta is the kind of little crumb that can be picked up and become a significant research item."

The ultimate fate of information relating to potentially valuable but obscure people, places, events or things like the Silenus highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital era. While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization — because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

"This is the great problem right now, and it's a scary thing," said the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. "The dots are only connected by a few of us who are willing to go to the places to make those connections."

In its digitization efforts, the Library of Congress is focusing mainly on special collections, hewing to a philosophy that it should be digitizing objects that cannot be seen elsewhere. There are the obvious things, like the papers of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. And then there are the Farm Security Administration's collection of photographs from the Depression, and a set of mounted photographs of the America's Cup yacht race since the 1890s.

Elizabeth Dulabahn, a senior manager at the Library of Congress who oversees part of the library's digitizing effort, said the library was examining closely the behavior of those who use its Web site.

"We're trying to do a better job of understanding the kinds of information that people are looking for on the Web, and the kinds of searches that bring users to the library's site," she said. She cited Women's History Month and the centennial of the first Wright Brothers flight as "examples of events of interest to a broad constituency."

The Library of Congress and other archives are creating indexes that refer to the contents of a physical collection, in the hope that they will entice researchers away from their computers.

But the reality remains that a new generation of researchers prefers to seek information online, a trend made all too clear to Hastings of the National Archives last year, after Google, in an experiment of sorts, digitized 101 of the National Archives' films — including World War II newsreels and NASA footage — and put them up on its site, at video.google.com/nara.html.

"Before that happened, we had 200 requests total for the whole year in our research room," Hastings said. "The first month the films were available on Google, there were about 200,000 hits on them — a thousandfold increase."

In some cases, strange bedfellows have conspired to help solve the problem.

Over the years, the New Orleans Public Library has steadily been digitizing its photographs, but its documents have gone largely untouched. The collection, which rivals the holdings of many university special collections, contains millions of historical documents, going back to 1769 and the Spanish colonial era.

The records survived Hurricane Katrina unscathed, but are still at risk for damage and loss, said Irene Wainwright, an archivist at the library.

"I can't tell you how many people have suggested to us, 'Oh, you just need to digitize all that stuff down in the basement and you'll be all right,'" Wainwright said. "They have no idea how much effort that requires."

Enter the Genealogical Society of Utah, an organization financed by the Mormon Church, for whom the search for ancestors is a core mission. The society has embarked on a three-year, $200,000 project to digitize all of the library's genealogically relevant records from 1805 to 1880 (www.familysearch.org).

"The records we gather document the lives of people," said Wayne Metcalfe, vice president of the society. "Births, christenings, land records and other documents that provide information about individuals who have lived on the earth."

To that end, genealogy experts affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are fanning out, digital cameras in hand, making copies of genealogically relevant records in 200 cities around the world, including New Orleans. Over the next five years, the church expects to have hundreds of millions of digital images available.

Metcalfe said economies of scale helped his organization bring down the cost of capturing each image to roughly 20 cents — far less than what a commercial company might charge.

Similarly, IBM's digitization efforts — dating to the mid-1990s, when the company converted a healthy chunk of the Vatican Library's archives — are done in a way to benefit the company as well as the institution looking to digitize its holdings.

"We look for projects that will highlight IBM's most innovative technologies or help us develop those technologies with very specific partners who have a problem to solve," said Paula Baker, vice president for global community initiatives at IBM The company looks for projects that require the newest technology.

Such is the case with its most recent multiyear, multimillion-dollar project: a virtual version of the vast Forbidden City in Beijing, which IBM is building in partnership with China's Ministry of Culture. When it is finished, early next year, the site will include interactive, three-dimensional images of ancient thrones, artwork and military implements.

Baker added that each time IBM embarks on a new venture, requests start coming in from other institutions in need. "When we do these projects everyone else comes out of the woodwork," she said. "But we have to be very selective."

Donald Waters, program officer for scholarly communication at the Mellon Foundation, said his foundation had also become increasingly selective over the years.

By way of example, Waters pointed to the papers of Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury in the 16th century who collected ancient manuscripts to prove the early existence of an independent English-speaking church that was responsible not to the pope but to the king of England. For centuries, those papers have been locked up at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. Mellon is financing a project to put them online.

"It takes a special skill to select stand-alone collections that have a durable appeal in the marketplace of scholars, which is the marketplace that Mellon cares most about," Waters said. "As interesting and as important as standout collections in individual libraries and archives might be, the mere fact of digitizing them does not mean that once they are online they will attract and sustain an audience."

The Parker collection, Waters said, meets all these criteria — it is a core collection for a variety of fields: linguistics, ecclesiastical and religious history, English history, art history, medieval studies. He added, however, that the materials have a long history of restricted access, largely to protect the materials because they are so important.

"Digitization would allow much broader access to the contents," he said, "which is sufficient for much research, without exposing the physical manuscripts to added handling."



WHILE copyright is not a concern for those digitizing documents that are hundreds of years old, copyright restrictions play a significant role when it comes to modern material. Even if the Steinbeck Center in Salinas were to find the money to digitize, say, the manuscript of "The Pearl," its copyright would limit its distribution.

"At this point, online materials are best for authors no longer under copyright," said Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University and scholar in residence at the Steinbeck Center.

When Leonard Bernstein's family donated the composer's papers to the Library of Congress in 1993, it was with the goal of digitizing portions of the collection and making them broadly accessible. Although more than a thousand items from the collection have been digitized and placed on the library's Web site, there is still an enormous quantity of material that, because of sheer volume and copyright concerns, is still accessible only to researchers who travel to the library.

For instance, the collection includes a seven-page letter that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote by hand to Bernstein at 4 a.m. on June 8, 1968, the day after the funeral for Robert Kennedy, thanking him for conducting Mahler's Requiem during the ceremony. The letter is an extraordinary window into her grief: "Your music was everything in my heart, of peace and pain and such drowning beauty," she wrote. But the library would need permission from the estate of Onassis to digitize it.

When it comes to sound recordings, copyright law can introduce additional complications. Recordings made before 1972 are protected under state rather than federal laws, and under a provision of the 1976 Copyright Act, may be entitled to protection under state law until 2067. Also, an additional copyright restriction often applies to the underlying musical composition.

A study published in 2005 by the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources found that some 84 percent of historical sound recordings spanning jazz, blues, gospel, country and classical music in the United States, and made from 1890 to 1964, have become virtually inaccessible.

"Copyright is a very blunt instrument," said Tim Brooks, the author of "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 to 1919" (University of Illinois, 2004). "Once you have copyright, you have total control; there's very little room in the copyright law even for preservation, much less reissuing material."

Generally, rights owners like Sony BMG have reissued on CD only a small portion of the recordings they control.

For example, John Philip Sousa's own band made scores of recordings for Victor Records in the early 20th century. BMG bought Victor in 1986, and few if any of those recordings have since been reissued on CD. "There is probably an odd track out somewhere," Brooks said, "but they've certainly never done any kind of retrospective of him that I'm aware of." And of the hundreds of recordings made in the same period by Noble Sissle, an African-American tenor who recorded for several labels now owned by Sony BMG, few if any have made it onto CD.



THE result, Brooks said, is a series of gaps in the popular understanding of the nation's musical heritage. "It's as if before Bessie Smith, there was nothing," he said. "It has the effect of narrowing our own understanding of our own history."

Another factor that determines what is digitized is how straightforward it is to copy the material.

In some cases, said Theresa Salazar, curator of Western Americana at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the two go hand in hand. "Agencies and organizations providing funding often want large volume for their money," Salazar said.

For example, she pointed out, objects like books can be handled in a straightforward way. It is easy to capture these materials because they are printed, and many of these titles are more or less the same size.

No one knows this better than Google, whose digitization efforts focus mainly on books.

In its quest to scan every one of the tens of millions of books ever published, Google has already digitized one million volumes. Google refuses to say how much it has spent on the venture so far, but outside experts estimate the figure at at least $5 million. The company has also been scanning and indexing academic journals to make them searchable, and is working with the Patent Office to digitize thousands of patents dating back to 1790.

David Eun, Google's vice president for content partnerships, said that rather than dwell on what is being left behind, he preferred to take a more optimistic view.

"We're talking about a huge, huge universe of content," Eun said. "If you look at the glass as half-empty it becomes too overwhelming."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...311history.php





How to Run Vista Legally Without Activation ... for at Least a Year
Gregg Keizer

Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end run around one of Microsoft Corp.'s key antipiracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today.

Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista's registry lets users put off the operating system's product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely.

"The [activation] demands that Vista puts on corporate buyers is much more than on XP," said Livingston. "Vista developers have [apparently] programmed in back doors to get around time restrictions for Vista activation."

Microsoft promptly labeled the registry change a "hack," a loaded word that is usually synonymous with "illegal."

"Recently it has been reported that an activation hack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has been identified," said David Lazar, the director of the company's Genuine Windows program, in an e-mail. "Although these reports are purely speculative at the moment, we are actively monitoring attempts to steal Microsoft intellectual property."

"This is not a hack," Livingston shot back when Lazar's e-mail was read to him. "This is a documented feature of the operating system." To back up his view, Livingston pointed out links to online support documents where Microsoft spells out the pertinent registry key. Nor is it speculative; Livingston demonstrated the procedure live via a Web conference session today and claimed "we have run this dozens of times."

Livingston last month revealed that a one-line command lets users postpone Vista activation up to three times. Combined with Vista's initial 30-day grace period, that meant users could run Vista for as long as 120 days before they had to activate the OS. At the time, Microsoft seemed unconcerned with the disclosure and flatly stated that using it would not violate the Vista End User License Agreement (EULA).

"The feature that I'm revealing today shows that Microsoft has built into Vista a function that allows anyone to extend the operating system's activation deadline not just three times, but many times," Livingston said.

Microsoft documented the key on its support site in a description of what it calls "SkipRearm". In it, Microsoft explains that "rearming a computer restores the Windows system to the original licensing state. All licensing and registry data related to activation is either removed or reset. Any grace period timers are reset as well."

By changing the SkipRearm key's value from the default "0" to "1," said Livingston, the earlier-revealed "slmgr -rearm" command can be used over and over.

In tests with several editions of Vista purchased at different times, Livingston found that copies of Vista Ultimate and Vista Home Premium obtained at the end of January would accept the SkipRearm change only eight times. Together with the three postponements made possible with slmgr -rearm and the opening 30-day grace period, that would give users nearly a year (360 days) of activation-free use. A copy of Vista Home Basic bought March 14, however, ignored the SkipRearm registry change.

"Microsoft has slipstreamed something into Home Basic and Home Premium," Livingston said. "But from my reading of the support documents, Microsoft needs to keep this feature in its business editions, Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. It seems that Microsoft is sympathetic to enterprises' difficulty in rolling out Vista within the activation deadlines."

Lazar did not answer several questions e-mailed to him today, including one that asked why Microsoft had included the SkipRearm feature in the first place. However, he indicated that the feature could be blocked if Microsoft desired. "It is important to note that these hacks are, at best, temporary. Microsoft has systems in place to detect and block piracy."

"This is somewhat of a threat to Microsoft," Livingston said. "But the extent to what it can retroactively patch, I don't know. Maybe they will want to change this. But that would only call more attention to activation and perhaps reveal the mechanism Vista is using to count SkipRearm."

Livingston has not been able to find where Vista stores the SkipRearm count; conceivably, that count is what restricts its use to a maximum of eight. If someone was to find the count location, however, and manage to change that as well as the SkipRearm registry key, users might be able to postpone activation forever, said Livingston.

"The problem I see with this is that unscrupulous system builders will use it [to install counterfeit copies of Vista], but that Vista will start demanding activation a year or more out, when the guy is long gone with your money," said Livingston. "And then the activation key wouldn't work because he would have used it on hundreds or even thousands of systems and Microsoft would have blocked it."

Microsoft introduced product activation in 2001's Office XP and also used it in that year's Windows XP. Activation was toughened up for Vista, however. After the grace period, nonactivated PCs running Vista drop into what Microsoft calls "reduced functionality" mode. In reduced mode, users can only browse the Web with Internet Explorer, and then only for an hour before being forced to again log on.

Livingston's work-around, however, may do away with activation altogether. "[Activation] has become so convoluted, the way Microsoft has implemented it, that it's more of an irritation to legitimate users than a worthwhile antipiracy measure," Livingston concluded.

Naturally, Microsoft's Lazar sees it differently. "The new antipiracy technologies in Windows Vista are designed to protect customers and prevent the software from working correctly when it is not genuine and properly licensed," he said. "Systems utilizing these hacks will not provide the benefits of genuine Windows, nor will they work as expected."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9013258





Ballmer Says Google's Hiring Pace is 'Insane'

Microsoft CEO calls rival's efforts to expand of outside search and advertising 'cute'

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said rival Google Inc.'s pace of employee growth is "insane," and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising.

"They're going to double in a year. That's insane, in my opinion," Ballmer said Thursday during an address to students at Stanford University, near Palo Alto, Calif.

Google, the most-used Internet search engine, had 10,674 employees at the end of last year, up 88 percent from a year earlier.

Redmond-based Microsoft, the world's largest software company, expanded to 75,000 employees over almost three decades, a rate that made it easier for the company to digest new hires, Ballmer said.

"What that's allowed us to do is build up a base of capable people," Ballmer said.

"I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."

Google also is reliant on a single source of revenue, Ballmer said. The company made almost all of its revenue last year from advertising sales.

"They're still really one business, and it's a search and advertising business," he said. Google's other efforts have been "cute," he said.

Ballmer, who was Microsoft's 24th employee, also said it's getting tougher to hire the best software developers.

"There's more recruiting competition than there's been in a long time," Ballmer said. "Hedge funds want programmers these days. It's kind of a pain in the neck."

Asked by a student what keeps him up at night, Ballmer said managing people and relationships and shifting business models were the biggest culprits. Still, those aren't major interruptions.

"I actually do sleep very well," he said.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...tgoogle16.html





Europe Exec Confirms Google Phone
Elinor Mills

The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. "Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone," Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish news Web site Noticias.com.

Google spokespeople in the United States have repeatedly declined to comment on rumors of a Google Phone, but the smoke has been rising lately. Earlier this month, Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners wrote in his blog that an inside source told him the Google Phone will be a BlackBerry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap and optimized Java and that it would offer voice over Internet Protocol.

Rumors also circulated that that Google and Samsung were building a phone, code-named "Switch," Simeonov said, and his posting includes what he claims is a leaked photo of the device. That wouldn't be so far fetched as Google and Samsung announced a partnership in January to bundle mobile versions of Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail on certain Samsung phones. Late last year, the rumor was that France Telecom Group's mobile-telephony division Orange was in discussions with Google.

Plus, Google has on its payroll. Andy Rubin, the founder of handheld device maker Danger who later started Android, a mobile-software maker that Google bought in 2005. Google also acquired mobile-applications company Reqwireless and Google secretly acquired a company called Skia, whose first product is a portable graphics engine that renders 2D graphics on handhelds.
http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-616...-0-5&subj=news





Palm Hires Apple Designer in Response to iPhone
John Markoff

Palm, the maker of hand-held computers, has hired a top Silicon Valley software designer as it seeks to respond to the challenge posed by Apple's new iPhone.

The designer, Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer, began work three weeks ago at Palm on a line of new products, a company spokeswoman said, but she declined to comment further on the project.

Mercer joined Palm with two employees from Iventor, the independent design firm that he headed in Palo Alto, California, but Palm did not acquire the company, said the spokeswoman, Marlene Somsak. Palm is based in nearby Sunnyvale.

Apple's iPhone is still several months away from being available, but its flexible interface is already shaking up the cell phone industry, including Palm, which makes the hybrid phone-organizers known as smart phones.

The Prada phone from the South Korean consumer electronics maker LG offers some similarities to the iPhone, and industry analysts have said that the Apple phone will force the industry to shift its focus from hardware to software design.

Although Palm pioneered the market for hand-held computers, the company has found itself under pressure in recent years by some of the most powerful names in consumer electronics, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Microsoft.

Last year, Palm gave ground in its struggle and adopted Microsoft's Windows Mobile software for one version of its Treo smart phone.

The company's own Palm OS software is widely seen within the industry as aging and in need of a fundamental revision.

Mercer, a college dropout, joined Apple in 1987. While there, he was the lead designer of Version 7 of the Macintosh finder, the operating system's graphical desktop. He later founded Pixo, a software tools firm that created a development system used by Apple software designers to conceive the first version of the user interface for the iPod music player.

More recently, as an independent designer, he worked under contract with Samsung to design the Z5, an MP3 player that has been a best seller in South Korea. He has developed a reputation for designing interfaces that have cinematographic qualities and yet perform briskly on small consumer electronics devices.

"He's the best of the best in this space," said Paul Saffo, an adviser to Samsung and a Silicon Valley forecaster. "The guy has a knack for designing complex systems in ways that are accessible."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ss/webpalm.php





Mobile Carriers Sick of so Many Operating Systems
Eric Sylvers

Two operating systems run more than 95 percent of the world's computers, but dozens of systems are behind the 2.5 billion mobile phones in circulation, a situation that has hampered the growth of new services, industry executives and independent specialists say.

"There are too many operating systems already and more are coming on stream, making things complicated for smaller software companies," said Tony Cripps, a senior analyst with the telecommunications consulting firm Ovum in London.

Mobile phone carriers are watching with more than passing interest because the new applications they are counting on to increase revenue and profit may make it to only a limited number of phones as software developers struggle to keep up with the different operating systems. Having multiple systems is also time-consuming and costly for the carriers, which must configure the phones they sell.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company in terms of revenue, has been leading a push to limit the number of operating systems, declaring in November that it would eventually sell only phones that ran on Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Symbian Series 60 or Linux. For more than a year, NTT DoCoMo of Japan has concentrated on Symbian, a privately held British-based company in which Nokia of Finland has a nearly 50 percent stake, and Linux.

"What Vodafone did by choosing a few was inevitable," a Symbian executive vice president, Andy Brannan, said.

Arun Sarin, the Vodafone chief executive, said last month: "We need to reduce the number of operating systems on phones. I'm not saying bring it down to one, but several. With fewer operating systems, it will be easier for content delivery."

Most mobile phone manufacturers use internally developed software to run their simpler phones. But smart phones, high-end devices that have access to the Internet and send e-mail, run on operating systems created by other companies. Brannan said that in the future, only the most basic phones would run on operating systems developed by the phone makers.

Last year, two-thirds of smart phones sold ran on Symbian's operating system, an increase of about four percentage points from 2005, according to Canalys, a consultant and market research firm based near London. Microsoft was second last year with a 14 percent market share, slightly less than the year before, followed by Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, with 7 percent, and Linux, with 6 percent, according to Canalys.

Having so many operating systems makes it expensive to make software, said Faraz Hoodbhoy, the chief executive of PixSense, whose software helps users of camera phones save and share multimedia content.

"It's not like with computers, where anybody who has an Internet connection can download your software," he said. "The barrier to innovation is higher in the mobile world."

What operating system a software developer decides to concentrate on first will most likely depend on what geographic area and type of user it is trying to attract, Cripps, the Ovum analyst, said. Windows Mobile is stronger in North America and with business users, while Symbian is dominant in Europe and with nonbusiness customers.

But despite the moves by Vodafone, DoCoMo and other service providers, the huge size of the mobile phone market will ensure that smaller operating systems survive, Cripps and several executives said.

Fabrizio Capobianco, chief executive of Funambol, an open-source software company based in Redwood City, Calif., that has developed a highly popular e-mail program for mobile devices, said, "I don't see convergence of the operating systems happening anytime soon."

Citing Apple's new phone, Capobianco, who began as a technology entrepreneur in Italy, added, "Vodafone is trying to standardize by going with three operating systems, but now the iPhone is coming, so they will have to have at least four."
http://news.com.com/Mobile+carriers+...3-6166275.html





Risky Behavior: Walking and Talking
Eric Nagourney

Much has been written about the dangers of driving while using a cellphone. But how about walking and talking on the phone?

Researchers said they have evidence that this, too, can pose a risk, and not just from irritated fellow pedestrians who don't want to hear the details of your personal life.

The researchers, Julie Hatfield and Susanne Murphy of the University of New South Wales in Australia, set out to see if people who are talking on the phone pay less attention at intersections. They observed more than 500 people crossing the street and found that those who were talking on the phone did indeed appear more distracted than those who were not.

In the study, which appears in Accident Analysis & Prevention, men on the phone crossed more slowly at intersections without traffic signals. Women on the phone not only crossed more slowly, but also were less likely to look at traffic before setting out or to wait for cars to stop.

The findings are in keeping with those of researchers who have looked at driving and cellphone use. The real issue seems to be one of distraction, and that is as important for pedestrians crossing the road as it is for drivers, the new study says.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/...ce/snvital.php





Telecoms Fighting in Tough TV Arena
Eric Pfanner

David Holt was leading a discussion at a conference on a new kind of television, sent into living rooms over telephone lines, when he decided to pop his toughest question. How many people in the audience, asked Holt, an executive at Nortel, actually watched television in this way?

The mostly young, male telecommunications and media executives facing Holt — Scandinavians in funky glasses, Americans with phones clipped to their belts — might have looked like early adopters. But only about a dozen people, out of several hundred in the room, raised their hands.

Faced with the loss of revenue from their core businesses, telecommunications companies around the world are spending billions to build high-speed networks that can deliver so-called IPTV services — like digital television, on-demand movies and interactive services — via telephone lines.

But as the sparse response to Holt's question showed, telecom companies may face a significant challenge in persuading even their own kind, let alone ordinary consumers, to subscribe to IPTV, or Internet protocol television.

The biggest hurdle, analysts say, is that consumers already have plenty of ways of bringing digital television into their homes. Cable and satellite have attracted many of the consumers who want to pay extra for television. Free, over-the-air digital television has been introduced in some countries.

Video services like YouTube and Joost are growing on the Internet. Given the variety of other options, does anyone really need IPTV? "That's the multibillion-euro question," said Lars Godell, an analyst at Forrester Research. "On a stand-alone basis, there's really no clear business case for these services."

