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Old 27-08-08, 09:00 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 30th, '08

Since 2002



































"The era of the American Internet is ending." – John Markoff


"Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent. They simply don't because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive." – Anton “Tony” Kapela


"It's a huge [security] issue. It's at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not bigger." – Peiter "Mudge" Zatko


"We’re like everybody else in the media. We can’t change analog dollars for digital pennies." – Dick Ebersol


"It's clear the FBI wants to minimize this as a mistake and not abuse. The facts are, there was a ridiculous amount of misuse and abuse." – Mike German


"I didn't expect one to go up where it has gone up. There are people watching me coming and going outside my house." – Councillor Albert Richardson, 18 months after voting for CCTV cameras


"38 Million View Obama’s Speech; Highest-Rated Convention In History." – New York Times headline


































August 30th, 2008




Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
John Markoff

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country’s fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet’s main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.

“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.

“This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control.”

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

“The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html





Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole
Kim Zetter

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.

The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental security weaknesses in some of the internet's core protocols. Those protocols were largely developed in the 1970s with the assumption that every node on the then-nascent network would be trustworthy. The world was reminded of the quaintness of that assumption in July, when researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed a serious vulnerability in the DNS system. Experts say the new demonstration targets a potentially larger weakness.

"It's a huge issue. It's at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not bigger," said Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, noted computer security expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998 that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. "I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago.... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail."

The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network.

Anyone with a BGP router (ISPs, large corporations or anyone with space at a carrier hotel) could intercept data headed to a target IP address or group of addresses. The attack intercepts only traffic headed to target addresses, not from them, and it can't always vacuum in traffic within a network -- say, from one AT&T customer to another.

The method conceivably could be used for corporate espionage, nation-state spying or even by intelligence agencies looking to mine internet data without needing the cooperation of ISPs.

BGP eavesdropping has long been a theoretical weakness, but no one is known to have publicly demonstrated it until Anton "Tony" Kapela, data center and network director at 5Nines Data, and Alex Pilosov, CEO of Pilosoft, showed their technique at the recent DefCon hacker conference. The pair successfully intercepted traffic bound for the conference network and redirected it to a system they controlled in New York before routing it back to DefCon in Las Vegas.

The technique, devised by Pilosov, doesn't exploit a bug or flaw in BGP. It simply exploits the natural way BGP works.

"We're not doing anything out of the ordinary," Kapela told Wired.com. "There's no vulnerabilities, no protocol errors, there are no software problems. The problem arises (from) the level of interconnectivity that's needed to maintain this mess, to keep it all working."

The issue exists because BGP's architecture is based on trust. To make it easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they're the quickest, most efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that when a router says it's the best path, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic.

Here's how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user's ISP then consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from announcements, or "advertisements," issued by ISPs and other networks -- also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes -- declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they'll deliver traffic.

The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific prefix "wins" the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific one.

To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide, before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.

The attack is called an IP hijack and, on its face, isn't new.

But in the past, known IP hijacks have created outages, which, because they were so obvious, were quickly noticed and fixed. That's what occurred earlier this year when Pakistan Telecom inadvertently hijacked YouTube traffic from around the world. The traffic hit a dead-end in Pakistan, so it was apparent to everyone trying to visit YouTube that something was amiss.

Pilosov's innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

Ordinarily, this shouldn't work -- the data would boomerang back to the eavesdropper. But Pilosov and Kapela use a method called AS path prepending that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its rightful recipients.

"Everyone ... has assumed until now that you have to break something for a hijack to be useful," Kapela said. "But what we showed here is that you don't have to break anything. And if nothing breaks, who notices?"

Stephen Kent, chief scientist for information security at BBN Technologies, who has been working on solutions to fix the issue, said he demonstrated a similar BGP interception privately for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security a few years ago.
Kapela said network engineers might notice an interception if they knew how to read BGP routing tables, but it would take expertise to interpret the data.

A handful of academic groups collect BGP routing information from cooperating ASes to monitor BGP updates that change traffic's path. But without context, it can be difficult to distinguish a legitimate change from a malicious hijacking. There are reasons traffic that ordinarily travels one path could suddenly switch to another -- say, if companies with separate ASes merged, or if a natural disaster put one network out of commission and another AS adopted its traffic. On good days, routing paths can remain fairly static. But "when the internet has a bad hair day," Kent said, "the rate of (BGP path) updates goes up by a factor of 200 to 400."

Kapela said eavesdropping could be thwarted if ISPs aggressively filtered to allow only authorized peers to draw traffic from their routers, and only for specific IP prefixes. But filtering is labor intensive, and if just one ISP declines to participate, it "breaks it for the rest of us," he said.

"Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent," Kapela said. "They simply don't because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive."

Filtering also requires ISPs to disclose the address space for all their customers, which is not information they want to hand competitors.

Filtering isn't the only solution, though. Kent and others are devising processes to authenticate ownership of IP blocks, and validate the advertisements that ASes send to routers so they don't just send traffic to whoever requests it.

Under the scheme, the five regional internet address registries would issue signed certificates to ISPs attesting to their address space and AS numbers. The ASes would then sign an authorization to initiate routes for their address space, which would be stored with the certificates in a repository accessible to all ISPs. If an AS advertised a new route for an IP prefix, it would be easy to verify if it had the right to do so.

The solution would authenticate only the first hop in a route to prevent unintentional hijacks, like Pakistan Telecom's, but wouldn't stop an eavesdropper from hijacking the second or third hop.

For this, Kent and BBN colleagues developed Secure BGP (SBGP), which would require BGP routers to digitally sign with a private key any prefix advertisement they propagated. An ISP would give peer routers certificates authorizing them to route its traffic; each peer on a route would sign a route advertisement and forward it to the next authorized hop.

"That means that nobody could put themselves into the chain, into the path, unless they had been authorized to do so by the preceding AS router in the path," Kent said.

The drawback to this solution is that current routers lack the memory and processing power to generate and validate signatures. And router vendors have resisted upgrading them because their clients, ISPs, haven't demanded it, due to the cost and man hours involved in swapping out routers.

Douglas Maughan, cybersecurity research program manager for the DHS's Science and Technology Directorate, has helped fund research at BBN and elsewhere to resolve the BGP issue. But he's had little luck convincing ISPs and router vendors to take steps to secure BGP.

"We haven't seen the attacks, and so a lot of times people don't start working on things and trying to fix them until they get attacked," Maughan said. "(But) the YouTube (case) is the perfect example of an attack where somebody could have done much worse than what they did."

ISPs, he said, have been holding their breath, "hoping that people don’t discover (this) and exploit it."

"The only thing that can force them (to fix BGP) is if their customers ... start to demand security solutions," Maughan said.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ed-the-in.html





Internet Service Providers Curb Traffic

Big files such as DVDS may end up costing customers
Peter Svensson

Three months ago, Guy Distaffen switched Internet providers, lured from his cable company to his phone company by a year of free service on a two-year contract. But soon the company quietly updated its policies to say it would limit his Internet activity each month.

"We felt that were suckered," said Distaffen, who lives in the small village of Silver Springs in upstate New York.

The phone company, Frontier Communications, is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more.

This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Cable companies have been at the forefront of imposing and talking about usage caps, because their lines are shared among households. Frontier's announcement is noteworthy because it is a phone company — and it is matching a seemingly low ceiling set by a main cable rival: just 5 gigabytes per month, the equivalent of about three DVD-quality movies.

"We go through that in a week," Distaffen said. "If they start enforcing the caps we're going to have to change service."

But since the other option for wired broadband in the village is Time Warner Cable, switching providers isn't necessarily going to get Distaffen away from a bandwidth cap. The cable company is trying out a 5-gigabyte traffic cap for new users in Beaumont, Texas. Every gigabyte above that costs $1. More expensive plans have higher caps — at $54.90 a month, the allowance is 40 gigabytes.

In a sense, caps on Internet use are no stranger than the limited number of minutes a cell phone subscriber gets each month. Internet use varies hugely from person to person, and service providers argue that the people who use it the most should pay the most. But the industry hasn't worked out where to set the limits, or how much to charge users who exceed them. Fearing a customer backlash, most providers are setting the limits at levels where very few would bump into them. Comcast has floated the idea of a 250-gigabyte monthly cap.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_10280745





It's Official: Comcast Starts 250GB Bandwidth Caps October 1
Jacqui Cheng

Comcast has announced that it will in fact be introducing bandwidth caps to all residential customers. The cap, which will go into effect as of October 1, will be 250GB per month. Comcast justifies the decision by saying that it's "an extremely large amount of data," and that a very large majority of customers will never cross it.

In fact, according to Comcast, this is actually the same policy that is already in place, except with more explicit numbers as to what is allowed and what isn't. "As part of our preexisting policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," the company said in a statement sent to Ars. "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

This announcement has been widely expected since at least May of this year, after the whole brouhaha went down with P2P throttling and the FCC fallout. Comcast had originally argued that that the FCC had no authority to block Comcast's process, but ultimately decided on its own to stop interfering with P2P traffic. The company also joined in with other ISPs in trying to devise a P2P user's bill of rights and contemplated the use of P4P software.

Comcast customers that make heavy use of their Internet connections—myself included—are sure to find themselves somewhat alarmed at the prospect of being capped. After all, perfectly legal things like movies from iTunes and Netflix, online music stores, massive software updates, and other media-heavy applications do suck up a lot of bandwidth. Comcast insists that the 250GB cap is enough to send some 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies. Okay, so if a cap is going to be enforced, 250GB isn't that bad. It beats the 60GB caps and lower caps seen elsewhere in North America and it's a nice change from the company's previous etherial and mysterious caps. Still, investing in the infrastructure necessary to alleviate the need for caps is a better option for everyone involved.

In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Free Press called the caps "relatively high," but said they were also an indictment of current US broadband policy. "If the United States had genuine broadband competition, Internet providers would not be able to profit from artificial scarcity‚ they would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand," said Free Press research director S. Derek Turner. "Unfortunately, Americans will continue to face the consequences of this lack of competition until policymakers get serious about policies that deliver the world-class networks consumers deserve."

In May when the cap was first rumored, there was also buzz that Comcast might try to charge customers $15 for every 10GB they went over the limit. As far as we can tell from Comcast's announcement and the accompanying FAQ page, that is not the case... yet, anyway. Even so, Comcast's honesty with the 250GB cap will probably only go so far, and customers with the option to do so may end up turning to an ISP such as AT&T, Verizon, or Qwest that has the infrastructure available to offer broadband without bandwidth limits.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...october-1.html





East Coast Rules in Broadband, Study Says
Brad Reed

States on the East Coast have significantly faster median download speeds than the rest of the country, with the top states doubling or nearly tripling the national median speed, a new study claims.

The study, which was conducted by affordable-broadband advocacy group Speed Matters, found that the nine states with the fastest median download connections are all located on the East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps).

The states with the slowest median download speeds primarily are located in the Midwestern or Western regions of the United States, including Idaho (1.3Mbps), Wyoming (1.3Mbps), Montana (1.3Mbps) and North Dakota (1.2Mbps); Alaska had the slowest download speed (0.8Mbps). It should be noted, however, that the sample sizes for many of these states was significantly smaller than the sample sizes studied for some of the faster states: North Dakota, for instance, had a sample size of 231 tests, whereas Massachusetts had a sample of 3,821.

Speed Matters, which is a project of the Communication Workers of America, conducted the study between May 2007 and May 2008 by asking users visiting its Web site to test out their connection speed to check how quickly they could download and upload data. In total, nearly 230,000 connections in the United States were tested.

In the end, the study recommended that the United States adopt a national broadband policy with the "initial goal" of building "an infrastructure with enough capacity for 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream by 2010." The study also said the U.S. government should look at branching out its universal service subsidies to help support high-speed Internet adoption.

The divide in Internet connectivity between urban and rural states has been a hot topic in recent months. Because many ISPs have stated consistently that there isn't enough money to be made that would justify expanding their broadband networks to large areas with low population density, many in government have suggested subsidizing rural broadband in the United States.

A report issued earlier this year by content-delivery-network vendor Akamai, for instance, found that there remain significant disparities between urban and rural areas in delivering broadband connectivity in the United States, despite a relatively large number of high broadband connections nationwide. Looking at the data state-by-state, the report found that most of the states with the highest percentages of 5Mbps connections are East Coast states that have large urban areas. Delaware has the highest percentage of 5Mbps connections at 60%, followed by Rhode Island (42%) and New York (36%). Seven states had high broadband connection rates of less than 10%, the report shows, with Hawaii having the lowest percentage at 2.4%.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/15021...tudy_says.html





Researchers’ New Algorithm Significantly Boosts Routing Efficiency of Networks
Contact: Paul K. Mueller

A time-and-money-saving question shared by commuters in their cars and networks sharing ever-changing Internet resources is: “What’s the best way to get from here to there?”

The XL algorithm developed by computer scientists at UC San Diego significantly outperforms standard link-state and distance-vector algorithms, speeding routing in computer and communications networks.

A new algorithm developed by computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego helps answer that question, at least for computer networks, and it promises to significantly boost the efficiency of network routing.

Called XL, for approximate link state, the algorithm increases network routing efficiency by suppressing updates from parts of the system – updates which force connected networks to continuously re-calculate the paths they use in the great matrix of the Internet.

“Routing in a static network is trivial,” say the authors in their paper, which will be presented at this week’s ACM SIGCOMM conference. “But most real networks are dynamic – network links go up and down – and thus some nodes need to recalculate their routes in response.”

The traditional approach, said Stefan Savage, professor of computer science at UC San Diego, “is to tell everyone; flood the topology change throughout the network and have each node re-compute its table of best routes – but that requirement to universally communicate, and to act on each change, is a big problem.”

What the team did with their new routing algorithm, according to Savage’s student Kirill Levchenko, was to reduce the “communication overhead” of route computation – by an order of magnitude.

“Being able to adapt to hardware failures is one of the fundamental characteristics of the Internet,” Levchenko said. “Our routing algorithm reduces the overhead of route re-computation after a network change, making it possible to support larger networks. The benefits are especially significant when networks are made up of low-power devices of slow links.”

The real technical innovation of their work, said another of the authors, Geoffrey M. Voelker, “is in how information about changes in the network is propagated. The XL routing algorithm propagates only some updates, reducing the number of updates sent through the network.”

They meet the “central challenge” of determining which updates are important and which can be suppressed by using three rules for update propagation, said team member Ramamohan Paturi. “The rules ensure that selected routes are nearly as good as if complete information about the network were available,” he said, “but at a fraction of the overhead required for maintaining such a state of perfect knowledge.”

The computer scientists also believe that there are “significant opportunities” to improve the efficiency of link-state routing even further. They look forward to discovering an algorithm that improves on their Approximate Link work with similar boosts in efficiency.

Grants from the National Science Foundation helped support the team’s research.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.ed.../article/18410





AT&T’s Rivals Are Happy to Attack Over iPhone’s Network Woes
Laura M. Holson

Apple sold more than a million iPhone 3G cellphones its first weekend — with some stores running out — and two million more since then, analysts say. But its July debut has been nothing less than a public relations headache for AT&T, with eager buyers complaining about dropped calls and poor network connections.

Some fingers point to Apple, which has tried to deflect the complaints. But many others point to AT&T’s cellular network. Whatever the source of the problems, AT&T’s rivals, long irritated by all the attention the iPhone has received, are on the attack and happy to exploit the discontent.

“A phone is only as good as the network it’s on,” said a full-page Verizon Wireless newspaper ad on Thursday, lobbing a shot at AT&T’s 3G, or third generation, high-speed network. A Verizon executive sent an e-mail to Wall Street analysts last week: “So much for a ‘new’ way of doing business at the old AT&T — your father’s phone company.”

For AT&T, the nation’s No. 1 wireless carrier, which exclusively offers the iPhone, the situation is especially tricky because the stakes are so high. Apple’s customers are largely forgiving of any foibles of the iPhone’s maker. But wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon are afforded no such a luxury. The 3G network is supposed to make it easier to surf the Web and watch videos online. With nearly 90 percent of all Americans owning a mobile phone, there is little room to grow and these rivals can ill afford to lose customers.

Further aggravating consumers, neither company has fully explained why calls were dropped and the network was slow. Theories abound, which is causing even more confusion — and finger-pointing. Is it a problem with the phone itself? Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities surmised in a research report that a new radio chip made by Infineon, a German chip maker, was to blame for the iPhone’s spotty service in areas where the cellular signal was weak.

Since Americans are not the only iPhone users complaining — consumers in the Netherlands reported iPhone problems too — some analysts think the iPhone is partly to blame. Apple offered a software fix to mixed reviews — but no explanation. Most analysts put the onus on AT&T. “If consumers are not getting the full 3G experience, that is not Apple’s fault,” said Akshay K. Sharma, a research director of carrier network infrastructure at the Gartner Group, a consulting firm.

Nielsen Mobile, a consulting firm, said that in tests in the 47 largest American cities, it was able to connect to 3G networks 93 percent of the time. (Its sample included all carriers.) By contrast, in the San Francisco area, where many of the iPhone troubles have been reported, that number was 87 percent.

Phil Marshall, of the research firm the Yankee Group, said the problem probably lies somewhere in between, in how the iPhone interacts with AT&T’s network and signals are transmitted and received.

AT&T’s growing pains with its 3G network might otherwise be overlooked if not for the popularity of the iPhone. (Verizon executives conceded they too had problems when data users increased use of their highest speed network.) AT&T’s 3G network includes 310 cities with 100,000 people or more, but it plans to add 40 cities by the end of the year.

“It’s hard to launch an iconic device like the iPhone on a network that it is not yet fully deployed,” said Mr. Marshall. “As they build these networks they will need to make more improvements or the complaints will persist.”

But there is a bigger issue at play too, Mr. Marshall said. “Both companies are accustomed to controlling all aspects of the delivery of its products,” he said. “It illustrates the culture clash, when you create an environment where you share the responsibilities between them. Then you have problems.”

Already there seem to be fissures in the relationship. Two camps are emerging at AT&T: those who think Apple is too controlling with information and those who think Apple can do no wrong, said two people who have talked to AT&T executives but who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak on their behalf.

Jennifer Bowcock, a spokeswoman for Apple, said executives there declined to comment about consumer complaints. Bill Hogg, president of network services for AT&T’s wireless divisions, acknowledged the complaints, but said, “We don’t believe macro or global issues are causing the problems.”

He said the company had enough capacity on its 3G network to handle all of its iPhone customers, who tend to be heavy data users. But he too was reluctant to discuss AT&T’s relationship with Apple.

When asked if the recent software update was devised to fix poor 3G network reception, he said, “Apple does a lot of updates.” When asked why calls were being dropped, a publicist intervened in the interview: “We are not going to go into the details of what customers are talking about.”

Customers are more than happy to be heard. Benji Jasik, a product manager at a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., said his new iPhone dropped calls several times on his commute between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Since he downloaded the software patch, he said has had fewer dropped calls, but network connections remain sluggish. “Everyone is interested in figuring out if this is an AT&T or an Apple issue,” he said. “I just want to know who to call to fix it.”

Verizon Wireless thinks that will give it the edge in getting consumers and analysts to believe its pitch: Verizon’s 3G network is better. For nearly a year, consumers have been gushing over the iPhone. Now it is Verizon’s turn. Gizmodo.com, a gadget Web site, this week posted an internal Verizon sales document entitled “3G iPhone Myths” that gave Verizon employees talking points. Mr. Sharma, the research director, said he recently met with Verizon executives who chided AT&T executives for their mishandling of the iPhone imbroglio. “They told us they’d rather miss a deadline than have a bad launch,” he said.

In the past two weeks a Verizon corporate communications executive, Jeffrey Nelson, has sent almost daily missives to analysts pointing out blog posts and news articles that take aim at AT&T, Apple and the iPhone. “Where is the recall?” said one e-mail from Aug. 19. “Where are the refunds? Or maybe toss in a free ring tone and a couple months of free service?”

“I get almost one a day,” said Mr. Marshall. “It’s almost like, hey, quit spamming me.”

Verizon executives are not apologizing. “As the market matures, every single customer is tougher to get,” said Anthony Melone, Verizon’s chief technology officer. “This environment is really competitive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/te...y/29phone.html





A Home Network Where Your TV Talks to Your Fridge
Kevin J. O’Brien

Across the consumer electronics industry, leading players are revamping their audio and video equipment for a future centered around the Internet, a world in which televisions, stereos and computers — even dishwashers and refrigerators — can communicate with each other over a wireless home network.

Expanded lines of networked entertainment equipment will take center stage this week at the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin, the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe, with 1,200 exhibitors and 200,000 visitors.

Sony plans to introduce plug-in adapters to enable some of its Bravia television sets to connect to the Internet wirelessly. The Dutch consumer electronics maker Philips will demonstrate a line of stereo systems that can wirelessly tap into music stored on personal computers or laptops in other rooms, streaming music through the house.

Pioneer, Samsung and Sharp will present flat-panel TVs that hook up to the Internet, some with wires, some without. Hewlett-Packard’s MediaSmart L.C.D. TV will wirelessly stream high-definition video.

Some industry executives say the new focus on Internet content and wireless networks reflects a fundamental shift in home entertainment.

“The Internet is so massive,” said Tim Page, technology marketing manager at Sony Europe. “So are the opportunities for electronics makers, content providers and consumers to get connected.”

The convergence of telecommunications, consumer electronics and computing is bringing together a new set of competitors. Telecommunications operators, seeking to increase their revenue from data traffic, are actively promoting home Internet access that is both easier and more sophisticated.

One way is through so-called residential gateways, boxes that combine an Internet router with a modem and software than can wirelessly shuttle video and audio among devices in a home. France Télécom has sold six million of its Livebox gateways through 2007, according to Parks Associates, a research firm in Dallas.

Major online businesses also view the living room as a potentially lucrative new location for their services, with consumers turning to their TVs instead of PCs to reach the Internet. Google and Yahoo have said they will jointly produce software to make it easier to display Internet content on TV screens.

But the development of wireless home networks will require a shift in consumer thinking.

“Consumers really aren’t driving the trend toward networked devices, the device makers are,” said Steve Wilson, an analyst at ABI Research in New York. “The companies are pushing this to try to build a new business, to offer new services. It is really a matter of getting the infrastructure in place.”

While networked devices like Internet-ready TVs, set-top boxes, residential gateways and game consoles are increasingly common, the truly networked wireless home is still a few years off, industry experts say. By the end of this year, 370 million homes worldwide will have broadband Internet, Parks Associates estimates. But only 5 percent, about 17 million, will have residential media gateways.

The technology already exists to enable many home electronic devices, including kitchen appliances, to communicate over a wireless network, said Alon Ironi, the chief executive of Siano, an Israeli company that makes video receivers for devices like digital picture frames. The problem, Mr. Ironi said, is that most devices are unable to communicate with other manufacturers’ products because of different technological standards.

Although most major consumer electronics makers — Samsung, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sharp, Toshiba — belong to the Digital Living Network Alliance, a consortium whose common protocols ensure that their devices communicate with one another, that has not stopped some from hedging their bets. In July, Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Hitachi and Motorola joined the Israeli company Amimon in a new standards group for wireless communication, called Wireless High Definition Interface, which is working to produce a new HD video standard.

“What this means for consumers is that some people may bring products home and discover that they can’t communicate with others on their networks,” said Kurt Scherf, a senior analyst at Parks Associates. “We are just starting to see the first networked products roll out and a shakeout in standards is inevitable.”

Still, manufacturers clearly think the appeal of a new information age centered on the living room couch will be strong enough to win over consumers who may be unimpressed by the early results. That is one reason that the former cordless telephone business of Siemens is starting to think about combining its phones with the Internet. Siemens sold 80.2 percent of the telephone unit, which makes Gigaset cordless phones, to Arques, a private equity firm in Munich, on Aug. 1. Although the transaction will not be completed until Oct. 1, the company is already considering plans to combine its phones with audio players and a wireless home network.

“Very soon, I don’t think there will be any consumer electronics device on the market that isn’t connected to the Internet,” said Jochen Eickholt, the chief executive of the Siemens unit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25ifa.html





Caution: Driver May Be Surfing the Web
Randall Stross

ANYTHING that keeps tykes pacified on long car trips, like video systems in rear seats, is a boon to automotive safety. Today, Chrysler is poised to offer in its 2009 models a new entertainment option for the children: Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity. The problem is that the entire car becomes a hotspot. The signals won’t be confined to the Nintendos in the rear seat; front-seat occupants will be able to stay online, too.

Bad idea. As drivers, we have done poorly resisting the temptation to move our eyes away from the road to check e-mail or send text messages with our cellphones. Now add laptops.

Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic,” a best-selling book about our driving habits, said last week: “We’ve already seen fatalities from people looking at their laptops while driving. It seems absolutely surprising that Chrysler would open the door for a full-blown distraction like Internet access.”

On Chrysler’s Web site, Keefe Leung, a manager in the company’s advanced connectivity technology group, explains the rationale for the service: “People are connected in their lives everywhere today. They’re connected at home, they’re connected at the office, they’re connected at Starbucks when they go for a cup of coffee.” But, he says, “the one place that they spend a lot of time that they’re not connected is in their vehicle, and we want to bring that to them.”

Clearly, for safety reasons, Mr. Leung cannot condone use of the service by drivers. When he is shown in the videos demonstrating the service, called UConnect, he always occupies a rear seat.

When I asked him last week about possible misuse of the service by drivers, he said that it was “tailored for kids in the back seat” and that the company would provide instructions to owners about its intended use.

Still, Chrysler is the company that came up with the “living room on wheels” concept for its minivans, and Mr. Leung can’t resist talking about the Internet-connected car as “another room, an extension of your home.” It isn’t, though. At my home, the living room is stationary. But on the road, my “room” may collide with yours.

In case you’re curious, the United States Transportation Department this month released the final totals for traffic accidents last year: 2.49 million people injured and 41,059 dead.

That’s just a single year’s tally. As Mr. Vanderbilt says in his book, many people have been willing to accept curtailed civil liberties as a response to terrorist threats, but many of the same people “have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll,” like curbing cellphone use while driving.

The Transportation Department is pleased that the number of traffic deaths in 2007 was the lowest since 1994 and reflected a historic low in deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.

But when one talks with public health groups and insurance industry representatives, one doesn’t hear jubilation. The decline in the total number of deaths obscures a more complicated story. While we have made large gains curbing alcohol-impaired driving and instilling the habit of buckling up, we have wasted most of the gains by using cellphones while driving.

