Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 5th, 2008

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Certainly it is appropriate for victims of copyright infringement to lawfully pursue statutory remedies. However, that pursuit must be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process." – Attorney General Hardy Myers, D-Oregon


"People get pushed into [RIAA] settlements. The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like." – Fred von Lohmann


"We cannot allow the media and marketing industries to construct a childhood that is all screens, all the time." – Susan Linn


"Sony’s PSP is doing great. The [Nintendo] DS is just doing better." – Michael Pachter


































January 5th, 2008





Is 2008 to be RIAA’s Death Knell?

I realize lots of folks have been predicting the imminent demise of the RIAA and the music industry since the inception of Napster and yet both are still here and still treating legitimate customers as criminals - or at least as potential criminals. Sure individuals have tried to fight the RIAA’s questionable lawsuits and SWAT like tactics but there has yet to be a smack down of any substance to put them in their place.

With the latest tactic by the RIAA to target universities, colleges and the students at these bastions of higher education they have tried everything from manipulating Congress into creating laws forcing educational institutions to play along with the RIAA or have funding cut to threatening wholesale lawsuits against students.

Well while Congress might be waffling on helping out the RIAA because after all they don’t want to endanger their own cash flow it maybe the students themselves that will be the harbingers of the end to the RIAA threats and possibly setting legal precedents along the way.

According to a post on p2pnet.net a small university legal clinic in Maine are taking up the fight in lawsuits being brought against fellow students. Under guidance from the clinic director and University of Maine associate professor Deirdre Smith law students Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki are representing the students being sued.

If successful this move by the legal clinic could pave the way for other university law students to fight back against these actions by the RIAA providing both protection for their students, a low cost method for the universities to get out from under the RIAA threats and provide the students with some real world heavy weight legal experience.

Now if you think that these law students might not be up to the legal shenanigans that can go on the real world this is what Ray Beckerman; the lawyer behind Recording Industry vs The People, said to p2pnet.net:

An experienced practicing lawyer, I reviewed the brief prepared by student attorneys Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki, under professor Smith’s supervision, and these young people did a bang-up job in exposing the fact that the RIAA has no case,

If this succeeds and snowballs through other universities it could be some interesting times ahead.
http://www.winextra.com/2007/12/29/i...s-death-knell/





RIAA's Sherman Speaks (Un)Believable 'Catch 22'
David Kravets

Don't believe Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, when he told a National Public Radio audience that Sony BMG's anti-piracy chief had misspoken during her testimony in the copyright infringement trial against Jammie Thomas.

And if Sherman was telling the truth during that NPR interview, Thomas was the victim of a miscarriage of justice -- despite the mountain of evidence against her.

Here's the skinny:

In October, a Minnesota federal jury found Thomas liable for copyright infringement and dinged her $222,000 for unlawfully sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network in what was and still is the nation's first and only RIAA case against an individual to go to trial. Most of the RIAA's 20,000 or more lawsuits have settled out of court.

During Thomas' trial in Duluth, RIAA attorney Richard Gabriel asked Sony's Jennifer Pariser if it was OK for a consumer to make one copy of a track that was legally purchased. No, she replied, saying that's "a nice way of saying, steals just one copy."

On Thursday, while debating a Washington Post reporter, Sherman told an NPR audience that Pariser "actually misspoke in that trial."

"I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs," Sherman said. "That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry."

One of the reasons jurors dinged Thomas was because she forked over to RIAA investigators a different hard drive than the one industry snoops detected her using on Kazaa in 2005. On the hard drive she did turn over were thousands of songs Thomas said she ripped from her CDs.

The RIAA's Gabriel suggested to jurors that copying one's purchased music was a violation of the Copyright Act.

Gabriel, for example, asked Thomas whether she had ever burned CDs, either for herself, or to give away to friends.

"Did you get permission from the copyright owners to do that?" Gabriel asked.

"No," Thomas responded.