Of the companies with the most at stake with IPTV, the biggest single outlay may be the $18 billion that the U.S. company Verizon has invested in a new fiber-optic network for delivering high-speed connections to millions of customers' homes. Companies like Deutsche Telekom, France Télécom and Telecom Italia have also announced big investments in faster networks.

Nortel, Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks, companies that make routers, switches, set-top boxes and other gear, are already reaping the benefits of these investments, executives say. So is Microsoft, which provides software to help telecoms manage digital rights, video on demand and electronic program guides.

The telecoms and their suppliers say IPTV can match or surpass cable and satellite systems in channel capacity, and makes vast video libraries available on demand. IPTV also creates the prospect of improved interactive services, they add.

"TV today is a very archaic experience — it's like the PC in the 1980s," said Christine Heckart, general manager for marketing at Microsoft TV, which is providing software to IPTV providers like AT&T in the United States, Club Internet in France and Swisscom in Switzerland.

One reason IPTV has been a tough sell, analysts say, is confusion about what it is. Though IPTV stands for Internet protocol television, it is not delivered over the Internet. Like cable, IPTV uses a closed network to deliver video to televisions, via set-top boxes. That separates it from nascent "Web TV" services like Joost, which are accessed over the public Internet and viewed on personal computers.

Analysts say about five million consumers around the world subscribe to IPTV, though the numbers are concentrated in places like Hong Kong, France, Belgium and Iceland, where market conditions have been favorable. Elsewhere, analysts say, the main attraction of IPTV may be the fact that it is often bundled with telephone calling and broadband in a convenient package of services entering the home via one line, with one bill.

Estimates of growth vary widely. Eric Abensur, a vice president of France Télécom's Orange division in Britain, predicted at the conference in London last week that there would be more than 100 million IPTV customers globally by 2010. MRG, a research firm, says the numbers will be about half that. Ovum, another firm, is even more conservative, predicting fewer than 30 million subscribers by 2010, though it does not include video-on-demand services in its estimate.

Several success stories for IPTV, or telecom television, as it is also known, were detailed at the conference.

In France, IPTV has attracted close to one million subscribers to at least a half-dozen competing services. In Iceland, the first country in the world to get a nationwide IPTV network, one- quarter of households subscribe to the service, according to David Gunnarsson, senior engineer for data services at Siminn, an Icelandic telecommunications company. In Hong Kong, the telecommunications provider PCCW has attracted 750,000 users to its IPTV service, said Paul Berriman, head of strategic market development.

But in markets where cable or satellite television are already widespread, IPTV faces an uphill battle, analysts say. In Germany, for instance, most homes are wired for basic cable, and consumers have shown little willingness to pay extra for digital cable or satellite. In Britain, well over half the households already get digital television in three major ways: from paid-for satellite or cable, or from Freeview, a free, over-the air digital service.

For some telecoms offering IPTV in these markets, "the main motivation has been defensive," said Annelise Berendt, an analyst at Ovum.

By adding television to broadband and voice services in a "triple play" package — some telecoms have even included mobile calls, creating a "quadruple play" — they hope to stop existing consumers from defecting and to attract new ones with convenience.

Some telecoms have gone on the offensive, investing in premium content in an effort to attract viewers. Rights to top-flight soccer matches have helped Belgacom, the former telecom monopoly in Belgium, attract subscribers to its IPTV offering; it had 140,000 customers by the end of last year, in a country of 11 million people.

Another pioneering IPTV service, FastWeb in Italy, also used soccer to attract audiences, though growth has slowed recently. In what may be a sign of the challenges facing IPTV, analysts say, the company's founder, Silvio Scaglia, has turned his attention to an Internet television venture, Babelgum.

Securing the rights to attractive programming can be expensive.

Godell, the Forrester analyst, said telecoms typically had to hand over about two-thirds of their IPTV revenue to content providers, tminimizing profit margins.

But if telecoms do nothing, they could stand to lose even more, analysts say. Video is going digital and online in any case, but telecommunications companies will see no benefit if consumers turn to openly available Internet services like YouTube or Joost instead of the telecoms' IPTV offerings.

Some telecoms would like to start generating revenue from Internet video sites and other guzzlers of bandwidth, in effect charging them tolls through separate carriage agreements. This has emerged as a sensitive issue in the United States as the 2008 presidential election campaign begins. Silicon Valley businesses that benefit from free use of the Internet have put forth the case for equal access to telecom networks, or "net neutrality." Without it, they say, only those who can afford the tolls will manage to get their content through an increasingly congested Internet.

Telecommunications companies, and some analysts, say mandatory net neutrality would actually hasten the day when gridlock seizes the Internet. Without the ability to charge fees for heavy users, the telecoms argue, they will be unable to afford the upgrades needed to keep Internet traffic flowing smoothly in the era of digital video.

"If Joost and YouTube think they can ride on someone else's bandwidth for free, there will be a problem," said Godell, the analyst.

In a European twist on the debate over network access, regulators in Brussels are locked in battle with the German government over a new law that allows Deutsche Telekom, the former monopoly phone company in Germany, to keep rival telecoms off a new, €3 billion, or $4 billion, high-speed network.

Deutsche Telekom hopes that exclusive access will help it recoup the cost by selling new services, including IPTV. But the European Commission recently warned the government that it faced legal action over what Brussels considers an illegal "regulatory holiday."

Meanwhile, Telecom suppliers like Nortel will benefit whether video is delivered over the Internet or on private networks; one way or the other, their equipment is needed. But they, too, have a stake in promoting the capabilities of higher-speed networks.

"It's like the transition from the corner store to the supermarket," said Holt, the Nortel executive.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ess/iptv12.php





Election Could Determine Future of French News Channel
Doreen Carvajal

With presidential elections looming, even the top brass of the television station France 24 cannot predict the long-term future of the new 24-hour international news channel that is subsidized by the government to offer a French voice to the world.
But the three-month-old station, broadcasting in English and French, is forging ahead, preparing to add another channel in Arabic on April 2 and pressing to expand its cable coverage in the United States, where it is still only available in a limited way in Washington and a small part of New York.

"We don't have our own destiny in our hands because we don't know who will be elected," said Alain de Pouzilhac, the chief executive who is presiding over the rapid evolution of the channel based in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. "The most important issue for France 24 is to have a strong audience, realize that objective and to be qualitatively different from the competition."

Basically, that competition is the elite global media club of CNN, BBC World and Al Jazeera. And Pouzilhac, the former head of the advertising agency Havas, has embarked on a charm offensive of his own to promote the idea that the ingénue, France 24 is breaking into the big time.

The personal campaign comes at a time when the new channel is fending off jostling from Radio France Internationale, the veteran international radio broadcaster that also benefits from public financing and is competing for limited government funding.

The RFI chief executive, Antoine Schwarz, publicly floated the notion last month of creating a cost-effective French version of the multimedia BBC, combining France 24 with the radio broadcaster and TV5, the French-language network that delivers international programming from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada.

Pouzilhac scoffed at the idea of a media merger.

"I am concentrating on France 24," he said. "When I read something about how we have to put together radio and television together to be a copy of the BBC, I say the guy who said that is right for another time. But unfortunately he is living in 2007, when the BBC did it in 1957."

Armed with encouraging survey results, Pouzilhac is driving France 24 hard into new media with its bilingual Web site, www.france24.com, which offers live streaming of its broadcasts. The newscaster is assiduously courting international bloggers, most recently organizing a competition and a giveaway of podcasting and videocasting kits to invite them into interactive discussions about the French presidential elections.

The channel does not have viewer figures yet about its television broadcasts, but it has released results of two studies, including Nielsen figures that show that its news Web site has established itself as a third international news network in some parts of the world.

During France 24's first three weeks, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, it attracted 2.5 million unique visitors in nine countries surveyed, including the United States, Germany and Brazil. The biggest following was in France with 1.2 million, but the other half came from abroad. CNN's Web site draws 9 percent of its visitors from outside the United States while the BBC attracts 53 percent from outside Britain.

ComScore, which also tracks Internet traffic, came up with a more modest count, indicating the French site drew 1.64 million unique visitors in its first month and 1.61 million in January.

"I don't have a feel for how good or how bad they're doing it in the market place," said Simon Spanswick, the chief executive of the Association of International Broadcasters, based in London. "It's possibly too early to tell. The product seems good, varied in terms of hard news and softer stories, which is quite interesting."

That reflects the advertising background of Pouzilhac, who also personally has been trying to forge new distribution deals in the United States through Time Warner Cable and partnerships with user generated online sites.

Mark Harrad, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable, said the company does not generally comment on its discussions. But France 24 is not the only news channel based in Europe pressing to get into the United States.

EuroNews, a pan-European 24-hour news channel that, like France 24, has France Télévisions as a shareholder, is also courting Time Warner and recently announced an alliance with EchoStar Communications, a digital satellite TV system in the United States.

As France 24 seeks to expand, it is has turned up its marketing machine.

"Over all, what they have been very good at since the launch is clever marketing," Spanswick said, noting its print ads and online marketing tactics.

As for the long term future of France 24, he predicts it is safe though it was a pet project of President Jacques Chirac.

"I would be surprised if a decision was made to scrap it, having spent tens of millions of euros on a channel that has already had impact on the market."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...iness/tv12.php





Conrad Black is Living Large Standing Trial
Richard Siklos

When Conrad Black pleaded not guilty to criminal fraud charges in December 2005, the Chicago court granted his request that he could be defended by Edward Greenspan, one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in Canada, where he is known by the nickname "Fast Eddie."

But the court made Black sign a waiver acknowledging that he understood his lawyer, for all his renown in Canada, does not know American law.

If he loses, Black, who could face up to 90 years in prison, cannot appeal on the grounds that it was his lawyer's fault.

"I love that I've been certified as stupid by the Illinois judge," said Greenspan, who plans to frame a copy of the court document and hang it in his Toronto law office. "So stupid," he added, "that no matter how incompetent I might be, Conrad can't rely on it."

The waiver is just one of the elements that seem to ensure that the case of United States of America vs. Conrad Black et al., which begins Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Chicago, is going to be unusual.

First there is Lord Black himself, a larger-than-life figure whose baroque vocabulary and towering demeanor can seem straight out of Dickens. Unlike most defendants in corporate malfeasance trials facing the rest of their years behind bars, Black has gone very public — giving interviews and speeches and writing articles chastising his accusers and vowing not only exoneration but a comeback.

"He not only says he's not guilty," Greenspan said, "he says it to everybody who listens, and everybody who doesn't listen."

The trial is taking place in Chicago because that is the registered headquarters of Black's former U.S. holding company, called Hollinger International — which in its heyday a decade ago was one of the world's largest newspaper companies by circulation. That means the former press tycoon will be pitted against Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney for Illinois who last week made headlines as a White House Special Counsel by convicting the former chief of staff for the vice president of obstructing justice, perjury and lying to investigators.

Fitzgerald is not expected to prosecute the Black trial personally, but will stop in from time to time to observe how the case is progressing.

In the midst of what is expected to be a three- or four-month trial, Black is also publishing a biography of Richard Nixon — his fourth book — and is expected, if time allows, to hold something of a promotional tour in the middle of the case. Also expected to add to the carnival atmosphere is a flotilla of international media expected to cover the trial and the promise of a parade of celebrity witnesses including Henry Kissinger, former Illinois Governor James Thompson, and the real estate developer Donald Trump.

In Black's native Canada, the media attention on the trial is nothing short of gaga. The Globe and Mail, considered the most serious newspaper in Canada, recently ran a front-page article about eating a lobster dinner with Black in a restaurant; the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans published a special edition last week devoted to the "trial of the century."

One poll said that 56 percent of Canadians were following the developments in Black's trial.

As Robert Fulford, a longtime columnist and commentator on Canadian media, said during an interview: "There seems to be no one in the country who has no opinion on Conrad Black."

In an e-mail last week, Black characterized what is to come as "the big battle" of his ordeal.

"The last act of the three-part story will come when we win, and we will win," he said.

The case against Black and his colleagues differs from other high-profile corporate scandals like Enron, Worldcom and Adelphia because, unlike those companies, Black's former company is a going concern, though much smaller.

Most of the newspapers it owned have been sold and Hollinger International is now called the Sun-Times Media Group. On paper, the case it most resembles is Tyco, which resulted in a conviction for its former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski, after an earlier mistrial. Kozlowski is serving up to 25 years in prison.

Black's legal team is expected to contend in court that the business is in worse shape today, having spent some $200 million investigating and pursuing allegations of wrongdoing by the company's cofounder.

In 2003, Black claimed to have come close to arranging a deal to sell Hollinger International for more than $18 a share. After paying special dividends totaling $5.50, the company's stock closed Friday at $5.31.

Black contended in an e-mail last week that the directors behind his ouster and Richard Breeden, the former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who helped conduct the internal investigation into Hollinger and its affiliates, "have sucked the blood out of those companies and done savage violence to the public shareholders."

There has long been a cinematic quality to Black's life and career — including his rise to prominence, and striking fall. He was, for a time, the publisher of newspapers like the Daily Telegraph in London, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and most of the large daily newspapers in Canada. Married to a glamorous conservative columnist, Barbara Amiel, who served on Hollinger International's board and as a corporate vice president, Lord and Lady Black cut a swath through high society in London, Toronto, Palm Beach and New York.

But in late 2003 — two years after giving up his Canadian citizenship in a huff to become a British peer — Black's career unraveled at the hands of his hand-picked board of high-profile directors, who included Kissinger and Thompson, amid allegations that he and several associates, including his longtime partner, F. David Radler, had helped themselves to unauthorized bonuses that were not properly disclosed to the board or shareholders. An internal company inquiry accused Black's management of greed on a massive scale and called Hollinger "a corporate kleptocracy."

Black and three former Hollinger International executives, Peter Atkinson, Jack Boultbee and Mark Kipnis, have pleaded not guilty to charges that include fraud, racketeering and obstruction of justice relating to $82 million in allegedly misappropriated money. Most of the money in question related to agreements between buyers of Hollinger newspapers and the company that neither it nor key executives would start publications that would compete against those being sold.

Black has argued that any wrongdoing was the result of either sloppy paperwork, was approved by the company's start-studded board, or was the handiwork of Radler — who has pled guilty to a single fraud charge and agreed to act as a chief witness against Black and the others.

Radler will serve a sentence of up to 29 months for his plea, possibly in a facility in Canada.

Some other charges against Black stem from alleged abuses of his position of trust running a publicly-traded company including using the company plane for a holiday to Bora Bora, buying a Park Avenue apartment on unfair terms from the company, and using $40,000 of company money to pay for a 60th birthday party for Amiel at La Grenouille restaurant in New York that was well attended by business and media elites.

Trump, who was at the dinner, is likely to testify on Black's behalf that he regarded it as a business event because he was negotiating a deal to buy the Sun-Times office building, three people close to the case said.

Edward Sussman, the assistant U.S. attorney who is trying the case with two colleagues, declined to comment.

Greenspan's place at his defense table is fitting for the latest chapter in Black's odyssey. The two men attended their first year of law school together at York University in Toronto in 1965, although Black dropped out but later completed the degree at a school in Quebec. Greenspan, who grew up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, also went to high school with Amiel.

At his office last Tuesday morning, Greenspan had filled the boardroom table in the main-floor library at his firm — which occupies a former bank branch complete with vault — with color-coded files relating solely to his much-anticipated cross-examination of Radler. Having risen at 4 a.m. in Chicago to grab an early flight, Greenspan underwent a quick blow dry by a stylist named Jimmy before having his photograph taken.

Although he would not discuss his legal strategy, Greenspan said he was confident of victory even though the curve for learning the procedures of the U.S. court after a career in Canadian law was steep.

In preparation for the Black trial, Greenspan and Edward Genson, a Chicago criminal defense lawyer, and their supporting lawyers have plowed through some seven million pages of evidence, much of it culled from various civil actions pending in the Hollinger debacle.

"I am going to be tired, but I am going to be ready," Greenspan said.

Asked if he had tried to curb Black's public statements, Greenspan declined to comment on the basis of client-attorney privilege.

He said it had not been determined if Black would testify on his own behalf, but it does not require a stretch of imagination to guess which way Black would vote on such matters.

But one thing he said he had not done was attempt to moderate Black's imperious, multisyllabic style.

"You can't change him," Greenspan said. "That would be silly if I tried to turn him into Forrest Gump."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...ness/black.php





The Web Drives an Advertising Boom Without the Need for Agencies
Louise Story

The Internet has allowed consumers to trade stocks without using high-priced brokers and let travelers book flights directly from airlines.

Now it may free advertisers to make their own television commercials without going through a traditional ad agency.

Several companies are offering automated ad creation over the Internet and, in some cases, ad placement services that all advertisers can use to more finely direct their marketing. Advertisers use the new sites to select from commercial footage and customize campaigns with a few clicks of the mouse and little human interaction, often for a low flat fee.

"When people say, 'you're commoditizing creative,' well, sure we are," said Jordan Zimmerman, chairman of Zimmerman Advertising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who calls the automated service "a virtual advertising agency."

"But we're really doing it with excellent work," he said.

The new systems threaten some of the roles that advertising agencies have traditionally played. National advertisers, mainly in the retail, real estate and auto industries, are using the systems to make their messages more relevant on the local level.

They can automatically add names of local sales agents or dealership addresses, and they can change the content of the ad, depending on where it is showing, to appeal to various demographic groups. Among the companies that have used the services are Wendy's, Ford, Coldwell Banker and Warner Independent Pictures.

Zimmerman, an advertising agency that is part of Omnicom Group, is selling stock advertising and online buying for television, the Internet, print publications, radio, direct mail and in-store ads.

The automated system they are offering to advertisers, called Pick-n-Click, is currently available only for automotive advertisers. It has 150,000 components — like voice-overs, video footage and text options.

AutoNation, a franchise group of 331 car dealers, has signed on as a customer. Zimmerman plans to expand the site's ad offerings to other retail areas, like home furnishings, in the next few months.

Visible World, based in New York, introduced a product this week that allows advertisers to create thousands of custom versions of television commercials. The company also plans to add online and mobile video ads to its system soon. And Spot Runner, an online ad agency based in Los Angeles that has been offering to make local television commercials for $499, plans to branch into automated radio and Internet ad development this year.

Interest in these systems is being driven, in part, by the increased use of customization in traditional media like television. Advertisers are increasingly interested in taking what they have learned in the online world about custom marketing and applying it in the off-line world.

"If there's a man and a woman watching television in two different houses and you are Procter & Gamble, it would be more efficient to show one of them an ad for a Gillette's men's razor and the other a woman's ad," said Mark Read, director of strategy at WPP Group, an advertising holding company that has invested in Visible World and Spot Runner. "In the scenario when you run the woman's ad in both houses, you've got half the efficiency."

To customize ads, the companies, to a varying degree, link postal codes with census and other third-party data to develop local demographic profiles, isolating viewers more finely than typical cable operators.

Visible World has an extensive system in place, running a distribution network through media partners and using the partners' routers to steer versions of ads to different parties. Visible World works at the household level by using information from cable set-top boxes.

The result is that Visible World can automatically run ads in Spanish when its databases determine that is appropriate or can send more youth-focused ads where younger people are likely to be watching.

Another company, OpenTV, a part of Kudelski Group, a digital security company based in Switzerland, is delivering multiple versions of ads to cable set-top boxes in partnership with a cable operator and uses viewer data to decide which ad to show.

Invidi Technologies, a company based in Princeton, New Jersey, has developed an ad system that uses remote- control behavior and other viewer actions to guess which member of a given household is tuned in.

In addition to tailoring ads to consumers, the new systems allow advertisers to modify their ads at the last minute by logging in online.

"You find out at 10 p.m. your competitor is running an intense sale on something," said Michael Goldberg, chief marketing officer for Zimmerman. "You can go into your arsenal of work and select something to combat that and program it to run the next day — all in five minutes."

The Web interfaces eliminate the need for advertisers to call or meet with ad agencies to fashion or tinker with their ads.

But humans are not entirely removed from the process. They are still involved in shooting the footage for the campaign options online and managing the new sites, among other tasks.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...iness/adco.php





Reporters and Sources Slowed Their Dance to Show the Steps
David E. Sanger

THE conviction of I. Lewis Libby last week unleashed the expected debate over who was the biggest loser: Mr. Libby himself; an administration that now sees a loyal insider facing prison; or the press corps, which hardly emerged unscathed and worries that the trial gives confidential sources one more reason to shut up.

But lost in that discussion is how much has changed since the summer of 2003 in the delicate dance between reporters and sources. Both are under intense new pressure to show their work — to explain what is a fact and what is an assumption or an extrapolation. It is a pressure that is building on government officials who once sat at lunch dropping a knowing line like, “I can’t go into the details, but the Iranians are building. ...”

And more than ever it is building on reporters whose job it is to go beyond reporting the latest conclusions of a secret National Intelligence Estimate and explain to their readers whether those conclusions — and the always-murky data attached to them — are reasonable, or being twisted to fit a policy agenda.

None of this started with Mr. Libby, of course, but his case centered on a brief window in time that summer, when the White House was forced to admit that it couldn’t support President Bush’s assertion that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa. Amid nasty finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., the administration suddenly had to declassify its intelligence findings, in a desperate effort to explain why Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made so many false assertions. Mr. Libby was consumed in that effort.

Ever since, no one in the administration has been able to stuff the intelligence genie back into the C.I.A.’s black bag. And so whether the subject is yellowcake in Africa, centrifuges in North Korea, a drawing of two hemispheres of uranium in Iran, or the pedigree of roadside bombs in Iraq, there is this different dynamic at work.

The understandable instinct to say, “Sorry, it’s classified,” has been tempered by the belated realization of the administration that its credibility has suffered so much damage, at home and abroad, that it has little choice but to reveal a broader sampling of the evidence that it reflexively stamps Top Secret. For the first time in memory in dealing with a White House that prizes “no comments,” it is easier to squeeze officials into explaining how they reached their conclusions — and who dissented.

“As a nation, we’ve lost something that’s very hard to get back, which is the benefit of the doubt,” said Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard professor worked for the Clinton administration and is now on an advisory panel to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “It will be years before we restore our reputation for veracity, and the only way to do that is to reveal more about the sensitive information that underlies our policies.”