Two studies, one Canadian and reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the other Australian and reported by the British Medical Association, examined cellphone records of people injured in automobile crashes. Both studies concluded that when drivers were talking on phones, they were four times as likely to get into serious crashes.

The studies show that laws mandating the use of hands-free phones are little help: the increased risk of injury is attributable to the cognitive impairment from the phone conversation, which distracts in ways that a conversation with a seatmate does not, and was just as high for those using hands-free sets as for those with hand-held ones. (Don’t look for a similar study for the United States: the carriers refuse to supply the necessary records, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va.)

J. R. Peter Kissinger, president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, calls “distracted driving” one of the leading threats to “all of us who drive or walk in this country.” Will drivers exercise good sense and not use their laptops while driving? He is not sanguine: he knows of few drivers who follow the example of a colleague, who locks her P.D.A. in the car trunk before setting out so she won’t be tempted to put it to use while driving.

A laptop will pose a similar problem, even if it remains on the lap of a front-seat passenger. Mr. Kissinger said: “I can picture two teenagers in the front and the passenger pulls up a YouTube video. I can’t imagine the driver saying, ‘I’m going to pull over and stop so I can safely watch what you’re laughing at.’”

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute, shares that concern. “Adding another electronic distraction,” he says, “is a formula for disaster.” Even if the entertainment devices are in the hands of a passenger, what will happen is perfectly predictable — “the driver will want to see,” he said.

Chrysler was not the first to endow laptops in the car with Internet connectivity; individual users have been doing on their own in any number of ways, such as by selecting laptop models with built-in cellular wireless access or by using PC cards supplied by their wireless carrier. An off-the-shelf mobile router and PC card could essentially duplicate the networking setup of UConnect Web and at a cost far less than the $495 plus installation fees that Chrysler will charge.

Which occupants in the car will most avidly use UConnect? Is it the children in the back with game consoles that provide plenty of self-contained entertainment without the Internet? Or is it the adults in the front seat, whose ability — never strong — to voluntarily remain unconnected is now disappearing?

Will we notice if our living room on wheels, fully loaded with every amenity, sails off the road?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/te...gy/24digi.html





Internet Radio Now Available In Your Car
FMQB

Easy access to Internet radio streaming in your car just became a reality, as Chrysler officially rolls out its UConnect Wi-Fi Web access in vehicles this week. In-car online access will cost $499, with installation fees and a monthly $58 subscription as well.

However, critics claim that the new mobile Internet access could be yet another major distraction for drivers. J. R. Peter Kissinger, President of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, told the New York Times, "I can picture two teenagers in the front and the passenger pulls up a YouTube video. I can’t imagine the driver saying, ‘I’m going to pull over and stop so I can safely watch what you’re laughing at.’"
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=858284





Report: RIAA Wins Case Over Erased Hard Drive
Steven Musil

The recording industry appears to have won a closely watched copyright infringement case over charges of evidence tampering.

Judge Neil Wake ruled on Monday that Jeffery Howell, a defendant in Atlantic v. Howell, had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA, according to a Tuesday report by Ars Technica. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it "therefore warrants appropriate sanctions," the site reported.

The RIAA sued Pamela and Jeffrey Howell for copyright infringement in 2006, claiming that the husband and wife had used Kazaa to make copyrighted files available for download.

In a deposition, Jeffrey Howell admitted to loading the file-sharing software onto his computer. He said, however, that the songs listed in the complaint were for personal use and that he had not placed the files in the program's shared folder. He said the recordings were copies made from CDs he owned placed on the computer for personal use, not copies downloaded from Kazaa.

He also argued that that he was not the one sharing the files, but that it was the computer that was sharing the files.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued on behalf of the couple--which lacked legal representation--saying the RIAA's "making available" position "amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized." The argument--that merely the act of making music files available for download constituted copyright infringement--has been the basis for the Recording Industry Association of America's legal battle against online music piracy.

Judge Wake apparently agreed with that position and in April denied the labels' motion for summary judgment in a 17-page decision, allowing the suit to proceed to trial.

However, the RIAA accused Howell of destroying evidence on four occasions after being served with the lawsuit, the site reported. RIAA experts found that Howell uninstalled Kazaa and reformatted his hard drive, Ars Technica reported.

"Defendant's intentional spoliation of computer evidence significantly prejudices plaintiffs because it puts the most relevant evidence of their claim permanently beyond their reach," the RIAA reportedly argued. "The deliberate destruction...by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported plaintiffs' case."

Wake reportedly agreed with the RIAA and is expected to inform Howell of his decision in a forthcoming written order.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10026694-93.html





Alleged UK Pirates Offered Free Legal Representation
enigmax

Over the last year, UK residents accused of sharing games like Dream Pinball have been threatened by lawyers Davenport Lyons. Stuck in a trap of not having enough money to defend themselves, many choose to pay compensation demands - guilty or not - fearful of a much bigger punishment if things go bad. Now a UK IP lawyer says he will defend as many people as he can - for free.

Last week, thousands of news outlets reported that a single mother, Isabella Barwinska from London, had been found guilty of uploading the game Dream Pinball. She collected a staggering £16,000 bill for her trouble. However, following a TorrentFreak report last week where we revealed that far from being a ‘landmark ruling’, Miss Barwinska actually mounted no defense, people are realizing that all may not be as it seems. Maybe it’s possible to fight back - and win. The timing couldn’t be better

According to reports, any minute now lawyers Davenport Lyons will send out up to 25,000 further ‘pay up or get sued’ letters, demanding around £300 in compensation on the back of their so-called ‘landmark ruling’. Unfortunately, those accused of infringement have had limited choices up to now. Pay around £200-£250 for a few minutes with a lawyer and maybe get him to send a solitary letter, or go it alone, maybe with limited help from the UK’s Citizens Advice service. Either way, it’s pretty much guaranteed to cost more than £300, in time and/or money.

Until now.

Michael Coyle is a Solicitor Advocate, which means he is entitled to represent clients in the High Court and has frequently done so. He is also a Director at his company Lawdit Solicitors and leads the company’s Commercial and Intellectual Property legal section. He’s says he’d like to help those file-sharers wrongly accused, so we caught up with him to find out more.

TF: Please introduce yourself Michael, and tell us about your company. What do you specialize in?

MC: Lawdit Solicitors was formed on 3 September 2001 by me, Michael Coyle. Almost seven years later we are a busy commercial law firm with close connections in Marbella and Rome. Lawdit’s team consists of five Solicitors and support staff. While Lawdit is a commercial law firm a large part of its client base is concerned with intellectual property and copyright of course.

TF: What inspired you to start the firm?

MC: I wanted a law firm which was fair and would not price anyone out of securing at the very least a right of response when either the client’s intellectual property has been infringed or they are defending a claim for intellectual property infringement.

TF: Please tell us a little about Lawdit’s track record, relevant to this matter.

MC: Over the years I have advised clients in many aspects of copyright infringement from both perspectives, i.e the rights holder and the copier. In relation to P2P there is a paucity of legal case law largely due to lack of funds and the lack of defences. We have advised a retired gentleman and a 14 year old child, both threatened with lawsuits and both issues seem to have gone away.

TF: Why do you think they have gone away?

MC: It may be because the rights holder does not wish to take the case further as they now know legal representation is in place or they do not want the publicity. We will never know. Litigation can often be described as a game of poker. You have to always show a willingness to commence a legal action even if this is not your intention. At the same time you always need to show you will defend. At the time its usual for a ‘without prejudice’ exchange of correspondence to be maintained.

TF: Let us know what first got you interested in these Davenport Lyons cases.

MC: I have some clients who watch with interest all these developments and either they let me know or we are generally very good at keeping in touch with copyright laws

TF: What is your opinion of the ’settle up now or we sue’ letters?

MC: It can make sense to ‘settle up now’ if you have no defence to the claim and are almost certainly going to lose. It’s back to the poker game analogy. Will they sue? etc. It seems they will commence legal action as the recent case shows, however I would need to know more about each case. If there is no defence and you are sure that a claim will follow then perhaps a penalty is worth paying. If they have no defence and it is a case of ‘its not me guv’ then perhaps not. If you have a valid defence then you should fight it.

TF: What is your opinion on how these ‘default judgment’ cases have been selected and prosecuted and the blanket media coverage of a ‘landmark case’ ?

MC: The individual would have ample opportunity to deal with numerous letters from the Lawyers. Equally once a claim has been issued the defendant has over a month in many instances to provide a defence. So the individual really ought to deal with it as the ostrich approach is not helpful. Lawyers will generally want to shout about their success and I am no different. A default Judgement is still a win although a fairly one sided win!

TF: So what exactly are you and Lawdit offering?

MC: I think it’s important that individuals do have a voice in this matter. There will be some defendants who are infringing copyright with their use of the P2P software. But at the same time there will be others who may not be. I am willing to offer Lawdit Solicitors services as the law firm to represent these individuals. I will do so for free. Obviously we are a small firm and there may be limitations to this offer. That is 5 offers for help will not be a problem. 5000 may pose me a problem, but yes, we’re willing to be on the end of an email for sure.

TF: How would you like people to contact you, bearing in mind that at the moment there are a few hundred people receiving demands and this may increase to tens of thousands shortly, or so they say…..

MC: Email is best. I am often in court but the Blackberry is on and happy to help as much as I can email is michael.coyle[at]lawdit.co.uk.

TF: Thank you for your time.

Readers contacting Michael are strongly advised to be very clear and concise in their initial correspondence. A lot of people will be interested in this offer and Michael and his team are a limited resource. Make their job as easy as you possibly can, so they can help more effectively.

Update: Already Michael is reaching capacity. If any other law firms wish to step up to get involved, please contact us here.
http://torrentfreak.com/alleged-uk-g...advice-080825/





It's time to get serious

Nintendo Sues Importers for Selling DS Piracy Carts
Kath Brice

In a serious attempt to crack down on pirated DS games, Nintendo has filed lawsuits against five Japanese companies for "importing and selling equipment that enables illegal game programs to be played on Nintendo popular DS portable video game player."

Reuters reported the story today and says the move is backed by over 50 Japanese developers. In fact, the lawsuit has been filed by a total of 54 other Japanese developers alongside Nintendo, which should put the fear of the gods into the companies involved.

Gaming trade body ELSPA recently spoke out about DS piracy cards, saying it is considering taking action itself against retailers selling devices such as the R4 cart. But it looks like Nintendo has beaten them to it.

With DS games so easy to obtain illegally online, it's not a surprise move that Nintendo is finally launching a attack to stamp it out. Expect to hear a lot more on this as the lawsuits hit the courts.
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/DS/DS...ews.asp?c=8063





Further Trial Delays for The Pirate Bay
Thomas Mennecke

With everything that's going on in the file-sharing world, it's easy to forget that administration behind The Pirate Bay is facing a criminal copyright violation trial in Sweden. The stakes aren't too terrible for the end user, as a worst case scenario wouldn't destroy the globally based network. However, the administrators are looking at hefty damages and possibly prison time - providing the case against them ever gets to trial.

The Pirate Bay is looking at a significant damage claim from the entertainment industry, primarily from the MPA (Motion Picture Association) and the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Total damages sought by the plaintiffs are ~$2.5 million from the IFPI, ~$15 million from the MPA, and ~$185,000 from the Swedish government. Whether or not that will happen remains unclear, as the much anticipated trial has yet to start, and according to The Local, has been delayed once again:

"'It has taken an extremely long time. It took time to inform the suspects, the last one as late as May. Then the claims from the plaintiffs had to come in,' said Anita Thimberg, an administrator with the Stockholm District Court, to the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper."

To better understand the situation in Sweden, Slyck has caught up with Peter Sunde, spokesperson and named defendant in The Pirate Bay trial.

Slyck: From your perspective, what is causing the delay?

Peter: I think it's the fact that the courts are very busy and the so called crime is not something that they can prioritize over real crimes.

There's also many factors here - they have decided to include four people that they claim to be part of the group (which is not correct), where one lives outside of Sweden. If he cannot come to the trial it will not be considered a fair trial in Sweden, since there can be a blame game against a person that does not show up to the trail. That's why the courts work very hard for everybody to be present.

Slyck: [The Local's] article states the lawyers are busy, does this include TPB's lawyers as well?

Peter: I think it only include our lawyers. We have some of the top lawyers in Sweden that are active in most of the court cases that you would read about in the Swedish news papers. They're famous here and a lot of people employ them because of this. The courts have to respect that they (our lawyers) [cannot] prioritize our irrelevant case over people suffering from real crime. Also, in the end, the courts will have to listen to our own time schedule as well, since we cannot be expected to be available 24/7 with these cases (as I mentioned before with the guy living abroad). And to sum it up - they need to find 6-10 days of free time in the [busiest] court in Sweden, make the [busiest] lawyers in Sweden have their schedule fitting with these 6-10 days, together with our schedules. It's a quite hard thing to do.

Slyck.com: Do you see this delay benefiting your case, or does your side already feel well prepared?

Peter: We want the case tried as soon as possible in order to get our point proven - that we're totally legal. We already know that today, but having a court case hanging over you for years and years is a big injustice against us as people tend to be a bit uncertain about what we do. We have previously written to the courts and asked them to get it moving with our case, but they have not done so.

We're very well prepared and have been so even before the unfair raid against us. Especially now with the case of the bribed police officer, we have even more proof of the injustice.

Slyck.com: Realistically, when do you see this trial begin?

Peter: My guess is at earliest next summer.

------

Trials of this magnitude typically aren't settled overnight. With delays piling up, it may be a long time before a resolution is reached. In the meantime, The Pirate Bay and its ten million plus user base continues to expand, further aggravating the efforts of the entertainment industry.
http://www.slyck.com/story1753_Furth...The_Pirate_Bay





Save the children

Peer-to-Peer Networks Get Another Black Eye With Child Porn Bust
Layer 8

Federal investigators targeting the use of peer-to-peer networks for nefarious deeds have charged 52 people with using those networks to exchange graphic images and videos of children.

The charges are the result of a coordinated law enforcement investigation that used sophisticated computer programs to track down computers on which child pornography was being stored and made available to others via peer-to-peer networks, according to the US Department of Justice. While the DOJ didn't specify which programs were being used it said using software such as Limewire, computer users can join networks that allow the sharing of files across the Internet, often for no charge.

Investigators were able to use these same networks to identify and target individuals using the networks to share child pornography, the DOJ stated. The FBI and others in the law enforcement community have in the past used pattern-matching programs, to scan Usenet groups and other sites for child porn and terrorist threats among other activities.

The cases announced today were investigated by the FBI's Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a host of other state and local law officers.

Peer-to-peer networks have had a number of run-ins with the long arm of the law. In June, the former administrator at EliteTorrents was convicted of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement in a Virginia court, the first time in the US that a peer-to-peer user has been convicted by a jury of copyright infringement, according to the DOJ. EliteTorrents.org, a Web site specialized in releasing copyright works without authorization, the DOJ said. EliteTorrents, which ceased operating in May 2005, used BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology to distribute pirated copies of movies, software, music and video games, the DOJ said.

In May a judge set a nearly $111 million copyright-infringement decision against TorrentSpy.com, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer search site. The US District Court judge awarded the judgment to the Motion Picture Association of America. And last Fall, in one of the first cases where file sharing programs used to steal identities, a Seattle man plead guilty to one count each of mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud, and aggravated identity theft.

Last year a congressional committee lambasted the peer-to-peer industry as it looked into how sensitive information, including personal financial data, is leaked through popular file-sharing programs such as LimeWire, KaZaA and Morpheus that individual, corporate and government users use to share music, movie and other entertainment files.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/31330





Album-Loving Artists Blame iTunes for Changed Music Tastes
Jacqui Cheng

Online music sales continue to skyrocket at the expense of CDs. iTunes continues to be the leader of the pack, too, not only in online sales, but music sales overall. But a small rebellion is brewing against iTunes as artists become disgruntled with the hit they're taking on overall album sales thanks to the now-wildly-popular method of cherry-picking favorite tracks for download.

As we reported on Infinite Loop back in June, Kid Rock is one of the artists who have begun to speak out against what they consider to be an unfair distribution system in iTunes. Rock said at the time that iTunes was representative of the "old system," where distributors and record labels take money instead of giving it to artists. iTunes, for instance, pushes the a la carte music track system instead of allowing artists to sell music in album-only format. But selling millions of singles isn't necessarily as lucrative as selling far fewer full albums, and for some artists (we don't necessarily include Kid Rock in this category), there's the artistic vision realized only in the full-album experience.

Rock eventually decided that he was boycotting iTunes and not placing his new album on the popular online service. "In so many ways it's turned our business back into a singles business," Kid Rock's manager Ken Levitan told the Wall Street Journal today, referring to iTunes as "part of the death knell of the music business."

Since June, Rock has sold 1.7 million copies of his Rock 'n' Roll Jesus album, and sales have grown steadily in 19 of the last 22 weeks. Levitan says that, if the album was sold the iTunes way, most of those sales would have merely shown up as 99¢ downloads of the hit single from the album, All Summer Long. If the rest of the album was actually good enough to attract fans, then perhaps this wouldn't be so much of a concern; artists worry that many fans will never even sample enough other material from an album to find out if it's good or not.

Rock's success sans iTunes apparently prompted Atlantic Records, owned by Warner Music Group, to pull an album by R&B artist Estelle from iTunes, too (Estelle's album remains on Amazon's MP3 store, but is sold "album-only").

AC/DC has never put its music on iTunes either, the WSJ points out, and still managed to enjoy some success with 2.7 million CD sales last year.

And, of course, Jay-Z made headlines late last year for boycotting iTunes when his new album (at the time) American Gangster went on sale. "As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles," he said at the time. The one thing we'll likely never know, though, is how much more successful these artists would be with the help of iTunes, if at all.

Music lovers: please change your buying habits

These artists' complaints aren't so much iTunes' fault as they are the "fault" of the evolving music market. There's an endless supply of other music stores that also sell music on a track-by-track basis, because customers just plain love being able to cherry-pick their favorite songs. Digital downloads just make that easier, but the practice itself has been around for decades.

Album sales have been plunging for some time now—they dropped a full 20 percent just last Christmas—and CD sales in general have been tanking for even longer. Some artists believe that actually cutting out iTunes and its per-track sales is the best way to increase revenue. It's a dangerous game, though; if consumers want only a single track that they could have for a buck but it's not available, will they purchase the whole album or simply grab the single from P2P networks?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ic-tastes.html





The Online Music Rip-Off

The perils of DRM-riddled music that we've been buying for years are now starting to come to light. Stuart Andrews finds out what's gone wrong.

Take yourself back to the days when everyone bought only CDs. Imagine what you'd have thought of a store that sold discs that might work on your CD player now, but weren't guaranteed to work on next year's models. Imagine that some required you to phone the music store on a regular basis to reassure them that you were the legitimate owner, and were that store to go under, all the CDs you bought from it would one day cease playing. And once you started buying music from this store, you found yourself locked into a system that discouraged you from buying from a rival store down the street. Why, you might think, would you have bought anything from a place like that? Well, if you're like millions of people in the UK, there's a strong chance you already have.

How to get free music

It's now four years since the iTunes store launched in the UK, and only now are we beginning to understand the full implications of buying music online. With vinyl or CD you knew where you stood: you bought the album or the single and, provided nobody lost, stole or scratched it, your music would still play in ten years' time. In the digital download age, however, that can't be taken for granted.

Digital rights management (DRM) has been a disaster. In December 2006, Bill Gates said "DRM was not where it should be", admitting that it "causes too much pain for legitimate buyers". By February 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs was in agreement: "DRM hasn't worked, and may never work to halt music piracy," he noted in an essay. Yet, even though consumers hate it and many industry insiders admit it doesn't do its job, DRM remains a major part of the online music buying experience.

Pirate-proof?

Why is DRM so contentious? Surely it's designed to protect the rights of artists and record companies in a climate where, as one international music industry body claims, illegal downloads swamp legitimate music store downloads by a ratio of 20 to 1? The problem is DRM doesn't affect the pirates, who upload and download DRM-free files often ripped directly from CD. Instead, it affects legitimate buyers in a range of deeply irritating ways.

The first roadblock comes down to Gates' talk of "simplicity" and "interoperability", or rather the lack of both. The online music industry has evolved so that, while there are open file format standards - notably MP3 - the major companies have so far preferred proprietary or licensed file formats protected by DRM systems. For instance, the biggest online music retailer, Apple's iTunes store, sells music in a proprietary, rights-managed form of the AAC codec that incorporates its FairPlay DRM. Bar a few Motorola mobile phones, these files will only play back on Apple's own iPod devices. iPods, meanwhile, are unable to play the WMA files sold by many rival online music stores. The effect is to trap iPod and iTunes users into what some have called a vertical monopoly. If you buy the world's most popular music player, you buy your music from the iTunes store. It works for Apple, but does it work for us?

If this is the sort of practice you'd normally expect from Microsoft, then don't worry - the Redmond boys are at it, too. Having spent four years building up a certification and DRM system, PlaysForSure, Microsoft decided to ignore it entirely when it came to its own Zune device. Instead, it swapped interoperability for an iTunes-style vertical monopoly. While the Zune will play MP3 and unprotected AAC and WMA files, it won't play DRM-enabled WMA files, including those purchased from Microsoft's own, now defunct, MSN Music service. Now, Zune owners are encouraged to buy tracks from Microsoft's Zune Marketplace.

As a result, anyone who purchased music in the past through Napster or MSN and then bought a Zune would be unable to play a portion of their music library on their new toy without first burning all the tracks to CD, then ripping those tracks into a Zune-friendly format, with the attendant loss in quality. It says a lot about the online music industry that anyone thinks this is acceptable.

DRM nightmares

Still, you might think, even if I can't play my old tracks on my shiny new music player, I can at least guarantee that they'll play on my computer. Wrong again. DRM-enabled tracks need a licence key to work, and if the software or hardware can't find one, playback is out of the question.

In March, Sony closed its Connect music service in the US and Europe, promising that customers could continue to enjoy music they'd purchased in Sony's DRM-enabled stores, but only on their existing music players and their "current PC configuration in accordance with our terms of use". So if you bought tracks from Sony a few years ago, and next year your hard disk implodes or your DRM files become corrupted, even if you sensibly back up your files in the interim, you'll still lose your music. Why? Because the licence servers will no longer be there to retrieve the licence keys for your tracks and authorise your computer to play them. The suggested workaround? The old burn-and-rip routine we just outlined.

Microsoft recently threatened to do the same thing, saying it would shut down the licence servers for the MSN Music store on 31 August, before a public outcry forced the software giant to extend that deadline to the end of 2011.

Even if your favoured store's authentication servers are still live, there's no guarantee of hassle-free playback. It's in the nature of DRM - inevitably a complex system involving encryption and the transferral of keys between company servers and private computers - that things can and will go wrong. Uninstalling software, changing a processor, swapping hard disks or using clean-up utilities or Registry sweepers can all affect DRM keys on your PC. Even Apple admits in its online support area that "in some cases, iTunes may 'forget' that your music is authorised".

When the files are DRM-protected WMA files, these issues might not only affect files from one store, but several. Earlier versions of Windows Media Player included a licence-backup option, which allowed you to keep a safe copy of your licences and restore them should you need to. However, the stores weren't bound to support this, and in Windows Media Player 11 the feature was removed altogether. If a file refuses to play, the application now requests a new licence from the original store. PC Pro's own David Fearon recently recounted how it took him 29 steps to try to re-enable an album he bought from Napster - and he ultimately failed (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/167music1). You don't get this kind of hassle with CDs.

The music stores make it easy to buy music, and to the user it seems like you just pay the money, download the track and play it. Behind the scenes, however, the authentication process means that unless you carefully track the number of computers you've accessed a library on, back up your DRM keys and make a note of any passwords, you could be left with a series of dud files years down the line.

Money for nothing?

Matters grow even more complex when you factor in subscription services, such as Rhapsody in the US or Napster in the UK. Napster does at least make it clear that, in subscribing to and downloading from the service, you're not actually buying tracks unless you specifically purchase them. In the words of Napster's UK marketing manager, Dan Nash, the users are "in effect, renting them". All the same, it isn't hard to understand why users become annoyed when, having paid £15 per month, they lose all rights to the music the moment they cancel that subscription.

It also doesn't help that Napster's PlaysForSure-based DRM model has its share of flaws. The biggest is that it needs to connect regularly to the service's servers in order to check subscription status. It's bad enough that Napster might demand authentication eight to ten times a week, as noted by US blogger Jason Dunn in one post. It's even more irritating when that process stops you listening to your music when it doesn't seem able to connect. Listen to Microsoft blogger, Mike Torres. "Two strikes, Napster is out. I am not waiting for a third, I play by my own rules. Which brings me to a declaration: the end-user should never, under any legitimate circumstances, have to worry about copy protection."

This is always the effect of DRM - it imposes limitations. The iTunes store, for example, limits you to playback from five computers, while Napster limits you to three. Use up your allocation and you're unable to play your library on a new computer without de-authorising one of your existing systems first. That would be fine, except that you might forget to de-authorise a system before formatting the hard drive or installing a new OS, or not even get the chance if your hard disk or PC goes kaput.

Now things get tricky. Napster will allow you to de-authorise a system without you connecting from it, but you can only de-authorise one system every 30 days. Install Windows Vista on your PC and drop your laptop in the space of a week, and you're going to have to do without Napster on one or the other. The iTunes store, meanwhile, needs you to de-authorise from the outgoing computer, unless you plump for the "nuclear option" of de-authorising all your machines at once - and this is something you can do only once a year.

It seems that everywhere you look, DRM is telling you what you're not allowed to do with your purchases and where you're not allowed to do it. Nearly all the major services have restrictions on how often a playlist can be burned to CD (seven times in the case of iTunes and Napster), and most have limits on how many times a track can be downloaded. Given that you might want to listen to your purchased music over a lifetime, not just a couple of years, it's likely that we'll all come up against the limits of DRM at some point in the future.

Of course, there are two ways to circumvent all this. The first is to only purchase music DRM-free. The second is to buy it on CD, rip the disc to MP3, Ogg Vorbis or one of the several lossless formats available, then keep the hard copy as a backup. Even given the fact that new CDs are usually more expensive than an MP3 download, this would seem the safest bet. You get a high-quality digital master in the world's most standard music format, giving you the flexibility to create new files in new formats as technology moves on. Even here, however, there are issues; not the least being that - amazingly - copying a CD remains technically illegal in the UK.