Gabriel, the RIAA's lead attorney, apparently misspoke too -- prejudicing jurors along the way.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis is weighing a motion from Thomas to lower the award or grant a new trial. She claims the Copyright Act, and the maximum $150,000 fine for each violation, is unconstitutionally excessive. THREAT LEVEL wonders what are the odds the RIAA would file papers with Davis explaining the misstatements?

UPDATE: RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in an e-mail message that Pariser "was quoted out of context and believed the question referred to downloads, not physical copies." THREAT LEVEL rests its case.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...cary-sher.html





Antitrust Lawsuit Charges Apple With Monopolizing Online Music

The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format.
Thomas Claburn

An antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple on Dec. 31 charges the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market.

Plaintiff Stacie Somers, represented by attorneys Craig Briskin and Steven Skalet of Mehri & Skalet PLLC, Alreen Haeggquist of Haeggquist Law Group, and Helen Zeldes, alleges that Apple dominates the market for online video, online music, and digital music players and that its dominance constitutes a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The attorneys are seeking to have their lawsuit certified as a class action.

"Apple has engaged in tying and monopolizing behavior, placing unneeded and unjustifiable technological restrictions on its most popular products in an effort to restrict consumer choice, and to restrain what little remains of its competition in the digital music markets," the complaint states. "Apple's CEO Steve Jobs had himself compared Apple's digital music dominance to Microsoft's personal computer operating system dominance, calling Apple's Music Store 'the Microsoft of music stores' in a meeting with financial analysts."

After years of government scrutiny, Microsoft was found to be exercising illegal monopoly power in late 1999. Some of its obligations under the settlement the company reached with the Department of Justice have expired; others remain.

The complaint against Apple claims that the company controls 75% of the online video market, 83% of the online music market, more than 90% of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70% of the Flash-based music player market.

A spokesperson for Apple said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format. "Apple's iPod is alone among mass-market Digital Music Players in not supporting the WMA format," it states, noting that America Online, Wal-Mart, Napster, MusicMatch, Best Buy, Yahoo Music, FYE Download Zone, and Virgin Digital all support protected WMA files.

This is based on the proposition that music companies "are generally unwilling to license their music for online sale except in protected formats." Such assertions look increasingly tenuous as unprotected music becomes more widely available through legitimate channels. Amazon.com, for example, claims to offer "Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads with more than 2.9 million songs from over 33,000 record labels." A week ago, Amazon said that Warner Music Group would make its artists' songs available in the unprotected MP3 format. EMI last year also began offering unprotected music online. And that's to say nothing of Web sites like Amie Street that have been offering unprotected music from independent artists for even longer.

Apple, for its part, might reasonably claim it doesn't want to license WMA from Microsoft, a cost the complaint speculates is unlikely to exceed $800,000, or 3 cents per iPod sold in 2005.

But the complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. "Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format," the complaint states. "Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as 'crippling' a product, and software that does this is known as 'crippleware.' "

Attorneys for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The filing claims that the SigmalTel STMP3550 chip in Apple's iPod Shuffles also supports WMA but that "Apple's crippleware operating system software prevents the iPod Shuffle from playing WMA files."

As for the injury to consumers, the complaint says that Apple's pricing is "monopolistic, excessive, and arbitrary," citing how a wholesale $5.52 price difference between 1-Gbyte ($4.15) and 4-Gbyte ($9.67) NAND flash memory modules results in a $100 retail price difference between 1-Gbyte iPod Nano and a 4-Gbyte Nano.

To buttress its antitrust claims under U.S. law, the complaint points to the fact that European antitrust authorities have taken issue with the way Apple operates its iPod and iTunes Music Store ecosystem.
http://informationweek.com/news/show...leID=205207895





University of South Florida - Letter to Students Regarding File Sharing.
AngryGnome

I have a couple of friends who attend the University of South Florida... and they forwarded this email to me this morning:

[quote]From: USF CTO
Subject: RE: File Sharing at USF

January 2008
Monitoring Usage of Filesharing Software on Campus


"As you are aware, universities around the country including USF have been struggling with the issue of illegal file-sharing and Peer to Peer (P2P) traffic on their network. We're faced with a dilemma: we want to allow students to do their work and to use the wealth of resources available through the Internet, but at the same time we can't support copyright infringement. It's the responsibility of those using the USF network to adjust their own behavior and avoid illegal sharing of copyrighted material. It's also the university's responsibility to help protect the system from illegal file-sharing.