The White House has hardly opened the spigot. Ask about the intelligence on the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan that led to Mr. Cheney’s recent trip. Or about evidence that American allies in the Middle East are toying with going nuclear. Officials remain tight-lipped.

But there have been exceptions. Even in the two months that Mr. Libby was in the dock, his old colleagues were busy talking. A military show-and-tell last month about Iran’s role in Iraq illustrated the new imperatives for the government: to demonstrate a bit more evidence, and to backtrack when the evidence doesn’t support the contentions. After weeks of promises from American officials in Baghdad and Washington to prove their case of Iranian meddling, American military and intelligence officials in Baghdad finally showed their evidence in February, laying out components for assembling deadly new varieties of roadside bombs. They showed off serial numbers and other evidence that they argued linked the weapons to Iranian arms factories.

Partly because it took the military so long to get its presentation together, the news coverage was skeptical. It was a skepticism fueled by the assertion of an anonymous briefer, who cited no evidence in declaring that Iran’s leadership had authorized smuggling the weapons into Iraq for attacks on Americans. That’s when it got interesting.

Back in Washington, first Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then Mr. Bush backpedaled, saying they could not prove Iran’s leaders were behind the attacks. “Part of it was messed up,” one senior military official acknowledged. “But everyone knew that every statement had to be footnoted. That’s new.”

And two weeks ago American intelligence officials were scrambling to explain their doubts, as well as their conclusions, about the extent of progress North Korea has made in enriching uranium, a different pathway to a bomb from the one used for the North’s nuclear test last year.

The big question is how long this flirtation with openness will last, and how long journalists will remember the bitter lessons that arose from their inability (critics would say unwillingness) to insist that the government talk not only about its conclusions, but about its logic. Officials are loath to do so, often invoking the familiar refrain that it would endanger “sources and methods.”

Sometimes it clearly would. But the Iraq experience also offered some lessons for reporters in how to test both the findings and the analysis of American intelligence agencies. The most straightforward way is to compare Washington’s analysis to the intelligence findings of other countries, or to those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose deadly dry reports on Iran have been the main source of information about the progress of its nuclear program.

The I.A.E.A.’s record isn’t perfect, but it was, after all, that agency and the Italians who played a big role in casting doubt in 2003 on Mr. Bush’s claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa. But even some I.A.E.A. officials complain that because of American mistakes, all intelligence reports are now considered suspect, including the agency’s.

That creates the risk that the next big intelligence mistake may be in the other direction: that over-caution could result in missing evidence of a country speeding toward weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Iraq was an anomaly. Many of the big intelligence failures of the past have included missing the speed at which the Soviets, the Chinese, the Indians and the Pakistanis were getting ready to test a weapon.

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, teaches a course called “Evidence and Inference,” and says he is now “hammering into the head of everyone around here that when someone tells you something, you have to say, ‘Walk me through how you came to your conclusion.’ ”

“It’s an ethos issue,” he said. Whether the new ethos proves lasting depends on how many in Washington — the spooks, the policymakers, the reporters — learned the real lessons of Iraq, and of the cascade of events that led to Mr. Libby’s troubles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/we.../11sanger.html





With Redesign of Time, Sentences Run Forward
Katharine Q. Seelye

Having just turned 84, Time magazine is coming out with a new look and editorial approach on Friday.

In: A cleaner, simpler design, heavy on labels at the top of each page and the names of its columnists in World-War- II-size type — the better to brand with.

Out: The last remnants of Time's signature syntax, parodied by the humorist Wolcott Gibbs with his phrase, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."

Richard Stengel, Time's new managing editor, said the inverted syntax would vanish from the Milestones section, where it still crops up in obituaries.

"Henry Luce may be rolling over in his grave over this," he said of Time's co-founder. "But it had outlasted its usefulness." Still, he said, Luce might like some of the changes, including the reintroduction of distinct sections.

The iconic cover is still recognizably Time, with its posterlike presentation of a central image showcased inside a red border. But the familiar Time logo is a bit smaller, to make room for three or four teaser boxes across the top.

The redesign is the latest step in a major retrenchment meant to uproot the magazine from the perception of it as a weekly report (meaning old news) to one that is more timeless, with the hope of staying relevant in a 24/7 news cycle with its Web site, time.com.

Since Stengel's appointment last spring, Time has cut back its circulation, from 4 million to 3.25 million. The move eliminated copies that were going to places like doctors' offices where they were not necessarily wanted, and it reduced the rates that advertisers had to pay.

Time also switched its publication date to Friday from Monday, cut 50 people from its staff, shut its bureaus in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles, and invested more in its Web site. It further saved costs by contracting with more columnists, who, as established writers, may be less expensive than full-time staff journalists.

The new design allows the magazine to highlight these columnists and shift its editorial approach from a single omniscient voice to multiple well-known voices (more like its rival Newsweek). Time's columnists include Joe Klein, Michael Kinsley and William Kristol.

Helping to streamline the look of the magazine is the elimination of most of its custom editions, sought by advertisers who wanted to reach narrow slices of readers based on geography and demographics.

In some weeks, Time printed as many as 30,000 (yes, 30,000) different versions of the magazine, said Edward McCarrick, the publisher, adding that it was not worth the effort.

Stengel said he sought inspiration for the redesign in back issues of Time that are bound and locked in a closet near his office on the 24th floor of the Time & Life Building in New York's Rockefeller Center.

"The original Time magazine divided the world into sections," he said. "It was like a TV dinner, where you had your dessert course, your main course, your vegetable course."

He said he would replicate that experience, with the new magazine clearly demarcated into something like chapters, each beginning on a right- hand page and taking the reader through Briefing, Arts and Ideas.

They will include yet more well-known writers who have what Stengel calls "branded expertise" in subjects like law and health.

Whether these changes can save the magazine remains to be seen. Or, as Gibbs wrote in 1936 in The New Yorker: "Where it all will end, knows God!"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/...iness/time.php





Citizen Journalism Wants You!
Jay Rosen

Welcome to Assignment Zero. It's pro-am journalism in the open style made possible by the web. This is a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired and those who choose to participate.

I hope you will. Because we're trying to figure something out here. Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?

If they can, this would matter.

It's called Assignment Zero because we needed to jump start our site somehow, and this project with Wired turned out to be it. We're trying to create a pro-am, open-platform reporting tool that we can improve and modify later, for use in bigger, more sprawling and difficult stories down the road. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or -- who knows? -- the war.

We're going to start with something closer to home, a story tangled up with the birth of NewAssignment.Net. I suppose some people consider it a "techie" subject. I do not. But it's definitely web journalism about something happening in the wider world because of the web. As I understand it, that is Wired's beat.

We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist.

Wired has paid special attention to the crowd-sourcing of new products, as with an open call for cool designs. This taps people outside the firm as potential producers, typically unpaid but doing it for their own reasons. (Like to get their ideas out there.) You know of outsourcing. Meet crowdsourcing.

While the geeks invented such practices, first with free software, then with open source, they long ago lost control of them; and today crowdsourcing is on the rise across a wide social landscape, from corporate America and government to arts and crafts. Wikipedia calls this open-source culture.

Collaboration in the open-source diaspora and why it works when it does (plus what it can't do ...), that's a sprawling and nuanced story with lots of locations. It lies in pieces -- and in people who know the practices. There's also a little mystery at the core of it: Why are these people willing to work for free?

After the crash of TWA Flight 800, the investigators cleared out a hangar and tried to find all the pieces of the plane so they could examine each and figure out what happened. In a way what we're doing is crash-site journalism. But for a social wave that's still breaking.

The part we need you for is to help us find the best parts, and develop them into pieces of original reporting. If there's a piece of it you're especially interested in -- Assignment Zero interviews Jimmy Wales about the social architecture that makes Wikipedia work (a piece we will do -- then you can work on it with others at our site, and maybe get the byline, even though everyone else gets (some) credit, too.

We'll give assignments to anyone who can complete the mission, and donate quality work. Anything you know that will help us track the spread of crowd sourcing and peer production can (if we do this right) be filed at the Assignment Zero site. Anyone you know who participates in "wisdom of the crowd" projects is a source for us. We're asking those with real experience in open-source or crowd-driven projects to take our survey of volunteers. The more we get the better a survey it is.

And if you just have an interest in developing this kind of journalism for future use, join the project. There will be plenty to do.

A professional newsroom can't easily do reporting in the many-to-many style. It's a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That's the strength of the system. The weakness is the newsroom only knows what its own people know or dig up. Which wasn't much of a weakness before the internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize some of their informational strengths.

The site we built for Assignment Zero is "open platform." Anyone can wander by and check out what we're doing. And if we do this right, anyone can find within minutes something useful to do. We're betting that openness has editorial advantages bigger than its well-known weak points. (Which include trolls, fools, spam, sabotage, edit wars and the inflow of "crap.")

Assignment Zero works like this:

• We're going to take one big, moving story -- the spread of crowdsourcing and peer production methods across wired society -- and with your active assistance break it down into reportable parts. Some of these parts we already have. More of them is what we need.
• Then we're going to develop those parts -- in the open, at the site -- into pieces we can formally assign to contributors. Each piece is a part of a larger puzzle we are putting together. We don't know yet how many pieces there will be. It's open-ended.
• We'll set deadlines for those pieces, and with your help find contributors who are motivated and qualified to complete them. Not for pay (we're not at that stage yet) but for public benefit and some byline glory in the final results. An "author" in our system can be an individual writer, a two- or three-person team. A class could get an assignment. A blog, plus users, could do one. In an agreement with Calvin Tang and Mike Davidson, the founders of Newsvine, we are going to ship to them a "box" of assignments for people at that site to complete. It will then be up to Newsvine to figure out how to get those pieces done. They have plans.
• We'll edit what comes in and with the crowd's help verify it to the best of our ability. (Our director of verification is Craig Silverman from Regret the Error.)
• Final results? That will probably take a couple of months. We plan to publish in a package at NewAssignment.Net all the pieces that came in and made the editor's final cut. Could there be video? Some, yes, but we have to think about it. Could there be audio? There could be. Photos, of course. Wired will run a piece by Jeff Howe drawing off Assignment Zero. Wired will be free to pick and choose from tour final package and publish any portion of it, in print or online. What doesn't run at our site or at Wired.com can appear elsewhere on the net. (We won't own your content. A Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License will apply.)

Pro-am means just that: a mix of professional and amateur talent. Some formatting, some freestyling. Some things decided by editors, others left to participants. We don't know what the optimal mix is yet.

Assignment Zero started when Evan Hansen, editor in chief of Wired News, wrote to me shortly after NewAssignment.Net was announced in the summer of 2006. He said he wanted to experiment at Wired's site with some of the same ideas. The most important of these was Dan Gillmor's citizen journalism classic: My readers know more than I do. They always had, but with the net they can bring it on.

Evan and I wondered: In situations where Gillmor's maxim applies, and readers collectively do know more than we do, could we pull that scattered knowledge together and tell a story of interest to Wired, and to others in the culture? He wanted to try it, as one path to innovation for his site. I wanted to try it, so that I could bootstrap New Assignment.Net and launch our beta site around the requirements of a particular story.

But we needed the particular story. I suggested to Evan a big, sprawling, pro-am, people-powered report on all the various forms of crowdsourcing and peer production now popping up across the social landscape, as the tools for online collaboration keep improving and people find new uses for the web. It's one of the more exciting things happening in Wired's field of vision, made possible precisely because we are so "wired." (That is, some of us are.)

Like any such shift it generates hype and improper definition when mainstreamed. So I said to Evan: It's been done, but we could tell this story way better if we took it by swarm. Let's find out what life is really like on the open-source frontier, which is big enough now to be unaware of its total reach. Let's try to find all examples, do a 360-degree sweep, and bring the parts together for analysis. And above all, let's locate the people who, living and working on that frontier (though they have others lives too) really know this subject from the inside out. Their realism is precious.

I wanted to cast a wide net, from well-publicized cases like Wikipedia, Linux software and the Mozilla browser, to less familiar examples like community patent review or open-source spying, newer ventures like open-source footware, or the crowdsourcing of consumer electronics, along with open-call T-shirt design and efficient collaboration among knitters, which is peer production, too.

Evan Hansen went for it, and Assignment Zero was born. Wired News and Wired magazine agreed to pay the costs of the editor we hired to organize the story and run the project from start to finish. She's Lauren Sandler. (Here's her blog, the best way to keep in touch with the project.)

Lauren has covered everything from cultural politics in the U.S. to the war in Iraq. She's been a producer at NPR, an editor at Salon and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU. She's also written a book (about evangelical youth in the United States) based on her immersion reporting. A pro but not a geek. One reason I hired her is she isn't native to "open source," or to web culture. She has brought fresh eyes.

The editor's job is part traditional. She has to commission work, set deadlines, keep track of all the parts and bring the whole thing in on time. In an open newsroom, none of that happens without quality participation. Making it happen is Amanda Michel's job. She used to work in politics -- online organizing -- then at Harvard's Berkman Center. She's the director of participation for Assignment Zero and for NewAssignment.Net. Her position is like the community guy in an open-source software project. It takes an editor (Sandler) and a DP (Michel) to complete the assignment when it's open platform journalism.

Evan Hansen also assigned to the project an extremely qualified writer, Wired's Jeff Howe, who helped coin the term crowdsourcing. Now he's writing a book about it. Jeff will be doing a big feature for Wired.com that will feed off of Assignment Zero, and link to parts of it. A good way into this subject is to read Jeff's earlier coverage of crowdsourcing: His original Wired story, a piece about Gannett, the big newspaper company, going to crowdsourcing and his blog.

Joining them is Steve Fox, editor at large for Assignment Zero and project manager for the launch site. He's a career journalist who spent 10 years at the Washingtonpost.com, as it rose from nothing to lead the big newspaper sites. He's also taught web journalism at the University of Maryland. David Cohn, who has been editing the NewAssignment.Net blog, is associate editor of Assignment Zero, Lauren Sandler's deputy, and head blogger for the project.

ChapterThreeLLC and partner Zack Rosen are our developers (Zack is my nephew.) They work in Drupal, an open-source content-management platform and developers' community. The site is designed by Unified Field in New York, led by Marla Supnick and Eli Kuslansky.

One day, stories with a thousand people on the masthead might become routine, and we'll know how to do them. Right now we're seeking hundreds, who can help us take apart and put together a single sprawling story that matters to Wired and the world beyond.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72970-0.html
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Who Owns the Live Music of Days Gone By?
Robert Levine

When it began in 1973, the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” was very much of its time. Bob Meyrowitz, who ran the show during its heyday, had the idea to start a weekly rock concert radio program as an alternative to chaotic festival shows after a fan was killed at the Rolling Stones performance at Altamont.

“I thought people would bring their cars into big parking lots and dance to the music,” Mr. Meyrowitz said. The first episode featured the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Blood Sweat & Tears and a barely known singer from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.

Back then no one thought much about what would happen to the King Biscuit recordings, which grew to thousands of hours featuring nearly every top act in ’70s and ’80s rock.

Now, more than 30 years later, the archives of radio and television shows like “King Biscuit,” “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” and “Later ... With Jools Holland” have become valuable prizes in the desperate search for new content for Web sites, DVDs and video-on-demand services.

“It’s all about supply and demand, and with all these new media — broadband, mobile phones, video on demand — there’s more of a need for content,” said Pat McDonald, co-president of Northstar Media.

Northstar recently brokered a deal for a company called Concert.TV to license video-on-demand rights to “Later ... With Jools Holland,” a British music program that has featured performances by R.E.M., Beck and scores of other artists.

But live recordings can come with thorny legal questions. They were often made outside the studio under contracts that did not clearly assign copyrights to a record label. Now the content owners are scrambling to get the permissions needed to sell the material in formats that did not exist when the music was recorded. And labels and musicians are also asserting their rights to such recordings — in one instance, in court.

The King Biscuit property, which has changed hands twice, is now owned by Wolfgang’s Vault, a company involved in a particularly important dispute about how such recordings can be used.

The company also owns the archive of the late San Francisco concert promoter Bill Graham, and is being sued on charges of copyright infringement and bootlegging, among other things, by a group of musicians, including the Grateful Dead and members of Led Zeppelin and the Doors.

Mr. Graham’s collection of recordings is remarkable, with performances by those acts and dozens of others in their prime. After Mr. Graham died in 1991, his production company was sold to Clear Channel Communications, which in 2003 sold a warehouse of Mr. Graham’s music memorabilia to William E. Sagan, a businessman in Minnesota, for more than $5 million.

Mr. Sagan started the Web site WolfgangsVault.com to sell items from the museum-worthy collection, which includes original posters, tickets and photographs (Mr. Graham’s given name was Wolfgang Grajonca.) Last year, to draw potential customers, Wolfgang’s Vault began streaming over the Internet some of the concerts Mr. Graham had recorded.

The streaming audio, according to Ashlie Beringer, a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who is representing the bands suing Wolfgang’s Vault, “was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The legal duel involves a number of issues, including the rights to sell reproductions of the items in the warehouse that feature the likenesses of the artists or the bands’ logos. But the most important issue, given the value of what is at stake, is precisely what Mr. Sagan owns. In a statement released when the suit was filed, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead said that Mr. Sagan’s actions amounted to stealing.

“Just because you own the tapes doesn’t mean you have the copyright to the music on them,” said Ms. Beringer, who argues that Mr. Graham never had a copyright to this music in the first place. “The copyright act says that the performers are the presumed owners of the copyright.” Since some artists were under contracts that specifically granted live recording rights to the label, Sony BMG Music Entertainment has also joined the suit.

In a counterclaim filed this month, Mr. Sagan asserts that Mr. Graham acquired these rights by making these recordings, with the explicit or implicit permission of the artists, who knew of his reputation for taping performances. In a sign of the acrimony the case has stirred up, the filing includes a defamation claim against Mr. Weir.

“A copyright owner is someone who contributes to that work, and our position is we contributed to the development of the sound recording,” said Michael S. Elkin, a lawyer with Winston & Strawn, which is representing Wolfgang’s Vault. He said that Mr. Graham had used some of the recordings over the years, and that the artists had not objected.

Mr. Graham could not have anticipated the ways it is now possible to market music and the legal confusion that would follow. Standard record company contracts give the label rights to artists’ recordings, but some older contracts don’t specify what kinds of performances that might include. The number of rights required to market a live recording without fear of litigation can make one’s head spin as much as some of the music played at Mr. Graham’s concerts.

“You have to look at the artist’s contract with the record company to see who would own recordings not made in the studio,” said Robert L. Sullivan, a lawyer with Loeb & Loeb who represents the estate of Johnny Cash. In the case of a performance originally intended for broadcast, he said, “you’d have to look at the radio show contract, and those vary widely.”

For decades, the expense and hassle of clearing all of those rights made it impractical to sell old live recordings.

“These are niche products and they’re not for the casual fan,” said Danny Goldberg, president of the artist management company Gold Village Entertainment. But Internet marketing and online stores have made it easier and less expensive to reach fans, and Mr. Goldberg said that he was considering buying a catalog of live recordings, even though he might acquire the rights to release only a fraction of them.

At a time when music sales are declining, many expressed frustration that it was so complicated to find a way to make money on these kinds of recordings. In an odd twist, material by older artists is especially desirable, since their adult fans tend to buy music rather than download it illegally.

“At some point it becomes irrational not to figure out a way to exploit this stuff if the parties involved will benefit,” said Greg Scholl, president and chief executive of the Orchard, a digital distribution company. “There’s no question this stuff is more saleable than it was.”

To get a sense of the value of historical musical performances, consider what Andrew Solt has made of the archive of “The Ed Sullivan Show.” As a director and producer of rock documentaries, Mr. Solt kept returning to the Sullivan archives to license footage from Mr. Sullivan’s family, which owned the rights to the program under the terms of Mr. Sullivan’s deal with CBS.

Mr. Solt’s licensing costs became so expensive that he inquired about buying the rights to the show, which he did in 1990, for a price said to be below $10 million. “I paid every penny I had to lawyers and borrowed all the money from a bank,” he said. “I would wake up at night and say, ‘What did I do?’ ”

But it seems that Mr. Solt got a very good deal. He has used the material in the archives to produce television specials and DVDs, but he said that the most valuable material is the musical performances, including historical appearances by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

He has released a DVD featuring the Beatles’ performances on the show, which he said has sold 200,000 copies; last fall, he released a similar Elvis package that he said has already sold 100,000 copies; and he licensed the material for “Ed Sullivan’s Rock ’n’ Roll Classics,” a box set distributed by Rhino, a subsidiary of Warner Music.

Mr. Solt, who also bought the rights to “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” with a partner a few years ago, believes such content will eventually generate even more revenue on the Internet.

“You won’t need Andrew Solt to make you an ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ anymore,” he said. “You’ll be able to go to a menu, choose your own favorites and use what you want.”
http://news.com.com/Who+owns+the+liv...l?tag=nefd.top





Where Did the Music Industry go so Wrong?
Patrick Faucher

Wasn't it all so gloriously simple back when people listened to top 40 radio and obediently paid $20 for discs at record store chains?

Labels set the deal terms for artists; managers handled the "biz"; the touring circuits were maintained by well-mannered warlords that politely divvied up the venues; and everyone had their place in the pond.

So where did it all go wrong with the music business? Somehow, the pond became stagnant over time, mucked up with greed, laziness, contempt and excess. People got bored with music. Then, someone threw a rock into the middle of it called "The Internet" and nothing will ever be the same. Today, anyone can hum a tune, mix it with a rhythm track and some samples on their Mac at home, put it up on MySpace, and end up with a publishing deal from Moby who will then sell it to the next Superbowl sponsor.

The industry has become decentralized. Major labels no longer have the market muscle or control over the distribution channels as they once did. Technology and consumer choice have caused a shift from the traditional music business model of major labels throwing copious amounts of money behind a few big hits to that of a vast collection of individual artists creating pockets of more moderate success among passionate fan bases.

This shift requires a different approach to the development and monetization of music by the producers and promoters--one that more directly resembles that of more traditional venture-backed business. The entrepreneurs (artists) create new intellectual property (music, artistic brand) that has a demonstrated market (fans) that is robust enough to attract investors (for example, a label) that wants to own some equity in that IP and wishes to put money into the asset to enable it to engage in value-building activities (distribution, merchandising, licensing, and so on). Oddly enough, this "new" model is, in fact, not new.