There's a proposed exception to the law to cover format-shifting: the process of creating a copy of a work you legally own. The bad news? The Music Business Group wants a licence governing when and how format-shifting should take place, and is asking the government to recognise that it has a monetary value, in the shape of a levy. Who would pay this levy? The hardware manufacturers, and through them - indirectly - us.

The death of DRM

Luckily, DRM is dying, at least in the download sphere. Napster's Dan Nash believes that DRM-free is "the general way things are going". In his opinion, record companies "have no choice but to adapt"; those that "stick to DRM on a pay-per-download basis will not remain competitive".

In the US, Napster has joined Amazon in selling DRM-free content in MP3 format from all the major labels. Over here, online stores from Play.com and 7digital are already selling DRM-free content from EMI, while 7digital has also become the first European store to win Warner Bros' substantial catalogue DRM-free. The remaining major labels, Universal and Sony BMG, are widely expected to follow. With a UK version of Amazon's DRM-free store set to launch this year, and a rival effort from Tesco expected shortly, things are looking up. According to Simon Wheeler, chairman of the independent record industry body AIM's new media committee, DRM's demise is inevitable. The only thing holding it back is "the amount of time it's taking for the deals to be done, and probably the size of that up-front cheque".

Going DRM-free makes sense not just for consumers, but for the industry. Deutche Telekom says three out of four technical support calls its Musicload service had to deal with were the result of DRM. And when it offered a DRM-free option to artists they saw a 40% increase in sales.

That said, the future still isn't entirely DRM-free. "For rental, or subscription, or whatever the model is that develops, there needs to be some sort of DRM to track usage," said Wheeler. Dan Nash agrees. That's hardly unreasonable; you can't expect to copy tracks willy-nilly when they're being rented. What you can and should expect is that DRM won't get in the way of you doing what you've paid to do - enjoy the music you love.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/2185...ic-ripoff.html





BMI Tops $900 Million In Revenue In '08
FMQB

Music performing right organization Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) has announced that it brought in more than $901 million in revenue for its 2008 fiscal year, including its subsidiary Landmark Digital Services, LLCTM. This is the first time any copyright organization has topped the $900 million mark for music performance revenues, and it represents a 7.2 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. The company also announced that it set a high in royalty distributions, and it will disperse more than $786 million to the songwriters, composers and copyright owners it represents.

BMI President & CEO Del Bryant commented, "BMI has been extraordinarily successful in signing the brightest and most popular new music creators across all genres, building upon a repertoire that already includes the most beloved songs of America’s legendary songwriters and composers. Our pro-technology and pro-business attitude has made it possible for BMI to continue to grow our revenues more than 7 percent each year, on average over the past 10 years, almost doubling our income in that period."

Furthermore, BMI generated $664 million in domestic licensing income, an increase of $51 million over the prior year. The company says that licensing music to cable, satellite radio and satellite television brought in revenues of more than $208 million, accounting for more than 23 percent of the company’s consolidated revenue, and traditional broadcast radio and television accounted for $340 million, or about 38 percent of revenue. Growth in revenues from the performance of music in retail and service establishments like restaurants and bars increased to $97 million, and BMI’s New Media revenues went up to $15 million. International revenues were also a bright spot in '08, raking in $238 million in revenue.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=856112





Online Libraries - 25 Places to Read Free Books Online

Think it's impossible to find free books online? Think again. There are tons of online libraries that provide fiction, nonfiction and reference books at no charge. Here is a list of the best 25 places to read free books online.





That Password-Protected Site of Yours - it Ain't
Dan Goodin

It's one of the simplest hacks we've seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it's still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.

While plenty of webmasters require their visitors to register or pay a fee before viewing certain pages, they are typically more than eager for search engine bots to see the content for free. After all, the more search engines that catalog the info, the better the chances of luring new users.

But the technique, known as cloaking, has a gaping loophole: if Google and other search engines can see the content without entering a password, so can you. Want to read this forum (http://forums.inkdropstyles.com/inde...showtopic=4227) from the InkDrop Styles website? You can, but first you'll have to enter a user name and password. Or you can simply type "cache:http://forums.inkdropstyles.com/index.php?showtopic=4227" into Google. It leads you to this cache (http://209.85.141.104/search?hl=en&q...e+Search&aq=f), which shows you the entire thread.

The technique yields plenty of other restricted forums, including those here (http://209.85.141.104/search?hl=en&q...Searc h&aq=f), here (http://209.85.141.104/search?hl=en&q...le+Search&aq=f) and here (http://supex0.co.uk/xforums/index.php?showtopic=16).

Those in the know have been using the trick for years, but a hacker who goes by the handle Oxy recently made this post (http://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=25040) that shares the technique with the world at large. It reminds us of a similar approach for accessing restricted sites that involves changing a browser's user agent to one used by search engine bots.

The hack is one example of the security problems that result from the practice of cloaking. Robert Hansen, the web security guru and CEO of secTheory (http://sectheory.com/) recently alerted us to the compromised blog (http://www.blakeross.com/) of Blake Ross, the co-founder of the Mozilla Firefox project who recently went to work for Facebook. For more than a month, unknown miscreants have been using his site to host links to sites pushing diet pills and other kinds of drugs.

Thanks the some javascript magic, users who visit the site never see evidence of the compromise, i.e. the links are cloaked. But the image below shows what happens when javascript is disabled.

We've contacted Blake about his website, but haven't yet received a response. Cleaning up the site ought to be as easy as updating his badly out-of-date version of WordPress. Addressing the shadowy world of cloaking will take a bit more work
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08...tricted_sites/





Asperger’s Added to British Hacker’s Defense
Mike Nizza

The case of the British conspiracy buff who hacked his way onto the wrong side of American law at a particularly sensitive time would seem to have reached a crucial point.

After several legal twists and turns, Gary McKinnon seems to have run out of ways to avoid extradition to the United States, where a prosecutor accused him of “the biggest hack of military computers ever detected,” but his defense is beginning to emphasize the suspect’s recent diagnosis to influence the proceedings.

The European Court of Human Rights was asked to step in on the grounds that Mr. McKinnon faced the possibility of “inhuman or degrading treatment” if he ended up in an American prison. The request was denied today, ending his attempt to stop the extradition in court.

“The appeal is lost,” Karen Todner, a lawyer for Mr. McKinnon, said, according to Reuters. “He is completely distraught, all of them are, his family, his girlfriend.”

Ms. Todner said that he could be put on a flight to the United States within three weeks unless a British official decides to reverse his earlier refusal to intervene in the case. Since the first decision, Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered a form of autism, was diagnosed in Mr. McKinnon.

Long before the medical ruling, Mr. McKinnon and his lawyers have said that he meant no harm by hacking into nearly 100 United States government networks between 2001 and 2002. While prosecutors agree that he was simply searching for U.F.O.’s and other government secrets, they also said that Mr. McKinnon temporarily disabled crucial national security systems as the nation was wary of follow-up attacks to 9/11.

Those charges, which he denies, seem closer than ever to being presented in an American court. If the British government is not swayed by the Asperger’s diagnosis, an American judge may be.

Last month, a federal judge in the Pittsburgh area named Gustave Diamond refused to send a 20-year-old man convicted of building about two dozen pipe bombs to jail for any amount of time — let alone the prosecutor’s recommendation of 24 to 30 months. The chief reason? Asperger’s syndrome.

“I have no doubt that his makeup, in this case a definable disorder, led him to commit this crime,” he said, according to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “He’s never committed an act of violence of any kind, nor has he threatened an act of violence of any kind.”
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...nse/index.html





Hackers Crack into Red Hat
John Fontana

Red Hat confirmed Friday that hackers compromised infrastructure servers belonging to the company and the Fedora Project, including systems used to sign Fedora packages.

In the Fedora breach, company officials said they had "high confidence" the hackers did not get the "passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key." Regardless, the company has converted to new Fedora signing keys.

Red Hat's Fedora project leader Paul Frields made the announcement Friday on the fedora-announce-list with the subject line "Infrastructure Report." When contacted, Red Hat officials pointed to Frields' announcements as the company's official statement.

In the Red Hat compromise, the intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only).

As a precaution, Red Hat released an updated version of those packages, a list of tampered packages and a script to check if any of the packages are installed on a user's system.

"This is a significant issue and they have to work to address it," says Jay Lyman, an open source analyst with The 451 Group. "These are some of the growing pains of a distribution becoming more complex. They are building more and more into their operating systems, and with that comes more complexity and more challenges. But what I think is most important here is the response."

Red Hat first hinted at a problem on Aug. 14, when Frields wrote that the Fedora infrastructure team was investigating an issue that could result in some service outages. The message was followed up on Aug. 16 saying the team was "continuing to work on the problem."

By that time, there were grumblings and rumors online and in discussion groups that internal systems may have been hacked, which indeed was the case, and was confirmed Friday by Red Hat.

In his announcement, Frields said changing the Fedora signing keys could require "affirmative steps" from every Fedora system owner or administrator, and said, if needed, those steps would be made public.

Frields also said that through checks of Fedora packages and source code that the company did not think packages had been compromised and said "at this time we are confident there is little risk to Fedora users who wish to install or upgrade signed Fedora packages."

The Fedora Project released alpha code for Fedora 10, its next version, earlier this month.

On the Red Hat side, the company issued an OpenSSH update and guidance on how users can protect themselves.

The company said it was "highly confident" that the Red Hat Network, an internal system that makes updates and patches available to its customers, was not compromised by the hacker.

The company, however, said it was issuing its alert for those who "may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers."

Frields also made it clear that the affects of the intrusions on Fedora and Red Hat were not the same and that Fedora packages are signed with keys different from those used to sign Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...o_red_hat.html





Welcome to Opera 1999

Microsoft Adds Privacy Tools to IE8

So-called porn mode tools to debut in IE8 Beta 2 this month
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft Corp. today spelled out new privacy tools in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) that some have dubbed "porn mode" in a nod to the most obvious use of a browser privacy mode.

A privacy advocate applauded the move, calling it a "great step forward," while rival browser builder Mozilla Corp. said it is working to add similar features to a future Firefox.

Slated to appear in IE8 Beta 2, which Microsoft former chairman Bill Gates promised will release this month, the three new tools share the "InPrivate" name, which Microsoft filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office several weeks ago.

The most intriguing tool, and the one that has prompted the porn mode label, was called InPrivate Browsing by Microsoft. When enabled, IE8 will not save browsing and searching history, cookies, form data and passwords; it also will automatically clear the browser cache at the end of the session.

Other new tools will include InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscription, which notifies users of third-party content that can track browsing history and subscribe to lists of sites to block, respectively. Microsoft will also tweak its existing "Delete Browsing History" by adding an option to preserve bookmarked sites' cookies even when all others are erased.

"When we began planning IE8, we took a hard look at our customers' concerns about privacy on the Web," said Andy Zeigler, an IE program manager, as he explained InPrivate Browsing in a long post to the team's blog. "Many users are concerned about so-called over-the-shoulder privacy, or the ability to control what their spouses, friends, kids and co-workers might see.

"If you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend or a public PC, sometimes you don't want other people to know where you've been," Zeigler added.

One wag commenting on Zeigler's post quoted some of his text before shooting back. "You know as well as I do this feature is built for porn," said a user identified as "Ert."

That label marginalizes privacy concerns, countered Mozilla's Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox. "To lock everyone into a 'porn bucket' makes people who have alternate privacy needs think that they're doing something wrong," said Beltzner.

Instead, Mozilla has used the term "private browsing" to describe the tools it plans on adding to Firefox, perhaps in a follow-on to Firefox 3.1, which the company has targeted for a release later this year or in early 2009.

Mozilla's goal, however, is to offer more than a privacy mode that users must switch on before the browser begins to cover their tracks. "We want users to not only be able to enter [a private browsing session], but tell the browser that they want to delete all evidence starting a couple of hours ago," said Beltzner.

Firefox 3.0, which went final in mid-June, was meant to have a privacy mode similar to what Microsoft promised today for IE8, but the feature was pulled as the browser made its run toward completion. Beltzner wouldn't put a timetable on the enhancements, saying that he couldn't guarantee they would make it into Firefox 3.1.

Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit policy group in Washington, said moves such as Microsoft's are important, not because they are new technologies, but because they put tools in the hands of more Internet users.

"The key part is getting privacy tools into the browser," said Schwartz, "rather than as add-ons or extensions. Microsoft's announcement is significant not because it's a major technological breakthrough, but because it's a breakthrough into making it easier for users to have real control over their privacy."

The CDT, said Schwartz, has talked with every browser developer about adding more privacy features to their applications, and was happy to see progress. Of the most-used browsers, only Apple Inc.'s Safari currently has a privacy mode. "But we'll have to wait to see how easy it is to use," he cautioned, talking about IE8's InPrivate tools.

Beltzner, meanwhile, echoed Schwartz on the need for a more granular approach to browsing privacy and wondered if the tools would be used by mainstream surfers. They both noted that the problem exists on shared computers in places such as schools or Internet cafes. "What we're seeing in Firefox is that people want their browsers to remember more, not less," he said, citing the work Mozilla did on Firefox 3.0's location bar to add search capabilities so users could retrieve previously visited sites.

Microsoft has not set a date for IE8 Beta 2's release, saying only that it would unveil the browser before the end of August. Company executives have said that the final version of IE8 will launch sometime this year.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9113419





Why a New Browser From Microsoft Matters
Steve Lohr

Microsoft’s new Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, is now available in a beta version meant for ordinary users, and it’s a pretty good piece of software.

Besides the private browsing mode, called InPrivate, which Microsoft has already announced, there are other nifty features. When your cursor moves over, say, an address on a Web site, one of IE 8’s so-called Accelerators drops down a menu bar of different Web mapping services. Click and the address is mapped. No copying and pasting across Web sites.

IE8 has also been designed so that tabbed Web sites are isolated. That means a poorly behaving Web site won’t crash the whole browser, just that tab.

The list goes on, and Microsoft explains all the new features on its Web site.

IE 6, introduced in 2001, was a mess, really opening the door for the open-source project Firefox, which is richly supported by Google. IE 7, analysts say, was a major catch-up effort, while IE 8 is Microsoft’s bid to move ahead of Firefox and Apple’s Safari in performance, features and user experience.

“In things big and small, it is a better experience,” contends Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group.

We’ll see. But Microsoft’s new entry and the revived competition in the browser market brings a sense of deja vu. I think back to the comment made by Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s co-founder, in the heady days of the browser pioneer’s ascent. The browser, he said, could “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.” Translated: the operating system would be relegated to plumbing, while all the action for users and programmers would be on the browser, riding above the operating system.

On the witness stand in 1998 during Microsoft’s federal antitrust trial, Jim Barksdale, Netscape’s chief executive, tried to dismiss the Andreessen comment as a young man’s flippant joke.

But it was no laughing matter to Microsoft, and that potential threat was the animating force behind the tactics Microsoft used to stifle the Netscape challenge.

Today, the browser challenge — though not Netscape — is alive and well. And it is far more realistic now. The tools for making richer Web-based applications have vastly improved. There is the rise of cloud computing, with its promise of shifting all sorts of computing tasks from e-mail to word processing onto the Web. And there is the proliferation of powerful cellphones that can handle many computing tasks via a mobile browser.

So the browser could become “the universal client,” noted Peter O’Kelly, an independent analyst. And Mr. Andreessen was “just ahead of his time,” Mr. O’Kelly said.

Firefox is now a credible competitor to IE, with its share of the browser market having climbed to 19 percent, according to Net Applications, a research firm. Microsoft’s IE has 73 percent and Apple’s Safari has 6 percent.

IE 8 is Microsoft’s answer to the renewed browser challenge. “There’s competition now and competition does amazing things,” says Matt Rosoff, an analyst for Directions on Microsoft, a research firm.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ers/index.html





Industry Rethinks Moneymaking Software Practice
Matt Richtel

Before they ship PCs to retailers like Best Buy, computer makers load them up with lots of free software. For $30, Best Buy will get rid of it for you.

That simple cleanup service is threatening the precarious economics of the personal computer industry.

Software companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to PC makers like Hewlett-Packard to install their photo tools, financial programs and other products, usually with some tie-in to a paid service or upgrade. With margins growing thinner than most laptops, this critical revenue can make the difference between profit and loss for the computer makers, industry analysts say.

If the programs are removed, the software makers gain no value out of the $2 to $10 they typically pay H. P. and others to install them on each PC — and PC makers miss out on their cut from revenue-sharing deals. But Best Buy, the nation’s largest electronics retailer, tells computer buyers that the preinstalled software, also known as bloatware, can clutter their machines and slow them down.

“You’d be surprised how often consumers tell us to get rid of it,” said Robert Stephens, the head of Geek Squad, the technical support division of Best Buy that removes the software. He declined to say how many people were paying for the service, but said that “it’s going to increase in popularity.”

The demand for the service, along with similar offers from Circuit City and other chains, reflects an outpouring of consumer frustration with the way that a brand-new computer can feel as if it is full of digital infomercials — even if those come-ons knock a few dollars off the PC’s price tag. The Web has dozens of do-it-yourself guides to removing such software, which, as one tutorial puts it, “turns your computer into a messy battleground.” Mr. Stephens said the personal computer makers should be worried about the demand for less cluttered computers.

“No matter what manufacturers want, we’ll give consumers what they want,” he said. But he added that he believed computer makers would find different ways to profit: “While they may be scared by these trends, they’ll be O.K.”

As it turns out, H. P., the world’s largest technology company, is already working on a fundamental change in the way it packages software on its new computers, and thus how its business model works.

Stephen DeWitt, who oversees H. P.’s personal computer business in the Americas, said that starting next year the company’s new computers would point users to a Web site where they can buy and download games, productivity software and other programs. Revenue from the site will be split in some fashion among H. P., a retailer like Best Buy and the makers of the software.

Mr. DeWitt said the change would cut how much software comes preloaded.

Mr. DeWitt said this was happening because consumers were demanding something different, but also because the technology was now in place to allow downloading of software on demand.

For now, he said, the benefits to consumers of the free software far outweigh whatever small slowdown it might cause. And he said Best Buy’s cleanup service was not pressuring H. P. to move to a new model. “There’s no tension coming from Best Buy on this — none,” he said.

But in Best Buy stores in Northern California, there is clear evidence of the different agendas of Best Buy and the computer makers. The stores display two H. P. computers, identical except that one desktop is cluttered with software icons from eBay, Quicken, AOL, Yahoo and others, while the other is entirely cleaned up. Best Buy workers use the display to promote the company’s $30 “optimization” service.

Industry analysts said that the planned change in H. P.’s approach could well reflect Best Buy’s growing influence — and its ability to exact new concessions from computer makers. They said Best Buy has benefited from two key changes: the declining fortunes of competing retailers like CompUSA and some large regional chains, and the addition to its shelves in the last year of computers made by Dell and Apple.

Bob Kaufman, a spokesman for Dell, said, “This is an evolving story and Dell is evaluating how it can best deliver software to its customers.” Best Buy’s offer to remove software began in 2006. But recently the toll its policies are taking has heightened considerably, analysts and industry executives say.

“Best Buy’s sway is definitely growing,” said Matt Fassler, an industry analyst who covers Best Buy for Goldman Sachs. He said the company had good relationships with computer makers, and, while it wouldn’t seek to harm those relationships, “if they have a strong competitive position, it is incumbent on them to use it.”

Mr. Fassler estimates Best Buy will have sales of $44 billion this year. Of that, $1.5 billion to $2 billion will be from the sale of H. P. computers, analysts estimated.

One important question is whether the new model being developed by H. P. will be as profitable as the current one. Mr. DeWitt said he expected it to be more profitable. But A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said the change could imperil H. P.’s profitability, in part because there is no guarantee that consumers will buy software offered through H. P. instead of another site.

As software buying moves online, Mr. Sacconaghi asked, “what makes a consumer go to HP.com over Google?” He also says the challenge for personal computer makers is that they are losing control of what shows up on PC screens — a form of real estate that they have used to sell billboard advertising for software.

“They no longer have that real estate advantage,” he said. “There’s a substantial profit pool at risk.”

And there can be little profit to begin with, analysts said.

The profit margin on many personal computers can be 5 percent or lower, depending on the model. The margins are slim in part because of intense competition that has driven down prices. In some cases, the computers are profitable only because their makers earn $30 or more for each computer for preinstalling the software, according to Shaw Wu, an industry analyst with American Technology Research.

And J. P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research, said, “For the average PC, that could be the entire margin.” Without the preloaded software, Mr. Gownder said, “it could put them in the red. That’s why they’ve become so addicted to it.”

Mr. Stephens of Geek Squad says he agrees with H. P. that the future is in allowing computer buyers to choose and download what they want. But he said he believed Best Buy, not H. P., was in the best position to help people choose what works for them because, he argued, the in-store technicians are in closest contact with them.

“Geek Squad agents have one thing over Apple and Microsoft engineers. We spend most of the day talking to people,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/te...8software.html





Tiny Nation of Niue Gets Laptop for Every Child
AFP

The tiny South Pacific nation of Niue Thursday became the first nation in the world to issue laptop computers to all its children, officials said.

Every primary and secondary school student was this week given a rugged "relatively waterproof and breakproof" little green laptop, which has wireless connection to the Internet as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

The computers have been specially designed by OLPC, a US-based charity, to help children's learning and to be cheap as well as difficult to break or damage.

The OLPC programme stems from research and development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston in the US and has been supported by businesses including News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch and Google Corp.

The donation of 500 computers to Niue -- which has a total population of less than 1,500 -- is part of an initiative to distribute 5,000 laptops in the Pacific region, OLPC said in a statement.

Barry Vercoe of OLPC Boston said the initiative was to "create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children".

The laptops are designed for primary school children aged six to 12 but have also been given to high school students in Niue, where the inhabitants have free Internet access.

If schools install servers, pupils can access school study information and chat to each other in a radius of a kilometre (half a mile), without having to connect to the Internet.

Jimmie Rodgers, the director general of regional development agency, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, said the laptops "have the potential to revolutionise education in ways that are difficult to imagine".
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/2008082...y-0de2eff.html





Web Audience for Games Soars for NBC and Yahoo
Brian Stelter

Steve Ferguson woke up early on Friday — 3 a.m. to be exact — to watch his stepdaughter Margaux Isaksen, a 16-year-old Olympian, complete a grueling 11-hour performance in the modern pentathlon.

Mr. Ferguson did not watch Margaux compete in person. From his home in Fayetteville, Ark., he watched a live stream of her sport on NBCOlympics.com, where 2,200 live hours of the Summer Olympics were shown for Internet users.

The ratings for NBC’s television coverage of the Games were record-breaking this month. But the extent to which the Internet served as a supplement to television was unprecedented, and there were two clear winners: NBC’s own Web site and Yahoo’s Olympics section.

Benefiting from the growth in broadband Internet access, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin. The popularity of the site will very likely make digital rights more significant in next year’s bidding for the 2014 and 2016 Games.

As this Olympics demonstrated, the Internet turns the action into a digital version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books, where every sport can receive its time in the spotlight. Enjoy cycling? NBC had 90 videos of the competitions by Sunday. Prefer softball? Yahoo had 186 photos. The Internet is “allowing people to create their own broader Olympics experience,” said Jon Gibs, the vice president for media analytics at Nielsen Online.

During previous pentathlons, Mr. Ferguson would sometimes have to wait until a Wednesday to see Margaux’s performances from the prior weekend. “It’s really nice to have this available,” he said of the streaming video, even though his connection at home was somewhat slow.

NBC, as the holder of United States rights to the Olympics, was the sole source for online video and the only media organization that could use the Olympics logos. But Yahoo, which offered a feature-oriented mix of news stories and slide shows, gave NBC a run for its online advertising money, or at least audience, attracting just as many visitors, according to Nielsen.

“The demand that we’re seeing has far exceeded even our wildest expectations,” said Jimmy Pitaro, the head of sports and entertainment for Yahoo.

Olympics sites operated by AOL, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Beijing Organizing Committee, The New York Times, and USA Today also had high levels of traffic, according to Nielsen. They differentiated themselves from the NBC site by offering slice-of-life features and entertainment stories. (The top Olympic story on Yahoo this month was, “Why divers always take showers.”)

NBC cites statistics that show its site had a clear advantage over Yahoo’s. But Nielsen Online’s numbers show that Yahoo drew an average of 4.7 million unique visitors a day through Aug. 18, compared with 4.3 million for NBC. The third-ranked site, AOL’s Olympics section, had 1.3 million visitors a day.

NBC treated the Olympics like a research laboratory, and it says it is gleaning information about how people preferred to consume content from its combination of television, online and mobile offerings. (Critics charge that because the network did not stream the most popular sporting events live, its findings are skewed.) Regardless, the network is using the Olympics to assert that TV is the preferred medium of consumers, with the vast majority of viewing — 93 percent — done via television.

Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC, concluded that many NBCOlympics.com visitors used the Web site as a video playback device. “People want to catch up on events that they miss,” he told reporters during a conference call on Aug. 13. “About half say that’s the main reason” they view video. “The second reason,” cited by close to 40 percent, “is that they want to resee and revisit the major events they had seen on TV earlier.”

In 1995, when the media rights to the Beijing Games were awarded, NBC could not have imagined millions of live video streams of sporting events, but the company ensured it would own all video rights to the events, protecting its content no matter what technologies emerged. NBC’s most popular video from Beijing, with 2.3 million views, was the United States swimming team’s 4x100 relay on Aug. 11 featuring Michael Phelps’s second gold medal win.

On Friday the research firm eMarketer estimated that NBC earned $5.75 million in revenue from online video ads, a tiny proportion of the $1 billion in total advertising revenue it raised from the Games. NBC officials said that Internet advertising revenues could not be estimated because the ads were sold across various platforms.

Traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked each day around noon as office workers checked in during the lunch hour. Mr. Gibs said Nielsen also saw traffic spikes on the last two Monday mornings, presumably as office workers caught up on Olympics action they might have missed over the weekend.

NBC’s decision to save some popular sports for prime time — up to 12 hours after they have happened — put the network at odds with the spirit of the Internet, which rewards speed and rejects scarcity. Americans awakened to breaking news e-mail messages and Web site headlines revealing the results of gymnastics and track and field races, but had to wait until bedtime to see the events on television.