Effective this month, Academic Computing will begin to more proactively monitor the network for the use of P2P software, such as Limewire, Bittorent, eMule, and others. Students found using such software will be redirected to a website which will inform them of the issues involved with using P2P software associated with the distribution of copyrighted music and videos. The student will be asked to acknowledge that their existing use of the software neither violates the University's Acceptable Use Policy and Code of Conduct, nor utilize the software in a manner which violates copyright laws. They will, additionally, be advised that violation of the University's Acceptable Use Policy would be cause for loss of on campus network privileges, in addition to other legal ramifications.

Should the student not acknowledge the agreement, access to the network will be denied. If the student using the P2P program agrees, he or she regains access to the network to continue their legal use of the P2P. This agreement would be valid for one month and the student will be required to re-acknowledge the Acceptable Use Policy each month that they utilize P2P software.

Subsequently, if the University receives any notice of copyright infringement violation due to the illegally sharing of copyrighted material, in accordance with University Policy, the student's network access will be suspended immediately and the case forwarded to the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities for further penalties. The University of South Florida is committed to the education of the students and the protection of the intellectual rights of the copyright holder.[quote]

It appears that USF is more interested in covering itself then it is in defending the rights and privacy of it's students. Any thoughts?
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24390





In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy
Adam Liptak

The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network.

The surprise was not that 20-year-olds listen to Sting. It was that the university fought back.

Represented by the state’s attorney general, Hardy Myers, the university filed a blistering motion to quash the subpoena, accusing the industry of misleading the judge, violating student privacy laws and engaging in questionable investigative practices. Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the industry had seen “a lot of crazy stuff” filed in response to its lawsuits and subpoenas. “But coming from the office of an attorney general of a state?” Mr. Sherman asked, incredulous. “We found it really surprising and disappointing.”

No one should shed tears for people who steal music and have to face the consequences. But it is nonetheless heartening to see a university decline to become the industry’s police officer and instead to defend the privacy of its students.

The recording industry may not be selling as much music these days, but it has built a pretty impressive and innovative litigation subsidiary.

In the past four years, record companies have sued tens of thousands of people for violating the copyright laws by sharing music on the Internet. The people it sues tend to settle, paying the industry a few thousand dollars rather than risking a potentially ruinous judgment by fighting in court.

“People get pushed into settlements,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like.”

In his filings, Mr. Myers claimed to be looking for a middle ground.

“Certainly it is appropriate for victims of copyright infringement to lawfully pursue statutory remedies,” Mr. Myers wrote last month. “However, that pursuit must be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process.”

“The larger issue,” Mr. Myers said, “is whether plaintiffs’ investigative and litigation strategies are appropriate.”

Mr. Myers questioned the tactics of MediaSentry, an investigative company hired by the recording industry. He said the company seemed to use data mining techniques to obtain “private, confidential information unrelated to copyright infringement.” He added that it may have violated an Oregon criminal law requiring investigators to be licensed.

A spokeswoman for MediaSentry said it collected only information that users of peer-to-peer networks make available to anyone who cared to look. She had no comment on the licensing law.

The record companies, in an apoplectic response in court, accused the university of having “a political agenda.” They said that it was protecting people who had broken the law and that it was not entitled to raise privacy and due process arguments on behalf of its students.

“Hundreds of universities and dozens of commercial Internet service providers have responded to the exact same subpoenas,” the record companies’ lawyers wrote.