We've all heard of The Grateful Dead, Phish, Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann and the Barenaked Ladies. These great artists have grassroots beginnings. They all employed clever uses of the technology available to them at the time to find fans and create direct distribution channels (from bootleg cassettes and toll-free phone orders to MP3s and e-mail distributions). Using these methods, these "artist-entrepreneurs" have circumvented the traditional channel gatekeepers and have blazed a trail for the rank-and-file working artists and the weekend warriors to follow.

Now all serious artists need to conduct themselves as entrepreneurs engaged in building a business, not just playing and selling music. There are many tools and services out there that artists can use to help them sell. Still, it's not enough to put up a MySpace page and get a song on iTunes. They need to build a brand that has long-term value. They need to own that brand and their customers outright. There is a need for artist platforms that make this process more efficient so the economics make sense. Those solutions increasingly are becoming available.

Investors--including the major labels--need to understand the intricate partnership role they play in development. It's no longer about throwing money into the ether, marketing to no one in particular, and seeking only mega-hit payouts. It's about patience and commitment and focus. The labels--or their successors--need to get down to sea level, pick up an oar, and help row with the artist into this new ocean of opportunity.
http://news.com.com/Where+did+the+mu...3-6167346.html





Report: Warner Music Considering Fresh Takeover Bid For EMI
FMQB

After EMI rejected a $4.1 billion takeover bid from Warner Music Group (WMG) earlier this month, WMG is reportedly ready to sweeten the deal. Warner chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. will soon meet with EMI chairman John Gildersleeve to discuss a fresh proposal, however, Bronfman wants an assurance from EMI that they will be prepared to consider a revised deal before he ups the ante, according to the U.K.'s Observer.

An industry executive told The Observer, "This is a marriage that is going to happen at some point; they have talked so often in the past." And some EMI shareholders are believed to be unhappy that the company has failed to leave the door open to negotiations with Warner, especially in light of EMI's recent profit warnings.

EMI's Board rejected WMG's most recent offer because they felt it was not in the best interests of the shareholders to entertain an offer which would entail prolonged regulatory scrutiny (ala the Sony BMG merger) and unacceptable operational risk at a critical time for the company. "The Board also regards a price of 260 pence per share as inadequate, having regard to the stand-alone value of EMI, the synergies available from a combination with WMG and the risks identified above," EMI said in a statement.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=366974





Hip-Hop Is Rock ’n’ Roll, and Hall of Fame Likes It
Jon Pareles

It’s official: Hip-hop is rock ’n’ roll.

Last night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who proved that hip-hop was more than party music with their 1982 hit “The Message,” became the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joseph Saddler, better known as the disc jockey and producer Grandmaster Flash, said backstage, “It opens the gates to our culture.”

Jay-Z, the rapper who is chief executive officer of Def Jam Records, handed the awards to the group. Reading his speech from a personal digital assistant, he said, “The shot heard ’round the world was fired from the South Bronx.”

When Melle Mel, the rapper on “The Message,” stepped up to speak, he urged the music executives in the audience to “make hip-hop the culture that it was, instead the culture of violence it is right now.”

Joining the rappers as new members of the Hall of Fame were the poet-turned- punk-rock-pioneer Patti Smith, the three-member girl group the Ronettes, the hard-rock band Van Halen and the Georgia college-town rockers R.E.M.

It was the hall’s first awards ceremony to be broadcast live, on both the cable channel VH1 Classic and on the Web by America Online. VH1 will broadcast an edited version of the ceremony on Saturday at 9 p.m.

On the stage, strong women’s voices dominated the music. Aretha Franklin swooped through “I Never Loved a Man,” singing in tribute to the hall’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, who died in December. Ronnie Spector belted “Be My Baby” with the Ronettes, and Ms. Smith brought an idealistic fervor to her songs.

Accepting her award, Ms. Smith recalled a kitchen table argument with her husband, Fred Smith, shortly before he died in 1994. “He said to me, ‘Tricia, one day you’re going to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “He asked me to accept it like a lady and not say any curse words and to make certain to salute new generations. Because it is the new generations that will redefine the landscape of rock ’n’ roll.”

Still, the epithets arrived when Ms. Smith tossed off her jacket, untucked her shirt and belted a punk anthem about being “outside of society.” She said it was her mother’s favorite song. The night’s closing all-star jam was also one of her songs, “People Have the Power.”

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam paid tribute to R.E.M., saying he had, by his calculations, listened to their album “Murmur” 1,260 times in the summer of 1984. Referring to R.E.M.’s hard-to-understand singer, Michael Stipe, he said, “One of the reasons I was listening so incessantly was I had to know what he was saying,” Mr. Vedder said. “He can hit an emotion with pinpoint accuracy or he can be completely oblique, and it all resonates.”

R.E.M. performed with its original drummer, Bill Berry, who had retired after suffering a brain aneurysm. Mr. Vedder joined R.E.M. onstage to sing “Man on the Moon,” and Ms. Smith joined them for the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” It was a reminder that Iggy Pop and the Stooges, whose music was a cornerstone of punk-rock, have not been elected to the Hall of Fame.

Old feuds were not left behind. The Ronettes, whose hits were triumphs of their producer Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” pointedly didn’t mention him in speeches that thanked a lifetime of other supporters, including Mr. Spector’s songwriting collaborators and the Ronettes’ arranger, Jack Nitzsche.

Introducing the Ronettes, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones described hearing the group warming up backstage when they shared touring bills in the 1960s. “They could sing all their way right through a wall of sound,” he said. “They didn’t need anything.”

Ms. Spector, who was married to Mr. Spector from 1968 until 1974, recalled the days of “our dresses slit up the side and our beehives up to here,” pointing well over her head. “All my life, all I ever wanted to do was sing rock ’n’ roll.”

The omission of Mr. Spector’s name reflected a 15-year court battle between the producer and the group. The Ronettes were paid less than $15,000 when they signed with Philles Records in 1964, and never saw another payment. In 1987, the Ronettes sued Mr. Spector — who also wrote their songs and owned their label — for royalties. They won an award of $2.6 million in 2000, but it was overturned on appeal.

After the Ronettes performed last night, Paul Shaffer of “Late Night With David Letterman” — who led the stage band — read a brief congratulatory message from Mr. Spector in which he said, “I wish them all the happiness and good fortune the world has to offer.”

Mr. Spector, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989, meanwhile, is about to go on trial for the 2003 killing of an actress, Lana Clarkson, at his Los Angeles mansion; jury selection is to start on Monday.

Van Halen, which planned and then canceled a tour this summer with its original singer, David Lee Roth, couldn’t manage a reunion for the Hall of Fame. Its guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, entered a rehabilitation center last Thursday, according to a statement on the band’s Web site, and negotiations over which songs Mr. Roth might perform broke down. Only Van Halen’s bassist, Michael Anthony, and its second lead singer, Sammy Hagar, attended the ceremony. They performed the 1986 hit “Why Can’t This Be Love” with the stage band.

Velvet Revolver, which includes members of Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, handed the members of Van Halen their awards and performed two additional Van Halen songs.

Mr. Hagar, accepting his award, said, “I couldn’t tell you how much I wish everyone was here tonight. It’s out of our control.” He also thanked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for including him as a Hall of Fame member, although he did not join Van Halen until 1985, after Mr. Roth left.

“They didn’t have to do that,” Mr. Hagar said. He added that while he regretted the full band wasn’t at the ceremony, “You couldn’t get me from here with a shotgun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/ar...ic/13hall.html





Sho ’Nuff

New Style for Studios: Peddling Films Softly
Sharon Waxman

As one of this summer’s most anticipated and heavily marketed movies, “Spider-Man 3,” the latest in the Sony Pictures blockbuster superhero series, will be hard to miss. But this week at ShoWest, the movie industry’s annual convention for thousands of theater owners, filling four days and two Las Vegas hotels, a giant poster in the convention area is pretty much all the promotion it is getting.

Three years ago, leading up to “Spider-Man 2,” Sony’s efforts did not cut such a low profile. Conventiongoers were treated to a special preview of the main action sequence, as spider-costumed acrobats descended on black cables from the ceiling of Le Theatre Des Arts at the Paris Hotel here.

The other major Hollywood studios are following similar no-frills scripts at what is the principal industry showcase for mainstream movies. A frayed relationship between the major studios and exhibitors, cost-cutting across the board and consolidation among the national theater chains has turned a promotional event for big-budget movies into one that is not promoting very many big-budget movies.

“It’s expensive,” explained Richard Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Last year Disney screened Pixar’s “Cars” for the convention, but on Tuesday it showed only a trailer of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” and 12 minutes of the next Pixar animated movie, “Ratatouille.” “You still have to sell the movie,” he added. “You just do it in a different way.”

Mass events at places like ShoWest have been replaced by one-on-one contact with the exhibitors responsible for the lion’s share of American cineplexes, like AMC, Regal and Cinemark. Studio executives say they can cover most of the country with a few phone calls or a visit to an exhibitor’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., or Knoxville, Tenn.

Mr. Cook said Disney executives would spend much of ShoWest in private meetings with the large exhibitors, promoting coming movies. And just a couple of weeks ago, Paramount played host on its Hollywood lot to executives from a small, regional chain, Pacific Theaters, showing them scenes from two high-end movies still in production, “Drillbit Taylor” and “Sweeney Todd.”

As recently as three years ago, exhibitors were treated to the full-on glamour treatment by Paramount, with a cavalcade of stars from the studio’s lineup of films, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and a dozen others, attending a lavish dinner for the ShoWest delegates. The cost for the evening, according to a Paramount executive, was close to $6 million. It did not, however, result in greater theatrical bookings for Paramount films.

“In the old days, when we had a huge dais of stars, it was pretty sexy and cool,” said Rory Bruer, the domestic distribution president for Sony. “Now ShoWest has evolved in a far more practical, business manner. It’s become about the whole operational aspect of theaters.”

This means presentations about new projectors and sound systems, and debates over advertising costs, the rating systems and the relative merits of popcorn makers. Delegates are also invited to sample panels, like one about the hearing-impaired and another on the dangers of trans fat at the concession stand.

“Nuts and bolts, that’s why we come — for the seminars, the trade show,” said Brian MacLeod, the vice president for operations at Empire Theaters, a 54-theater chain based in Canada. “It’s always nice to see the stars, but that doesn’t help me with my job directly.”

But the shift at ShoWest is also a sign of continuing tension between the Hollywood studios and the exhibition chains, a demotion of sorts, as festivals in places like Toronto and even Venice have absorbed more attention from the news media.

Though the industry’s domestic box-office gross revenues rose 5.5 percent in 2006 after a disastrous drop in 2005 (and is off to a good start this year, thanks to movies like “300” and “Ghost Rider”), the major studios still complain that theaters are not doing enough to lure customers off their couches and into the multiplex. Among the studios’ desires: hiring more ushers to cut down on cellphone use and other noise.

Meanwhile, exhibitors resent Hollywood’s pressure to shorten the interval between the theatrical first run of a film and its DVD release. That interval, known as a window, shrank an average of 10 days last year, to three months and 25 days, according to John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners. Exhibitors are concerned that people won’t make the trek to the theater if they know the movie will soon show up at the local video store.

“What message are we sending to the patron with these short windows?” he said in his speech on Tuesday to exhibitors, betraying annoyance. “Get the DVD really fast,” just because the movie stank? he asked, using a more vulgar term. He added, “That part wasn’t in the script.”

Asked later about tension with the studios, he said, “I wouldn’t say it’s completely dissipated, but it’s certainly improved.”

Exhibitors have also not rushed to install digital projectors in their theaters, an expensive process whose cost they are sharing with Hollywood studios. After years of discussions with manufacturers, there are now 2,300 screens across the country with digital projectors, still a small fraction of the nation’s 37,000. The higher-quality equipment is not expected to be widely installed until 2009, when a few high-profile movies in 3D requiring digital projection (like James Cameron’s “Avatar”) are scheduled for released.

Screenings and stars have not been completely banished from ShoWest; the actor Shia LaBeouf came with the director Michael Bay and 20 minutes of their movie, “Transformers.” But the dream machine has lost some of its dazzle. The studios are instead using ShoWest to promote some of their lesser-known releases rather than big-budget spectacles.

MGM (now a modest-size distributor) showed “Mr. Brooks,” a psychological thriller with Kevin Costner and Demi Moore (though it excluded reporters from the screening). And Paramount screened a small movie, “Disturbia,” also starring Mr. LaBeouf.

“We have a bunch of movies with a lot of profile,” said Rob Moore, president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Paramount, explaining the decision not to show the studio’s most anticipated films. “I don’t need to show ‘Shrek 3’ or ‘Blades of Glory’ to anybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/movies/15show.html





Edison the Inventor, Edison the Showman
Randall Stross

This article was adapted from "The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World," by Randall Stross, a contributor to The New York Times. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Crown Publishers, examines the reality and the myths surrounding the Edison legacy.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON is the patron saint of electric light, electric power and music-on-demand, the grandfather of the Wired World, great-grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person who flipped the switch. Before Edison, darkness. After Edison, media-saturated modernity.

Well, not exactly. The heroic biography we were fed as schoolchildren does have its limitations, beginning with the omission of other inventors who played critical roles — not just Edison's gifted assistants, but also his accomplished competitors. What's most interesting about the standard Edison biography that we grew up with is not that it is heroic but that it is outsized, a projected image quite distinct from the man who stood 5-foot-9.

Edison is famously associated with the beginnings of movies, which is where the modern business of celebrity begins. But he deserves to be credited with another, no less important, discovery related to celebrity that he made early in his own public life, accidentally: the application of celebrity to business.

No one of the time would have predicted that it would be an inventor, of all occupations, who would become the cynosure of the age. In retrospect, fame may appear to be a justly earned reward for the inventor of practical electric light in 1879 — yet Edison's fame came before light. It was conferred two years earlier, for the invention of the phonograph. Who would have guessed that the announcement of the phonograph's invention was sufficient to propel him in a matter of a few days from obscurity into the firmament above?

After "Edison" became a household name, he would pretend that nothing had changed, that he was as indifferent as ever. But this stance is unconvincing. He did care, at least most of the time. When he tried to burnish his public image with exaggerated claims of progress in his laboratory, for example, he demonstrated a hunger for credit unknown in his earliest tinkering. The mature Edison, post-fame, is most appealing whenever he returned to acting spontaneously, without weighing what action would serve to enhance his public image.

One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of "Dr. Livingston, I presume" fame, and Stanley's wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, " Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?"

"Napoleon's," replied Edison without hesitation.

"No, no," Stanley said piously, "I should like to hear the voice of our Savior."

"Well," explained Edison, "You know, I like a hustler."

Edison had retained the patent rights and business stakes in the phonograph, so when the business came into its own, he approved the construction of expanded manufacturing facilities adjacent to his laboratory to handle the orders that poured in. This was followed by still more growth, and more building: an entire block adjacent to the laboratory was filled with five-story hulks. By 1907, as the company erected its 16th building, Edison boasted of "the largest talking machine factory in the world."

Edison and his copywriters courted the urban middle class with advertising that made prospective customers feel as entitled to enjoy the pleasures of recorded music as anyone. "When the king of England wants to see a show, they bring the show to the castle and he hears it alone in his private theater." So said an advertisement in 1906 for the Edison phonograph. It continued: "If you are a king, why don't you exercise your kingly privilege and have a show of your own in your own house."

Other advertisements developed the theme of the phonograph as the great leveler. In 1908, a man in formal wear and his slender wife stood on one side of a table, upon which sat a phonograph; on the other side stood four servants, wearing smiles and expressions of curiosity. The caption said the Edison phonograph had brought the same entertainment enjoyed by the rich within the range of all. The credit for making the phonograph "the great popular entertainer" was to be bestowed upon Thomas Edison. "He made it desirable by making it good; he made it popular by making it inexpensive." Another advertisement promised that the phonograph would "amuse the most unresponsive," adding reverently, "It is irresistible because Edison made it."

IN truth, the Edison phonograph fell short of being irresistible; nor did it lead the industry in technical innovation. It was the Victor Talking Machine Company that made discs a practical medium. The disc's flat dimensions offered a more convenient means of storing many songs than the three-dimensional Edison cylinder. It was Victor that came up with a disc that offered four minutes of capacity when Edison's cylinder's had only two minutes. And it was Victor that introduced the Victrola, which hid the horn of the phonograph within a wood cabinet, transforming it into a piece of fine furniture — and a very profitable item for its manufacturer.

Edison's offerings may have lagged, but such was the demand for kingly entertainment enjoyed at home that the Edison Phonograph Works prospered along with Victor and Columbia, the companies that with Edison comprised the dominant three in the industry. Edison's cylinder, which cost about 7 cents to manufacture, sold for 50 cents, providing a nice gross margin that covered all manner of strategic missteps. One of those was Edison's conviction that there was no need to switch to discs. When he finally gave in and brought out discs, he could not bring himself to relinquish cylinders, so resources had to be spread across two incompatible formats. Nor would he permit his standards for sound quality to be compromised. He insisted that his discs be twice the thickness of those produced by the competition and much heavier, which provided for better sound but made them far more cumbersome.

Edison was adamant that Edison recordings would be played only on Edison phonographs. His competitors, Victor and Columbia, shared the same playback technique, etching a laterally cut groove that sent the needle moving horizontally as the record played. Their recordings could be played on one another's machines. Edison, however, adopted his own design, a groove that varied vertically, called at the time a "hill and dale" cut. An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitors' machines.

Edison had never shown a talent for strategy, and he did not give the subject close study. He spent most of his time working on problems related to industrial chemistry, principally those related to batteries, and, secondarily, those related to mass production of cylinders and discs. Yet he did take time to make decisions about music, personally approving — and, more often, disapproving — the suggestions of underlings about which performers should be recorded. His dislike of various musical genres and artists was strong and encompassed almost everything. Popular music — "these miserable dance and ragtime selections" — had no chance of receiving his blessing. Jazz was for "the nuts;" one performance reminded him of "the dying moan of dead animals." But he was no elitist. He also dismissed the members of the Metropolitan Opera House as lacking tune. Sergei Rachmaninoff was just "a pounder."

In 1911, Edison wrote a correspondent that he had had to take on the responsibilities of musical director for his company because the incumbent had made what Edison deemed to be awful decisions, permitting players to play out of tune and, most egregiously, tolerating a defective flute that "on high notes gives a piercing abnormal sound like machinery that wants oiling."

To Edison, the technical problems posed in recording sound by purely mechanical means, prior to the development of the microphone, were far more absorbing than business issues. He allocated his time accordingly. He spent a year and a half overseeing research on how to record and clearly reproduce the word "sugar" perfectly. Two more months were needed to master "scissors." He wrote, "After that the phonograph would record and reproduce anything." This was not wholly true. Recording an orchestra with pre-electric acoustic technology presented insoluble problems. He did his best, ordering the construction of the world's largest brass recording horn, 128 feet long, 5 feet in diameter at the end that received sound, tapering down to 5/8 of an inch at the other. Its construction required 30,000 rivets alone, each carefully smoothed on the interior surface. It was a marvel of metalwork, but as an instrument for recording sound, it never worked very well. (It did serve its country well, however, being sent off for service in World War II in a scrap drive.)

Edison's partial loss of hearing prevented him from listening to music in the same way as those with unimpaired hearing. A little item that appeared in a Schenectady newspaper in 1913 related the story that Edison supposedly told a friend about how he usually listened to recordings by placing one ear directly against the phonograph's cabinet. But if he detected a sound too faint to hear in this fashion, Edison said, "I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong." The story would be confirmed decades later in his daughter Madeleine's recollections of growing up. One day she came into the sitting room in which someone was playing the piano and a guest, Maria Montessori, was in tears, watching Edison listen the only way that he could, teeth biting the piano. "She thought it was pathetic," Madeleine said. "I guess it was."

EDISON, though, was undaunted by the limitations of his hearing, which would make for an inspirational tale, were it not for the fact that he was the self-appointed musical director of a profit-seeking record business, whose artistic decisions directly affected the employees of the Edison Phonograph Works. His judgments and whims met no obstruction.

Workers spread word daily about Edison's mood. "The Old Man is feelin' fine today" was welcome news. But if the word was "the Old Man's on the rampage," employees dove for cover, "as in a cyclone cellar, until the tempest was over."

Not just his employees but also the general public angered Edison. He was exasperated by a public that clamored, he said, "for louder and still louder records." He believed that "anyone who really had a musical ear wanted soft music." And it was those customers, the "lovers of good music," whom Edison in 1911 said would be "the only constant and continuous buyers of records." This was wishful thinking. What was plainly evident to everyone else was that the only constant in the music business was inconstancy, the fickle nature of popular fads. The half-life of a commercially successful song was brief. By the time Edison's factory shipped the first records three weeks after recording, the flighty public had already moved on.

Even then, in the founding years of the recorded-music business, the economics of the industry was based upon hits, the few songs that enjoyed an unpredictably large success and subsidized the losses incurred by the other releases. On rare occasions, Edison grudgingly granted this. Then he would concede that the popular music he disdained was in most demand, and he took what comfort he could in the thought that the "trash" his company reluctantly released did help to sell phonographs and indirectly help him to provide "music of the class that is enjoyed by real lovers of music."

This business was not so easily mastered, however, and the contempt with which Edison regarded popular music did not help him understand his customers. They would purchase the records of particular performers whom they had heard of but shied away from the unknown artists. Decades later, economists who studied the workings of the entertainment industry would identify the winner-take-all phenomenon that benefited a handful of performers. The famous become more famous, and the more famous, the richer. Everyone else faces starvation. This was the case at the turn of the 20th century, too.

The management of the Victor Talking Machine Company understood these basic market principles long before Edison absorbed them. Shortly after the company's founding in 1901, Victor signed Enrico Caruso to an exclusive contract, paying him a royalty that was rumored to be 25 percent of the $2 retail price of a Caruso record. His estimated annual earnings from royalties in 1912 was $90,000, at a time when the second most popular singer earned only $25,000.