Nonaffiliated sites tried to fill that void. On Wednesday, for example, Yahoo’s Olympics blog linked to two Web sites that were showing BBC video of Usain Bolt’s 200-meter race, hours before NBC showed it on television and placed it on its Web site. Yahoo, which added a gold medal to its logo for the duration of the Games, used the power of its popular home page to push visitors to a special mini-site devoted to the Olympics. Mr. Pitaro said the site more than tripled its traffic compared with Turin in 2006.

For people like Mr. Ferguson who could not travel to China to watch family members compete, the Internet allowed them to watch full coverage in a way that television did not. That was especially true for sports like the women’s pentathlon, which took place over the course of the day Friday in China.

“It’s not real TV-friendly,” Mr. Ferguson said. “But now I can watch it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/sp.../25online.html





On TV, Timing Is Everything at the Olympics
Bill Carter

In mid-2005, Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, had secured the support of the International Olympic Committee for the critical move of the finals of the key television sports of swimming and gymnastics to morning hours in China so they could be shown live in prime time in the United States. But he had one more person he needed to consult: Michael Phelps.

“Michael was the first outsider I talked to about it,” Mr. Ebersol said in an interview from Beijing, where he wrapped up NBC’s coverage of the Games Sunday. He said he wanted to make sure that competing in the morning would not harm the performance of the likely American star of the Games.

Mr. Ebersol had already developed a close relationship with the swimmer, so much so that Mr. Phelps and his mother had attended the funeral of his young son Teddy after a plane crash that also seriously injured Mr. Ebersol. Competing in the morning, Mr. Phelps said, was no problem.

“He told me: ‘My only real goal is to leave the sport bigger and better than I found it,’ ” Mr. Ebersol said.

Getting American stars like Mr. Phelps and the gymnast Shawn Johnson to perform live in prime time was just one of the moves and unexpected breaks, some going back almost a decade, that set up the spectacular success NBC achieved in the Beijing Games that ended Sunday night. It was a success represented by record viewer totals of more than 200 million people, a surge in ad sales that guaranteed a profit of more than $100 million, and probably the best word of mouth about any Olympics coverage in a generation.

As a result, NBC was able to turn the Beijing Games with all their potential liabilities — time differences, pollution and potential political upheaval — into a triumph for the network.

“Everything is fraught with risk,” Mr. Ebersol said, adding that the prospects for Beijing did not look very bright as recently as five months ago. “At that point I was sure we’d lose money.” The economy was bad; advertisers were tightening budgets; a lot of NBC’s Olympic ad time was going unsold.

Then as the Games neared, ad sales picked up — and, after the Games started off so well, they exploded. Mr. Ebersol said that in the end it may have been NBC’s good fortune that the country was going through some tough times.

“The economy was so dark,” Mr. Ebersol said. “But with $4 a gallon gas, more people were staying home. Many fewer were taking vacations.”

That made people both more available and more susceptible to the pull of the Olympics.

“When these Games came along, it was really at a point where the country was just ready for something they could really get crazy about,” he said.

Switching swimming and gymnastics to prime time was not the biggest scheduling coup Mr. Ebersol helped pull off. Long before that, during the Games in Sydney, Mr. Ebersol played the central role in a move to alter the weeks when the Beijing Games would be held.

By the summer of 2000, NBC already possessed the rights to the Winter and Summer Games through 2008. The network had made a deal in 1995 to secure them all even before the Games were awarded to any cities — a notion Mr. Ebersol sold effectively to the I.O.C. as a better way to go than having the cities make plans without knowing how much they were going to acquire in TV rights.

But the Sydney Games, which took place in late September, were not doing especially well in the ratings. Juan Antonio Samaranch, then the I.O.C. president, left Sydney after the first day because of the death of his wife. When he returned, Mr. Ebersol related, he visited the NBC broadcast center and observed that the ratings were not what NBC had hoped. He asked Mr. Ebersol if there was anything he could do to help.

“Not for these Games,” Mr. Ebersol said he told him. But he wanted to plant another thought. “I believed China was going to win the bid for 2008,” he said. And he had heard that China planned to bid based on dates similar to Sydney. He asked Mr. Samaranch if China could move the dates of its bid four weeks back into August.

“If you’re into September, you’re going to lose a big percentage of your male viewers,” Mr. Ebersol said. “There’s N.F.L. coverage on Sundays and Mondays, and college football is now on four or five nights a week. All of that goes away if you start in mid-August.”

Also, he said, moving the dates back meant bringing in children who would be in school a month later and thus not allowed to stay up late to see American stars like Nastia Liukin on the balance beam. “The Olympics are about the last event that gets the whole family viewing together,” Mr. Ebersol said.

Mr. Samaranch listened to the arguments carefully. “Forty-eight hours later, when the Chinese made their official bid, the dates were in mid-August,” Mr. Ebersol said. As it turned out, even those dates did not hold. Once the tennis federation heard mid-August, it suggested a move back another week — or else Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, the Williams sisters and every other tennis star would skip the Games to play in the United States Open.

China made a move again, Mr. Ebersol said, setting up the start date of 8/8/08, which received so much attention for the mystical importance that the Chinese attach to the number 8.

“But that’s not really why the Olympics started then,” Mr. Ebersol said.

In both cases when NBC’s desires were accommodated, “no money changed hands,” Mr. Ebersol said. The $894 million that NBC paid for the American television rights was already in a Chinese bank, Mr. Ebersol noted. But the I.O.C. has an intense interest in assuring that its American TV partner has a success with the Games, he said, because American television money accounts for more cash for the I.O.C. than all the world’s other broadcasters combined. (By contrast, he said China paid $17 million for its television rights, while selling $400 million worth of ads.)

Mr. Ebersol also made a very early decision to use Mr. Phelps — and his mother — as the centerpiece of NBC’s marketing. The first promotions for Beijing focused on Mr. Phelps’s relationship with his mother and played during NBC’s coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The network followed that the same day with another promotion featuring Mr. Phelps and his dog, Herman, placing it in the network’s coverage of the National Dog Show, which followed the parade.

“That’s our biggest family viewing day of the year, with the parade and the dog show,” Mr. Ebersol said.

In April 2007, Mr. Phelps was even more directly involved in NBC’s marketing effort. For the first time NBC decided to stage an Olympic upfront — a special sales presentation for advertisers in advance of an event (as is done before every prime-time television season.) Mr. Ebersol invited Mr. Phelps to make an appearance to help woo the advertisers, which he did in a single day, so as not to miss any training.

“He never asked for a dime,” Mr. Ebersol said.

During the planning, Mr. Ebersol also acceded to a move pushed by members of his staff to cut way back on the now much-mocked athlete profiles, usually known as “up close and personals,” during which heart-tugging tales of overcoming handicaps and tragedy are often recounted. The overall number dropped from about 160 eight years ago to 80 in Athens and only about 60 this year.

“I always loved them,” Mr. Ebersol said. “I sit there and cry at them. I might as well be part of that female demographic we’re seeking.”

The scheduling shift to prime time was very much a personal victory for Mr. Ebersol, who first broached it during a conversation with Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, in the summer of 2001. Mr. Rogge, just named to the position, flew to the United States to speak with American Olympic officials, and on his way back to Europe made a stop at Mr. Ebersol’s home on Martha’s Vineyard.

There, after giving Mr. Ebersol’s sons a sailing lesson (Mr. Rogge was an Olympic sailor for Belgium), Mr. Rogge got a lesson in television programming.

“We took a long walk around Edgartown,” Mr. Ebersol said. On the walk, he explained how critical swimming and gymnastics were because they kicked off the competition and they were the sports of most appeal to the audience the Olympics counts on for success: women. Mr. Ebersol said that Mr. Rogge was sympathetic, but said he would do nothing that might harm the performance of the athletes.

“I pointed out that the swimmers are normally up at 5:30 a.m. to train, and in previous Olympics they had swum their heats in the morning,” Mr. Ebersol said.

Mr. Rogge eventually got the support of the swimming and gymnastics federations for the schedule. Many months later, long after Mr. Phelps was advised, the move was formally announced.

Having Mr. Phelps on board with swimming for gold at 10 a.m. Beijing time gave Mr. Ebersol a formidable line of defense against anyone who suggested that the schedule tailored for American television would prove detrimental to the athletes — and some Australian swimming officials did just that.

“Michael and his coach told them: ‘Anyone who is among the best in the world should be able to swim any time of day,’ ” Mr. Ebersol said. He added, “It was really all about Australian television wanting to get swimming into their prime time.”

The live events did ignite the American coverage this year with instant excitement, especially thanks to Mr. Phelps, who seemed to win a race every night, setting new world records in the process. More evidence, Mr. Ebersol said, that swimming in the morning proved no handicap was that 20 world records, as many as in the previous two Olympics combined, were set in the Beijing pool, some by the Australian team.

Still, the scheduling that Mr. Ebersol used to enhance the Beijing Games may not work so well in four years when the Games are in London. (The Winter Games, in Vancouver in 2010, are ideally set up for live prime-time viewing.) Would the British stand for starting swimming finals at 1 a.m. local time?

“London is going to be different,” he said. “I have some ideas. I want to talk to some key advertisers to get a sense of where they think they’re going to be in four years.”

Mr. Ebersol also acknowledged that the rampaging growth of the Internet — particularly broadband access — would transform the medium over the next four years and that the advertising engine of the modern Olympics will be in for a radical overhaul.

The problem going forward, he said, is that commercials at the beginning of streamed videos and banner ads would never pay for the kind of coverage viewers expect from Olympic broadcasters.

“We’re like everybody else in the media,” he said. “We can’t change analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Still, he was hardly ready to predict that London would be the final stop on NBC’s long Olympic journey. He said he expects NBC to be in the mix when the rights to the 2014 and 2016 Games are awarded about 14 months from now.

Nor was Mr. Ebersol, who is 61, ready to pass the baton, despite rumors that he might see Beijing as the perfect time to go out at the top of his own game.

“There is no way” he would not be in both Vancouver and London, he said. “My sanity in life is wrapped up in this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/sp...ics/25nbc.html





NBC Giddy at Conclusion of Successful Olympics
David Bauder

NBC says the Beijing Olympics proved so captivating that millions of Americans now need to catch up on some sleep.

A survey of people who followed the Olympics found that 76 percent said they stayed up later than normal to watch, NBC said Sunday. More than half of its specially convened panel said they got fewer hours of sleep.

NBC Universal is giddy following its 17-day Olympics coverage, which ended Sunday with a tape-delayed presentation of the closing ceremonies. With thousands of hours available on the broadcast network, cable affiliates and online, the company said it surpassed the 1996 Atlantic Olympics to capture more viewers than any other event in U.S. television history.

"It's safe to say it's gone beyond my wildest expectations, and my expectations were really high," said David Neal, executive vice president of NBC Olympics.

Through Saturday night, NBC averaged 27.7 million viewers a night for its prime-time coverage, still the focal point for attention and advertising sales. That won't top the 33.1 million average for Atlanta. (NBC Universal attracted more viewers overall this year because of the cable hours that weren't available in Atlanta.)

Most important was that NBC was able to eclipse the prime-time averages for Athens in 2004 (24.6 million) and Sydney in 2000 (21.5 million). With more networks, Web sites and video games competing for attention each year, it's the rare television event that sees such growth.

NBC's effort to convince Olympics officials to schedule certain events in the morning so the network could show them live everywhere except the West Coast (Beijing's time zone is 12 hours ahead of New York's), paid off handsomely.

Michael Phelps' bid for eight gold medals was a dream when the Olympics began and for NBC, it turned into a miniseries.

Without being able to check for the results on the Internet in advance, an estimated 39.9 million people tuned in to watch Phelps break Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics on his final relay.

American gymnasts Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, and beach volleyball players Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh were secondary stars, but their competitions also unfolded live in prime-time.

When there was less live action during the second week, viewers began to lose interest. Only 17.6 million people watched Friday night, and a million fewer on Saturday, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The time difference will make things more difficult for the London Games in 2012. For NBC to show something live in prime-time then, an event would have to be scheduled after midnight—hardly an ideal time for athletes or live spectators.

NBC showed little taste for upsetting their Chinese hosts; in a brief visit to China's Three Gorges dam Mary Carillo chose to joke about beavers instead of talk about safety issues or the displacement of communities. But it didn't turn out to be much of an issue. With pollution and political dissent swept away, at least temporarily, the focus was on compelling athletic stories.

NBC News brought the "Today" show and "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams to Beijing. During a 10-day period just before the games and in the first week of competition, those shows devoted 48 percent of their newshole to the Olympics, far more than their rivals. That led the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism to question, in a report, how much these broadcasts were letting business considerations influence news coverage.

It paid off in ratings, though. The already dominant "Today" show had its biggest margin of victory in eight years and Williams' broadcast turned what is usually a close race with ABC into a rout.

Key for NBC will be seeing whether, in the coming weeks, some of these gains become more permanent. The network also wants to see if its relentless promotion of NBC's new prime-time season will pay off; that tends to be a much harder sell.

The success of the Beijing Games may have a hidden costs down the line for NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric Co. NBC Universal paid $894 million for the rights to broadcast the games. ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Co., has expressed interest in bidding for the 2014 and 2016 games, and the 2008 result may send bids soaring.

For now, NBC wants to bask. Its panel of 600 Olympics viewers also found that 90 percent had been talking about the Olympics with their friends and family.

"The results from this survey clearly show that these games were truly a cultural event," said Alan Wurtzel, NBC's chief researcher.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_10292735





Preferring the Web Over Watching TV
Alex Mindlin

Parents who worry that their children watch too much television can take heart: a bigger concern may be children spending too much time online.

For children ages 10 to 14 who use the Internet, the computer is a bigger draw than the TV set, according to a study recently released by DoubleClick Performics, a search marketing company. The study found that 83 percent of Internet users in that age bracket spent an hour or more online a day, but only 68 percent devoted that much time to television.

The study found that the children often did research online before making a purchase (or bugging their parents to make one). The big exception to this rule was apparel: like many grown-ups, the children said they preferred to choose their clothes at a store.

Performics reported that some corners of the Internet were more popular with the children than others. While 72 percent of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60 percent of them said they rarely or never read blogs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/te...y/25drill.html





Can Hollywood Help LinkedIn?
Brooks Barnes

As LinkedIn struggles to remain relevant in an ever more socially networked world, the Internet company has found a constituency that might need its help.

The economy everywhere is no picnic, but the situation in Hollywood has been made worse by a screenwriters’ strike, a threatened actors’ strike and the shuttering of several independent film companies. More layoffs are likely, particularly at Paramount, which must decide what to do with its DreamWorks unit once Steven Spielberg decamps.

Enter LinkedIn. The company bills itself as “the world’s largest and most powerful business network” but is known to most people as the Web site they begrudgingly visit every few months to approve be-my-contact invitations. Could Hollywood’s woes represent an opportunity for LinkedIn to woo new followers?

“Because so many people are looking for work, entertainment is an area that’s ripe for people to be ambitious and entrepreneurial,” said Rob Getzschman, LinkedIn’s entertainment market manager.

Mr. Getzschman lectured about LinkedIn at the Los Angeles Film Festival; on Thursday a LinkedIn representative will speak to indie filmmakers at a Film Independent workshop, also in Los Angeles. Engagements at the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America are also planned. LinkedIn has one happy customer. Robert Margouleff, a producer of Stevie Wonder albums, lost a big sound-mixing client. After attending a LinkedIn event, he used the network to find sponsors for a documentary and to meet a National Geographic executive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/bu.../25actors.html





Report: Studios Want Interoperable DRM
Greg Sandoval

Most of the largest motion picture studios are backing a plan that would create interoperability among digital rights management schemes.

TechCrunch is reporting that Sony Pictures is behind the plan that has the support of most of the top film companies--other than those backed by Walt Disney. A Sony spokesman could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening.

According to Michael Arrington, the plan calls for "a set of policy decisions and a software and services framework that will allow interoperability of various formats and DRM schemes that are currently splintering the market."

The plan also calls for a neutral party to manage a central registry where users would register their devices. Movies purchased from participating services would then play on devices from participating manufacturers.

OK, while acknowledging I haven't heard all the details, the plan at this point sounds complicated and it also calls for competitors to cooperate. This is not an easy thing in Hollywood.

I'm always skeptical of any proposition that requires the studios to agree on standards. Hollywood should also learn from the music industry and abandon DRM now. Consumers have already rendered a verdict on DRM: death.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-100...ag=mncol;posts





At Disney, Blu-ray Sales Team Is a Cast of Characters
Brooks Barnes

The Walt Disney Company is dispatching Pinocchio, Snow White and a team of other characters in its effort to accelerate consumer adoption of next-generation DVD technology.

Disney, like other media companies, is counting on high-definition Blu-ray discs — and companion technology that connects them to the Internet — to reinvigorate its highly profitable home entertainment business. But so far, Blu-ray players are selling more slowly than expected, apparently because people are not convinced they need a better DVD experience.

So Disney is sending in the troops. The company will release five “platinum” titles from its library in the Blu-ray format over the next two years, hoping that classic animated movies will spur wider interest.

The films are “Pinocchio,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Fantasia,” “Fantasia 2000” and “Beauty and the Beast.” The company had previously announced plans to introduce one such title, “Sleeping Beauty.”

All the DVDs will include unusual features geared toward a generation that embraces interactivity and social networking. Viewers can watch a movie in tandem with friends in other locations, while they chat using a laptop or cellphone (the comments appear on the screen).

Viewers will also be able to compete against others around the world at trivia or send what Disney is calling movie mail, video images of themselves that appear within the context of the movie.

Such activities are possible because of a technology called BD Live that connects Blu-ray discs with the Internet.

Bob Chapek, president of Disney’s home entertainment unit, said that his company hoped the animated favorites would help it “break past early adopters” to a wider group of consumers.

“BD Live is not a niche product,” Mr. Chapek said. “We see mass adoption of the technology.”

Mr. Chapek said that “Snow White,” last available in 2001, had helped start the market for traditional DVDs. “The power of these titles is incredible,” he said.

Disney needs all the muscle it can find. Sales of Blu-ray players have been disappointing — although the industry has big hopes for the coming holiday season — and players compatible with BD Live just became available a few months ago.

They are also expensive: Blu-ray players that function with BD Live are priced from $300 to $700, much more than regular Blu-ray machines.

Making DVDs exciting is a trick that movie studios are desperate to pull off. After years of blistering growth, domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year, to $15.9 billion, the first annual drop in the medium’s history, according to Adams Media Research.

Blu-ray sales are growing fast, but still represent a tiny part of the business. The industry estimate for sales of Blu-ray discs in 2008 is nearly $1 billion, up from $170 million last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/bu.../27disney.html





Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera
Michael Behar

A crowd has gathered in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where a security guard is about to unlock the main entrance. It's less than a minute before 9 am, the official opening of the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters Show—typically a sleepy sales and marketing event known more for schmoozing than buzz. But as the glass doors open on this April morning, a hundred people race toward a large crimson tent in the center of the hall.

The tent is home to Red Digital Cinema and its revolutionary motion picture camera, the Red One. Standing nearby is the man who developed it—a handsome guy with a neatly trimmed goatee and a pair of sunglasses perched atop his clean-shaven head. He clutches a can of Diet Coke in his left hand, an unlit Montecristo jutting from between his fingers.

Jim Jannard, 59, is the billionaire founder of Red. In 1975 he spent $300 to make a batch of custom motocross handlebar grips, which he sold from the back of a van. He named his company Oakley, after his English setter, and eventually expanded into sci-fi-style sunglasses, bags, and shoes. In November of last year he sold the business to Luxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, for a reported $2.1 billion.

Jannard won't say how much money he has poured into Red, but his target market clearly appreciates the investment. Supplicants swarm the tent, many of them with offerings—fine wine, gourmet coffee, single-malt whiskey—all to thank Jannard for building the Red One. "I guess they just like me," he says with a wry smile.

It's more than that: His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution—"4K" in filmmaker lingo—and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There's also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn't have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K. And that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper—by orders of magnitude—than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete.

Two years ago, Jannard brought a spec sheet and a mock-up of a camera—not much more than an aluminum box about the size of a loaf of bread—to NAB 2006. Even though it wasn't a working product, more than 500 people plunked down a $1,000 deposit to get their names on a waiting list. For months, industry watchers wondered if the company was for real. Today, there's no question. The Red One is being used on at least 40 features. Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director, borrowed two prototypes to shoot his Che Guevara biopics, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and later purchased three for his film The Informant. Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings himself, bought four. Director Doug Liman used a Red on Jumper. Peter Hyams used one on his upcoming Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Digital cinema that's all but indistinguishable from film is finally coming to a theater near you.

The Red headquarters is in Lake Forest, California, a sprawling Orange County exurb consisting mainly of strip malls and office parks. The 32,000-square-foot facility, which Jannard recently bought for a reported $7.7 million, has a stark white exterior unbroken by windows except at the entrance, where a winged human skull is painted on the glass. Jannard, wearing blue jeans, black slip-on sandals, and a lime-green short-sleeve shirt, greets me in the lobby and ushers me through a set of gray metal doors. On the way into the workspace, there is a sign:

1) Please knock.
2) Take two steps back.
3) Kneel.

Since I'm getting a tour from the wizard himself, I'm apparently excused from genuflecting.

Behind the doors, the walls are festooned with camouflage netting—a nod, perhaps, to the postapocalyptic design of the steel-clad Oakley headquarters half a mile away.

"I had been thinking about this project for a long time," Jannard says. "As a camera fanatic and a product builder, this was something I seemed destined to do." When businesspeople talk destiny, it can sound like bullshit. But at Oakley, Jannard not only ran the company, he personally shot one of its two TV spots and all of its print ads from 1975 to 1995. He owns more than 1,000 cameras, both still and motion picture, several dating back almost a century. "I have a Bolex, Aaton, Arriflex, Eyemo, Filmo, Mitchell, Photosonic, Beaulieu, Keystone—just about every movie camera you can think of."
Why The Red Rocks, Part I
The Red One camera gives moviemakers the best of both worlds. It delivers the ease of use and editing flexibility provided by digital cinema cameras. At the same time, the Red's resolution and color fidelity rival that of 35-millimeter film, and it allows the same kind of control over focus. Bonus: Like HD and 2K digital, it's cheap.C

In 2004, Jannard bought a Sony HDR-FX1—the first hi-def videocam for consumers. When he found he couldn't use the files it produced without translation software from a company called Lumiere, he telephoned Lumiere's owner, filmmaker Frederic Haubrich. "I told Frederic that I couldn't even view my footage on a Mac and that this had pissed me off enough that I wanted to build my own camera. And he said, 'Jim, I know guys in the industry who can help.'" Haubrich introduced Jannard to interface designer Ted Schilowitz.

Schilowitz, Haubrich, and Jannard spent a year trying to design that dream camera, one that would combine the practical advantages of digital moviemaking with the image quality of analog film. They recruited mathematicians, programmers, digital imaging experts, hardware engineers, and physicists. "We needed a bunch of guys who were inventors to come up with entirely new ways of getting to the finish line," Jannard says. He kept the project quiet until his team could determine whether building the device was even feasible, but rumors swirled through Hollywood about some kind of mysterious supercamera in the works. "I didn't know who Jim was," Soderbergh says. "But I heard about Red because they were canvassing filmmakers and cinematographers, asking, 'If you could wave a magic wand, what camera would you design?'"

Most of the work took place in what employees call Jim's garage, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from Red's massive headquarters. The team quickly concluded that existing technology was inadequate. The guts of the camera—the image sensor and all the accompanying circuitry—would have to be created from scratch. It was a daunting challenge, but the fact that Jannard's management style falls somewhere between Mr. T and Steve Jobs on the autocracy scale helped. "What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker," he says. "That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it's the same at Red—I'm in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call. Red is a benevolent dictatorship."

The video revolution has been on pause in Hollywood. Just as digital still cameras now rule the photography market, hi-def digital movie cameras were supposed to replace film. But moviemakers never fully bought in. Typical digital videocams use prisms to split incoming light by color and send it to three separate sensors, which tends to soften images. Onboard software sharpens the footage but also introduces halos and exaggerated edges. Worse, the small sensors put too much of the picture in focus, giving it a canned look. Cinematographers hate that; the ability to guide the viewer's eye by selectively blurring focal planes is one of their favorite techniques. "That's a storytelling tool," says Pierre de Lespinois, a producer and director who spent three weeks in April filming a feature in the Mojave Desert with two Red Ones. "In HD, what's right in front of the lens and what's 20 feet away are both sharp, so the image looks flat."

To compete with celluloid, a digital cine-camera would need an image sensor identical in size and shape to a single frame of 35-mm motion picture film. Without that, the Red couldn't give filmmakers the control over depth of field, color saturation, tonality, and a half dozen other factors that 35-mm film provides.

You'll find that kind of full-frame sensor at the core of any high-end digital single-lens reflex camera. But they're designed to shoot no more than 10 frames per second. That's warp speed for still photographers but barely first gear for filmmakers. Movies are shot at a minimum of 24 frames per second, with some scenes topping out at 120 fps for slow-motion effects. The Red's sensor would have to do everything a DSLR sensor does—and do it significantly faster.

The camera also had to be able to record in the same bulky file format that DSLRs use—called raw. The format preserves picture data in essentially unprocessed form, which gives photographers more latitude to tweak images with software the way they once did in a darkroom. (Cinematographers do the same thing with 35-mm film, but it's a complicated, expensive process: The film must be scanned into digital to be manipulated, then converted back to analog for projection.) Since a movie is just a long sequence of still pictures, using the raw format presented bandwidth and data-storage problems. A two-hour feature could run up to 7 terabytes. The Red engineers built a workaround, a lossless compression codec they call Redcode Raw.

Finally, in August 2006, Jannard's team flipped the switch on Red's first prototype, codenamed Frankie. It wasn't really a camera at all, just a mechanical test bed containing the new sensor. "Our whole business was predicated on this sensor," Jannard says. "If it didn't work, we'd be cooked. When it did, it was like giving birth and counting all the fingers and toes to make sure everything was there. It was phenomenal. Everybody went nuts." Schilowitz remembers that moment, which camera makers call first light, as mind-blowing: "Everyone started screaming like little kids, 'First light! First light! It's alive!' The thing actually worked."

Two weeks later, at an industry event in Amsterdam, Jannard showed test footage taken with Frankie—a clip of two perky women in '50s garb chugging milk from glass bottles—on a 60-foot screen. "People were stunned," Schilowitz says. "They were standing around scratching their heads. That moment made a lot of people into believers." Filmmakers didn't care how the Red One worked, but they liked what they saw. "The Red camera is the closest thing to film I've seen," says Tristan Whitman, a cinematography lecturer at USC.

The Analog Advantage

Typical 2K and HD digital movie cameras keep everything in focus. The 4K Red One is more like an analog camera, allowing depth of field control, which blurs the foreground or background.

Analog film lets moviemakers control the depth of field.

2K and HD cameras force everything into focus.

By March 2007, Red had assembled two additional prototypes, named Boris and Natasha. But now, with three weeks to go before NAB 2007, Jannard wanted new footage to show what the camera could do. He emailed Jackson, asking if the director could recommend a good cinematographer in Los Angeles to help create a Red promo spot. Not long after, Jackson telephoned. "Jim, why don't you fly down here to New Zealand, and I'll shoot the footage for you," he said.

"Don't tease me," Jannard replied.

"No, I'm serious," Jackson said. "Bring the cameras down."

Jannard packed up Boris and Natasha, still crude machines with no features other than a run/stop button and a shutter, and headed south. When he got to Wellington, Jackson was ready. "Peter had put together an army," Jannard says. "He was going to shoot a mini-movie to put the cameras through their paces, using them on helicopters and Steadicams, crawling on the ground with them—and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I just hope they keep working through the weekend.'" Boris and Natasha performed flawlessly. "We stayed at Peter's house, and he was just beaming because he was having so much fun." Jackson delivered his 12-minute featurette, titled Crossing the Line, the night before the NAB Show opened.

Jannard shows me the film at Red headquarters. His desk is in an open workspace that he shares with six staffers and his puppy. Next to his computer there's a box of the Montecristos he favors and a pinewood crate from Napa Valley Reserve, the world's most exclusive wine club. Members reportedly pay up to $145,000 to join, in exchange for which they can partake in grape harvests and create their own blends. There's something oddly honorable about a billionaire with insanely expensive taste in wine but no office.

I watch Crossing the Line on Jannard's 30-inch HD display while he stands behind me. The film, set on the front lines of World War I, alternates between aerial dogfights and bloody ground combat. The screen resolution is about half what it would be in a theater. Nevertheless, it's like looking through a window onto a battlefield. I can barely discern a single pixel. The detail is stupefying; the colors are rich and sensual.

After NAB 2007, Jannard showed Crossing the Line at the Directors Guild in LA. "I rearranged my travel plans to be there," Soderbergh says. After he saw the film, he called Jannard.

"Jim, I'm all in. I have to shoot with this."

"OK, great," Jannard said. "But what does that mean?"

"I'm making two movies with Benicio del Toro. Come to my house, and we'll do a test. If it looks as good as what I saw in Peter's film, I want these cameras for my movies."

Soderbergh took two prototypes into the Spanish wilderness. "It felt like someone crawled inside my head when they designed the Red," he says. What impressed him most was the cameras' sturdiness. Movie sets are often a flurry of crashes and explosions, which can vibrate sensitive electronics, introducing visual noise known as microphonics into images. "A lot of cameras with electronics in them, if you fired a 50-caliber automatic weapon a few inches away—which we did—you'd get microphonics all over the place," Soderbergh says. "We beat the shit out of the Reds on the Che films, and they never skipped a beat."

Then there's the economics: The Red One sells for $17,500—almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn't publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot—more than the cost of purchasing a Red. "It's clearly the future of cinematography," Peter Hyams says. "You can buy this camera. You can own it. That's why people are excited."

Even so, traditionalists cling to film's reliability. Film is tangible. Hard drives crash; files get corrupted. "You put film in a can and stick it on a shelf, and it costs $1,000 a year to store," says Stephen Lighthill, who teaches cinematography at the American Film Institute. "With a project that starts as data, you have it on a hard drive, which has to be nursed and upgraded. It's an electronic, mechanical device that can't be left unplugged." Preserving a 4K digital master of a feature film would cost $12,000 a year, according to a report by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And that doesn't address the reliability of the camera itself. "In the slammin', jammin' world of production, you want a really tough machine that takes very simple approaches to problems," Lighthill says. "I'm not sure Red is the way to go. It's a supercomputer with a lens on it."

Proponents dismiss such criticism as Luddite drivel. "Hollywood is just used to shooting on film," says Bengt Jan Jönsson, cinematographer on the Fox TV show Bones. "Honestly, if you proposed the film work-flow today, you'd be taken to the city square and hung. Imagine I told you we're going to shoot on superexpensive cameras, using rolls of celluloid made in China that are a one-time-use product susceptible to scratches and that can't be exposed to light. And you can't even be sure you got the image until they're developed. And you have to dip them in a special fluid that can ruin them if it's mixed wrong. People would think I was crazy."

As Reds infiltrate Hollywood, the typical filmgoer might not notice much difference at first. After all, once they're projected onto a cineplex screen, movies shot with Jannard's camera will look like the analog movies audiences are used to. But the camera's ease of use and lower cost are sure to change the industry. "There's talent on the streets, kids with ideas who have stories to tell and never get a chance," Jannard says. "Up to now, they've been limited to tools that confine their stories to YouTube." Access to this kind of tech will make it easier for aspiring auteurs to break in and could ultimately expand the range and variety of films that get made.

Of course, most theaters still show movies the old-fashioned way, running analog film in front of a bright light. For now, pictures shot with the Red must be transferred to celluloid for distribution. It's a cumbersome system: A full-length feature might take as many as five (heavy, expensive to print) reels. A major release goes to at least 3,500 theaters. Plus, the celluloid stock gets damaged and dirty and has to be sent in for cleaning and repair after every few dozen screenings.

Luckily, analog projection seems to be on the way out. In March, four big Hollywood studios announced plans to retrofit 10,000 screens—about a quarter of the US total—for digital projection at 2K. Movies shot with Red's 4K camera will look every bit as good as those shot on film, and they'll all be ads for the company's next camera, the Epic, with more than 5,000 lines of resolution. That's a knockout pixel punch. I ask Jannard if Red plans to develop a 4K projector or perhaps even a 5K that it would market to theater owners. He's cagey. "I will say that the future of motion-capture will be digital," he says, "and I think you can extend that to say the future of presentation will be digital."

Jannard is doing his best to fulfill that prophecy. He spends nights on the company's Internet user forums sifting through customer feedback, answering technical questions, and addressing rumors about upcoming products. "I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/h...9/ff_redcamera





Huge iPhone Security Flaw Puts All Private Information at Risk

There's a huge security problem in the latest iPhone 2.0.2: if you have your JesusPhone password protected, using a very simple trick gives anyone full access to your cellphone private information in Mail, SMS, Contacts, and even Safari. The two-step trick is even simpler to the one used in the past to gain access to the phone to install unlocking cards or jailbreak. Fortunately, there's a way to avoid this obvious security breach until Apple fixes it.

First, password protect your phone and lock it. Then slide to unlock and do this:

1. Tap emergency call.
2. Double tap the home button.

Done. You are now in your favorites. This seems like a feature, because you may want to have emergency number in your favorites for quick dial. The security problem here is double. The first: anyone picking up your phone can make a call to anyone in your favorites. On top of that, this also opens access to your full Address Book, the dial keypad, and your voice mail.

If that wasn't bad enough, the second one is even worse: if you tap on the blue arrows next to the names, it will give you full access to the private information in a favorite entry. And it goes downhill from there:

• If you click in a mail address, it will give you full access to the Mail application. All your mail will be exposed.
• If there's a URL in your contact (or in a mail message) you can click on it and have full access to Safari.
• If you click on send text message in a contact, it will give you full access to all your SMS.

Hopefully, this major security break that fully exposes your most private information will be solved as soon as possible. Until then, you can avoid any potential breach doing the following:

1. In the iPhone home, go to Settings.
2. Click on General.
3. Click on Home Button.
4. Click on either "Home" or "iPod".

This way, the double-click on the home button will take the user back to the unlock screen (if you use "Home") or the iPod screen. I recommend using Home. You will lose the ability to quickly access your favorites for a quick call—which is one of my favorite features—but that's better than having all your private mails, contacts, and SMS database compromised. UPDATE: Evidently Apple has a fix coming in their next firmware update, but we've got no word on when that release is planned.
http://gizmodo.com/5042332/huge-ipho...mation-at-risk





Connected, Yes, but Hermetically Sealed
Ben Stein

“MAN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What would Rousseau have made of the modern-day balls and chains with which we shackle ourselves? They are not made of steel or iron, but of silicon and plastic and digits and electrons and waves zooming through the air. These are the chains of all kinds of devices, like the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the Voyager. These are the chains with which we have bound ourselves, losing much of our solitude and our ability to see the world around and inside us.

Consider an airplane flight. We are soaring across the country. We listen to music. We read books and newspapers. We sleep and dream. If you are like me, you look at the cloud formations and listen to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. Maybe you talk to your neighbors.

You are free to think and to reflect on existence and on your own small role in it. You are free to have long thoughts and memories of high school and college and the first time you met your future spouse.

Then, the airplane lands. Cellphones and P.D.A.’s snap into action. Long rows of lights light up on tiny little screens. These are people we absolutely have to talk to. Voice messages pour in, telling of children who got speeding tickets, of margin calls, of jobs offered and lost. The bonds of obligation, like handcuffs, are clapped back onto our wrists, and we shuffle off to the servitude of our jobs and our mundane tasks. A circuit is completed: the passengers who were human beings a few moments earlier become part of an immense, all-engulfing machine of communication and control. Human flesh and spirit become plastic and electronic machinery.

What if we didn’t have cellphones or P.D.A.’s? We would still have duties and families and bosses, but they would not be at our heels, yipping at us constantly, barking at us to do this or that or worry about this or that. We would have some moat of time and space around ourselves. Not now.

Consider another example: Walk down the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, between Central Park South and 45th Street. Almost every man and woman is on the phone or scanning the screen of a BlackBerry. No one looks at anyone else (except me; I stare openly and voraciously). It is as if each person were in a cocoon of electrons and self-obsession and obligation. Each of these people might as well be wearing a yoke around his neck.

There is no community here — or on the streets of any other city. Beverly Hills, my home, is far worse. There, people are hermetically sealed off from one another, not taking in the air or the stupendous buildings or the sky or just the miracle of confronting the earth as it is.

Or consider our beloved young people. I see them in Beverly Hills, in Malibu, among magnificent homes, next to the mighty Pacific, walking along avenues of mansions and towering palm trees. They walk in rows of three, each on a cellphone, not even talking to the people next to her.

I keep thinking of my happiest moments of youth, walking along Sligo Creek Parkway in Silver Spring, Md., coming home from Parkside Elementary School (long ago closed) or along Dale Drive, coming home from Montgomery Blair High School. I could smell the leaves burning in the late fall, think the long thoughts that young people are supposed to have, and dream of my adult life, when I would have the love of a great woman and a Corvette. Those were moments of power.

Now, there is no thought or reverie. There is nothing but gossip and making plans to shop or watch television. The cellphone and the P.D.A. have basically replaced thought. When I was a young White House speech writer, we communed with one another and otherwise read and wrote quietly in our offices. We had mental space. No more.

I spent much of the summer in my beloved Sandpoint, Idaho, far north in the Panhandle, overlooking Lake Pend Oreille. People there still have some freedom of thought. They walk along the streets without phones. They ride in their boats and water-ski or fish without any talking over the airwaves. They talk to one another. They look up at the sky. Children line up to swing on a rope over Sand Creek and then drop into the creek. Businesspeople walk to their appointments, greeting the people they see, not talking to a small plastic box. In other words, they are connected to the glorious Bonner County sky and water and land, and, most of all, connected to their own ruminations.

WHAT would we do if cellphones and P.D.A.’s disappeared? We would be forced to think again. We would have to confront reality. My own life is spent mostly with men and women of business. I have been at this for a long time now, and what I have seen of the loss of solitude and dignity is terrifying among those who travel and work, or even who stay still and work. They are slaves to connectedness. Their work has become their indentured servitude. Their children and families are bound to the same devices, too.

But try a day without that invasion of your privacy. Or a week. You will be shocked at what you discover. It’s called life. It’s called nature. It’s called getting to know yourself. I have a close friend who is in prison. He used to be imprisoned by his P.D.A. He has many stories, but the most haunting one is about how, without his phone, without his P.D.A., he has come to know, for the first time, who he is.

Will the rest of us ever get the chance? Will we ever throw away the chains that go “ping” in our pocket? Or have we irrevocably become machines ourselves?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/bu...y/24every.html





Despite Airlines' Promises, Customers Find a Way to Make VOIP Calls on Flights
Dave Demerjian

We knew it would happen eventually, but we figured it would take longer than a week.

Just days after American Airlines made the big-deal announcement that it had rolled out in-flight internet on certain routes, hackers have found a way to use the service for voice-over-internet protocol calls, despite promises from the airline that its air-to-ground system, developed by Aircell, would block voice calls.

A tip before we go any further: Voice calls on airplanes will result in chatty passengers who yap their way through an entire six-hour flight, which is likely to increase the chance of an air-rage incident. Fly at your own risk.

The workaround, called Phweet, allows users to call friends who are linked via Twitter. Andy Abramson from VoIP Watch says that he recently used Phweet to chat with a friend on an American Airlines flight, and that the conversation was so clear he could hear the flight attendant ordering people to get back to their seats in preparation for landing.

Phweet is a shortURL link to an external directory (for now, only Twitter, though others will be added later), that enables calls between two or more profiles without sharing any additional information between the parties. Using the application to make calls at 27,000 feet is a painless three-step process:

1. Go to the Phweet homepage and log on with your Twitter name and password.
2. Add the Twitter user name of person you want to connect with, along with a message telling them want to talk. A Twitter update and Phweet URL is sent.
3. When your friend clicks on the Phweet URL and accepts, your browser whistles and a Flash widget appears. Click on it to talk.

A spokesperson from Aircell told Wired.com that the company was aware of the Phweet workaround. "At American's request, we set up various mechanisms to block voice calls. Obviously someone found a way around them." She added that although it's up to American to enforce its no-call policy during flights, Aircell is doing everything it can to address the issue.
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/08/despite-airline.html





Road Tolls Hacked

A researcher claims that toll transponders can be cloned, allowing drivers to pass for free.
Duncan Graham-Rowe

Drivers using the automated FasTrak toll system on roads and bridges in California's Bay Area could be vulnerable to fraud, according to a computer security firm in Oakland, CA.

Despite previous reassurances about the security of the system, Nate Lawson of Root Labs claims that the unique identity numbers used to identify the FasTrak wireless transponders carried in cars can be copied or overwritten with relative ease.

This means that fraudsters could clone transponders, says Lawson, by copying the ID of another driver onto their device. As a result, they could travel for free while others unwittingly foot the bill. "It's trivial to clone a device," Lawson says. "In fact, I have several clones with my own ID already."

Lawson says that this also raises the possibility of using the FasTrak system to create false alibis, by overwriting one's own ID onto another driver's device before committing a crime. The toll system's logs would appear to show the perpetrator driving at another location when the crime was being committed, he says.

So far, the security flaws have only been verified in the FasTrak system, but other toll systems, like E-Z Pass and I-Pass, need to be looked at too, argues Lawson. "Every modern system requires a public security review to be sure there aren't different but related problems," he says. Indeed, in recent weeks, researchers announced flaws in another wireless identification system: the Mifare Classic chip, which is used by commuters on transport systems in many cities, including Boston and London. However, last week, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) filed a lawsuit to prevent students at MIT from presenting an analysis of Boston's subway system.

The Bay Area Metropolitan Transport Commission (MTC), which oversees the FasTrak toll system, maintains that it is secure but says it is looking into Lawson's claims. "MTC is in contact with vendors who manufacture FasTrak lane equipment and devices to identify potential risks and corrective actions," says MTC spokesman Randy Rentschler. "We are also improving system monitoring in order to detect potentially fraudulent activity."

In the past, authorities have insisted that the FasTrak system uses encryption to secure data and that no personal details are stored on the device--just two unique, randomly assigned ID numbers. One of these is used to register the device when a customer purchases it, while the other acts as a unique identifier to let radio receivers at tolls detect cars as they pass by.

But when Lawson opened up a transponder, he found that there was no security protecting these IDs. The device uses two antennas, one to detect a request signal from the toll reader and another to transmit its ID so that it can be read, he says.

By copying the IDs of the readers, it was possible to activate the transponder to transmit its ID. This trick doesn't have to be carried out on the highway, Lawson notes, but could be achieved by walking through a parking lot and discreetly interrogating transponders.

What's more, despite previous claims that the devices are read only, Lawson found that IDs are actually stored on rewritable flash memory. "FasTrak is probably not aware of this, which is why I tried to get in touch with them," he says. It is possible to send messages to the device to overwrite someone's ID, either wiping it or replacing it with another ID, says Lawson.

"Access to a tag number does not provide the ability to access any other information," says MTC's Rentschler. "We also believe that significant effort would need to be invested in cloning tags." He adds, "If any fraudulent toll activity is detected on a customer's account, the existing toll-enforcement system can be used to identify and track down the perpetrator."

Lawson says that using each stolen ID just once would make it difficult to track down a fraudster. A better solution, he believes, would be to require toll readers and transponders to carry out some form of secure authentication. But this would require changes by MTC. As an alternative, Lawson is working on a privacy kit to let drivers turn their transponders on and off so that they are only vulnerable for a brief period as they pass a toll.

There is another way, he says. "It's probably in the user's best interest to just leave it at home." This is because FasTrak uses license-plate recognition as a backup.

Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, in the U.K., says that "very many embedded systems are totally open to tampering by anyone who can be bothered to spend some time studying them."

Competent use of encryption is the exception rather than the norm, Anderson adds, and the situation is unlikely to change soon. "One industry after another is embracing digital technology, and none of them realize that they need computer security expertise until it's too late and they get attacked," he says.

Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT, based in Mountain View, CA, says that it is too easy for companies to get away with lousy computer security. "Honestly, the best way is for the transportation companies to sue the manufacturers," he says. "Then they'll think twice about selling shoddy products in the future."
http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/21301/?a=f





Bus Firm Calls Online Car Pool Illegal Service
Tyler Hamilton

A Canadian Internet company that co-ordinates car sharing around the world could soon be shut out of Ontario if one of the province's largest chartered-bus companies gets its way.

PickupPal Online Inc. was launched less than eight months ago by two Ontario entrepreneurs who thought car sharing, if it could be made easier through the Web, was a noble way to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution.

The service is like an Internet dating service for drivers, matching up people who are going to the same place at the same time – anywhere from concerts to sporting events to corporate functions. Special mapping software helps them find the best route.

But Peterborough-based Trentway-Wagar Inc. says PickupPal is breaking the law because it helps drivers collect money by offering strangers a ride. The bus company even hired a private investigator to test out the service, posing as someone who needed a ride from Toronto to Montreal and negotiating a fee of $60 with a driver travelling from Simcoe, Ont.

Trentway lawyer Robert Warren of WeirFoulds LLP says such drivers aren't licensed to operate a vehicle for a public transportation service and, as a result, don't have to comply with expensive safety standards and insurance requirements.

"Any time anybody operates such a service and they don't have to comply with all these regulatory burdens, then it's unfair competition in my client's view," Warren said. "They do erode substantially what really is a low-margin business."

PickupPal currently has more than 100,000 registered users of its service worldwide, with about 10 per cent based in Ontario. The bus company wants PickupPal to stop its service and has asked the Ontario Highway Transport Board to make it happen. A hearing is scheduled for October.

Eric Dewhirst, co-founder and chief technology officer of PickupPal, was expecting the challenge. He said the company has not broken any laws and has no plans to back down. He said Ontario's rules for carpooling under the Public Vehicles Act are the strictest he's seen anywhere in the world, and go against the spirit of policy that encourages car sharing. This includes the creation of high-occupancy vehicle lanes on major highways.

"We're being innovative, and that's what Premier Dalton McGuinty wanted," Dewhirst said. "We're looking for someone high enough up to step in here and say, `We're going to review this, because it's just wrong.' What we're saying is let's be reasonable here."

It wouldn't be the first time the bus industry, and Trentway-Wagar, has cracked down on ride sharing in Ontario. Quebec-based carpooling company Allo Stop was taken to the Ontario transport board because of a route it ran between Montreal and Toronto. The service was banned in 2000.

"Do we just have to draw a big map around Ontario and say, sorry folks, we can't help you? That just doesn't make sense, and that's why we're going to challenge it," Dewhirst said.

PickupPal has become popular in British Columbia, parts of the United States and Australia.

People trying to get to and from work can use the service, but Dewhirst said it is targeted at people who need a one-time ride to an event and back.

It has been the official ride-share service for Edgefest and will be for the upcoming Virgin Mobile Festival in Toronto. The company is also in talks to support ride sharing to CFL games, and for employees and customers of Sears and Home Depot.

PickupPal initially earned revenues by collecting a 7 per cent commission on any fee negotiated between a driver and a rider. But in late June it stopped collecting a commission, deciding instead to earn its revenues from online advertisements.

The fact that PickupPal no longer earns a commission is irrelevant, Warren said. He said the drivers who use the service can still charge a fee, and there’s nothing stopping people from using the website to co-ordinate vanloads of people moving between Toronto and Montreal several times a day.

“Those are real dangerous operations. Those vans are not licensed, they’re not insured and don’t pass strict safety guidelines. PickupPal hasn’t picked up on the fact that their system can be abused,” he said.

Warren also took issue with PickupPal’s environmental claims. “The folks who are using the service are not stopping using their own car, they’re stopping taking the bus.”

Dewhirst said bus services such as those offered by Trentway-Wagar are essential, but they don’t go everywhere and don’t appeal to everyone. He said with gas costs skyrocketing and congestion getting worse in cities such as Toronto, people are beginning to gravitate toward car sharing as an alternative to getting around.

“And we don’t care if they exchange doughnuts to do it,” he said.
http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/482653





Best-Laid Plans: Media Beat Obama to the Punch
John Dunbar

Sen. Barack Obama's pledge to supporters that they would be the "first to know" his running mate turned out to be a savvy but unworkable communications strategy.

The Democratic presidential candidate got scooped by the media on his own announcement, done in by dogged reporting, loose-lipped party insiders and the limits of technology.

But all was not lost. He amassed a huge database of cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses for the fall campaign.

Obama's plan to use text messaging to announce his choice was a first in politics. He had promised supporters that by providing cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses they would be "part of this important moment" — the revelation of his choice for vice president.

The text message announcing Biden as Obama's pick began filtering across the U.S. at 3:02 a.m. EDT Saturday, when most people were asleep. By then, it was old news, by today's standards. The media had reported the pick more than two hours earlier.

Michael Silberman, a partner at online communications firm EchoDitto, said the campaign gambled when they made such a high-stakes promise and find themselves in a precarious situation where they could risk a great deal of trust with supporters.

"For Obama supporters, this is like finding out from your neighbor instead of your sister that she's engaged — not how you want or expect the news to be delivered," Silberman said.

The campaign won't say how many people signed up to receive the text message, nor will the small Washington, D.C., company that handled the imposing chore.

"It's a big number," said Kevin Bertram, the 37-year-old founder and CEO of Distributive Networks.

The 16-employee firm, which built the text messaging system, has higher-paying clients. According to Federal Election Commission records, it has received about $130,000 from the Obama campaign, not including August.

But no account has a higher profile, Bertram said.

"We have seen some text campaigns in the many hundreds of thousands of opt-in mobile users over the past couple years, all in the consumer products-services realm," said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. "This is the first massive effort in the political world."

He said the scale appeared similar to Olympics updates, which occur several times a day.

CTIA, the wireless industry's lobbying organization, says in the month of December alone, there were more than 48 billion text messages sent in the U.S.

The real test for Distributive Networks was speed.

"It's a pretty big challenge, because we're under a strict time constraint to get all those messages out," Bertram said.

Simultaneous delivery of millions of text messages is impossible. The messages must be routed to the carriers, which themselves may have bottlenecks.

Bertram said it took about 15 minutes for the bulk of the messages to get through the system. Meanwhile, the campaign posted the veep choice on its Web site.

The Obama campaign has worked closely with Bertram's company, asking for added features in the text messaging campaign — like the ability to text supporters based on their ZIP code, a capability that allows for targeted voter-turnout campaigns.

Once the Obama campaign composed and sent the message, it was largely an automated process. The instant the campaign pushed the button, the message text flashed on Bertram's laptop.

The CEO said he was "nervous, confident, relieved and sleepy all at once" as he watched the text message move through the system.

"Mobile marketing" is a relatively new phenomenon in politics, but one the Obama campaign has capitalized on it like no other.

People can sign up for text and e-mail updates on specific issues. They can get news on campaign appearances, receive discounts for campaign merchandise and even download Obama speech sound bites as ring tones.

It's also an effective fundraising tool. Anyone who signed up for the notification on the campaign Web site was taken to a page where they could make a contribution.

Overall traffic on Obama's Web site hit an all-time high Saturday. The Obama campaign said more than 48,000 people watched the live stream of Obama and Biden's first joint appearance from their Web site. By about mid-afternoon, more than $1.8 million had been contributed online.

Messages can also act as a call to action, encouraging people to call their friends and encourage them to vote or donate to the campaign. The list of cell numbers is similar to campaign snail-mailing lists, but more personal and more valuable.

Of course there is a potential for burnout. Recipients, who pay to receive texts, will not tolerate spam.

"We don't send a message to anyone who hasn't initiated contact with the campaign and opted in," Bertram said. "You have to have a very light touch. If you send someone 10 messages a day, they are just going to say, 'Stop.'"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080823/...e2v.tsh2O WIB





New Media Stream Into an Old Tradition
Katharine Q. Seelye

The musician Will.I.Am, who produced the hit video “Yes We Can” for Barack Obama, calls the Democratic gathering here the first “batonical” convention.

That’s not botanical, as in gardens, but batonical, as in baton and the passing of: The Democratic National Convention is the first in which people are passing on enormous amounts of information to friends, who are in turn passing it to more friends, mostly by way of YouTube, the superhighway’s video conveyer belt, which didn’t exist during the 2004 convention.

Will.I.Am, who is a rapper with the Black-Eyed Peas, made his observations about the new media during a panel discussion today not far from the Pepsi Center, which is a showcase for how the new media is mixing with — and altering — old politics in an age of declining attention from the big television networks. It also shows how the new media can help the party reach audiences unfiltered by the old media.