At the same time Victor was writing checks for the leading talents of the day, Edison brought out his checkbook reluctantly and rarely. One exception was when, in 1910, he signed the woman who way back on a wintry night in 1879 had visited his Menlo Park laboratory: Sarah Bernhardt.

In the Edison Phonograph Monthly, the company's internal trade organ, much was made of the difficulties that had had to be overcome in order to land an artist such as Bernhardt. She had had to be persuaded to discard her "professional aversion to exploiting her talent in this manner." The monetary terms supposedly were not an issue. The sticking point was her concern that crude recording technology would leave posterity with a sound inferior to her voice. According to the company's publicists, a demonstration of the phonograph persuaded her that Edison would produce "perfect records." The company urged dealers to write their local newspapers and reap free publicity: "No paper will refuse to publish the news, as everything that the immortal Bernhardt does is eagerly seized upon by the press."

We do not know whether Bernhardt ruled out commercial considerations. (She did endorsements for commercial products like a dentifrice for a fee, but she did draw the line when P. T. Barnum offered her $10,000 for the rights to display a medical curiosity: her amputated leg.) We do know that Edison hated the negotiations with recording stars, which entailed monetary demands far in excess of what Edison considered reasonable. He complained that despite their talk about their love for their art, "it is money, and money only, that counts." Even the large sums paid to the most famous failed to secure their loyalty. He grumbled that artists would bolt "for a little more money offered by companies whose strongest advertising point is a list of names."

EDISON convinced himself — without consulting others, in typical fashion — that he could simply opt out of competition for stars. He tried a small-budget alternative, scouting undiscovered voices among local choirs in Orange, New Jersey, and Newark. He wrote a correspondent in 1911, "I believe if you record church choir singers and musical club, glee club, etc., singers, that we shall be able to discover a lot of talent just suitable for the phonograph." He was pleased to have found locally two tenors who "can beat any opera tenor except Caruso." Over time, Edison did add Anna Case, Sergei ("the Pounder") Rachmaninoff and a few others. But he permitted competitors to snatch up other performers like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fannie Brice and Al Jolson. The first record to sell one million copies was Vernon Dalhart's hillbilly ditty "The Prisoner's Song." Not surprisingly, it was a Victor recording, not an Edison.

The fame of the performers whom Victor Talking Machines astutely signed did more than bolster record sales; it also added great luster to Victor's brand. A "Victrola" soon replaced "phonograph" as the generic term, a development that caused Edison considerable distress.

Edison dealers grumbled among themselves, too. The Topeka, Kansas, agency, for example, complained in early 1915 to the one in Des Moines, "We have no artists of any note on the Edison." It fell to Edison's salespeople to explain their absence on the Edison label. A sales manual from this time laid out the company's defense, which directed the public's attention to "the great Wizard" who personally tested voice samples using techniques of his own devising and selected "those voices which are most worthy of re-creation by his new art." Only the voice, not the reputation, mattered to the Wizard.

So determined was Edison to strip artists of their vanity and unreasonable demands that he refused to print the name of the recording artist on the record label. When his dealer in Topeka asked him to reconsider, Edison let loose a torrent of pent-up opinion:

"I am sure you will give me the credit of having put a tremendous amount of thought into the phonograph business after the many years that I have been engaged on it. Not alone to the technical side of the business have I given an immense amount of thought but also to the commercial side, and I want to say to you that I have most excellent reasons for not printing the name of the artist on the record. Your business has probably not brought you into intimate contact with musicians, but mine has. There is a great deal of 'faking' and press agent work in the musical profession, and I feel that for the present at least I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations."

Edison wrote this in 1913, when he was 66 years old. His confidence in his business acumen had, if anything, grown over time. And in taking this stand, he reveals a nature that could not see the inconsistency: Here his own companies used his fame as the Wizard to market his inventions, prominently displaying his name and driving off anyone who threatened to infringe the trademark. But he could not abide others — in this case, his own recording artists — using fame, even though much more modest, for their own commercial interests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/bu.../11edison.html





South Korea Creates Ethical Code for Righteous Robots
New Scientist Tech and AFP

South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to stop humans misusing robots – or vice versa – officials announced on Wednesday.

The government expects to issue a "Robot Ethics Charter" for manufacturers and users in April 2007. Its key considerations are preventing illegal use, protecting data acquired by robots and establishing clear identification and traceability of machines.

But the charter will also cover ethical standards to be programmed into robots, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy says. A five-member task force including experts, futurists and a science fiction writer began working on the code in November 2006.

"The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots, as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future," the ministry said in a statement. As the South Korean population ages, various service robots will come into use, eventually becoming "key companions to human beings", it added.

Robot rules

However, one robotics researcher warns that it remains a mystery whether machines will ever be able to understand ethics in the same way as humans.

"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's code of ethics team says. "Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked on the cyberworld."

Hye-Young adds that the government's guidelines will reflect the "Three Laws of Robotics" put forward by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. These are:

1. A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm

2. A robot must obey orders given by a human unless these conflict with the first law

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as this does not conflict with the first or second law

Max Lungarella, a robotics researcher at the University of Tokyo in Japan told New Scientist that rapid progress in the field has made robot ethics a hot topic. But he adds that it is still unclear whether an ethical code could ever be programmed into a robot effectively.
Context counts

"Good and bad depends on the context and on the situation," Lungarella says. "One issue is to program robots to be secure and dependable. It's quite another to have robots that 'know' what is good and what is bad, or that can act on an intrinsic shared value system."

South Korea is currently developing various types of robot. In September 2006, the government unveiled a machinegun-toting sentry robot designed to patrol the heavily fortified border with North Korea.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology, in Seoul, is also working on robot caregivers that can perform simple chores and monitor the health of elderly people. The project is due for completion in 2013. The same institute developed EveR-2 Muse, a robotic "woman" that can speak and reproduce various facial expressions.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...us-robots.html





Bowing to Sikhs’ Call, California Wants Textbook Change
Jesse McKinley

The picture on Page 95 of “An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600,” a seventh-grade history book used in California schools since last fall, had been unremarkable to state education officials: a stiff 19th-century portrait of a man with a trimmed beard holding a few beads and wearing a crown.

But for Sikhs, that image of Guru Nanak (1469-1538), their religion’s founder, is anathema to everything they believe about the prophet, a simple man who preached to the poor and certainly, they say, never wore a crown.

So, after months of lobbying by Sikhs, the California Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday to ask the book’s publisher to remove the portrait from future printings, and to provide a sticker with another image or text to place over the portrait in existing copies.

“The image itself was offensive to the Sikh community,” said Thomas Adams, director of the Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources Division of the State Education Department. “And it wasn’t defensible on the issue of accuracy, because it is from a later period” than the one in which Guru Nanak lived.

Sikhs, who trace their religion to the late-15th-century Punjab region of what are now Pakistan and India, number some 24 million around the world and about 500,000 in the United States, says the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, based in Washington. According to Kavneet Singh, the fund’s Western regional director, 75,000 to 100,000 live in California, though some estimates put the number at twice that. Many arrived in the United States in two waves, immigrating either as laborers during the early 20th century or as skilled professionals since World War II.

Sikhs in California had pushed to have the picture removed from the text ever since the book first arrived in schools at the start of the academic year. Gurcharan Singh Mann, a Sikh who lives in Fremont and who was active in the effort, said that in addition to the crown, the trim of Guru Nanak’s beard was in the style of a Muslim or a Hindu rather than a Sikh.

“It is not a suitable picture,” Mr. Singh Mann said. “Every Sikh at their home has a picture of Guru Nanak, and it looks like the modern dress of the Sikh, of the 21st century, with a turban and a fully grown beard.”

The book’s publisher, Oxford University Press, did not return a call for comment. But education officials and other publishing houses said the episode was just the latest example of a textbook change prompted by concerns about giving offense to various racial, ethnic or religious groups.

California’s school board has a public — and often lengthy — process of reviewing textbooks before they are made available for purchase by individual school districts. Last year, for example, the board took comments from a variety of groups, including representatives of the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religions, each looking for changes to a proposed social sciences curriculum. The textbooks were approved last March, but only after the board had given publishers a 126-page list of suggested tweaks, trims and fixes.

“This has always been the story of the California adoption process,” Mr. Adams said. “It is intended for the public to participate. It’s not intended for a bureaucrat like myself to sit behind a desk and do it comfortably.”

But publishers say that with the rise in cultural sensitivity and in new educational standards, including those from federal programs like No Child Left Behind, the cost and time consumed in making schoolbooks have also increased.

“We jump through a lot of hoops, and a great deal of money is spent in terms of developing materials,” said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. “And there’s a very strong correlation, particularly in California, that the new standards do indeed lead to more pages and lead to more costs.”

Still, publishers usually make the changes, if only because of California’s size and buying power. The schoolbook market in the United States is roughly $4.2 billion, Mr. Diskey said, and California schools are the nation’s No. 1 purchaser: the state government allocated $403 million for schoolbooks in 2006, Mr. Adams said, not counting federal money or lottery revenue.

It is not just ethnic or religious groups that lobby over the issue, either. Last year the California Legislature approved a bill forbidding any negative portrayal of lesbians and gay men in textbooks, though it was vetoed in September by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the ground that existing antidiscrimination law was sufficient to address the matter.

Mr. Singh Mann said the depiction of Guru Nanak was important not only for historical reasons but also to help keep students from confusing Sikhs with other ethnic groups. He said that several Sikhs were assaulted after the attacks of Sept. 11 and that some non-Sikh students still treated Sikhs with suspicion or worse.

“You’re in the school and some kids have a turban, they’ll be called Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Singh Mann said. “And the kids want to drop out the school. We don’t want to be a burden on the country, but if a kid drops out, it is a problem.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/us/10textbook.html





Triumph of Willful Blindness to the Horror of History

LENI RIEFENSTAHL
A Life

By Jürgen Trimborn. Translated by Edna McCown.

Illustrated. 351 pages. Faber & Faber. $30.

LENI
The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

By Steven Bach

Illustrated. 386 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.


Michiko Kakutani
Leni Riefenstahl liked to say that her art and life were devoted to the pursuit of Beauty. But her career, as Hitler’s favorite and highly gifted filmmaker, stands as an enduring rebuke to Keats’s assertion that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and that is “all ye need to know.”

She arguably remains the most controversial filmmaker in history. The critic John Simon hailed her as “one of the supreme artists of the cinema, the greatest woman filmmaker ever.” And she is the sole woman director on a Time magazine list of the all-time 100 best films.

Susan Sontag, in contrast, went from arguing, in the mid-’60s, that Riefenstahl’s films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” transcended “the categories of propaganda or even reportage” to concluding, a decade later, that the very conception of “Triumph of the Will” “negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.”

Sontag also observed that “the purification of Leni Riefenstahl’s reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time,” with her defenders, including many in the avant-garde film establishment, suggesting that she was first and foremost an “indomitable priestess of the beautiful,” fascinated by the ideal and the monumental, “a beauty freak rather than a horrid propagandist.”

This of course is what Riefenstahl — who died in 2003 at 101 — has maintained since the end of World War II, and it’s what she argued at length in her 600-plus page memoir (1993) which attempted to create a portrait of the author as a political naïf and victim of slander, even as it promoted an image of her as a visionary artist.

The chief value of two new biographies of Riefenstahl — one by Jürgen Trimborn, a professor of film, theater and art history at the University of Cologne; the other by Steven Bach, the author of biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart — is that they both serve as much needed correctives to all the spin, evasions and distortions of the record purveyed by Riefenstahl, and that they both re-situate her work (and recent efforts to divorce her work and her aesthetic from the context in which they were created) in a historical perspective.

In “Leni” Mr. Bach notes that in the 1970s the feminist movement “sought to claim her as forerunner or exemplar,” while proponents of the auteur theory encouraged “viewing her work for its style, for its formal qualities and technical innovations, as if her art were independent of subject and technique were irrelevant to content.”

In “Leni Riefenstahl” Mr. Trimborn points out that critical praise for the formal qualities of this filmmaker’s work, along with growing historical distance from the Third Reich and respect for her advanced age, led “to an increasingly unbiased acceptance of Riefenstahl” on her own terms in the last years of her life. The dangers of this development, he astutely points out, is that it reflects a willful determination to deny or ignore her role in promoting Hitler and the Reich, and points, in Germany especially, to “a questionable comprehension of history, which desires to attain ‘normality’ at any price.”

It is Mr. Trimborn’s conclusion that Riefenstahl was “primarily a careerist:” “through her friendship with Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl made her career, the peaks and valleys, the breaches and contradictions of which are not atypical of many Germans of the 20th century.” As for Mr. Bach, he writes that “the ‘horror of history’ in which her apologists thought her ‘imprisoned’ was a narrative of her own making about which she remained nostalgic and unrepentant. It was richly rewarded and free of any compulsion save ambition. She did not suffer from it but profited and to suggest otherwise — as she often did — is an insult to the millions who died at the hands of a regime she took pride in glorifying, using and enabling.”

Both books do an energetic job of trying to ferret out the facts of Riefenstahl’s life, facts obscured by her own lies, boasts and denials, and a job made all the more difficult, as Mr. Trimborn writes, by the lack of dependable evidence from other sources relating to many of the early chapters of her life. Both books trace her early ambition and dogged determination — which were transferred from dance to the cinema, after a knee injury — and both note her reliance on powerful male mentors and collaborators, despite her assertions of independence.

Riefenstahl’s stint as the star of a series of mountain movies made by Arnold Fanck — whom she’d sought out and impressed, after seeing his picture “Mountain of Destiny” — would pave the way for her work for the Reich. Fanck, as Mr. Bach points out, “gave her a foundation in filmmaking that would prove indispensable for everything that followed,” including an appreciation of striking visuals, strong angles and monumental vistas.

In addition the mountain film genre, with its echoes of German Romanticism and emphasis on heroic striving, would dovetail, in many ways, with a developing fascist aesthetic. Hitler himself was a fan of Fanck’s movies and responded quickly when Riefenstahl wrote him in 1932, requesting an audience. “Once we come to power,” he told her, “you must make my films.”

It would be a useful collaboration for both parties. The Reich’s lavish financial backing gave Riefenstahl unusual logistical and creative freedom along with a luxurious life among the elite, and she and the architect Albert Speer, Mr. Trimborn writes, “quickly rose to international prominence as figureheads of the Nazi regime,” while helping “to erect the facade that diverted the rest of the world from Hitler’s true plans and goals.”

Although Riefenstahl would later claim that “Triumph of the Will” was “a pure historical film” without “a single reconstructed scene,” Mr. Bach suggests that it was actually a carefully orchestrated, stage-managed work (which included rehearsed scenes and fragments of speeches delivered at various times); moreover its virtuosic manipulation of formal elements were put in the service of exalting Hitler and his movement.

As for Riefenstahl’s film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, “Olympia,” it was secretly financed and sponsored by the Reich, and it played a key role in Goebbels’s broader propaganda campaign, Mr. Bach notes, “to present the New Germany to the world in a positive light, deflecting attention from repressive racial policies by emphasizing Strength through Joy.”

Riefenstahl would repeatedly ignore or deny news reports of anti-Semitic atrocities in Germany. Mr. Bach reports that she claimed not to believe reports about Kristallnacht, shrugging it off as slander on her homeland, and that during a 1938-39 trip to the United States, she told a reporter that as an artist she could not be expected to know about events, even if the rest of the world did. “There are four walls about me” when she was at work, she said, and “it is not possible for me to know what is true” or what is a story.

In 1940, with the fall of Paris, Riefenstahl wrote Hitler an ecstatic telegram: “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind.”

This from a woman who wanted history to see her simply as an artist, who falsely denied ever making anti-Semitic statements, who implausibly claimed she knew next to nothing about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, a woman who never acknowledged moral accountability for the role her movies played in promoting Hitler and his cause, a woman who in recent decades would win acclaim from cineastes on her own terms as a great artist and who, in 1974, received a tribute from the Telluride film festival for her “exemplary contributions to the art of the film.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/books/13kaku.html





What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing
John Tierney

So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here!”

And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”

Did that alleged joke make you laugh? I would guess (and hope) not. But under different circumstances, you would be chuckling softly, maybe giggling, possibly guffawing. I know that’s hard to believe, but trust me. The results are just in on a laboratory test of the muffin joke.

Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees and rats. They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke — or, to be precise, the first stand-up routine to kill with an audience of primates.

It wasn’t any funnier than the muffin joke, but that’s not surprising, at least not to the researchers. They’ve discovered something that eluded Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humor.

Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.

When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago, he naïvely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and a George Carlin routine. They didn’t laugh much. It was what a stand-up comic would call a bad room.

So he went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80 percent to 90 percent of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.” The witticisms that induced laughter rarely rose above the level of “You smell like you had a good workout.”

“Most prelaugh dialogue,” Professor Provine concluded in “Laughter,” his 2000 book, “is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”

He found that most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly.

“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”

The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Washington State University, discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.

He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter (or, in some inexplicable cases, to Jim Carrey movies). Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.

Which brings us back to the muffin joke. It was inflicted by social psychologists at Florida State University on undergraduate women last year, during interviews for what was ostensibly a study of their spending habits. Some of the women were told the interviewer would be awarding a substantial cash prize to a few of the participants, like a boss deciding which underling deserved a bonus.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”

Mr. Stillman says he got so used to the laughs that he wasn’t quite prepared for the response at a conference in January, although he realizes he should have expected it.

“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/sc...d10&ei=5087%0A





Government Releases Transition Plan For End Of Analog TV

The government will provide coupons to help households buy analog-to-digital converter boxes so they can continue to receive over-the-air television for free.
K.C. Jones

The federal government has released its final rules on plans for a digital-to-analog converter box coupon program to help Americans receive free digital TV transmission when the age of analog comes to a close in the United States.

"This really has the opportunity to be an absolute game changer in the broadband marketplace," Assistant Secretary of Communications and Information John Kneuer said during a news conference Monday.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced rules Monday that set the stage for manufacturers and retailers to move forward with a switch that is supposed to result in clearer pictures, more programming, broader spectrum for wireless service, and interoperability for emergency responders. The digital age of television is scheduled to take off Feb. 17, 2009, when full-power television stations stop analog broadcasts.

Federal laws require the switch. They also require the government to help some Americans pay for boxes that will allow their television sets to receive digital transmissions.

From Jan. 1, 2008, through March 31, 2009, each U.S. household can request up to two coupons worth $40 each toward the purchase of two analog-to-digital converter boxes, the NTIA said. The federal government has allocated $990 million for the program. Administrators expect that to fund more than 22 million coupons. The NTIA can ask Congress for about $500 million more to cover more than 11 million additional coupons and contingent funds, which administrators said they would reserve for homeowners that only receive over-the-air broadcasts.

Regulators say people with cable and satellite television should not need the boxes. The coupons apply only to basic boxes that meet energy efficiency standards, not for boxes with advanced recording and playback features. Government contractors will store applicants' information in a database. The government will prosecute individuals who commit fraud using criminal statutes, and retailers violating the terms of the program will be banned from it, NTIA administrators said during the news conference.

Consumer electronics and broadcasting groups have formed a coalition to cooperate on an analog-to-digital public education campaign.

Industry and government leaders are eager for the switch to digital, which will broaden the transmission spectrum to provide capabilities that public and private groups seek.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000216





Tech Firms Push to Use TV Airwaves for Internet

Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily
Charles Babington

A coalition of big technology companies wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way: over television airwaves. Key to the project is whether a device scheduled to be delivered to federal labs today lives up to its promise.

The coalition, which includes Microsoft and Google, wants regulators to allow idle TV channels, known as white space, to be used to beam the Internet into homes and offices. But the Federal Communications Commission first must be convinced that such traffic would not bleed outside its designated channels and interfere with existing broadcasts.

The six partners -- Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips -- say they can meet that challenge. Today, they plan to give FCC officials a prototype device, built by Microsoft, that will undergo months of testing.

If the device passes muster, the coalition says, it could have versions in stores by early 2009.

Proponents liken the idea to so-called WiFi signals, which provide wireless Internet access from phone or cable companies to users in airports, coffee shops and elsewhere.

"These devices have the potential to take the success of the WiFi phenomenon to another level," said Jonathan S. Adelstein, an FCC commissioner.

Warily watching from the sidelines are the major telephone and cable companies that compete to bring high-speed Internet into millions of businesses and homes.

Telecommunications officials and analysts differ on the degree to which TV-spectrum-based Internet access might seriously threaten existing Internet providers.

Some said a new Internet provider might force the older companies to drop prices. Others said the available white-space spectrum might be too limited to make much of an impact.

Wireless carriers said they were not afraid of new rivals. "The wireless industry was born in a competitive environment," said Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, playing down the risk to his company. AT&T said in a statement that FCC rules "should protect not only current TV band incumbents from interference but also those services that will be introduced into adjacent spectrum" in the future.

Several analysts said a TV-spectrum system might make the most sense in rural areas, where high-speed Internet access via phone or cable lines is expensive to deploy. Small companies might build some towers, beam white-space spectrum to farm homes and cabins, and connect it to an Internet provider, they said.

In urban areas, a TV Internet system might somehow be combined with phone- or cable-provided Internet service to redirect signals through every wall of a house or office -- without replacing the phone or cable company as the provider, said a person affiliated with the coalition. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about such possible uses.

In a document filed with the FCC, the coalition stated: "As the world's largest producers of consumer electronics, software, semiconductors, personal computers, and peripheral devices, the Coalition's members stand ready to commit substantial resources to bring these advancements to consumers."

Google joined the coalition because the effort could create opportunities to transmit information over new platforms. It also might strengthen Google's hand should the traditional Internet pipelines -- big phone and cable companies -- start charging Internet companies higher prices to move their content more swiftly to consumers.

"It recognizes that the heart of the problem is a lack of competition on the broadband platform," said Rick Whitt, Google's telecom and media counsel in Washington. "We're very interested in finding ways to create platforms for other broadband connectivity."

Staff writers Sam Diaz and Alan Sipress contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031201395.html





Not so Fast, Broadband Providers Tell Big Users

Firms impose limits even as demand rises
Carolyn Y. Johnson

Amanda Lee of Cambridge received a call from Comcast Corp. in December ordering her to curtail her Web use or lose her high-speed Internet connection for a year.