This convention was ushered in with a text message last weekend to millions of Obama supporters telling them that Mr. Obama had picked Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., as his running mate. It will close with a giant phone bank at Invesco Field, where 75,000 people will be asked to use their cell phones to call potential supporters. In the process, the campaign will be capturing the phone numbers of tens of thousands of people sitting in the stands who have not yet become part of Obama Nation.

The convention has jazzed up its communications in several ways, all because of advances in technology that are expanding the audience way beyond the reach of television and newspapers.

For one thing, it has added an online component to its popular in-house studio, a glassy, cluttered, jam-packed hub just off the convention floor where elected officials can hook up with their local radio hosts or television anchors back home. Both parties have had something similar in the past, but this year, the Democrats’ nerve center, called Studio’08, features computers with Wi-Fi so that pols can also do online chats with their constituents.

“This is a one-stop shop,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said cheerily as she prepared for a satellite television interview. “I can do talk radio here, I can do satellite feeds, I can do on-line stuff, I can do actualities. It’s very convenient. It makes it simple to talk to people at home — and it’s a great way to get around those nasty ads. People can actually get real information if they just take a little energy and click a few times.”

With its steady stream of politicians on the airwaves and online, Studio’08 also helps the Obama campaign counter the heavy media presence of surrogates for Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. So far, Studio’08 has transmitted more than 200 satellite interviews to 90 media markets.

Also new this year is a Web site www.demconvention.com that shows the first live high-definition streaming of gavel-to-gavel convention proceedings, using the same new Microsoft platform that made its debut at the Olympics. The site offers a complete Spanish-language simulcast, for the first time.

The site features its first daily convention Web cast, which previews that night’s program and serves up convention tidbits — snippets of Michelle Obama’s video in advance, for example — and includes “by the numbers” tallies, like the gallons of coffee made and miles of cable laid.

Speaking of numbers, the log of credentialed bloggers this year has more than tripled, to 120 from 35 in 2004, the first year they were allowed in.

And bloggers now have a rotating position on the podium, just as print and television reporters have. The convention has also created a state blogger corps, giving credentials to one blogger from each state, a system that has irked many who felt it unnecessarily limited their number.

But Google, DailyKos and others are sponsoring a “Big Tent” within a short walk of the Pepsi grounds where hundreds of bloggers are sitting shoulder to shoulder at long tables and pounding on their keyboards and taking video of each other most of the day and night. It cost them $100 for a space for the week. It’s air-conditioned and does not involve security lines: the only line is for media types who are not blogging but coming in for a look. They have to sign in at a table marked “Traditional Media,” not the most welcome group in bloggerland.

Typical of the material being sent back home are postings (“Live from Denver!”) by Brian Rothenberg on ProgressOhio.

“Through the use of state-of-the-art Internet and cell-phone technology,” his promo says, “Brian is providing live interviews with Ohio delegates and party officials which we are posting on our website for you to see and get an insiders’ view of the convention not provided by the TV hosts, newspapers or other blogs.”

The convention also has its own blogging team. The 2004 convention had a blogger too; the difference this year is that there is a team and it also posts lots of videos (remember — YouTube did not exist four years ago).

All of this is backed by a huge online communications team that includes dozens of volunteers. On Monday night, they used several cameras to record Ms. Obama’s speech, said Chris Hughes, 24, a co-founder of Facebook who has brought his social-networking skills to the Obama campaign and is now its director of online organizing.

They put her speech up on YouTube in two or three hours and sent it out by e-mail early the next morning to millions of Obama supporters. The hope was that many of them would forward the speech to other friends.

“We weren’t just pushing information out, but getting people to post it to their profiles,” Mr. Hughes said during an interview in the convention hall. He said that major speeches like hers can become extremely popular, as did the race speech that Mr. Obama delivered in Philadelphia in the spring. That 35-minute-long speech remains the most-watched video of the Obama campaign on YouTube.

“It’s not just YouTube, but all these networks make it easier for people to share information, and video is probably the best medium for that,” Mr. Hughes said. “This is all so integral to fundraising and organizing. Having good video has made a difference, and so has having the resources of Facebook and MySpace and MyBarackObama too. Half the delegates here have MyBO accounts.”

This is the kind of activity that Will.I.Am meant when he talked about batoning. At the panel discussion, which was sponsored by the Huffington Post, he searched for a metaphor to describe the differences between what he said was the passive, old media and the engaged new media.

“You watch old media on the couch,” he said. “This new media is horse material. You travel and you tell people and it’s like Paul Revere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/us...eb-seelye.html





38 Million View Obama’s Speech; Highest-Rated Convention In History
Brian Stelter

Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday as an estimated 38 million viewers watched on television, setting a new record for convention viewership, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Mr. Obama’s speech — a historic one given his status as the first African American nominee of a major political party — reached significantly more viewers than the comparable addresses in 2004. Coverage of John Kerry’s acceptance speech in 2004 had 24.4 million viewers; coverage of George W. Bush’s convention speech that same year drew 27.5 million.

The audience estimate of 38.3 million means that Mr. Obama’s speech reached more viewers than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year, the Associated Press notes.

Furthermore, the four-night Democratic convention ranks as the most-watched convention of either party, Democratic or Republican, since Nielsen began measuring conventions in 1960.

The four nights of “common coverage” by networks — 10 to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday — were viewed by an average of 22.4 million households, Nielsen said Friday. Previously, the highest-rated Democratic convention occurred in 1980 with 20.5 million households watching, and the highest-rated Republican convention occurred in 1976 with 21.9 million households watching.

Comparisons to previous conventions must include a number of important caveats. For one thing, until the 1980s conventions were shown on just three networks, and they were covered in greater length than they are now. This year’s conventions are being shown on at least ten TV channels. Additionally, consumers have the option to record the convention and play it back later using a digital video recorder, and those viewers won’t be counted for weeks. Perhaps most significantly, this convention is being streamed online on a number of different Web sites, and the Internet audience will be hard, if not impossible, to measure.

By any measurement, this convention was a popular one among viewers. Early ratings from Nielsen — subject to revision later in the day — suggested that CNN had reached a milestone on Thursday, with more than 8 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour, more than any of the broadcast networks. If confirmed by Nielsen this afternoon, the ratings would represent CNN’s first time topping the broadcast networks. (Fox News Channel defeated the broadcasters during the Republican convention in 2004.)

The 38 million figure from Nielsen includes the audience on ten networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. It does not include PBS or C-SPAN, which also carried the address live. PBS estimated that it averaged 3.5 million viewers between 8 and 11 p.m.
http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...obamas-speech/





Cable, Quietly, Introduces an Anytime Elections Channel
Stephanie Clifford

THE cable industry, aiming to prevent Internet companies like Yahoo and YouTube from snatching away its ad revenue, has introduced an experimental political channel that gives advertisers a uniform way to buy time and measure the number of people watching.

The channel, called Elections ’08 On Demand, lets people watch videos whenever they want, much the way they can on YouTube or the Web sites of television networks. Depending on where they live, people can tune into the channel to see an infomercial for Barack Obama, coverage of the Democratic National Convention, or historical clips like Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy” ad.

So far the nascent channel offers only about eight hours of programming. But the participating cable companies, many of which joined a consortium this year called Canoe Ventures, say this effort shows that they can work together well. Canoe Ventures is trying to make cable television a more attractive place for advertisers; Elections ’08 is the first product it has worked on.

The channel is available in 32 million households, primarily the ones served by the six partners of Canoe Ventures: Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks. Most subscribers probably have not noticed it, because it is not particularly easy to find: On Time Warner, for example, it is Channel 1279; on Cablevision, Channel 500.

Though Elections ’08 has been available since January, only 500,000 segments have been viewed, said David Porter, vice president for marketing and new media at the Cox Media division of Cox Communications. And that is even after all the local markets of the participating cable companies pledged to run at least 100 spots a week promoting it.

“What we’ve accomplished with Elections ’08 may not feel and sound like a huge success story to the layperson, but behind the curtain, we’ve laid the foundation for the cable operators working together in an unprecedented manner,” Mr. Porter said. “Trends now are causing us to stop and look at these individual cable operators to say, ‘How can we compete in the world of the Internet?’ ”



Canoe Ventures aims to make cable a more desirable place for advertisers by standardizing the way ads are bought and measured, and the way that technology is used. It is also working on longer-term projects, like placing ads in on-demand content, asking viewers to vote or answer polling questions with their remote controls, and aiming television ads to specific households.

Some media professors said that while this effort represented a step forward for the cable industry, it lagged behind the Web portals and TV networks that have already made plenty of similar — and better — content available online.

“If you are a high interest voter or an activist, you can find everything on YouTube, and it’s very simple to do,” said Tobe Berkovitz, the associate dean of the college of communication at Boston University. He adds that Mr. Obama’s campaign in particular has been active in driving young voters to its Web site.

Neither traffic nor advertising on the election channel has been particularly strong. Mr. Obama is the first major candidate to buy time on it, but only in 15 states; his seven-minute segment is running Aug. 18 through Sept. 3.

Other than Mr. Obama, only a handful of local politicians — and the Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who is promoting wind energy — have bought ad time. Mr. Porter of Cox said he expected more interest as Election Day neared, adding that the sales team for the channel was trying to get Senator John McCain to advertise.

The pitch to politicians is that they can have a longer time to talk to voters than during the standard 30-second TV spot. With the On Demand feature, the voters, in turn, can choose to watch the messages at their own convenience and on a big screen.

Bill Perkins, who is handling media buying for Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. of Indiana, the Republican incumbent, spent $10,000 for 30-minute segments to appear on the election channel in September and October in the Chicago market, which covers a few Indiana counties. “It’s an interesting experiment,” he said.

“One of the discussions was, ‘Why don’t we put it on the Web site and let people look at it up there?’ ” said Mr. Perkins, of the firm Perkins Nichols Media in Indianapolis. “It’s not quite the same environment looking at your home computer as it is looking at a 50-inch screen.”

Mr. Porter of Cox emphasized that the medium was new and still in the trial-and-error phase. “It certainly is not mainstream and part of every candidate’s media plan yet,” he said. “To the extent they’ve participated, it’s still to try to learn and test.”

While the cable companies’ coordination on Elections ’08 may represent a technological innovation, Internet companies are far faster at reaching audiences with new messages.

For example, while Mr. Obama’s campaign Web site had videos from the Sunday night opening of the Democratic National Convention available within hours, Mr. Porter said many of the cable operators would take a week to put convention coverage on Elections ’08 because of technical constraints.

“That’s one of the hurdles that we expect to improve upon,” Mr. Porter said, adding that the consortium was hoping to have segments from the Republican National Convention up more quickly.

The most polished pieces on Elections ’08 are short documentaries produced by the History Channel. One tells of how Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party run in 1912 earned his party the nickname “Bull Moose”; another spotlights the well-known tank ride by Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. There are items about Richard M. Nixon’s Checkers speech, John F. Kennedy’s speech on Catholicism in politics, and Lloyd Bentsen’s line to Dan Quayle in a 1988 vice-presidential debate: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Some of the other content, though, seems to have lower production values. There are six short voter-education segments on topics like absentee voting, reminiscent of the videos shown to jury pools. The Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network has contributed clips on issues affecting Latino voters; other content offers a sort of telenovela that stars Rosario Dawson and Wilmer Valderrama as a couple sparring over voter registration.



So far it looks doubtful that the Canoe Ventures channel will take off the way YouTube has, for example.

“In terms of this being any sort of persuasive tool, I don’t think it will have any impact, for the simple reason that people will have to self-select to watch the show,” said Ken Goldstein, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. People who are already interested in Mr. Obama might like to see more of him, but people who are apathetic about politics are unlikely to tune in, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/bu...ia/29adco.html





YouTube Praises Dismissal of Copyright Suit Against Veoh
Miguel Helft

Added comments from Viacom and additional background.

A federal court in California late Wednesday threw out a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the IO Group, an adult entertainment company, against Internet video sharing site Veoh Networks, saying that Veoh was protected by the safe harbor provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

IO Group, whose videos had been uploaded without permission to Veoh, had claimed that company was guilty of copyright infringement. But Veoh said it took great pains to prevent infringement and the court agreed.

“Far from encouraging copyright infringement, Veoh has a strong DMCA policy, takes active steps to limit incidents of infringement on its website and works diligently to keep unauthorized works off its site,” Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd, of the U.S. District Court in San Jose, wrote in the decision.

The case has similarities with Viacom’s $1 billion suit against Google and its YouTube unit. While the ruling will not serve as binding legal precedent because the Viacom-Google case will be decided in federal district court in New York, it may prove influential.

Google wasted no time in praising the decision.

“It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights,” Zahavah Levine, YouTube’s chief counsel, said in a statement.

Viacom could not immediately be reached for comment.

But in a statement, Viacom said the ruling did not weaken its case against Google: “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners. Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement – conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.”

Nonetheless, legal experts said that YouTube was right to feel encouraged by the decision.

“The reason that this case is such good news for YouTube and other service providers, is that the court recognizes it is impossible to eliminate infringement and that Veoh should be recognized for the hard work they are doing,” said Eric Goldman, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of its High Tech Law Institute.

Judge Lloyd cautioned that “the decision rendered here is confined to the particular combination of facts in this case and is not intended to push the bounds of the safe harbor so wide that less scrupulous service providers may claim its protection.”

You can expect that the Viacom lawyers will argue that the facts in its case against YouTube are very different from those in IO Group v. Veoh Networks.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...eoh/index.html





Joe Biden's Pro-RIAA, Pro-FBI Tech Voting Record
Declan McCullagh

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.

Copyright
But back to the Delaware senator's tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.

A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are here.)

Now, it's true that few Americans will cast their votes in November based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law. But these pro-copyright views don't exactly jibe with what Obama has promised; he's pledged to "update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated." These are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach.

Unfortunately, Biden has steadfastly refused to answer questions on the topic. We asked him 10 tech-related questions, including whether he'd support rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as part of our 2008 Technology Voters' guide. Biden would not answer (we did hear back from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Ron Paul).

In our 2006 Technology Voters' Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.

Privacy, the FBI, and PGP
On privacy, Biden's record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was "persuaded" to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language:

It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.

Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden's bill as representing the FBI's visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency's parallel, but less visible efforts. (Biden was no foe of the NSA. He once described now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the "single most competent man in the government.")

Biden's bill -- and the threat of encryption being outlawed -- is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who's now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden's legislation "that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups."

While neither of Biden's pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI's pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed -- and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI's legislative proposal later that decade
for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)

"Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation" in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers.

CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA's attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush's administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: "Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime."

There's another reason why Biden's legislative tactics in the CALEA scrum amount to more than a mere a footnote in Internet history. They're what led to the creation of the Center for Democracy and Technology -- and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's simultaneous implosion and soul-searching.

EFF staffers Jerry Berman and Danny Weitzner chose to work with Biden on cutting a deal and altering the bill in hopes of obtaining privacy concessions. It may have helped, but it also left the EFF in the uncomfortable position of leaving its imprimatur on Biden's FBI-backed wiretapping law universally loathed by privacy advocates. The debacle ended with internal turmoil, Berman and Weitzner leaving the group and taking their corporate backers to form CDT, and a chastened EFF that quietly packed its bags and moved to its current home in San Francisco. (Weitzner, who was responsible for a censorship controversy last year, became a formal Obama campaign surrogate.)

"Anti-terror" legislation
The next year, months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of "terrorism" that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode "constitutional and statutory due process protections" and would "authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations."

Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill," he said when the Patriot Act was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as "the Democratic Party's de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism."

Biden's chronology is not accurate: the bombing took place in April 1995 and his bill had been introduced in February 1995. But it's true that Biden's proposal probably helped to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration's Patriot Act.

In 1996, Biden voted to keep intact an ostensibly anti-illegal immigration bill that outlined what the Real ID Act would become almost a decade later. The bill would create a national worker identification registry; Biden voted to kill an Abraham-Feingold amendment that would have replaced the registry with stronger enforcement. According to an analysis by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the underlying bill would have required "states to place Social Security numbers on drivers licenses and to obtain fingerprints or some other form of biometric identification for licenses."

Along with most of his colleagues in the Congress -- including Sen. John McCain but not Rep. Ron Paul -- Biden voted for the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act (which was part of a larger spending bill). Obama voted for the bill containing the Real ID Act, but wasn't in the U.S. Senate in 2001 when the original Patriot Act vote took place.

Patriot Act
In the Senate debate over the Patriot Act in October 2001, Biden once again allied himself closely with the FBI. The Justice Department favorably quotes Biden on its Web site as saying: "The FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What's good for the mob should be good for terrorists."

The problem is that Biden's claim was simply false -- which he should have known after a decade of experience lending his name to wiretapping bills on behalf of the FBI. As CDT explains in a rebuttal to Biden: "The Justice Department had the ability to use wiretaps, including roving taps, in criminal investigations of terrorism, just as in other criminal investigations, long before the Patriot Act."

But Biden's views had become markedly less FBI-friendly by April 2007, six years later. By then, the debate over wiretapping had become sharply partisan, pitting Democrats seeking to embarrass President Bush against Republicans aiming to defend the administration at nearly any cost. In addition, Biden had announced his presidential candidacy three months earlier and was courting liberal activists dismayed by the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping.

That month, Biden slammed the "president's illegal wiretapping program that allows intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans without a judge's approval or congressional authorization or oversight." He took aim at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allowing the FBI to "flagrantly misuse National Security Letters" -- even though it was the Patriot Act that greatly expanded their use without also expanding internal safeguards and oversight as well.

Biden did vote against a FISA bill with retroactive immunity for any telecommunications provider that illegally opened its network to the National Security Agency; Obama didn't. Both agreed to renew the Patriot Act in March 2006, a move that pro-privacy Democrats including Ron Wyden and Russ Feingold opposed. The ACLU said the renewal "fails to correct the most flawed provisions" of the original Patriot Act. (Biden does do well on the ACLU's congressional scorecard.)

"Baby-food bombs"
The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor bomb-making information on the Internet. One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb-making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

"I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked if they knew what kind of bone-chilling information is making its way over the Internet," he told the Senate. "You can access detailed, explicit instructions on how to make and detonate pipe bombs, light-bulb bombs, and even -- if you can believe it -- baby-food bombs."

Biden didn't get exactly what he wanted -- at least not right away. His proposal was swapped in the final law for one requiring the attorney general to investigate "the extent to which the First Amendment protects such material and its private and commercial distribution." The report was duly produced, concluding that the proposal "can withstand constitutional muster in most, if not all, of its possible applications, if such legislation is slightly modified."

It was. Biden and co-sponsor Dianne Feinstein introduced their bill again the following year. Biden pitched it as an anti-terror measure, saying in a floor debate that numerous terrorists "have been found in possession of bomb-making manuals and Internet bomb-making information." He added: "What is even worse is that some of these instructions are geared toward kids. They tell kids that all the ingredients they need are right in their parents' kitchen or laundry cabinets."

Biden's proposal became law in 1997. It didn't amount to much: four years after its enactment, there had been only one conviction. And instead of being used to snare a dangerous member of Al Qaeda, the law was used to lock up a 20-year old anarchist Webmaster who was sentenced to one year in prison for posting information about Molotov cocktails and "Drano bombs" on his Web site, Raisethefist.com.

Today there are over 10,000 hits on Google for the phrase, in quotes, "Drano bomb." One is a video that lists the necessary ingredients and shows some self-described rednecks blowing up small plastic bottles in their yard. Then there's the U.S. Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook with instructions on making far more deadly compounds, including methyl nitrate dynamite, mortars, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive -- which free speech activists placed online as an in-your-face response to the Biden-Feinstein bill.

Peer-to-peer networks
Since then, Biden has switched from complaining about Internet baby-food bombs to taking aim at peer-to-peer networks. He held one Foreign Relations committee hearing in February 2002 titled "Theft of American Intellectual Property" and invited executives from the Justice Department, RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft to speak. Not one Internet company, P2P network, or consumer group was invited to testify.

Afterwards, Sharman Networks (which distributes Kazaa) wrote a letter to Biden complaining about "one-sided and unsubstantiated attacks" on P2P networks. It said: "We are deeply offended by the gratuitous accusations made against Kazaa by witnesses before the committee, including ludicrous attempts to associate an extremely beneficial, next-generation software program with organized criminal gangs and even terrorist organizations."

Biden returned to the business of targeting P2P networks this year. In April, he proposed spending $1 billion in U.S. tax dollars so police can monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity. He made that suggestion after a Wyoming cop demonstrated a proof-of-concept program called "Operation Fairplay" at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

A month later, the Senate Judiciary committee approved a Biden-sponsored bill that would spend over $1 billion on policing illegal Internet activity, mostly child pornography. It has the dubious virtue of being at least partially redundant: One section would "prohibit the broadcast of live images of child abuse," even though the Justice Department has experienced no problems in securing guilty pleas for underage Webcamming. (The bill has not been voted on by the full Senate.)

Online sales of Robitussin
Around the same time, Biden introduced his self-described Biden Crime Bill of 2007. One section expands electronic surveillance law to permit police wiretaps in "crimes dangerous to the life, limb, and well-being of minor children." Another takes aim at Internet-based telemedicine and online pharmacies, saying that physicians must have conducted "at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient" to prescribe medicine.

Another prohibits selling a product containing dextromethorphan -- including Robitussin, Sucrets, Dayquil, and Vicks -- "to an individual under the age of 18 years, including any such sale using the Internet." It gives the Justice Department six months to come up with regulations, which include when retailers should be fined for shipping cough suppressants to children. (Biden is a longtime drug warrior; he authored the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act that the Bush administration used to shut down benefit concerts.)

Net neutrality
On Net neutrality, Biden has sounded skeptical. In 2006, he indicated that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that "the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House." Obama, on the other hand, has been a strong supporter of handing pre-emptive regulatory authority to the Federal Communications Commission.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cnet/2008082...57831002416338





RIAA, MPAA Converging on Political Conventions
David Kravets

When the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America aren't suing individuals and websites for copyright infringement, they're lobbying.

The two groups are making the rounds in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, where they're likely pushing proposed legislation that would create a cabinet-level copyright czar. Officials from the RIAA and MPAA plan on hitting the Republican convention next week in Minnesota, where they would likely be pushing proposed legislation that would create a copyright czar.

In the age of political correctness, the groups prefer not to use the derogatory term -- "lobbying."

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said RIAA president Cary Sherman and others from the recording industry are in Denver "to be relevant to the political process. We'll be in Minnesota next week."

Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA, was equally cryptic. Dan Glickman, the association's chairman and former congressman, is there "reconnecting with old friends," she said.

"Obviously," Martinez added, "he's there as a representative of the motion picture industry."

The RIAA, MPAA and others are hosting a fundraiser party at the convention on Wednesday for the One Campaign to fight world poverty.

Here's a news tip: As part of the love fest where change is being promised, the Democrats will nominate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as the party's presidential candidate. You read it here first.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...paa-conve.html





Got a Pirated Copy of XP? Expect to be Nagged

When Windows Vista was first introduced, it came with a powerful defense against pirating. In fact, it was so powerful that paying customers complained when it malfunctioned, and Microsoft wound up making some big changes.

Unless Vista was properly activated, it would drop into "reduced functionality mode", in which the only thing you could do with it was access the Internet in order to complete online activation -- or buy a valid product key.

In Service Pack 1, the behavior was changed so that the operating system would still operate, but the background turned black and nagging boxes warned you that you "might be a victim of software piracy".

Now, Microsoft is going to bring this "feature" to Windows XP Professional with a new version of the Windows Genuine Advantage. From the WGA blog:

With this update to WGA Notifications in Windows XP, we've implemented a couple of related features that draw on the notifications experience we designed for Windows Vista SP1. After installing this version of WGA Notifications on a copy of Windows XP that fails the validation, most users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously (see below).

The desktop background can be reset to anything else in the usual ways, but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background. This will continue to happen until that copy of Windows is genuine.

Also, the user will see the addition of what we call the "persistent desktop notification." This notification is similar to a watermark but works a bit differently. The image appears over the system tray and is non-interactive in the sense that you can't click on it or do anything to it.

This update will come only to XP Pro users, since Microsoft says that's the most-pirated version of XP. If you use XP Home or Media Center Edition, you won't get this new release of WGA. It will take several months before all XP Pro users have the new WGA.

Blog author Alex Kochis claims this is something XP users actually want:

. . . Our research has clearly shown that customers value the ability of Windows to alert them when they may have software that is not genuine, but they also want the ability to stay up to date with the least effort required on their part. . . .

OK, Alex, if you say so . . .

While I don't think users of activated, valid copies of XP Pro will care much about this, it could become an issue if WGA malfunctions, as it has in the past. If Microsoft's WGA servers mistakenly report a valid copy as being not genuine, XP Pro users aren't likely to "value" this feature all that much.
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/arch...be_nagged.html





10 Most Pirated TV-Shows on BitTorrent
Ernesto

TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?

There’s only one week to go before the new TV season starts, but here is one of the latest summer charts. Stargate Atlantis is leading the chart this week.

The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

TV-shows such as “Lost” and “Heroes” can get up to 10 million downloads per episode, in only a week.

Top Downloads August 17 - August 24Ranking (last week) TV-show

1 (6) Stargate Atlantis
2 (2) Weeds
3 (1) Olympics 2008 Opening Ceremony
4 (3) Eureka
5 (4) Generation Kill
6 (5) Burn Notice
7 (7) Fifth Gear
8 (9) Psych
9 (8) Mad Men
10 (new) Project Runway

http://torrentfreak.com/10-most-pira...orrent-080826/







New Pirate Site

http://www.p2p.releasepirate.com/




Florida Man Sentenced for Video Game Piracy

15 months in prison, US$415,900 fine
GamePro staff

A Florida man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay US$415,900 in restitution for selling video game systems that were preloaded with more than 75 pirated copies of games, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Kifah Maswadi, age 24, of Oakland, Florida, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He pleaded guilty on June 3 to one count of criminal copyright infringement after he was indicted Jan. 24, the DOJ said.

Maswadi sold Power Player handheld game consoles that contained pirated copies of at least 76 video games, most of them games by Nintendo and its licensees, the agency said.

Through a Web site, Maswadi sold the game consoles from 2006 to 2007 in Virginia and elsewhere, the DOJ said. His profits exceeded $390,000.

In addition to the prison term and restitution, a judge ordered Maswadi to serve three years of supervised release and to perform 50 hours of community service, which includes educating the public on the perils of criminal copyright infringement.
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/inde...;4;fpid;802453





Judge Restricts Online Reporting of Case
Edward Gay and NZPA

A judge has today taken the unprecedented step of banning news websites from naming two men charged with murder while allowing newspapers, radio stations and TV networks to reveal who they are.

Judge David Harvey said online media could not use the names, or publish images of the accused, to prevent the public searching for the information when the case comes to trial.

He said he was "concerned about someone Googling someone's name and being able to access it later".

He was also "concerned about the viral effect of digital publication".

Judge Harvey ruled in Manukau District Court that it was OK to report the names and publish the images in print tomorrow or on tonight's 6pm television news but not on news websites.

To find out who the men are you can buy tomorrow's New Zealand Herald.

Lawyers for nzherald.co.nz are studying the ruling today.

Two unemployed men, aged 21 and 23, were yesterday arrested and appeared in the court today facing charges of murdering 14-year-old John Hapeta, assault with intent to rob and possessing a pistol for the commission of a crime.

They were remanded in custody to reappear in Manukau District court on Friday.

A 15-year-old boy had also been arrested and charged with being a party to assault with intent to rob and also appeared in Manukau Youth Court today.

He will reappear in Manukau Youth Court on Friday.

University of Canterbury media law expert associate professor Ursula Cheer said she is not aware of a suppression order like this before.

"This is hugely different because it's taking out a large block of people but not everybody, because the norm is to try and cover all media," Dr Cheer said.

She said it could reflect the judge's view that new media is taking over "old media" in terms of reader numbers.

"Suppression orders are usually intended to make sure a significant number of people don't get to see certain information and he could be saying: I think those who might be wanting to rush to the internet might be out-numbering the others now, it's just a guess," Dr Cheer said.

"On the other hand it does look absurd in a way. Why bother to take it off the internet? Once it's out, it's out," she said.

Media law commentator Steven Price said he had never heard of a suppression order which applied to some media types and not others.

He would not comment further until he saw Judge Harvey's judgement.

Judge Harvey teaches the Law and Information Technology course at the University of Auckland. The course looks at the way technology impacts on evidence, jurisdiction and freedom of information.

Judge Harvey has also written a textbook on the internet and law called internet.law.nz.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/...ectid=10528866





The Dangers Of Citizen Journalism
Greg Hollingsworth

By now I’m sure many of you have heard the story about citizen journalist Brian Conley being detained in Beijing while documenting pro-Tibetan protests during the Olympic Games. While I do not personally know Brian (having exchanged only a few messages with him on Twitter), my good friend Dan Patterson knows Brian quite well, and has done a lot to make sure that people know about this situation. Brian is well known in most social media circles and his work has gained him the utmost respect in the new media community.

Alive In Baghdad

Brian was detained on Tuesday morning while filming a pro-Tibetan rally featuring electronic art by Brooklyn, NY artist James Powderly. His friend Jeffrey Rae (a photographer from New York City) and 5 other American protesters were arrested and taken in to custody about 20 seconds into the rally. No official statements have been made by the Chinese government regarding the arrest of Conley and the others, although there is much speculation that Conley was a target due to the use of his video by several pro-Tibetan websites.

Now that you’ve been caught up, I’m going to get to the point of my column. Brian is a shining example of the true possibilities that new media put at our feet. He has dedicated his life to shedding light on the plight of normal people in places like Iraq and Mexico. His passion for using the tools of new media to raise our understanding of the true effects of war, poverty, hunger, etc… is representative of the true potential of new media. New media puts the tools of the powerful into the hands of ordinary people, people who have to choose how they want to use them. Most of us new media lovers look at these tools as a way to make more money, Brian decided to use it to raise our awareness, and for that we should all thank him.

However, the decision that Brian made has put him in danger, on more than one occasion, and will continue to put him in harm’s way. I think that quite often this is the part of citizen journalism that most of us tend to overlook, because most of us would never dream of making the kind of commitment to journalism that Brian has made. While new media is increasingly being used by mainstream media outlets, the people that MSNBC, CNN, etc… send in to more dangerous areas are credentialed reporters. Citizen journalists like Brian don’t have the protection of major media outlets. They may have the protection of the American government, but they don’t have the permission of host governments to be where they are going, thus creating situations like this.

Citizen journalism is in many ways the ultimate goal of new media, of resting control of our information from large media corporations and putting information back into the hands of the people. A situation like this also presents those of us in the new media community with a chance to do something with our new-found community power, spread awareness. This development has already warranted comment by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and was covered by the New York Times, but it hasn’t even made it to the front page of digg.

I can’t say that I have what I would consider a long reach, but I’m doing what I can, between tweeting, plurking, sharing and this column I’m doing my best. Chris Brogan is talking about it on his blog, the Push My Follow Podcast did a show last night talking about it, and I hope that anyone who reads this will go out and do something to cast a little more light on this situation.

UPDATE: It seems that Brian was released and will be returning from China as of this morning.
http://howtosplitanatom.com/columnis...en-journalism/





Bristol Palin Pregnancy: Is VP Sarah Palin’s 5th Child Really Her Daughter’s? Fake Blogs Appear.
John C Dvorak

This is going to dominate the news this weekend. Generally a smear tactic does not go in this direction. The key elements are that there are few pics of Sarah pregnant and her daughter was out of school for an extended period with mono.

Obviously all we need is the birth certificate, a doctor, someone to confirm or deny the story. This could backfire or result in a McCain error in judgment. If you wanted to be a conspiracy theorist you could argue that this story was actually planted by Republicans to be proven false to cast aspersions on the Dems for being heartless since this poor woman is raising a baby with Down’s syndrome and now they are claiming it is not hers. Bastards!

We’ll see how it unfolds. It will be fun to watch either way.

Quote:
Now being upfront, we have no idea if this story is true but sources say it’s correct. But Media Takeout is reporting that McCain’s vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, is said to have pretended her fifth child, Trig Palin, was hers… when actually the baby belonged to her teenage daughter, Bristol Palin.

UPDATE: Further research discovers a slew of fake blogs linking to a phony video linked in China! Here is the current list of fake WP Blogs with posts obviously designed to create a Google bomb. The plot thickens. Something is indeed being orchestrated. Seems amateurish.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=22614





Egyptian Blogger Rearrested After Release Order
AFP

An Egyptian blogger held a month ago and issued with a release order this week has been rearrested, rights groups said on Saturday.

Media student Mohammed Refaat "is being held under the hateful emergency law," the Arabic Network for Human Rights and the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre said in a statement.

Refaat, who runs the blog "Matabbat" (Speedbumps), was first detained on July 21 after police raided his home and confiscated his computer, the groups said.

"He was accused of offending state institutions, destabilising public security and inciting demonstrations and strikes via the Internet," the groups said.

"State Security decided to release him on August 17... but an order to arrest him was issued under the state emergency law," they added.

On his website, Refaat describes himself as an "Egyptian Muslim who dreams of seeing my nation free, and I'm working on my dream through media."

Police have arrested several bloggers in recent months, in an indication of their growing political importance in Egypt.

Despite the Internet explosion, the cyber realm remains largely the preserve of the young and educated in a country where 40 percent of the population of 80 million people cannot read.

With little access to live and independent Egyptian reporting, blogs and "real time" social networking sites such as Twitter provide regular but unverified updates on events.

The state of emergency was imposed in 1981 after the assassination by Islamists of president Anwar Sadat, and has been repeatedly renewed since then despite protests from rights groups and regime opponents.

It has been widely criticised for granting security forces sweeping powers of arrest and restricting non-government political activity.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...cedxsRkp3zlQ7A





Blogger Arrested Over Leak of Guns N' Roses Songs
AP

A blogger suspected of streaming songs from the unreleased Guns N' Roses album ''Chinese Democracy'' on his Web site was arrested Wednesday and appeared in court, where his bail was set at $10,000.

FBI agents arrested 27-year-old Kevin Cogill on Wednesday morning on suspicion of violating federal copyright laws. Cogill appeared in court in the afternoon in a T-shirt.

Federal authorities say Cogill posted nine unreleased Guns N' Roses songs on his Web site in June. The songs were later removed.

According to an arrest affidavit, Cogill admitted to agents that he posted the songs on his Web site. The magistrate judge did not impose any special Internet use restrictions on Cogill, who's expected back in court Sept. 17.

''Chinese Democracy'' is a much anticipated -- and repeatedly delayed -- new album by Guns N' Roses that is more than 10 years in the making.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...-Arrested.html





Turkish Court Lifts YouTube Ban after Online Censorship Protest
Robert Tait

A court in Turkey has lifted a ban on YouTube, the video sharing website, after hundreds of sites voluntarily blocked themselves in protest at growing internet censorship.

Access to YouTube had been blocked since May in the latest of a series of bans triggered by the posting of videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state.

Two previous bans have also been lifted but the latest decision comes after 412 web and blog sites, including the Turkish-English dictionary site, zargan.com, participated last week in an online protest.

They shut themselves temporarily after campaigners revealed that 853 websites in Turkey had been blocked as a result of court orders. Organisers said many of the orders were arbitrary and risked creating a climate of rising censorship.

Users clicking on to many of the protesting sites' web pages were greeted by a message reading: "The access to this site is denied by its own decision." This was a reference to the official message greeting those trying to access banned websites, which reads: "The access to this website is prevented by court order."

The bans on YouTube and other sites have hurt Turkey's image at a time when its restrictions on free speech are under scrutiny owing to its EU membership bid.

Websites can be blocked under Article 5651 of the Turkish penal code for a range of offences including insulting Atatürk, child pornography and encouraging suicide.

Turkey first banned YouTube in March last year after Greek users posted videos alleging that Atatürk was homosexual.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008...turkey.youtube





Sheboygan Women Files Landmark Case Over Web Links
John Diedrich

Can a city stop people from posting a link to its Web site?

That’s the question at the center of a federal lawsuit brought by a Sheboygan woman against the mayor and other officials there, in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, according to an Internet law expert.

Jennifer Reisinger says the Sheboygan city attorney ordered her to remove from her Web site a link to the city’s police department, in what she believes was retaliation for her support of recalling Mayor Juan Perez, according to the suit filed last week.

The city went further, the lawsuit claims, launching a criminal investigation of Reisinger for linking to the department on one of her sites.

The city’s actions torpedoed Reisinger’s Web site marketing business and led to death threats against her, according to the lawsuit.

“The mayor decided to use his office to get back at Jennifer for her efforts in the recall and picked this to do it,” said her attorney, Paul Bucher. “There is more than a mistake here. There have been repercussions.”

The mayor, City Attorney Stephen McLean, the police chief and city clerk are named as defendants in the lawsuit. Perez and McLean did not return calls for comment.

Reisinger alleges her First Amendment rights were violated by the city. She seeks $250,000 in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages and unspecified declaratory relief.

First of its kind

Bruce Boyden, an assistant law professor at Marquette University who specializes in Internet law and copyright, called the case novel.

“If this goes all the way to trial and produces a decision, I believe this would be a first in United States,” he said.

Boyden said some companies require other Web sites to get permission to link to them, but he knew of no companies, much less a government body, that have tried to enforce violations of that condition if the links didn’t infringe on a copyright or trademark.

Boyden said not all speech is protected, including links. For instance, someone might use a link to communicate a threat or violate a copyright, and that wouldn’t be protected.

The lawsuit doesn’t show how Reisinger used the link to Sheboygan police or the city’s cease-and-desist order, but Boyden said it appeared from the lawsuit to be protected speech.

“Linking to the Web site is no different than listing the street address of the Sheboygan police department,” he said.

Bucher also said the case was a first as far as he knows.

“I have never heard that you can’t link to a government Web site that, by the way, is paid for with taxpayer money,” he said.

War over a link

Reisinger ran several Web sites and also was active in an unsuccessful recall effort against the mayor. A recall site she created later showed a Fourth of July parade photograph of Perez with a U.S. flag that had been digitally replaced with a Mexican flag and the caption, “Power to illegals?”

Reisinger told a Journal Sentinel reporter in July 2006 she did not know who put up the altered photo because the Web site allowed anyone to upload to the site.

According to her lawsuit:

Separate from the recall, Reisinger ran the Brat City Web Design site, which featured several links, including one to the Sheboygan police department.

On Oct. 18, 2007, the mayor’s secretary e-mailed McLean, the city attorney, asking if Reisinger could link to a city Web site. McLean answered, “Anyone can create a link to someone else’s Web site very easily without the knowledge or consent of the linked party.”

Nonetheless, McLean said he could issue a “cease and desist” order to Reisinger, and the mayor said to do it.

Reisinger said she felt intimidated by McLean’s letter and removed the link. Then a police lieutenant told Reisinger he was investigating her use of links to city government sites, the suit says.

That is when Reisinger hired Bucher, who told her to put the link back up. In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=786584





Seinfeld Free-Speech Defense Shticks It To 'Em
Jennifer Fermino

Jerry Seinfeld insisted yesterday he ought to be the master of his own comic domain.

Seinfeld didn't slander the woman who accused his wife of ripping off her cookbook, he said in legal papers filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court.

He was just mining the legal system for laughs - and supporting the right of standup comedians to do the same, he said.

Seinfeld cited several episodes of the "show about nothing" where he mocked frivolous lawsuits - including an episode where Kramer wins free coffee for life in a court settlement because he got burned on gourmet roast.

His lawyers, who are trying to get the defamation suit against him tossed, pointed out that his flick "Bee Movie" also has a plot that revolved around a silly suit.

In the movie, a bumblebee voiced by the comic sues honey manufacturers for exploiting bees. And rock star Sting is hauled in as a witness.

Seinfeld was hit with the slander suit because he called author Missy Chase Lapine, who claims his wife, Jessica, copied her cookbook, a "wacko" and "mentally unhinged celebrity stalker" on David Letterman's show.

Lapine, author of "Sneaky Chef," is suing Jessica, too.

She claims that Jessica Seinfeld stole her ideas about hiding healthy veggies in pudding and brownies for the cookbook "Deceptively Delicious."

Lawyers for Seinfeld insisted his suit is no joke - because the First Amendment protects humor.

And the attorneys said allowing Lapine's suit to go forward would make it impossible for other comedians to get laughs out of lawsuits.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08282008...it__126463.htm





Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?
John Tierney

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.

Dr. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards and earned good reviews even from engineers analyzing its technical plausibility. He can write space operas with the best of them, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Dr. Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Dr. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.

The Singularity is often called “the rapture of the nerds,” but Dr. Vinge doesn’t anticipate immortal bliss. The computer scientist in him may revel in the technological marvels, but the novelist envisions catastrophes and worries about the fate of not-so-marvelous humans like Robert Gu, the protagonist of Dr. Vinge’s latest novel, “Rainbows End.”

Robert is an English professor and famous poet who succumbs to Alzheimer’s, languishing in a nursing home until 2025, when the Singularity seems near and technology is working wonders. He recovers most of his mental faculties; his 75-year-old body is rejuvenated; even his wrinkles vanish.

But he’s so lost in this new world that he has to go back to high school to learn basic survival skills. Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft, iPhones, instant messaging — all these are quaint ancestral technologies now that everyone is connected to everyone and everything.

Thanks to special contact lenses, computers in your clothes and locational sensors scattered everywhere you go, you see a constant stream of text and virtual sights overlaying the real world. As you chat with a distant friend’s quite lifelike image strolling at your side, you can adjust the scenery to your mutual taste — adding, say, medieval turrets to buildings — at the same time you’re each privately communicating with vast networks of humans and computers.

To Robert, a misanthrope who’d barely mastered e-mail in his earlier life, this networked world is a multitasking hell. He retreats to one of his old haunts, the Geisel Library, once the intellectual hub of the University of California, San Diego, but now so rarely visited that its paper books are about to be shredded to make room for a highbrow version of a virtual-reality theme park.

At the library he finds a few other “medical retreads” still reading books and using ancient machines like laptops. Calling themselves the Elder Cabal, they conspire to save the paper library while they’re trying to figure out what, if anything, their skills are good for anymore.

Dr. Vinge, who is 63, can feel the elders’ pain, if only because his books are in that building. He took me up to the Elder Cabal’s meeting room in the library and talked about his own concerns about 2025 — like whether anyone will still be reading books, and whether networked knowledge will do to intellectuals what the Industrial Revolution did to the Luddite textile artisans.

“These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”

It’s an unsettling vision, but Dr. Vinge classifies it as one of the least unpleasant scenarios for the future: intelligence amplification, or I.A., in which humans get steadily smarter by pooling their knowledge with one another and with computers, possibly even wiring the machines directly into their brains.

The alternative to I.A., he figures, could be the triumph of A.I. as artificial intelligence far surpasses the human variety. If that happens, Dr. Vinge says, the superintelligent machines will not content themselves with working for their human masters, nor will they remain securely confined in laboratories. As he wrote in his 1993 essay: “Imagine yourself confined to your house with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with ‘helpful advice’ that would incidentally set you free.”

To avoid that scenario, Dr. Vinge has been urging his fellow humans to get smarter by collaborating with computers. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for some of his proposals.) At the conclusion of “Rainbows End,” even the technophobic protagonist is in sync with his machines, and there are signs that the Singularity has arrived in the form of a superintelligent human-computer network.

Or maybe not. Perhaps this new godlike intelligence mysteriously directing events is pure machine. Dr. Vinge told me he left it purposely ambiguous.

“I think there’s a good possibility that humanity will itself participate in the Singularity,” he said. “But on the other hand, we could just be left behind.”

And what would happen to us if the machines rule? Well, Dr. Vinge said, it’s possible that artificial post-humans would use us the way we’ve used oxen and donkeys. But he preferred to hope they would be more like environmentalists who wanted to protect weaker species, even if it was only out of self-interest. Dr. Vinge imagined the post-humans sitting around and using their exalted powers of reasoning:

“Maybe we need the humans around, because they’re natural critters who could survive in situations where some catastrophe would cause technology to disappear. That way they’d be around to bring back the important things — namely, us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/sc...tier.html?8dpc






Terror Watchlist "Upgrade" is "Imploding," Legislator Says
Julian Sanchez

The database used to produce the government's terror watch lists is "crippled by technical flaws," according to the chairman of a House technology oversight subcommittee—and the system designed to replace it may be even worse.

In a letter to the inspector general at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) complained that the National Counterterrorism Center's "Railhead" initiative, designed to upgrade the government's master database of suspected terrorists, "if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today."

Miller, who chairs the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, cited "severe technical troubles, poor contractor management, and weak government oversight," which he said had brought the Railhead program to the "verge of collapse."

The NCTC's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, established pursuant to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, is the government's centralized master database of people with suspected terror links. Containing some half a million names, it is used to create more specific watchlists used by other government agencies, such as the Transportation Security Administration's much-derided "no-fly" list.

The current TIDE system has its own set of "serious, long-standing technical problems." It requires users to perform "cumbersome and complex" SQL searches rather than delivering straightforward text matches. And its data is scattered across 463 different, poorly-indexed tables.

But the Railhead "upgrade," Miller's letter charges, only compounds the problems. According to his subcommittee's analysis, the new-and-improved system boasts fewer features, hobbles information sharing between agencies, fails to match slight variations in aliases contained on the watchlist, and is stymied by basic Boolean search operators. Miller also alleged that some of the $500 million spent on Railhead already had been improperly used to renovate a facility owned by contractor Boeing.

The NCTC fired back Friday in a statement, calling Miller's description "inconsistent with the facts" and complaining that his subcommittee "has had no interaction with the NCTC or the Intelligence Community on the Railhead Program."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...r-charges.html





Safe in Our Cages

Proposals to monitor all our communications are an intolerable assault on liberty in the name of security[/b]
AC Grayling

In the Queen's speech this autumn Gordon Brown's government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and "made accessible" to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and "other public bodies".

This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and "other public bodies".

This Orwellian nightmare, additionally, is proposed for a world in which leading soi-disant liberal democracies run, and/or permit rendition flights to, Guantanamo Bay. How many steps separate an innocent British citizen from some misinterpretation or interference or error in the collected and 'made accessible' data of text messages and emails, and a forthcoming home-grown version of Guantanamo Bay for people whose pattern of phone calls does not fit the police definition of acceptable?

Two things have made this ghastly development possible: the technology, and politicians. The technology is way ahead of the game: Siemens of Germany are already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity; its software establishes patterns of uses and alerts monitoring staff to deviations from the patterns. As New Scientist reports, the system is already known to throw up huge numbers of false positives; that could have been predicted by a rudimentary acquaintance with human nature and human life. But it is a fact that has to be added to the brilliance and reliability of government and law enforcement agencies in keeping data secure, unhackable and unlosable.

The second point concerns the quality of our politicians. They say they are putting us all under suspicion for our own good. They wish to protect us against terrorists and criminals, and to make bureaucracy more efficient. The efficiency of bureaucracy has one of its finest moments in the neat and sorted piles of false teeth, hair and spectacles at the gas chamber doors. Oh no: better the milling crowd than the police-disciplined queues of bureaucratic efficiency; better the irritation of dealing with human fallibility than the fear of dealing with jack-booted gendarmes whose grip on one's arms follows stepping out of the queue.

But as to the first matter: protecting us – by making us all suspects, all potential criminals and terrorists – from terrorism and criminality. Well: the first duty of our politicians should be to protect our liberties, and to encourage us to see that liberty carries risks, which we should be trusted to understand and accept so that we can make our own lives our own way. But no: these politicians – Brown and Labour, once the party of the people – are going to keep us safe by not keeping our liberties safe; they are going to keep us safe by making us unfree. Yet the putative benefit of protecting us from terrorism and crime is unattainable. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. They themselves say 'there is no 100% guarantee of safety': but they are going to spy on us all anyway! In fact they are going to create crime: a huge new criminal industry awaits for stealing, copying, falsely creating and manipulating that newly-created precious commodity, "identity". A huge new impetus awaits for techno-crime to disrupt the monitoring and data storage systems on which the government intends to spend billions of our tax money, creating its unblinking eye in our bedrooms. As surely as night follows day, the new surveillance society will do more harm than good.

The potential for profoundly negative uses of technology has escaped us. It is with despair that I conclude that we have to start all over again with the demos and resistance, the campaigns and arguments, to roll back this huge and ultimately destructive assault on our civil liberties. Once upon a time the authorities worked at frightening everyone into thinking that the unblinking eye of a deity exercised surveillance and data-gathering over them. Now we have Gordon Brown and Siemens, the real thing, not a myth: the unblinking eye of the security services, the local council, "other public bodies", in our bedrooms, our text messages, our emails, our internet searches. Torquemada and Stalin would have given their right arms for what Gordon Brown will tell us in this autumn's Queen's speech he is intending to introduce. Brown has not even thought of that comparison, shame and double shame upon him. Might it help to read the glutinous websites of the Home Office on surveillance and protection of our liberties? Enjoy, if you can: or weep.

Is this adequate to today, before the new universal surveillance comes on stream? Is it adequate to future developments in surveillance technology, to future even less benign governments, to increased "security" powers in actual or alleged future states of emergency? What new crimes, new criminals, new threats to society, will need to be plucked from the watched masses? Smokers? Readers of unauthorised books? Will old crimes return - homosexuality, Catholicism, Jewishness, atheism, adultery, pre-marital sex? Will every individual have to be a tight-lipped, right-thinking, timid, dutiful, obedient, queue-forming clone to escape the censure of the unblinking eye now being opened by the state upon us?

We need to stop this assault on civil liberies going further, we need to roll back the attritions they have already suffered, and we need a rock solid written consitution to protect us from those who aim to make us all suspects in the gaze of the unblinking universal eye.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...berties.labour





Suzy Spymaker

Surveillance Made Easy
Laura Margottini

"THIS data allows investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time."

So said the UK Home Office last week as it announced plans to give law-enforcement agencies, local councils and other public bodies access to the details of people's text messages, emails and internet activity. The move followed its announcement in May that it was considering creating a massive central database to store all this data, as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism.

Meanwhile in the US the FISA Amendments Act, which became law in July, allows the security services to intercept anyone's international phone calls and emails without a warrant for up to seven days. Governments around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance methods in a bid to identify terrorist cells or spot criminal activity.

However, technology companies, in particular telecommunications firms and internet service providers, have often been criticised for assisting governments in what many see as unwarranted intrusion, most notably in China.

Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe andAsia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries.

According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs "intelligence modules".

This software is trained on a large number of sample documents to pick out items such as names, phone numbers and places from generic text. This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates.

Once a person is being monitored, pattern-recognition software first identifies their typical behaviour, such as repeated calls to certain numbers over a period of a few months. The software can then identify any deviations from the norm and flag up unusual activities, such as transactions with a foreign bank, or contact with someone who is also under surveillance, so that analysts can take a closer look.

Included within the package is a phone call "monitoring centre", developed by the joint-venture company Nokia Siemens Networks.

However, it is far from clear whether the technology will prove accurate. Security experts warn that data-fusion technologies tend to produce a huge number of false positives, flagging up perfectly innocent people as suspicious.

"These systems tend to produce false positives, flagging up innocent people as suspicious"

"Combining two different sources of data has the tendency to increase your false-positive rate or your false-negative rate," says Ross Anderson, a computer security engineer at the University of Cambridge. "If you're looking for burglars in a run-down district where 50 per cent of men have a criminal conviction, you may find plenty. But if you're trying to find terrorists among airline passengers - where they are extremely rare - then almost all your hits will be false."

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier agrees. "Currently there are no good patterns available to recognise terrorists," he says, and questions whether Siemens has got around this.

Whatever the level of accuracy, human rights advocates are concerned that the system could give surveillance-hungry repressive regimes a ready-made means of monitoring their citizens. Carole Samdup of the organisation Rights and Democracy in Montreal, Canada, says the system bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese government's "Golden Shield" concept, a massive surveillance network encompassing internet and email monitoring as well as speech and facial-recognition technologies and closed-circuit TV cameras.

In 2001, Rights and Democracy raised concerns about the potential for governments to integrate huge information databases with real-time analysis to track the activities of individuals. "Now in 2008 these very characteristics are presented as value-added selling points in the company advertisement of its product," Samdup says.

In June, the PRISE consortium of security technology and human-rights experts, funded by the European Union (EU), submitted a report to the European Commission asking for a moratorium on the development of data-fusion technologies, referring explicitly to the Siemens Intelligence Platform.