Lee, who said she had been using the same broadband connection for years without a problem, was taken aback. But when she asked what the download limit was, she was told there was no limit, that she was just downloading too much.

Then in mid-February, her Internet service was cut off without further warning.

For Lee and an increasing number of people, a high-speed Internet connection is a lifeline to everyday entertainment and communication. Television networks are posting shows online; retailers are lining up to offer music and movie downloads; thousands of Internet radio stations stream music; more people are using WiFi phones; and "over the top TV," in which channels stream over the Internet, is predicted to grow.

That means that more customers may become familiar with Comcast's little-known acceptable-use policy, which allows the company to cut off service to customers who use the Internet too much. Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.

"Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience and to address any excessive usage issues that may impact that experience," Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said in a statement. "The few customers who are notified of excessive use typically consume exponentially more bandwidth than the average user."

Feddeman declined to say where Comcast draws the line on too much Internet usage, instead saying the amount of data that could trigger a warning call would be roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month. Although those files vary in size, a typical photo file size is 1 to 2 megabytes, meaning that excessive users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month.

Matt Davis, a research director at IDC Corp., said that because of the way cable high-speed Internet works, a person using a huge amount of bandwidth will slow service for hundreds of customers.

"You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"

Davis said that even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet. Today, he said, an average subscriber downloads about one gigabyte per month, but even if everyone on the network began downloading just one movie a month, it could have a dramatic effect on the network.

Downloading is "certainly going to increase dramatically over the next five years," he said. "And even if it's double or triple or quadruple, it's going to place a lot of pressure on networks that are being pressured right now."

Limiting Internet use to maintain good service for everyone is common among providers, and Comcast says it does not disclose a hard-and-fast limit because numbers would shift as the network evolves. But the policy contrasts with Comcast's marketing, which emphasizes download speeds and touts its PowerBoost service, which gives customers an extra surge of speed when downloading large files.

"If Comcast has that limit, they really need to say what that is," said Frank Carreiro of West Jordan, Utah, who said he contacted customer support via an online chat after his family got a phone call warning that they were using the Internet too much. The customer representative said there was no official limit; the family's service was shut off in January.

"It's like if you're driving down freeway, and there's nothing to say what the speed limit is," Carreiro said.

It also seems to be something that the company's own customer support representatives are unfamiliar with, according to three people who were recently kicked off Comcast Internet service.

Lee said that she was not given specifics about how much to reduce usage and that when she called customer support to get more information about the warning, the customer service representative suggested that it may have been a prank call.

Joe Nova in Attleboro said a Comcast representative called in June to inform him that he was downloading too much content and must stop immediately or lose Internet service for a year.

When his service was cut off, he called customer support. "I told them I was willing to sign up for a professional account, a business account, and they said they never heard of a bandwidth limit," he said.

Nova, Lee, and Carreiro admit to activities that devour bandwidth, like downloading movie and television shows, listening to Internet radio, or making video calls. But they also said they weren't given clear guidelines about how to remedy the situation and were told repeatedly that there was no download limit, even though they were warned that they were downloading too much.

Acceptable use policies that state that consumers cannot download so much content that it degrades service are common among Internet providers.

Although Richard Ramlall, RCN senior vice president of strategic and external affairs, said in a statement that the company "does not suspend service related to the frequency or size of downloads," RCN's policy says customers cannot "act in a manner that negatively affects use of the Internet by other subscribers, users, individuals, or entities."

Verizon's DSL service has a different network architecture that means a single "bandwidth hog" should not affect neighbors and does not limit downloads, according to spokesman Mark Marchand.

"Legitimately, everybody's going to be a bandwidth hog sooner or later, because that's what the Internet is, going forward," said Linda Sherry of Consumer Action.
http://www.boston.com/business/perso...ell_big_users/





AT&T, Yahoo May Scale Back Co-Branding Deal

Yahoo and AT&T are negotiating potentially sweeping changes that could scale back their partnership, a person familiar with the matter said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fraying of the alliance could be a blow to Yahoo, which gets roughly $200 million to $250 million of revenue annually from AT&T, according to two people familiar with the matter, the Journal said in a report on its Web site. The newspaper said it also showed how AT&T itself is much stronger, and less reliant on Yahoo, than during the early days of the alliance, which was announced in late 2001. The partnership offers co-branded dial-up and DSL service.
http://news.com.com/ATT%2C+Yahoo+may...l?tag=nefd.hed





Yahoo Stock Dives on News of AT&T Loss
AP

Yahoo Inc. recently resurgent stock retreated by more than 5 percent Friday amid fears that a setback in a lucrative partnership with AT&T Inc. will undercut the anticipated gains from an overhaul of the Web portal's advertising platform.

The sell-off was triggered by an unconfirmed report in The Wall Street Journal that AT&T wants to stop giving Yahoo a slice of the subscriber fees from a 6-year-old co-branding agreement to sell Internet access in most of the country.

If AT&T gets its way, Yahoo would have to be satisfied with whatever money it could make by selling its own online products, such as digital music or matchmaking services, to subscribers of the joint service.

San Antonio-based AT&T declined to comment on the substance of the Journal's report, but acknowledged in a statement that its Yahoo partnership "is rooted in the open and ongoing dialogue we maintain."

A Yahoo statement included that same language and dismissed the Wall Street Journal report as "based on rumor and speculation." It added, however, that the companies were discussing ways to expand their partnership to include AT&T-owned Cingular Wireless.

Investors drew their own negative conclusions. Yahoo shares fell $1.59, or 5.2 percent, to close at $29.12 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Before Friday's downturn, Yahoo's stock had climbed by 20 percent this year, rebounding from a horrible 2006 performance. That reflected Wall Street's widespread belief that Yahoo will prosper from a month-old upgrade to its formula for linking ads to search requests.

However, a reshuffling of the AT&T deal would deliver a substantial blow.

Under the current terms of the contract, AT&T is believed to pay Yahoo $200 to $250 million annually, accounting for more than 25 percent of the $798 million in total fees that the Internet powerhouse collected last year. Most of Yahoo's revenue - which totaled $6.4 billion last year - comes from advertising.

Compounding the pain, Yahoo's profit margins on the AT&T partnership are much higher than on many of its other services because the telecommunications carrier handles most of the heavy lifting.

Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler estimated the reported revisions in the AT&T deal would reduce Yahoo's annual profit by $30 million to $70 million, or 2 to 5 cents per share.

Analysts expect Yahoo to earn nearly $780 million, or 54 cents per share, this year.

The damage to Yahoo could be worse if its other major Internet access partners - Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), BT Group PLC (BT) and Rogers Communications Inc. (RG) - follow AT&T's lead when they renegotiate their contracts.

Yahoo hasn't publicly disclosed the length of the contracts with its Internet access partners, but the AT&T alliance reportedly expires in April 2008.

Friday's news woke up many investors who thought Yahoo had turned the corner after slowing revenue growth and competitive challenges posed by increasingly popular Internet hangouts like MySpace.com contributed to last year's 35 percent decline in Yahoo's stock price.

An improved advertising system known as "Panama" - unveiled Feb. 5 after a three-month delay - has become the foundation for Yahoo's turnaround hopes. The upgrade is supposed to begin boosting Yahoo's profit in the second half of this year - a prospect that now looks shakier, Kessler said.

"A lot of people have gotten scared again and are starting to realize that they have been pinning their hopes on the promise of something that is still uncertain," he said.
http://www.9news.com/money/article.aspx?storyid=66174





SkyPilot Touches Down At Low End Of Muni Wi-Fi

The company's latest access point product aims to fill in those critical last-mile holes in citywide Wi-Fi networks.
Richard Martin

As more and more municipal wireless networks are deployed, cities and service providers are finding that fulfilling promises of citywide coverage over the unlicensed spectrum is more difficult than anticipated.

Seeing a market opportunity, SkyPilot on Monday announced a new access point -- known as the SkyAccess DualBand -- that it hopes will help fill holes in wide-area Wi-Fi networks at a relatively low expense.

A streamlined version of SkyPilot's flagship SkyExtender DualBand product, the new dual-radio devices will not extend a mesh network, but will act as edge connections that provide the last hop of the system. Like SkyExtender, the new devices have two radios: a mesh backhaul component operating in the 4.9 GHz to 5.8 GHz frequency band, and a Wi-Fi access point that operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band. In addition to providing high-speed Internet access to residential and business users, the dual-radio SkyAccess offers backhaul connections over distances up to 12 kilometers, the company said, to upstream mesh nodes.

The new device is "really a coverage fill-in" product, said SkyPilot VP of product marketing Brian Jenkins, "that offers increased flexibility to service providers."

Using the SkyAccess nodes at the edge of the network can reduce overall capital expenses for network build-outs by up to 33%, Jenkins claims.

That's an important benefit in a market where many service providers are finding it more costly than expected to build out Wi-Fi networks in densely populated urban areas. In San Francisco, a partnership with Google and EarthLink to provide a citywide network was among the earliest and most ballyhooed municipal Wi-Fi deals. Public criticism has mounted over, among other things, the level of coverage planned for the system. In Mountain View, Calif., Google has built a Wi-Fi network designed as a test-bed for future state-of-the-art systems. Even there, users have complained about the spotty coverage.

Many experts also have warned that that municipal mesh networks will be plagued by radio-frequency interference, slowing connection speeds to dial-up levels.

The result: wireless providers have been forced to provide node densities (i.e., the number of radios per square mile) much higher than in their designs, pushing the expense of building such networks to unforeseen levels.

The SkyAccess device is designed to fill holes in the network without driving budgets to the point where business models become nonviable.

"The price point of the SkyAccess DualBand allows us to fill in the coverage gaps and expand the reach of our overall service area without breaking our budget," Jim McKenna, president and CEO of RedZone Wireless, a provider based in Rockland, Maine, said in a statement.

"Since a last-hop mesh node doesn't need to repeat the wireless signal, we designed this product to provide the same performance and coverage at a lower cost," Jenkins said.

At a list price of $1,799, the SkyAccess DualBand costs about half as much as a SkyExtender node.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000227





Where Neo-Nomads' Ideas Percolate

New 'bedouins' transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office
Dan Fost

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins."

San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.

"In 'Lawrence of Arabia,' the bedouins always felt like they were on the warpath. They had greater cause," said Niall Kennedy, a 27-year-old San Franciscan who quit his day job at Microsoft Corp. to run his own Web company, Patrick Media, out of cafes and a rented desk. "At a startup, you're always on the go, plowing ahead, with some higher cause driving you."

San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to make their own rules.

"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."

Burton and Kennedy are among those popularizing the bedouin name, separating the movement from traditional freelancing by stressing the workers' involvement in technology, in general, and Web 2.0 ideology in particular. While the movement is at its apex in San Francisco, where young urban independents can easily find a coffeehouse with the right vibe for them, it's also happening across the more suburban reaches of the Bay Area, and across the country as a whole.

The move toward mobile self employment is also part of what author Daniel Pink identified when he wrote "Free Agent Nation" in 2001.

"A whole infrastructure has emerged to help people work in this way," Pink said. "Part of it includes places like Kinkos, Office Depot and Staples." It also includes places like Starbucks and independent coffee shops, where Wi-Fi -- wireless Internet access for laptops and other devices -- is available.

"The infrastructure makes it possible for people to work where they want, when they want, how they want," said Pink, who is based in Washington, D.C. Pink said numbers are hard to pin down, as the Census Bureau does not count independent workers. Using available census data and private surveys, Pink estimates that one-fifth of the workforce, or 30 million out of 150 million people, are working on their own.

In February 2005, the census identified 10.3 million independent contractors, 2.5 million on-call workers, 1.2 million temporary help agency workers, and 813,000 workers with contract firms. The independent workforce is hard to track, as the workers are neither employee nor employer -- and yet, in what Pink termed a "Zen turn," they are both employee and employer.

"It's been a slow steady trajectory over the last 15 or 20 years for a whole host of reasons. One of them, obviously, is there's no lifetime job security any more. I'm going to be more secure working for myself."

Pink calls it "Karl Marx's revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop."

Funny he should mention Marx. Soviet iconography is popping up all over the Bay Area's bedouin landscape, from the coffee cup and star on the red background of Ritual Roasters' logo, to the cell phone and mouse that look suspiciously like a hammer and sickle on the logo of Web Worker Daily, a blog that covers the bedouin phenomenon.

Web Worker Daily is published by GigaOm, a media company that practices what it preaches. Om Malik, 40, a technology journalist who lives in San Francisco's Financial District, started blogging five years ago and last year quit his day job, taking an undisclosed amount of venture capital to launch GigaOm as a business. He now has a full-time staff of five and a team of freelancers, all scattered about, contributing to different online journals. One is in Oakland, one in San Mateo, two in San Francisco and one at Lake Tahoe, he said. The freelancers are in Utah, Denver, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and spread around the world.

"There is nothing more free than being a Web worker," Malik says. "There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West. The individual is more important. That's the American way. It's about doing things your own way. Web workers represent that. ... It's the future, my friend."

There is a downside, Malik readily admits. "I can put in an 18-hour day," he said. "You don't know when to stop."

The Starbucks model

If you could split the Web workers into two main camps, you could say that one camp plugs in at Starbucks, while the other chooses independent neighborhood cafes. The two have vastly different ethics.

Starbucks offers a more corporate culture, and is a popular place for business meetings. Executives who travel a lot often prefer Starbucks, knowing they can find many branches in whatever city they go to. They also pay for the Wi-Fi, through Starbucks' partnership with T-Mobile.

Malik, for instance, swears by his Starbucks. (He doesn't want to say where it is, for fear that publicists from the companies he covers will stake him out there and ruin the experience.) "The biggest day of my own little boy life was when my own local Starbucks made me 'customer of the week,' " Malik said. "That's a Web worker gold medal."

Yet many of the scrappier startups, particularly those who have not taken funding from venture capitalists, prefer the ethos of the independent cafes, where the music is a little louder and the Wi-Fi is free.

Ritual: the scene

Ritual Roasters in San Francisco's Mission District is in many ways the epicenter of the bedouin movement. Ritual, on Valencia Street near 21st Street, is almost always packed with people working on laptops.

Every bedouin seems to have a Ritual story. There's the time someone buzzed through the cafe on a Segway scooter. Rubyred Labs, a hip Web design shop in South Park, had its launch party there. Teams from established Web companies such as Google Inc. and Flickr, a photo sharing site that's now owned by Yahoo, meet there. "You'd never know these guys were millionaires," said Ritual co-owner Jeremy Tooker.

The founders of Web video startup Dovetail Television were meeting there one day, griping as usual about how hard it was to find talented programmers.

"I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. "I got on a chair and yelled, 'Hey, are there any ActionScript programmers in the room?' People at the counter looked at me glaringly, but a couple of people looked around and raised their hand."

They lined up for interviews. None were actually hired, but it cemented in Levine's mind the notion of where the talent pool lies.

Kennedy, the self-professed bedouin who has worked at blog aggregator Technorati and at tech giant Microsoft but who is now working on his own idea of developing a new more personal way to search the Internet, is a regular at Ritual and blogs about it often. Kennedy tries to earn his spot in the cafe. "They'll come up to me and say, 'Did you notice that the Wi-Fi is down?' I can troubleshoot that kind of thing. Or when they were talking about redesigning their Web site, I was able to give advice."

"In the old days, people used to yell, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' " Kennedy said. "In cafes now, it's, 'Is there a Wi-Fi technician in the house?' "

On one recent weekday, software engineer Chase Tingley, 29, worked at one table, where he telecommutes for Idiom, a Massachusetts software company. Tingley moved to San Francisco when his wife took a job at a law firm. At the next table, three friends worked on their own projects: system administrator Sean Kelly, 36, wrote database reporting scripts, while Kaytea Petro, 28, worked at her job in publishing, and Robert Boyle, 37, hacked out code for the company he's co-founded, Podaddies.com, which he said will "monetize user-generated video."

As for why they're there, Kelly said, "I'm visiting with my friends instead of being locked up in a big building in the South Bay."

And he added, cheekily, "If you bring a flask, you can tip it into your coffee and your boss isn't watching you."

Tingley, at the next table, turned around and asked, "Can we be in separate articles?"

Coffee to the people

Kevin Burton, an expert in blogs and RSS feeds who runs a Web startup called Tailrank.com that claims to "track the hottest news in the blogosphere," spends about 10 percent of his time at Ritual, but the crowds have driven him elsewhere. His favorite at the moment is Coffee to the People on Masonic Avenue.

When you enter, you have no doubt you're in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The coffee drinks have names like Flower Power, the menu includes a vegan blueberry cornbread. At one table, a woman with an open laptop talks on her cell phone, while the man reading a paperback next to her keeps a hand over his ear. (Most bedouins say cell phones need to go outside the cafe.) Nearby, Kiff Gallagher, 37, pursues his passion, making music, while trading stocks online.

"I have a home office, but I just get cooped up," he said.

Burton arrives at 11 a.m., and his lead engineer, Jonathan Moore, 30, arrives a few minutes later. Burton has a double latte and a cupcake, and starts explaining how his site uses "wisdom of the crowds" algorithms to scrape the hottest news from the blogosphere and upend the mainstream media.

As he talks, Gallagher joins in, and advises, "Lower your voice. I already know the ins and outs of your business plan from the last time I was here."

That is an occupational hazard in the bedouin workforce. Kennedy rented a desk at San Francisco's Obvious Corp., a Web company in South Park, so he could have confidential meetings. Kennedy also said he has equipped his laptop with a firewall that's always on and e-mail and instant messaging encryption. He said it's fairly easy to sit in a cafe and start "sniffing the network, see what sites people are accessing, get an idea of a site that hasn't launched yet, see people's e-mail logins and passwords."

Bedouin history

Using a cafe to run a business is nothing particularly new. Venerable insurance firm Lloyd's of London was actually started in a coffee house, Kennedy points out. According to the Lloyd's of London Web site, "Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in 1688, encouraging a clientele of ships' captains, merchants and ship owners -- earning him a reputation for trustworthy shipping news. This ensured that Lloyd's coffee house became recognized as the place for obtaining marine insurance."

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of their best work in Parisian cafes. And in San Francisco, writers and poets of the Beat generation, such as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in the cafes of North Beach.

Caffe Trieste was among the most popular North Beach hangouts. "To have a cappuccino, you come to North Beach, to Caffe Trieste," says Giovanni "Papa Gianni" Giotta, the founder.

Now Caffe Trieste has joined the ranks of Wi-Fi cafes. It would figure that the one laptop in action on a recent afternoon belonged to an art dealer. "A cappuccino for overhead isn't bad," said David Salow, 33. He struck out on his own three months ago, and has yet to open a gallery. "Sixty to 70 percent of what I do can be done with the standard tools available to everyone -- a phone, a computer and a laptop connection."
So, how much coffee do you need to buy?

The proliferation of Wi-Fi cafes brings with it a moral dilemma: If you're one of these people sitting around and working on your laptop in a cafe, how much coffee do you need to buy?

Every cafe owner has wrestled with the flip side of that question: How much do I need to sell to make it worth letting someone take up space in my cafe?

Roger Soudah, owner of Cafe Reverie on Cole Street, was persuaded in 2004 to add Wi-Fi by one of his steady customers, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. But Soudah got fed up with the Wi-Fi squatters by the next year.

"I got fed up and pulled it out of the wall, and my employees cheered," he said. "My space is really small. We count on turnover for that reason."

He tells of one woman who designs places with feng shui principles. "She comes in with all these humongous blueprints and a laptop, taking up four tables, then has the nerve to say, 'Can you turn the music down?' " he said. "I feng shui'd her out of here."

Newmark says he won't be deterred. "My evil plans include using a cellular data connection," he said. "I plan to foil Roger again."

Other cafe owners welcome the bedouin workforce and its laptops.

At Ritual Roasters in the Mission, co-owner Jeremy Tooker said the main downside is the cost of power, which he said runs $2,000 a month. (Some laptop workers in the cafe said that's not so bad, calculating on the fly that that pencils out to about $64 a day, or $4 an hour.) Ritual covers up its outlets on weekends, and Tooker said it will likely eliminate many other outlets altogether, figuring that will increase turnover.

The hardcore customers shrug off the change. "I bought three batteries" for the laptop, said system administrator Sean Kelly. "It's a little spendy, but it's totally worth it."

Cafe Lo Cubano in San Francisco's Laurel Heights is contemplating a tiered system for access, according to floor manager Jeremiah Vernon. "People sit outside in their cars, stealing the Wi-Fi without buying anything," Vernon said.

To solve the problem, the new system would give small purchases an hour of free Wi-Fi, modest purchases would get five hours, and $10 or more would buy a full day. That allows the morning business customers the chance to buy their cafe Cubano and check their e-mail, as they do now, without allowing others to clog up the space for hours. One regular buys a cup in the morning, and returns with the cup hours later asking for a free refill, Vernon said.

One coffee shop, Coffee to the People in the Haight, even wrestled with the issue on its blog last year. "Here at CTTP, we need to bring in on average $100 PER HOUR simply to cover our costs," co-owner Karin Tamerius wrote. "That means, if all of our customers were people who stayed for three hours and spent $1.50 for coffee, we would require 200 people in our shop every hour we were open, 7 days a week, just to stay in business."

"Fortunately, not all of our patrons are quite so thrifty."

Indeed, almost every mobile worker interviewed said they try to buy something at least every hour.

But not everyone.

Ryan Mickle, 26, moved to San Francisco last month to run a Web site he co-founded, DoTheRightThing.com, which lets users rate companies on their social value. But Mickle can't always afford to do the right thing himself.

"We're bootstrapping entrepreneurs. We don't have any funds," he said. His Web site is not yet bringing in any money. "I'm reluctant to pay $9 for the overpriced food that tends to be in the cafe," he said. "It's the Wi-Fi user's dilemma. ... It's a mind game I play with myself: How many coffees is fair? I need to be sure to invest in them as a consumer or they're not going to last very long."

But Mickle vows that when he does incorporate, make money and issue stock, he will give shares to the cafes that he used as office space.

In a way, argues author Daniel Pink, the Wi-Fi cafe is bringing efficiency to the commercial real estate market.

Most offices sit vacant all night long, he said, creating an "incredible inefficiency." Pink, the author of "Free Agent Nation" and "A Whole New Mind," said people can rent interim offices from companies like Regus Corp., where the coffee is free, or do their work in a cafe. "This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business," he said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...GKKOCBA645.DTL





Meet cGrid, the Real-Time P2P Punisher
Jacqui Cheng

There's a tool in the war on piracy that's picking up steam, and its proponents are thrilled with what it can do. Dubbed "cGrid," the application is powerful and daunting to those caught in its snares, for it can boot users off the network in real-time if it suspects that they are engaging in P2P file sharing, or even if they are using so-called darknets. As you might expect, the entertainment industry loves it.

cGrid was a hot topic of conversation at last Thursday's House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, where the problem of piracy on US college campuses was the focus. It's not hard to see why: colleges are being accused of being too lax on piracy and taking too much time to act on reports of file sharing. cGrid's developer Red Lambda hopes that the current imbroglio between the RIAA and America's colleges will turn into a business opportunity.

cGrid's developers describe it as "the industry's most advanced P2P and file-sharing mitigation technology." It uses undisclosed techniques to monitor and record traffic at the packet-level and also uses proprietary behavioral analysis to determine whether individual users are participating in illegal file sharing. It monitors local networks and keeps historical logs on users according to their MAC addresses. In this way, cGrid can also monitor private file sharing such as that done with invitation-only FTP servers and other normally closed "networks."

The software provides detailed usage reports to administrators which can then be used to discipline students who have had multiple infractions. However, one of the most distinct features of the software is its ability to instantly kick users off of the network for engaging in suspicious behavior.

Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors "a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others," and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

cGrid is lauded by the RIAA and MPAA because of its ability to automatically determine usage patterns and remove offenders' Internet access on the spot, without the lag of involving bureaucracy. The University of Florida, where the cGrid was first developed under the name "Icarus," itself reports that it has been monitoring its dorm networks since 2003 with some success.

While students have been finding ways around the service (as discussed, perhaps not too wisely, on Facebook), UF's interim CIO Marc Hoit told Gainesville.com that the university has seen a dramatic reduction in downloading. Instantly kicking students off the network for suspected infractions seems to work, too: "The first and second warnings are sufficient" in scaring students straight about piracy, Hoit said.

Red Lambda's CEO Greg Marchwinski testified at last Thursday's hearing, saying "I think the Congressmen in this committee are losing their patience." Red Lambda would undoubtedly love for Congress to mandate universities to install such a solution, with its $1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.

Will cGrid become a member of the campus cops? The executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, John Vaughn, testified that the cost of such a system is prohibitively expensive, and that universities and colleges were already making an effort to curb piracy in other ways. There are other concerns about cGrid as well, including infringing upon student privacy and stifling the creativity of students who might be working on cutting-edge projects.

But the low recidivism of students caught by cGrid may make all of that moot, at least for some college administrators who would rather get the piracy monkey off their back. According to the University of Florida, only 10% of students identified by the system as engaging in unauthorized activity were caught a second time, and only 10 percent of those students were caught a third time.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-punisher.html





Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet next month to discuss their concerns about the new operating system.
Paul McDougall

In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled "Windows Vista Security" to discuss "the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks." NIST officials weren't immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST's Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

FAA CIO Dave Bowen told InformationWeek that he may forego upgrading the aviation safety agency's computers to Microsoft's latest offerings in favor of desktops running some combination of Linux and Google Apps, Google's new online suite of office productivity tools.

Among other things, Bowen said he is concerned that Windows Vista may be incompatible with many software applications already in use at the FAA.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000229





Top Five PC Manufacturers Fail Naked PC Test

A ZDNet special investigation into buying PCs without an operating system from the top five PC vendors uncovered a litany of conflicting advice and confused instructions

IT professionals are being forced to adopt Microsoft's operating systems — even if they tell their PC supplier they want a system free of Microsoft software, ZDNet UK's research has revealed.

ZDNet's reporters posed as undercover buyers to identify the policy of the top-five PC vendors in terms of supplying systems without an operating system, known as naked PCs. A naked PC gives IT professionals freedom to install the operating system of their choice.

But the ZDNet investigation showed that none of the five manufacturers would sell any PCs without Windows, our reporters found.

The reasons — or excuses — were varied.

Acer said it would give our reporter a refund of £30 for not using Windows, but would only make a refund if we drove to its Plymouth "repair" centre. In contrast to other reports, Dell refused to refund the Windows software if it went unused. Instead it offered to cancel the shipping charge of £50 as a compromise.

We backed up our undercover enquiries with official calls to every one of the five vendors. Two of the five — Acer and Toshiba — would not discuss the matter with us. Dell, HP and Lenovo claimed it was possible to buy naked PCs from their company — but our attempts to follow their guidance to buy one proved impossible.

Dell and HP both claimed it was possible to buy a naked PC from them, but we were unable to buy one from either vendor. Lenovo told us it sells PCs with pre-installed Linux, but it could not tell us how we could buy such a system.

Microsoft has placed considerable pressure on a number of PC vendors not to sell systems without Windows. Critics have suggested that vendors have yielded to such pressure because they are afraid of losing their bulk purchasing discount with Microsoft. Others have suggested that it would cost PC vendors considerably more in unit costs to produce naked PCs.

Ranjit Atwal, Gartner principal analyst, is pessimistic about the future for naked PCs. "The market for Linux is probably not big enough for them [suppliers] to go down that route," said Atwal, adding that he thought the number of users wanting to use Linux at the desktop was "in the small single digits".

"To do that [provide systems without Windows] costs them money," he argued.

Yet many customers have demanded naked PCs. A user forum set up in February by Dell has been inundated with such requests.

While customers find it difficult to get naked PCs, some of the vendors are beginning to apply more thought to loading Linux on PCs for both high-street buyers and corporates. HP is one such company. It recently began a feasibility study that tested the public's appetite for the operating system.

"We carried out a test marketing exercise and made Linux PCs available to users," explained Peter Murray, director of enterprise server and storage at HP. "It was disappointing and we had very little interest. We looked at the exercise and we think we may have got the marketing wrong so we are trying it again."

Murray believes there is a market for Linux in the UK but is also aware of the issues facing any large supplier who wants to make Linux boxes available. "It means diverting production lines and that is a lot of money and so we have to prove the business case," he said. However, he made it clear that he is enthusiastic about the idea and wants to make it work. "We just have to show it is worthwhile," he said.

Dell's position is less clear. The company has said it is keen to promote Linux and systems ready to run with Red Hat Linux are available on its site, but only in the US. While Linux is not available to UK users, Dell is currently assessing user interest on its own site and is asking for input from potential Dell/Linux users.

We have used the latest figures on PC sales from Gartner to identify the top five vendors. We detail our findings one vendor at a time over the following five pages.

Additional reporting by Colin Barker of ZDNet UK.


A trip to Plymouth with Acer

Acer did not return our call seeking to clarify its policy on naked PCs and whether it would offer a refund on Windows software.

However, we called its customer call centre, and recorded the following conversation:

ZDNet: I'm wondering whether you supply notebooks without Windows software.

Acer: I'm afraid not, no.

No? Nothing at all?
Although we can do the refund for the operating system as per the OEM licensing.

So if I get a machine with Windows on, you'll give me the refund?
There is a refund process, yes. I don't know the exact terms of it. You'd need to speak to tech support, unfortunately, but it is entirely possible. I don't know if it's financially viable or not, but it is possible.

Tech support wanted to send us an email to explain its policy. In the email Acer said: "These items [the notebook] will need to be returned to your local Acer Repair Centre in order to allow us to remove the Windows Operating System and refund you for it. Acer will refund you in accordance with the value of the operating system shipped: XP Home = €30 and XP Professional = €60. Shipment of the product to our repair centre and back to you after the removal of Windows will be at your own expense. As this is not a manufacture defect and not covered by the warranty, you would have to organise your own courier when the machine is ready to be sent back to you. Following the refund, any remaining software support on your Acer warranty will be void."

Acer's sole repair centre in the UK is in Plymouth.

Free shipping from Dell

Dell told ZDNet UK: "The Dell n Series solution for notebook and desktop PCs is designed for those customers who do not want to be burdened with the cost of an installed OS, and would prefer either to load Linux or their own licensed software. Dell's Latitude notebooks, OptiPlex desktops and Precision workstations offer the n Series solution on all of their systems in EMEA. n Series has been available in the UK for UK customers for over four years."

The company said customers should call its sales call centre to order a naked PC, and that it was impossible to do it online.

Dell told us that if a customer purchased a PC with Windows and subsequently did not use the software, no refund would be made. "It is not Dell policy to issue refunds," a Dell spokeswoman told us.

Our reporter found a completely contradictory response from Dell's customer call centre. The conversation was as follows:

ZDNet: I'm looking at buying a notebook. I just wondered whether you can supply a notebook without Windows. Can you do a Latitude or something like that without Windows?

Dell: What type of laptop is that?

A Latitude looks good.

Just a moment, sir. Which model of Latitude is that?

I just wondered whether I can get a Latitude without Windows on it?

Yeah, I mean which model is that in the Latitude?

I don't know. I was hoping you would be able to tell me.

Neither of the laptops on Dell doesn't come with any Linux on it.

OK, but I can install Linux myself. Would you just be able to ship it without Windows?

We'll send XP Pro in that. You just need to uninstall that.

I don't want Windows at all. Can you send it without Windows?

Without Windows. Just a moment sir... I've spoken to my manager regarding this. I'm sorry, sir, every computer from Dell does have an operating system in there.

So there's no way of getting it...?

You can uninstall it, sir. If you want, I can give you a discount of operating system price on the computer and give it to you.

On the grounds I don't use XP?

All you need to do is after it's been rescheduled, just format the computer and everything has been lost sir, that's it. If you do that, I won't charge you anything for operating system.

OK. That's cool. What have you got then?

[We discuss the precise specifications.]

The operating system is XP Pro. I'll give you a £50 discount.

OK, so I don't have to pay that £50 in the first place. You'll just knock that off, will you?

£50 is not required. One more thing, sir. Microsoft Office. Did you get any information about the latest ones, Microsoft Office.

No, I'm going to run OpenOffice, so I don't need Microsoft Office.

So the price of this computer — which is a Latutide D520, we call it — £499, which is excluding VAT, sir.

£499 ex VAT. Do I have to pay for delivery on top of that?

I'll give you a free delivery charge. Delivery is £50 pounds extra and I'm getting rid of that for that [lack of] XP Pro option. I'm adding XP Pro but I'm giving you the free shipping offer on that XP Pro, which is £50 exactly. The total price comes to £587.

I'm just wary that I'm not infringing anything from Microsoft in getting the XP. So if I uninstall it, it's fine is it?

That's it, sir. You don't need to do anything until you get the computer. You just need to uninstall the computer specifications. You have an option in the control panel that you can format the computer and then you can download Linux if you want.

HP's elusive FreeDOS version

An HP spokeswoman told us: "HP offer desktops with no operating system if requested by the customer (available via direct or indirect)."

The spokeswoman added that no refund would be made even if the customer declined the End User License Agreement (EULA). "If a customer does not require this [Windows] when placing the order and purchases an operating system, HP will not refund regardless of the End User License Agreement for Windows," she said.

Ian Dent, Linux Business Manager for HP, added more information on HP's policy. "There are two options: PCs with Windows and a version with FreeDOS." Dent said there was no minimum order, and the FreeDOS PCs could be ordered through any of HP's sales channels.

ZDNet UK asked HP for a URL from which readers could buy a FreeDOS-based PC. HP promised us the URL, but has not sent it.

HP's call centre told us that all machines come with Windows, and that it was not possible to buy any PCs without Windows.

Lenovo: Refunds not possible

In an email, a Lenovo spokesperson told us: "Lenovo has designated two 'Linux' ready models which ship with a DOS operating system allowing the user to install Linux on a clean hard disk. I can confirm that there are two Linux models: the ThinkPad T60p UT08YUK and the ThinkPad T60p UT08ZUK."

But despite repeated requests, Lenovo could not say how customers could buy either of these models.

Lenovo adopted the same policy as Dell, HP and Toshiba over claiming a refund on unused Windows software. The spokesperson added: "In line with the licence agreement, and because the software is pre-installed, Lenovo does not offer refunds for those looking to remove the software."

Lenovo's call centre could not identify any machines with a clean hard disk, only those with Windows. It said it used to give a refund for customers who returned Windows software, but said refunds now "won't be possible".

No refunds from Toshiba

Toshiba did not return our calls seeking to clarify its policy on naked PCs, and whether it would offer a refund on Windows software.

We had the following conversation with its customer call centre, which clarified that it would sell only PCs with Windows.

ZDNet: I just want a notebook without Windows. Can you supply me one without Windows?
Toshiba: I can't I'm afraid. It's always going to be pre-installed.

It's got to have Windows?
Yes.

If I'm paying for Windows, can I get a refund on that? I'm not going to use it.
Obviously the Windows, it's sold at a certain price. The price is considerate of the fact it comes with the operating system pre-installed.

But I'm not going to use it. I'm going to turn down the licensing agreement for it.
Yeah. There's no way of sending the machine with different specs, I'm afraid.

OK, but can I get a refund from you for not using Windows?
Erm, no you wouldn't be able to, I'm afraid.

Right. So even though I'm not using it I've still got to take it and I can't get any money back?
I'm afraid we only sell the machines as they are.

OK, so it's take XP or Vista basically.
That's the case, I'm afraid.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1...9286228,00.htm





H.P. Restarts as Spy Case Lingers On
Damon Darlin

Mark V. Hurd, the chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, would prefer that the discussion at the annual meeting this afternoon focus on the company’s future, not its past.

But the revelations of last fall that a dysfunctional board spied on its members and on journalists still casts a shadow on a company that by most measures is performing well.

Since the meeting in a hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., would be the first opportunity for shareholders to question him directly as chairman, Mr. Hurd said he expected that he would be fielding at least a few questions about the boardroom meltdown, which led to the resignation of three directors, including its chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, and the filing of criminal charges against her.

Mr. Hurd said he would answer shareholders’ questions, but he wants to look forward. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Mr. Hurd said in an interview. “The board still has a lot of work to do.”

Nor, he said, would the meeting be a celebration of everything that did go right at the company in 2006, though it could be. Among H.P.’s accomplishments were besting its rival Dell as the world’s largest maker of personal computers, adding $5 billion in annual revenue for a total of $91.7 billion, surpassing I.B.M. as the world’s largest technology concern, and increasing profit margins in all operating units.

All those factors pushed the stock price up 19 percent in the last year.

“The focus will be on what will be done, not on what has been done,” Mr. Hurd said.

The spying operation, managed by Ms. Dunn in an effort to stop boardroom leaks to the media, was in large part the reason for a shareholder proposal to make it possible for stockholders to nominate directors. The proposal is to be voted on at the meeting.

“We think it is time that shareholders who watched the board soap opera for years try to fix it once and for all,” said Richard Ferlauto, director of pension and benefit policy at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees pension fund, which sponsored the proposal along with the New York State Common Retirement Fund and several other funds.

The proposal is opposed by the board, which said such a step might allow special interests to nominate candidates. It was not expected to pass. But it demonstrates the trouble that a divided board continues to bring the company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Hurd, who will preside over the meeting for the first time since becoming chairman last fall, said that Bart Schwartz, whom he hired to examine the company’s investigative practices, is expected to finish his report within a few weeks. Mr. Hurd said the report, which will recommend the best way for the company to conduct investigations, is part of an overall effort by Mr. Hurd to restore an ethical reputation. “It’s part of a bigger plan for us,” he said.

H.P. hopes that federal prosecutors will not file charges, and it expects a resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission over its failure to reveal details of the resignation of one of its directors, Thomas J. Perkins, last May. Mr. Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says he resigned when he learned of the spying operation.

Mr. Hurd said the company’s top executives and directors were being trained about ethics and the company’s core values. “We are trying to transform the board as we are trying to transform the whole company,” Mr. Hurd said, adding that the board would continue to seek new members. He did not, however, specify any particular type of director the board is looking for.

Richard A. Hackborn, who worked at H.P. for 33 years and has been designated the board’s lead independent director, said the board is looking for one director who has experience with management software for large data systems and another familiar with an Internet service business. Both are areas that the company is emphasizing for future growth.

“It is not enough,” said Mr. Ferlauto, whose proposal is also supported by Calpers, the large pension fund of California state public employees. He argues that the board needs more fresh blood and only outside nominations will bring it. “We view it as an insurance policy for reform,” he said. “If the reform process doesn’t continue, then we will have a mechanism in place to add directors.”

Mr. Hackborn said he expected that tensions within the board would be a thing of the past with the resignation of Ms. Dunn, Mr. Perkins and George A. Keyworth III, a physicist and former science adviser to President Ronald Reagan. “I do not see any of the personal animosities that were going on last year,” he said. “We have a very strong core.”

Yet the Hewlett-Packard board recently came under criticism from Mr. Perkins. In a speech last month before a conference in San Francisco, he lamented that the board has become a “compliance” board that watches that the company’s management does everything by the book. He says such boards are boring, and more to the point, legalistic. Ms. Dunn was a proponent of this approach.

His preferred model, Mr. Perkins said, is a “guidance” board that focuses on technical strategy, marketing and other issues. He also said the “embarrassing mess” of September was “actually the culmination of a war for control of the board.”

Mr. Perkins attached a higher purpose to the conflict between himself and Ms. Dunn. But the spying, several board members and people close to board members say, nevertheless was the result of two people who did not like each other. The two went at each other in a recent article in The New Yorker about the spying.

Mr. Perkins also needled Ms. Dunn in the speech, laying the blame for the spying at her feet. Her criminal defense lawyer, James J. Brosnahan of Morrison & Foerster, was quick to respond: “He has made the biggest mistake of his career. He is a bully, and he is bullying the wrong people.”

The speech drew more attention to past events, and Mr. Hurd can only stand by and watch. “Neither Pattie nor Tom have any direct affiliation with H.P.,” he said. He said he expected that would be the answer he would give shareholders who ask him about the board conflict.

Mr. Hackborn said that he disagreed with the assessment by Mr. Perkins of the H.P. board as a compliance, not a guidance, board. “My view is that you have to have a board capable of doing both,” he said. “We spend as much time if not more on the basic business models and business strategies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/te...14hewlett.html





Fed case still pending

County Court Dismisses Charges Against Former HP Chair

Attorney general cuts back on case for all defendants
Benjamin Pimentel

Embattled former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn scored a major legal victory Wednesday after a Santa Clara County judge dismissed the case against her in connection with the corporate spying scandal at the Palo Alto company.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge Ray Cunningham, which came after the state attorney general had reduced the charges against all four defendants, marked a decisive turning point in the corporate spying scandal that ruptured the reputation of one of the Silicon Valley's most revered companies and focused national attention on pretexting, the use of false identities to obtain private information.

With the decision, Dunn, who was forced to give up her positions as director and chairwoman as a result of the scandal, eluded a long, debilitating trial that could have adversely affected her health while exposing more details of HP's botched probe of boardroom leaks to journalists.

Dunn, who has been described by some analysts as HP's scapegoat, is battling ovarian cancer and California Attorney General Jerry Brown's office cited her health as a factor for the agreement.

However, her attorney James Brosnahan maintained that Dunn did not commit any crime and that the new attorney general became convinced that the case should not go forward.

The state case against Dunn and her co-defendants was filed during the administration of former Attorney General Bill Lockyer, later elected state treasurer.

"The new administration came to the view that this case was not an appropriate one to pursue," Brosnahan said in an interview. "I think that as a matter of public policy and priority, the new administration felt that this case should go. ... Pattie has maintained her innocence all the time."

However, it is unclear how the outcome will affect the federal investigation of the HP scandal.

Justice Department spokesman Luke Macaulay said the federal investigation is ongoing.

Brosnahan said Dunn is happy about the dismissal of the case.

"She is doing OK," he said. "She is getting by. She is active in a couple of public interest groups. A lot of people have come to support her."

In a statement, Dunn said Wednesday, "I am pleased that this matter has been resolved fairly, and want to express my deep gratitude to my husband and family, who never lost faith in me throughout this ordeal. I have been strengthened by wonderful support during this difficult time -- both from my dear friends and from people I have never met."

The court also offered to dismiss the charges against three other defendants if they each complete 96 hours of community service and make any necessary restitution to victims of the HP probe.

Brown's office initially reported Wednesday that Dunn and her co-defendants had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent wire communications but later said the agency had made a mistake in the announcement.

Dunn had been charged with felony identity theft and conspiracy with four other defendants: Kevin Hunsaker, HP's former ethics director, and three private investigators involved in the HP probe of boardroom leaks, Ronald DeLia, Matthew DePante and Brian Wagner.

Wagner pleaded guilty to federal charges in January as part of an agreement in which he will help federal prosecutors investigating the case. As a result of Wagner's plea, Brown's office dismissed state charges against him.

The state charges stem from an internal probe of HP board members to determine who was leaking information to journalists. The investigation included falsifying identities to obtain phone records of both directors and members of the media.

The state agency had reduced the charge against Dunn, Hunsaker, DeLia and DePante to one misdemeanor count of fraudulent wire communications. Dunn did not enter a plea during Wednesday's hearing; her co-defendants pleaded no contest, Brown's office said. Cunningham dismissed the misdemeanor charge against Dunn.

Brosnahan said the agreement involving his client was reached Tuesday and formalized at a hearing on Wednesday.

The spying scandal dates to early 2005, when then-CEO Carly Fiorina and other directors began looking into leaks of board deliberations to journalists.

After Fiorina was fired, her successor as chairwoman, Dunn, pursued the investigation, which eventually pointed to director George Keyworth.

Another director, Thomas Perkins, a Keyworth ally, left the board in protest over the handling of the probe.

Dunn and Keyworth also later left after the scandal became public last year.

In a statement, Perkins, a respected Silicon Valley venture capitalist who became known as Dunn's nemesis, said, "The attorney general and the court have fashioned a most appropriate resolution of the case. My thoughts and hopes continue to be with Pattie Dunn in her courageous battle against cancer."