"The efficiency and reliability of such tools is as yet unknown," says the report. "More surveillance does not necessarily lead to a higher level of societal security. Hence there must be a thorough examination of whether the resulting massive constraints on human rights are proportionate and justified."

Nokia Siemens says 90 of the systems are already being used around the world, although it hasn't specified which countries are using it. A spokesman for the company said, "We implement stringent safeguards to prevent misuse of such systems for unauthorised purposes. In all countries where we operate we do business strictly according to the Nokia Siemens Networks standard code of conduct and UN and EU export regulations."

Samdup argues that such systems should fall under government controls that are imposed on "dual-use" goods - systems that could be used both for civil and military purposes. Security technologies usually escape these controls. For example, the EU regulation on the export and transfer of dual-use technology does not include surveillance and intelligence technologies on the list of items that must be checked and authorised before they are exported to certain countries.

The problem is that surveillance technologies have developed so rapidly that they have outpaced developments in export controls, says Samdup. "In many cases politicians, policy-makers and human-rights organisations lack the technical expertise to adequately assess the impact that such technology could have when it is exported to repressive regimes."
http://technology.newscientist.com/c...made-easy.html





CSI Stick Grabs Data from Cell Phones
Marc Weber Tobias

If someone asks to borrow your cell phone, or you leave it unattended, beware!

Unless you actually watch them use it, they may be secretly grabbing every piece of your information on the device, even deleted messages. If you leave your phone sitting on your desk, or in the center console of your car while the valet parks it, then you and everyone in your contacts list may be at risk, to say nothing of confidential e-mails, spread sheets, or other information. And of course, if you do not want your spouse to see who you are chatting with on your phone, you might want to use extra caution.


Paraben's CSI Stick can be used to make a copy
of all data on a cell phone.
(Credit: Marc Weber Tobias)


There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain. More phones will be added to the list, including many from Nokia, RIM, LG and others, in the next generation, to be released shortly.

I recently attended and lectured at the Techno-Security conference in Myrtle Beach, Fla. About 1,500 law enforcement and security professionals participated and were briefed on the latest in cybersecurity vulnerabilities from participating federal agents, manufacturers, and cyber-consultants. The CSI Stick caught my attention because of the potential to rapidly and covertly download all of the information contained in many cell phones.

This device connects to the data/charging port and will seamlessly grab e-mails, instant messages, dialed numbers, phone books and anything else that is stored in memory. It will even retrieve deleted files that have not been overwritten. And there is no trace whatsoever that the information has been compromised, nor any risk of corruption. This may be especially troublesome for corporate employees and those that work for government agencies.

The good news: the device should find wide acceptance by parents who want to monitor what their kids are doing with their phones, who they are talking to and text messaging, and where they are surfing. It could also be valuable in secure areas where employees need to be randomly monitored to insure that sensitive information is not compromised through the use of a cell phone as a memory device.

The CSI Stick sells for $200 and requires an added piece of software to mine the data and do sophisticated processing on your computer. So now, in addition to worrying about your conversations or data being intercepted through your Bluetooth headset, there is a new threat, and it is very real.

The rule: if your phone contains sensitive data, do not leave it unattended. If you loan it to someone to use because they tell you theirs is not working, make sure you actually see them using the phone and there is nothing connected to it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10028589-83.html





He voted for it

Councillor's Spy Camera Anger

A councillor is threatening to block Big-Brother-style CCTV cameras from spying on his house – by letting his trees grow.

Coun Albert Richardson claims the surveillance cameras near his home on Ribbleton Avenue can monitor visitors to his house and are invading neighbours' privacy.

Coun Richardson backed the cameras when they were set up almost 18 months ago – but is now fuming as one has been erected close to his front door.

He said: "I didn't expect one to go up where it has gone up. There are people watching me coming and going outside my house.

"I am not too pleased about it at all so I'm letting my trees grow."

But in April 2007 when the new cameras were announced, Coun Richardson told The Evening Post: "I live right in the middle of St Matthew's ward so I welcome this.

"It is sad to say it because no-one likes being spied on by these cameras, but when I think of the vulnerable people who live in St Matthew's ward, I do think this is needed."

Insp June Chessell, of Lancashire Police, said: "The CCTV cameras were installed following lengthy public consultations.

"The cameras have been a useful tool in helping crime reduction and feedback from residents has been very positive."
http://www.lep.co.uk/news/Councillor...ger.4425535.jp





Congress: Terror Database Upgrade Failing

A congressional committee on Thursday asked for an investigation into a counterterrorism database software upgrade that it says is months behind schedule, millions over budget and would actually be less capable than the U.S. government terrorist tracking system it is meant to replace.

At issue is Railhead, a software upgrade to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which is a vast database of names that feeds the nation's terrorist watch list. It is meant to help analysts "connect the dots" between known or suspected terrorists and their contacts, potential targets and safe houses. As of January, the database contained 500,000 names. The upgrade was supposed to be completed by the end of this year.

But the House Science and Technology investigations and oversight subcommittee said Thursday that the program "has been imploding for more than one year," citing internal program documents and e-mails obtained by the committee.

"The program appears to be on the brink of collapse after an estimated half-billion dollars in taxpayer funding has been spent on it," said subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., in a statement issued Thursday.

Miller said the "majority" of more than 800 private contractors from dozens of companies working on Railhead have been laid off, and the National Counterterrorism Center "drastically curtailed" the program last week and may shut it down completely.

Carl Kropf of the counterterrorism center declined immediate comment.

Miller sent a letter to the national intelligence director's inspector general requesting an investigation.

The committee also says "Railhead insiders" allege the government paid the Boeing Co. $200 million to retrofit the company's Herndon, Va., office with security upgrades so top secret software work could be performed there and then leased the office space from Boeing. A Boeing spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

The committee investigation also found problems with the existing terrorist database. It says 40 percent of suspect names and addresses contained in CIA cables that should be entered into the database are never entered.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Judges Consider Whether FBI Violated Free Speech

A panel of federal appeals court judges pushed a U.S. government lawyer on Wednesday to answer why FBI letters sent out to Internet service providers seeking information should remain secret.

A panel of three judges from the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on whether a provision of the Patriot Act, which requires people who are formally contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for information to keep it a secret, is constitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in 2004 on behalf of an undisclosed Internet service provider against the U.S. government challenging the so-called National Security Letters (NSL) as well as gag orders placed on the recipients.

The appeals courts on Wednesday questioned a lawyer representing the U.S. government on whether the FBI violated free speech rights in placing the gag orders.

The government argues they are in place for national security concerns, such as keeping terrorists from learning what they are investigating.

"You can't tell me that any terrorist is going to make anything out of the fact you issued NSLs to AT&T and Verizon," said Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, using a hypothetical example.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas said the FBI "assesses the need for secrecy in each particular case."

Between 2003 and 2006 nearly 200,000 national security letters were sent out. Of those about 97 percent received gag orders.

ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said the gag order had prevented the small Internet service provider the ACLU was representing from speaking out "against an FBI investigation that he believes is illegitimate."

The government is appealing a lower court ruling that said the gag order violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and was unconstitutional.

The judges will rule on the issue in the coming months.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, editing by Michelle Nichols)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNe...50234720080827





FBI: Phone Record Seizure was Miscommunication
AP

The FBI did not abuse its authority when it seized the phone records of two journalists, according to the bureau's top lawyer, who attributed the improper behavior to simple miscommunication.

FBI Director Robert Mueller recently apologized to The New York Times and The Washington Post for obtaining phone records of reporters in Indonesia in 2004.

Normally, top Justice Department officials must approve such requests and it's up to a grand jury to issue a subpoena. But none of that occurred. The FBI simply wrote a letter to the phone company asking for the records, saying only that it was an emergency.

Valerie E. Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, offered the first public explanation of the misstep. She told The Washington Times that an FBI agent recommended seeking Justice Department approval and a grand jury subpoena for the records.

Instead, terrorism investigators in the Communications Analysis Unit sent what is known as an "exigent letter," Caproni said. It's unclear exactly why they did that, but Caproni said investigators may just have been trying to be helpful.

Civil liberties groups have criticized the use of such letters, which help authorities gather information without judicial review. The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating the use of exigent letters and is expected to release a report soon.

A previous report found that more than 700 such letters were sent between 2003 and 2006.

"The numbers of true emergencies is far smaller than that," Caproni told the newspaper. "It's a small number of true emergencies, though there are some. There are times when we have true emergencies, and we need things quickly."

The FBI has since banned letters in such vague forms. Now, Caproni said, investigators seeking urgent information must write a memo explaining the emergency and the request must be signed off by a supervisor.

Mike German, Washington policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said he didn't buy the FBI's explanation.

"It's clear the FBI wants to minimize this as a mistake and not abuse," he said. "The facts are, there was a ridiculous amount of misuse and abuse."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Delayed by Her Bra, Air Passenger is Indignant
Tyche Hendricks

When Berkeley resident Nancy Kates arrived at Oakland International Airport to board JetBlue flight 472, she thought she was heading off on a routine journey to visit her mother in Boston. Instead she ended up in a standoff with Transportation Safety Administration officials over her bra.

In the post-Sept. 11 world of heightened airport scrutiny, Kates, like most travelers, is familiar with the drill: Take off shoes and belts, open the laptop, carry shampoo in 3-ounce bottles.

For Kates, on Sunday, though, the security check got too invasive. A big-busted woman wearing a large underwire bra, she set off the metal detector. She was pulled aside and checked by a female TSA agent with a metal-sensitive wand.

"The woman touched my breast. I said, 'You can't do that,' " Kates said. "She said, 'We have to pat you down.' I said, 'You can't treat me as a criminal for wearing a bra.' "

Kates asked to see a supervisor and then the supervisor's supervisor. He told her that underwire bras were the leading item that set off the metal detectors, Kates said.

If that's the case, Kates said, the equipment must be overly sensitive. And if the TSA is engaging in extra brassiere scrutiny, then other women are suffering similar humiliation, Kates thought.

The Constitution bars unreasonable searches and seizures, Kates reminded the TSA supervisor, and scrutinizing a woman's brassiere is surely unreasonable, she said.

The supervisor told her she had the choice of submitting to a pat-down in a private room or not flying. Kates offered a third alternative, to take off her bra and try again, which the TSA accepted.

"They tried to humiliate me and I was not going to be humiliated over this," Kates said. "If I was carrying nail clippers and forgot about them, I wouldn't have gotten so upset. But here I was just wearing my underwear."

So she went to the rest room, then through the security line a second time. Walking through the airport braless can be embarrassing for a large-chested woman, not to mention uncomfortable. The metal detector didn't beep on the second time through, but then officials decided to go through Kates' carry-on luggage, she said.

The whole undertaking took 40 minutes, Kates said, and caused her to miss her flight. JetBlue put her on another one, but she was four hours late getting to Boston.

"It's actually a little funny in a way, but a sad, sad commentary on the state of our country," Kates said. "This is bigger than just me. There are 150 million women in America, and this could happen to any of them."

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said Monday that he wasn't familiar with the incident. But he said in all circumstances, "we have to resolve an alarm."

That's the case for bras, artificial hips or anything with metal that sets off an alarm, he said. "Unfortunately, we can't take a passenger's word for it."

Melendez said he didn't have any statistics on how many times passengers are screened because of bras. But he said, "we do everything we can to ensure that a passenger doesn't feel humiliated."

Kates said she plans to talk to her family lawyer as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women and decide how to pursue the incident.

Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, said Monday of federal security officials: "They can't find bombs in checked luggage, and they're essentially doing a pat-down of private parts. This is a security apparatus that is out of control."

Kates said that although she flies about once a month, the only other time her bra has set off alarms in an airport was while she was being "wanded" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. When she explained to the security agent that the wand was picking up the metal in her bra, she said, that was the end of the matter and she was allowed to go on her way.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...HVK3.DTL&tsp=1





The Crime that Created Superman: Did Fatal Robbery Spawn Man of Steel?
David Colton

On the night of June 2, 1932, the world's first superhero was born — not on the mythical planet of Krypton but from a little-known tragedy on the streets of Cleveland.

It was Thursday night, about 8:10 p.m., and Mitchell Siegel, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, was in his secondhand clothing store on the near East Side. According to a police report, three men entered. One asked to see a suit of clothes and walked out without paying for it. In the commotion of the robbery, Siegel, 60, fell to the ground and died.

The police report mentions a gunshot being heard. But the coroner, the police and Siegel's wife said Siegel died of a heart attack. No one was ever arrested.

What happened next has exploded some of the longest-held beliefs about the origins of Superman and the two teenage boys, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who invented America's best-known comic-book hero.

Past accounts suggest Siegel and Shuster, both 17, awkward and unpopular in high school, invented the meek Clark Kent and his powerful alter-ego, Superman, to attract girls and rise above their humble Cleveland beginnings.

But now it appears that the origin might have been more profound — that it was the death of Jerry Siegel's father that pushed the devastated teen to come up with the idea of a "Superman" to right all wrongs.

"In 50 years of interviews, Jerry Siegel never once mentioned that his father died in a robbery," says Brad Meltzer, a best-selling author whose novel, The Book of Lies, due Sept. 2, links the Siegel murder to a biblical conspiracy plot.

"But think about it," Meltzer says. "Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero. I'm sorry, but there's a story there."

The first 'Superman'

The evidence for such a psychological underpinning is strong.

It was just a year after Mitchell Siegel's death, 1933, that writer Siegel and artist Shuster came up with "The Superman," a grim, flying avenger they tried to sell to newspaper syndicates and publishers for five years. In the oldest surviving artwork, this early Superman, whom they call "the most astounding fiction character of all time," flies to the rescue of a man who is being held up by a masked robber.

Was it Jerry's alter-ego flying to rescue his helpless father?

"America did not get Superman from our greatest legends, but because a boy lost his father," Meltzer says. "Superman came not out of our strength but out of our vulnerability."

The more Meltzer looked, the more intriguing things became. A letter published in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer on June 3, 1932, the day after the robbery, denounces the need for vigilantes in the harsh days of the Depression. The letter is signed by an A.L. Luther.

"Is that where (Superman foe) Lex Luthor came from?" Meltzer says. "I almost had a heart attack right there. I thought, 'You have to be kidding me!' "

In search of answers

Meltzer was not the only one looking. Comic-book historian Gerard Jones first disclosed the fact of the robbery in 2004 for his book, Men of Tomorrow, after interviews with Siegel's cousins.

"It had to have an effect," Jones says. "Superman's invulnerability to bullets, loss of family, destruction of his homeland — all seem to overlap with Jerry's personal experience. There's a connection there: the loss of a dad as a source for Superman."

Although they never went public, the father's side of the family was told for decades that the elder Siegel had been shot in the robbery. That's the dramatic angle Meltzer takes in his conspiracy novel. Siegel was shot twice in the chest at his store, he writes, and "a puddle of blood seeped toward the door."

In an afterword to his work of fiction, Meltzer concedes that the facts remain murky. In an interview, Meltzer said that some in the family were told "since they were little kids" that Siegel died by gunfire. Others were told he had a heart attack. "It was probably a heart attack," Meltzer said.

And yet Meltzer is not ready to embrace either answer as final.

More definitive is Marc Tyler Nobleman, author with artist Ross MacDonald of this year's illustrated book Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman, who concludes that Mitchell Siegel died of a heart attack during the robbery. The coroner, he notes, reported "no wounds" on Siegel's body, and the gunshot might not have been related to the robbery.

"I spent a long time going after this," Nobleman says. "I believe I have the first accurate account. Jerry's father wasn't shot and robbed. He had a heart attack during a robbery."

A fortune sold for $130

The rest of the saga of Siegel and Shuster is better known, but no less tragic. It wasn't until 1938 that the familiar red-and-blue-garbed Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics No. 1. The creators got a check for $130. In return, DC Comics acquired rights to the character "forever."

Siegel and Shuster bristled as Superman grew in popularity — on radio, in wartime cartoons and serials in the 1940s. They went to court several times, winning settlements but never rights to the character. By the 1970s, Siegel had been working as a mail clerk for $7,000 a year, and Shuster was almost blind.

"A shameful legacy," says Blake Bell, author of The World of Steve Ditko, a biography of the co-creator of Spider-Man. Comic-book creators "had no pensions, no contracts, no health benefits, and companies didn't even pay for the artists' supplies. When these artists tried to negotiate greater rights for themselves, they were either collectively cast out or made false promises."

After hearing that Warner Bros. had paid $3 million for the rights to make Superman the Movie in 1975, Siegel and Shuster tried again to reap some benefits. This time, though, they had help from the artistic community and from fans who knew their work.

In a landmark settlement, DC Comics agreed to pay the two men $20,000 a year for life. More important, friends say, DC agreed to add "Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" on all printed and filmed material in the future.

"Having their names listed as Superman's creators was the biggest victory of all," says Steve Younis, editor of SupermanHomepage.com. "It's worth more than any kind of monetary reimbursement."

The man who helped negotiate the Siegel and Shuster deal was artist Jerry Robinson, who co-created The Joker in 1939 but who received little recognition for decades. (He's now a creative consultant for DC Comics in the wake of The Dark Knight film.)

Robinson says he threw a party in his Manhattan apartment when the Siegel and Shuster settlement was announced.

"Kurt Vonnegut, Jules Pfeiffer, Will Eisner, Eli Wallach and his wife were there," Robinson, 86, says. "Walter Cronkite came on, and they showed Superman flying, and he described what had happened. At the end, he said, 'Another triumph for truth, justice and the American way.'

"We opened Champagne. Jerry and Joe were there, and it was a very emotional moment. There wasn't a dry eye in the place."

The struggle goes on

Michael Uslan, executive producer of the six Batman movies since 1989, including The Dark Knight, says there has been a "sea change" in how corporations view comic books and their creators. "Here you have people in their 80s and 90s seeing their comic-book work being taken seriously," Uslan says. "They are deriving economic benefits now either directly or through consultancies."

Shuster died in 1992 and Siegel in 1996, but their legal battles have been never-ending. In March, a court ruled that Siegel's heirs (wife Joanne and daughter Laura) were entitled to parts of the billion-dollar Superman copyright. Because of the ongoing litigation, neither the families nor DC Comics would comment, not even about Mitchell Siegel's death 76 years ago or its implications.

But in an e-mailed response, the Siegel family did say, "It is gratifying to know people want to know about Jerry Siegel, and that he is getting recognition for his creativity."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/n...creators_N.htm





Studio War Involving ‘Watchmen’ Heats Up
Michael Cieply

The legal brawl over “Watchmen” is about to get rougher.

Lawyers for Warner Brothers, which has already shot a movie of this graphic novel about the seamier side of superhero life, and lawyers for 20th Century Fox, which claims it owns the rights to the material, laid plans for a frenzied fight in a joint report submitted to the federal court here on Friday.

Fox has said it will seek an injunction blocking Warner’s planned release of the film next March. Warner has argued that Fox should not be allowed to stop the movie, after standing by while Warner and its partners on the film, Paramount Pictures and Legendary Pictures, spent more than $100 million on the production, directed by Zack Snyder (“300”).

In a summary of its position in Friday’s report, Warner said Fox “sat silently” as one of the producers of “Watchmen,” Lawrence Gordon, took the project “to studio after studio with Fox’s express knowledge.”

Fox, which filed a lawsuit in February, has claimed in its own filings that Mr. Gordon did not keep the studio apprised of his plans, as required by a 1994 agreement. That deal granted Mr. Gordon rights to “Watchmen” in “turnaround” — an industry term for arrangements under which producers can move a project from one studio to another under certain conditions.

In Warner’s version of events, Mr. Gordon, who is not named as a defendant in the Fox suit, actually offered the project to Fox in 2005, shortly before bringing it to Warner after years of trying to make the movie with Paramount. “Fox simply rejected it,” Warner said in the Friday filing.

On Friday Warner said Fox had gone so far as to grant it rights to the title “Watchmen,” which Fox had earlier registered with the Motion Picture Association of America.

Fox, moreover, was paid $320,000 by one of Mr. Gordon’s companies for rights to “Watchmen” as early as 1991, Warner lawyers said in the report. Fox has said that agreement was superseded by a later deal, under which Mr. Gordon was supposed to deliver a much larger buyout price that has never been paid.

The report also outlined conflicting requests for a trial date: as early as next June, if Fox has its way, or April, if Warner prevails.

Friday’s filing makes it clear that not only Mr. Gordon, but also Paramount, Legendary and even Universal Pictures can expect to be drawn into the fray. Universal had tried to make a version of the film in 2001, before Paramount took over. And though Paramount dropped its plans for the movie, it became involved as a partner when Warner teamed up with the director Mr. Snyder in the wake of the box office success of “300.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/movies/30watc.html





With Software, Till Tampering Is Hard to Find
Roy Furchgott

For mom and pop shops, cooking the books is becoming a high-tech business.

Thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners can siphon cash from computer cash registers and cheat tax officials.

While zappers are most likely to be used by medium and small businesses, the take is anything but small change. A 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years, federal prosecutors say.

Zappers — also known as automated sales suppression devices — are a new twist on an old fraud. “The technology is new and getting newer, but the concept is as old as having two sets of books,” said Verenda Smith of the Federation of Tax Administrators, the association of state tax administrators.

Zappers alter the electronic sales records in a cash register. To satisfy tax collectors, the tally of food orders, for example, must match the register’s final cash total. To hide the removal of cash from the till, a crooked business owner has to erase the record of food orders equal to the amount of cash taken; otherwise, the imbalance is obvious to any auditor.

With paper, one keeps two sets of books. Or throws away the paper receipts. Because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine’s memory and changing that record. With no physical paper trail, it is easier to hide tampering. And it is easiest for businesses that handle untraceable cash, like restaurants, grocery stores and hair salons.

While merchants, security experts and government agencies know of these devices, they exist in such a shadowy realm that it is difficult to assess how big the problem may be or how to address it.

“We can’t get our arms around how much this is in use,” Ms. Smith said. The Internal Revenue Service said it did not track the use of zappers.

Zappers are a worldwide phenomenon. They have been found in Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, France and the Netherlands.

But the Canadian province of Quebec may be the world leader in prosecuting zapper cases. Since 1997, zappers have figured in more than 230 investigations, according to the tax collecting body Revenu Québec, which has found an active market for the software. In making 713 searches of merchants, Revenu Québec found 31 zapper programs that worked on 13 cash register systems.

Only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States, which leads Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes, to ask, “Why aren’t cases being identified in the United States?” Mr. Ainsworth, who has published several academic papers on zappers, said, “We should be finding more here.”

In older cash registers, adjustments left tracks for those who knew where to look. The latest zappers cover their tracks more efficiently. Thieves put a zapping program onto a portable flash drive so it can be run and then removed from the machine, leaving no trace.

“If someone comes in and audits your books, it all looks O.K.,” said Ms. Smith of the tax collectors association.

The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use, according to several experts. A dialogue box, which shows the day’s tally, pops up on the register’s screen.

In a second dialogue box, the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till. The program then calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Then it suggests how much cash to take, and it erases the entries from the books and a corresponding amount in orders, so the register balances.

The cash register security industry is focused on protecting patrons and owners from theft by employees, which may be one reason so few zappers are uncovered in the United States. No one hires security experts to protect the government from devious businesses.

The use of zappers may also be less publicized here, tax collectors say, because if a business is caught using one to avoid taxes but pays its back taxes and penalties, the case will not become public.

Canada has taken a slightly different tack. In several cases, it has found the zapper maker, which led to businesses that used the zapper. According to Revenu Québec, in 2000, Réjean Turcotte admitted to providing his zapper software to Nickels — a 39-store restaurant chain created by the singer Celine Dion — and three other restaurant groups. The Dutch equivalent of the I.R.S. followed a zapper maker’s client list to 1,200 stores, according to a Dutch newspaper report.

One of the first reported zapper cases in the United States was Stew Leonard’s dairy, whose owner was convicted in 1993 of skimming $17 million over 10 years. The theft was uncovered after Mr. Leonard tried to board a plane to St. Martin with an unreported $50,000.

In the Detroit case, I.R.S. investigators in 2006 said that Talal Chahine, owner of 12 Lebanese restaurants called La Shish, had used a zapper to hide more than $20 million in cash, according to federal court documents filed by a United States attorney in Detroit. The cash has not been recovered, and at least part of the money was sent to Lebanon as cashiers’ checks, the prosecutors say.

Mr. Chahine was indicted on income tax evasion charges, but the Department of Justice believes that he is a fugitive in Lebanon, where he has connections to Hezbollah, a terrorist organization. Authorities declined to comment on how the reported crime was discovered, but according to court records, Mr. Chahine failed to file a tax return in 2003.

As hard as zapper software is to detect, it is easy to make, said Jeff Moss, organizer of the annual hacker convention Def Con. “If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,” he said.

According to analysts at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, 85 percent of all point-of-sale systems, as cash registers are called, run on the Windows operating system, although other systems are also vulnerable.

Foreign countries are moving to secure cash registers and shut down zappers. The European Union has formed a committee to address cash register fraud, including zappers. The German Cash Registers Project Group has proposed legislation to make cash registers tamperproof. And Quebec has drafted legislation to mandate the use of secure registers.

Mr. Ainsworth said the United States should at least take up a study of the problem. “The later you get into this game, the more likely criminals have moved on to the next technology,” he said. “This is my tax money. It makes me mad.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/te.../30zapper.html





Houston, We Have a Virus

Worm infects International Space Station laptops
Dan Goodin

A computer worm that ferrets out passwords managed to stow away on laptops aboard the International Space Station, NASA has confirmed. It is not the first time a NASA computer has become infected.

SpaceReg.com identified the infection as W32.TGammima.AG, a worm that spreads by copying itself to removable media devices. Once in place, it steals passwords to various online games, according to anti-virus software provider Symantec, which first spotted the worm 12 months ago.

"This is not the first time we have had a worm or a virus," a NASA spokesman told Wired News. "It's not a frequent occurrence, but this isn't the first time."

The infected machines were not considered mission critical, meaning they weren't responsible for command and control. The NASA spokesman was unable to say if the infected laptops were connected to mission-critical systems.

Exactly how computers aboard the tightly controlled space station get infected by a common internet parasite is a bit of a head scratcher. Because more than one laptop was infected, it's reasonable to assign blame to an internal network or thumb drive. Then again, floating around in outer space can be a lonely experience, so other forces may have been at work.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08...tops_infected/

















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