Last month, Perkins had publicly criticized Dunn's leadership on the HP board, which prompted Brosnahan to fire back and accuse Perkins of being a bully who was subjecting Dunn to "cowardly attacks."

Brosnahan had also accused Perkins and Keyworth of inaccurate statements about what happened and about Dunn's role in the scandal.

Asked if Dunn was planning any action against them, Brosnahan responded, "We are reviewing everything. Pattie Dunn has been put through a terrible time here, but we're reviewing things, but we're not announcing anything."

HP Spokesman Ryan Donovan said the company had no comment. The company held its annual shareholder meeting in Santa Clara Wednesday.

During the meeting, HP CEO Mark Hurd announced the resolution of the state case against Dunn and other defendants but said he and other HP officers were not going to answer questions about that development.

Hunsaker's attorney Michael Pancer said his client is also happy about the court decision.

"He has maintained his innocence from the beginning of this prosecution," he said in a statement.

William Keane, a criminal defense attorney with Farella Braun & Martel, said the court decision is "obviously a big turnaround for the state."

"This is clearly a big win across the board for the defense," he said. "Such a dramatic turn of events makes you wonder if the decision came down from the new attorney general. Either he thought the case was weak or simply wasn't worth the resources to fight over."

But Charles Weisselberg, a UC Berkeley law professor, said state prosecutors must have weighed the merits of the case against Dunn and the other defendants before filing the case.

"Obviously we had a change in attorney general, but this was a high-profile case," he said. "One assumes that it was thought through very carefully at the time the decision was made to file it."

Brosnahan noted, however, that the case was filed by Lockyer "at the height of the hysteria" over the spying scandal.

Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford law professor, also noted, "I think it is not irrelevant to observe that the case was brought by an attorney general running for election as state treasurer and the case was settled by an attorney general who only had to look at the reality of the law and not the dynamics of the ballot box."

He added: "The decision suggests that the case should not have been filed in the first place. ... There is a significant difference between bad judgment as may well have occurred and criminally illegal conduct."

But Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Lockyer, countered that allegations the former attorney general used the HP scandal as a way to draw attention to his campaign "never held water."

"Anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about the California political scene in 2006 could tell you that," he said.

"In terms of the case itself, all five defendants broke California law, pure and simple. They used false pretenses to invade people's privacy in violation of our statutes."

He said Lockyer stands by the decision to file the case.

"He offers no apologies for bringing this case, to hold people accountable for breaking the law," Dresslar said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...G2IOL3JG46.DTL





Simpson Book Rights Will Be Auctioned

The rights to the aborted O. J. Simpson book, “If I Did It,” will be publicly auctioned so the family of the murder victim Ronald L. Goldman will receive all future proceeds from their sale, a judge in Los Angeles ruled yesterday.

Jonathan Polak, a lawyer for the Goldman family, said Mr. Simpson’s original contract with HarperCollins stipulated that on May 8 the rights to the book would revert to Lorraine Brooke, which Mr. Polak called a shell corporation set up by Mr. Simpson to hide proceeds from the book.

If the rights had reverted to Lorraine Brooke, Mr. Simpson could have potentially sold them to another publisher, an action the Goldman family was trying to prevent, Mr. Polak said. If no publisher bids on the book, he said, “then the Goldmans will buy it and lock it up.”

After a public outcry over Mr. Simpson’s book last fall, HarperCollins canceled plans in November to publish it. In December, the company dismissed Judith Regan, the publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins that was to publish the book, and a month later announced that it would dissolve ReganBooks.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, declined comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/us/14simpson.html





Avoid Static Damage to Your PC

If you're upgrading your PC, static electricity can cause real damage. But a few precautions can protect sensitive electronics.
Stan Miastkowski

All of us are familiar with walking across a rug, reaching out to touch a doorknob, and getting zapped by a charge of static electricity, what's technically known as electrostatic discharge, or ESD. For most of us, it's annoying; for some, dangerous (fireworks and explosive makers have to take special precautions to avoid static sparks); and for the sensitive electronics inside a PC, static can be a computer-killer.

For most day-to-day PC use, static isn't much of a problem, but the chances of problems go way up if you pop open your computer's case to add RAM, upgrade your CPU or hard drive, or plug in a new sound card or graphics.

A little background: Static electricity is much more common than you might think, and most of it is created by a process called triboelectrification, when two materials touch (your fingers and your PC keyboard, for example) and then move apart or rub. Electrons are exchanged, and one object becomes electrically positive; the other electrically negative. When you touch another object with an opposite charge, or a ground (neutral charge), electrons flow.

The amount of voltage involved in static electricity sounds impressive. Walk across that rug and touch a grounded metal object, and the voltage can be in the 10,000-to-12,000-volt range. (If you think back to your high school physics class, you'll remember why static voltage isn't life threatening. Its amperage is miniscule. And it's amps, not volts, which are dangerous.)

There are many variables involved in how much static voltage triboelectrification creates, including the materials involved and the humidity. Low humidity causes static shocks with more kick. But for PC upgrades, the important thing to remember is that while a static shock must be 3500 to 4000 volts before you can feel it, it's the voltage below that level that is common, and insidious. It's entirely possible that you'll open up your PC, plug in an add-in card or some RAM, never have any sensation of static, and still have zapped the electronics. That's because the integrated circuits can be damaged or destroyed by static voltages as low as 400 volts.

What's worse is that the component you installed may appear to be fine, but days, weeks, or months later your PC may lock up or start acting strangely. A dead board or RAM module is easy to diagnose if it doesn't work immediately after you install it, but low-voltage static charges can also cause latent damage, destroying a few gates out of the millions in a typical integrated circuit. That damage can be almost impossible to diagnose, and may not cause problems for a long time. It's also quite possible that you might never take precautions to avoid static and yet never lose a component to static damage.

To avoid the ravages of static damage, your body and the components you're working with (add-in card, RAM, PC case, and so on) must be at the same electrical potential. And the easiest way to do this is to make sure that all static charges are drained to ground, an object connected to the Earth, which can harmlessly absorb the static charge. Until recently, that wasn't difficult. Since all standard AC wiring includes a common ground, you used to be able to ground yourself by touching the case of your PC while it was switched off but still plugged into the wall outlet. However, since today's PCs have voltage flowing through their motherboards whenever they're plugged in (5 volts direct current are used for switching the PC on and off), it's all too easy to accidentally short something and zap your motherboard, without static being involved at all. That's why it's essential that PCs be unplugged when you work with them.

If you're daring and careful, you can still keep yourself and the computer at the same electrical potential by constantly touching the case while installing an upgrade, but it's a juggling act. And if you accidentally touch something with a different electrical potential--such as the tabletop the computer is sitting on--all bets are off.

Using a ground is still the most effective way to minimize the potential damaging effects of static electricity, although you'll need to invest in some additional components Here's how to do it:

• Check your AC wiring: Before you can use the electrical ground in your home or office, you need to make sure it's actually working. Old homes may have grounded outlets on the wall, but they may not be grounded. And even new construction isn't necessarily safe, given the time constraints of harried builders. The best way to check the wiring is to buy a wiring checker. Sophisticated units can be expensive, but Radio Shack has a $20 tester (Catalog # 910-5501) that will tell you if the ground is working, and much more. If you do find problems, call a licensed electrician to fix them. While they're usually used for bathroom and kitchen AC outlets, Underwriter's Laboratories, the leading U.S. safety certification organization, suggests you have a licensed electrician install ground fault circuit interrupters on all your AC outlets. While their main purpose is to prevent life-threatening shocks if problems develop with the ground in your AC wiring, they're a logical upgrade for your computer-upgrade work area, because they shut the power off completely if the ground isn't working.


• Use a wrist strap: The easiest way to dissipate static electricity is to use an antistatic wrist strap, which connects to your AC ground. Follow the manufacturer's instructions carefully to connect it. Wrist straps are available in a wide variety of models, from disposable units for under $10 designed for one-time use , to $50 units designed for those who use them regularly. Sources include ESD Systems, Radio Shack, and Visiflex Static Solutions. If you don't want to deal with a ground, $39 cordless wrist straps, based on a technology that uses the Corona principle to dissipate static without using a ground, are also available at Directron.com. Industry experts say they're not as effective as a true grounded wrist strap, but they're better than taking your chances.

• Use additional antistatic components: If you work with computer upgrades regularly, consider investing in additional antistatic measures, such as grounded pads that you can lay your PC case on when you work with it. (You should still use a wrist strap.) The companies listed above have a wide range of products to choose from.

• Prepare your work area: Make sure the area where you're working on your upgrades isn't full of other static-inducing components. A bare table is best. Keep plastic desk accessories, wastebaskets, and telephones away from your work area. And one of the worst creators of static charge is a rolling desk chair. Push it away, and stand up when you're working on your PC.

• Control the humidity: The lower the humidity, the more likely it is that damaging static charges will build up quickly. If your ventilation system allows you to control it, a humidity level between 35 and 50 percent is ideal. If you can't control your humidity, don't do upgrades on a cold winter day when the humidity tends to be very low, or on a warm day with the air conditioning turned up high. If you live in an area where the humidity is generally high, it's not a bad idea to open the windows while you do your upgrades.


While the precautions above can't guarantee to prevent static electricity discharge, they will at least reduce the chances that your memory or hard drive upgrade will leave your system permanently damaged.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,82...1/article.html





Awaiting a Compromise on YouTube
Joe Nocera

“Viacom is so ticked off at YouTube,” my son Nick informed me not long ago. “It’s just so obvious.”

Nick, who is a senior in high school, knew this not because he reads the business pages; like most 17-year olds, he doesn’t. He knew it because he is a YouTube fanatic, and has a keen understanding of the rhythms of the online video site. For months, he had been able to watch clips of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report” on YouTube — shows that were produced by Viacom’s Comedy Central channel.

Suddenly, though, he couldn’t get access to them. They had disappeared from YouTube, as had most of Viacom’s other copyrighted fare, like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “South Park.” Clearly, something was up. Viacom was, indeed, upset with YouTube.

So upset that this week Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube and its parent, the mighty Google, which last year bought the tiny start-up for a jaw-dropping $1.65 billion. At that point, YouTube was a fledgling company with no profits and negligible revenue. But it had already become the site for posting — and watching — short user-generated digital videos. Most of the videos on YouTube really are generated by users — there are lots of spoofs and home videos and the like on the site. But there are also plenty of users who are “generating” content by slapping up shows, or portions or shows, that are owned by the big media companies like Viacom. Shows like, well, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”

At first glance, the Viacom lawsuit may seem like a carbon copy of the music industry’s fight against Napster in the late 1990s. Old-line industry sees new threat from the Internet and tries to sue it into oblivion. But it’s not. In that earlier case, the music industry won the battle only to lose the war. Although the courts decisively ruled that Napster was infringing copyrights owned by the big music companies, that decision didn’t exactly eliminate the practice of stealing copyrighted music from the Internet. All it meant, in practical terms, was that youths had to find other, more shadowy sites to use to download music. Pandora’s box having been opened, it couldn’t be shut again.

The Viacom suit is about something a good deal more complicated. Just as getting music from the Internet is here to stay, so is downloading videos. All the big media companies understand that. They all realize that the Internet has created potential new methods for distributing their shows — and that creates both great possibilities and great pitfalls. They all fully understand that they are not going to be able to litigate YouTube off the face of the earth.

The fact that Google owns YouTube gives the small company leverage Napster never had.

So the big media companies are all grappling with how to deal with YouTube. Ultimately, they all want money for their content, no matter how it is distributed or by whom.

Some companies, like CBS, have decided that honey catches more flies than vinegar. Its approach has been to play nice with YouTube, and do small deals in the hopes that it can eventually work out something big. (It is putting March Madness on YouTube, for instance, in a deal sponsored by Pontiac.) Others, like Time Warner, while deeply annoyed with YouTube, are continuing to negotiate. The company’s patience is wearing thin, however.

But Viacom has decided that the only way to deal with Google and YouTube is to sue. In talking about its suit, Viacom officials use phrases like the sanctity of copyright, and they speak harshly about what they see as Google’s and YouTube’s willful misuse of their property. But really, their goal isn’t all that different from CBS and Time Warner. Viacom wants money for its content. The only real question is whether this suit will get it for them.

“Google respects copyright,” insisted Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. In fact, he told me a few days after the suit was filed, “we need copyright to be effective because we don’t make our own content.” In Mr. Schmidt’s opinion, even though YouTube doesn’t prevent users from posting copyrighted material on the site, that doesn’t mean the company is ignoring the law. On the contrary. “We are governed by a law called the D.M.C.A., and we are in compliance with that,” he said.

One of Mr. Schmidt’s great qualities is that he always sounds like the voice of sweet reason. You come away from an interview with him wondering how anyone could possible think that “Do No Evil” Google could be less than fully engaged in protecting the copyrights of others. As Mr. Schmidt points out, the Viacom suit came “in the context of a business negotiation” in which the two companies were trying to work out a deal. From Google’s point of view, the lawsuit is little more than effort to gain some increased leverage in the negotiations. And it most certainly is that.

But when you look at it a little more closely, you realize that it is also about those initials Mr. Schmidt used a few paragraphs ago. D.M.C.A. stands for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that governs how Internet companies are supposed to handle copyrighted material. At its core, the lawsuit is about whether the D.M.C.A. should favor Google’s approach to copyrighted material, or Viacom’s.

Paradoxically, the law was originally intended to help the big media companies, which, in the wake of Napster, were terrified that they were losing their ability to control their copyrighted material. But it also had an important sop to Internet service providers: it said that they shouldn’t be held responsible if people used their service to post copyrighted content. What they had to do, however, was promise to remove such content immediately when a copyright holder complained.

This is what Mr. Schmidt means when he says that YouTube is abiding by the law. YouTube doesn’t police its site because its doesn’t have to, under its interpretation of the D.M.C.A. But whenever a copyright holder complains, it removes the offending material. The reason you don’t see much Jon Stewart on YouTube anymore is that Viacom has been complaining — a lot.

But from Viacom’s point of view, it is ridiculous that it should bear the onus of finding the offending material and asking YouTube to remove it. “To say that the D.M.C.A. protects a company like YouTube when they systematically show copyrighted material is an extremely twisted interpretation,” said Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive. According to Viacom, YouTube has allowed tens of thousands — nay, well over 100,000 — of its copyrighted clips to be posted on the site. The company claims it is spending more than $100,000 a month hunting them down and asking that they be removed. Can this really be the intention of the law?

One provision of the D.M.C.A. is that in order to be held harmless for copyrighted content, an Internet company has to have no knowledge that the content is on the site. Google, of course, says that it has no idea whether material on YouTube is being posted illegally or not. But here’s where Viacom goes completely ballistic. Surely, it says, YouTube knows that Viacom’s material is on the site — everyone knows how popular Jon Stewart is to YouTube viewers. “If you are aware of copyrighted material being put up and you are profiting from it, then you have an affirmative duty to do something about it,” Mr. Dauman said. He also complained that Google was willing to filter copyrighted content — but only with companies that cut deals with it.

One of the things you realize when you begin to talk to people who care about copyright law is how fervent they can get. For much of the technorati, Viacom is a dinosaur that doesn’t understand the new world — or the power of YouTube to act as a marketing vehicle for their shows.

“YouTube has become a brilliant promotional platform for video content,” said Roger McNamee, the technology investor. “How can it be bad that all the Comedy Central stuff is on there?” Lawrence Lessig, the law professor at Stanford who specializes in copyright issues, said that YouTube “allows people to signal what is interesting and what is valuable.” If Viacom, he went on, “thought about how to leverage the value instead of trying to stop it, they would be better off.”

But from the Viacom side, the issue is simple: It’s their property, and they should get to decide who to give it to and how much to charge for it. “The law says this is our material,” said Michael Fricklas, a company lawyer. “Google is saying, ‘We’ll take it and then we can have a business discussion.’ ”

The problem for both sides is that copyright law is not nearly as black and white as Google and Viacom are making it out to be. It is filled with compromises and ambiguity. People have always been able to use small amounts of copyrighted material without asking permission, for instance. And though both sides insist that the law is on their side, it is impossible to know right now how a judge might ultimately rule.

Which is where the real danger lies for both sides. Victory would be sweet, but losing could be disastrous. If Google wins, YouTube will never have to pay much to anyone for copyrighted content, and companies like Viacom will wind up either handing over their material or continuing to ask that it be removed — again and again and again. Smaller companies — not to mention the artists themselves — will probably have less control over their own work. If Viacom wins, YouTube will no longer be able to allow copyrighted content to be posted — which will surely hurt its business prospects. And it will make it more dangerous for any Internet site to use copyrighted material — even when it is legal to do so.

That’s why, as adamant as they sound now, it is highly likely that Google and Viacom will figure out a way to settle their dispute — and in so doing set an example for everyone else trying to figure this out. Sometimes, a little ambiguity isn’t such a bad thing.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/17.../17nocera.html





Streamcast Heading Back To Write The Latest Chapter In The Grokster Supreme Court Ruling
Mike

Nearly two years ago, when the Supreme Court came out with its ruling in the MGM v. Grokster case, many people simply assumed that that was the end of it -- and the Supreme Court had shut the file sharing companies down. Certainly, that's what the folks at the RIAA wanted everyone to believe -- even publicly saying that the Court ruled in a way it absolutely did not. The Court never said that Grokster and other file sharing apps were illegal. It simply said that if they were found to be actively inducing unauthorized file sharing then they could be sued for infringement as well. That's a pretty big "if." While many other file sharing networks figured it wasn't worth the fight and shut down, Streamcast decided to keep up the fight. Unfortunately for Streamcast, the lower court judge found that, indeed, Streamcast was guilty of infringement by actively inducing unauthorized file sharing.

Brian Deagon, from Investors Business Daily, writes in to point to his own article about the next step in the case, where Morpheus returns to court later this month to argue with the RIAA over what happens next. The judge clearly wants the two sides to work out a settlement (one that either kills Streamcast or forces them to be an RIAA-sanctioned software provider, which is effectively the same thing as killing Streamcast). If not, apparently the judge will mandate what kind of filtering solution Streamcast must use in its file sharing application. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. While Deagon's article quotes EFFites like Fred von Lohmann worrying about what kind of precedent it sets for a judge to be picking the technological solution, it's certainly not a first for this kind of thing.

Back in 2001, the judge in the Napster case forced Napster to put in place filters, which were completely useless. In the summer of 2005, a judge imposed similar restrictions on Kazaa, who started blocking thousands of songs -- which people also quickly discovered to be useless. In both cases, the effective result was the same. Soon afterwards, the regular free file-sharing app was forced to shut down completely as the filters served no purpose, and both tried to resurrect the brand as a "legitimate" music download service with the blessing of the RIAA. Yet, as a separate sidebar from Deagon notes, neither resulted in any reduction in unauthorized file sharing. In fact, it just keeps on growing. So, while Streamcast may be relegated to the dustbin of P2P history, it's not as though it has any real impact on the issue -- though, we're sure that the RIAA will grandstand about how it's their latest "significant blow" against piracy.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070313/010506.shtml





CD With Medical Data of 75,000 is Found
Milt Freudenheim

A missing CD containing confidential medical and personal information on 75,000 Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield members was recovered Wednesday.

Erin Sommers, a spokeswoman for Magellan Behavioral Services, a managed care company that monitors payments for mental health and substance abuse cases of insurers, said the company received a telephone call Wednesday morning saying that the CD was delivered by mistake to a residence in the Philadelphia area. The CD had been missing since January.

Magellan sent two security employees to identify the CD, interview the people who received it and bring it back. "We have no reason to believe, based on our interviews, that there was any improper access to the evidence," Sommers said.

The recipients were assembling a new audio system when they found the Magellan disc among the packages, she said.

The coding and password protection for the information on the CD, which included the names of patients, their doctors, hospitals, Social Security numbers and medical claims going back to 2003, had been removed by the sender, Health Data Management Solutions, a company working for Magellan, Sommers said.

Health Data Management Solutions is a unit of ActiveHealth Management, a data management company owned by the Aetna insurance company. Health Data and Magellan staff members "had agreed to exchange the data in an unencrypted manner," ActiveHealth spokeswoman Oonagh Holt said.

Both companies said that they are no longer sending patients' information without coding protection. Failure to provide adequate security protection for individuals' medical records is prohibited by privacy laws.
http://news.com.com/CD+with+medical+...3-6167435.html





U.S. Patent Office Says Free Music Downloads Could Harm Children, National Security

The report states that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, making them the target in most copyright lawsuits.
K.C. Jones

The United States Patent and Trademark Office claims that file-sharing sites could be setting up children for copyright infringement lawsuits and compromising national security.

"A decade ago, the idea that copyright infringement could become a threat to national security would have seemed implausible," Patent and Trademark Director John Dudas said in a report released this week. "Now, it's a sad reality."

The report, which the patent office recently forwarded to the U.S. Department of Justice, states that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults. That could make children the target in most copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those protecting their material appear antagonistic, according to the report.

File-sharing software also could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job, the report states.

"There are documented incidents of P2P file sharing where Department of Defense sensitive documents have been found on non-U.S. computers with no protection against hostile intelligence," the Patent and Trademark Office explained in a statement.

In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security announced that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.

"There will almost never be a legitimate business or governmental justification for employee use of file-sharing programs," the report said. "Nevertheless, preventing employees from using these programs on corporate or government networks can be both difficult and expensive."

Some unanswered questions raised in the report could be addressed by consumer-protection advocates or agencies or by computer science researchers, the report states.

Dudas said he commissioned the report after hearing some of the information the authors compiled for a law review article. After publishing the report on his office's Web site last week, he urged further investigation.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000239





Chatterbox

What the f*ck do the desk-jockeying sh*t-stabbers at the f*cking patent office know about national security and the safety of children?

If it's Un-American and "terroristic" to share files, just call me Alsama Bin Downloaden. In fact, go ahead sign me up for all of the Un-American you've got, because the adjective "American" has come to mean "embarrassing, backwards, and pridefully ignorant on a massive scale".

Dr. Avery

http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=12457


















Until next week,

- js.



















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