James Gibson, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said Mr. Myers’s arguments had been raised in other cases and had met with little success. Still, Professor Gibson said, “it’s significant that a public university and its state apparatus is standing up to the R.I.A.A.”

Mr. Sherman, of the recording industry association, predicted that Mr. Myers’s motion would fail and said the industry’s litigation strategy had worked well.

“The litigation program, as controversial as it is often written up to be, has been very successful in transforming public awareness,” Mr. Sherman said. “Everybody used to think this was legal. Now everybody knows it’s illegal.”

Indeed, the program seems to be expanding, and universities are being asked to play an even bigger role. In February, the association started asking universities to identify students suspected of file sharing and to pass along “prelitigation letters” to them. The association says it has provided some 4,000 such letters to more than 150 colleges and universities. The letters offer the students what they call bargain settlements of about $3,000 if they act fast, by punching in a credit card number at www.p2plawsuits.com.

“The ‘reduced’ settlement amount, in other words, represents the record companies’ savings from cutting out the middleman — our justice system,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

The universities are under no legal obligation to pass the letters along, but most do. Those that don’t typically receive subpoenas like the one issued to the University of Oregon.

At least one other public university in Oregon has cooperated with the industry. In 2004, Portland State responded to a record industry subpoena by blandly and efficiently providing the names, addresses, phone numbers and goofy e-mail addresses of two roommates. The university said it could not say which student’s computer was involved, so it fingered both of them.

“We definitely felt betrayed,” said Karen Conway, the mother of one of the roommates. “They readily turned over private information without notifying us. They placed responding to a legal subpoena far above a student’s right to privacy.”

Though her daughter Delaney was blameless, the record companies’ lawyers demanded $4,500. It was, Ms. Conway said, “basically extortion,” and the family was forced to hire a lawyer. The case against Delaney Conway was eventually dropped. Her roommate settled.

Mr. Sherman said the University of Oregon should disclose what it knew and let the legal system sort out the rest. “It’s no different than us subpoenaing Verizon,” he said.

But an institution of higher education has different aspirations and obligations than an Internet service provider, which is why Portland State’s actions are so unsettling. The University of Oregon’s efforts may be doomed, but there is something bracing about them nonetheless.

All the university is saying, after all, is that the record industry must make its case in court before the university will point a finger at one of its own.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/31bar.html





Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use
Marc Fisher

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry's lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

RIAA's hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

They're not kidding. In October, after a trial in Minnesota -- the first time the industry has made its case before a federal jury -- Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $220,000 to the big record companies. That's $9,250 for each of 24 songs she was accused of sharing online.

Whether customers may copy their CDs onto their computers -- an act at the very heart of the digital revolution -- has a murky legal foundation, the RIAA argues. The industry's own Web site says that making a personal copy of a CD that you bought legitimately may not be a legal right, but it "won't usually raise concerns," as long as you don't give away the music or lend it to anyone.

Of course, that's exactly what millions of people do every day. In a Los Angeles Times poll, 69 percent of teenagers surveyed said they thought it was legal to copy a CD they own and give it to a friend. The RIAA cites a study that found that more than half of current college students download music and movies illegally.

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.

But lawyers for consumers point to a series of court rulings over the last few decades that found no violation of copyright law in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs; that is, to make personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording.

As technologies evolve, old media companies tend not to be the source of the innovation that allows them to survive. Even so, new technologies don't usually kill off old media: That's the good news for the recording industry, as for the TV, movie, newspaper and magazine businesses. But for those old media to survive, they must adapt, finding new business models and new, compelling content to offer.

The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only "created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies," Beckerman says. "Every problem they're trying to solve is worse now than when they started."

The industry "will continue to bring lawsuits" against those who "ignore years of warnings," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said in a statement. "It's not our first choice, but it's a necessary part of the equation. There are consequences for breaking the law." And, perhaps, for firing up your computer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122800693.html





The Shrinking Market Is Changing the Face of Hip-Hop
Kelefa Sanneh

UNTIL a few weeks ago it seemed like one of the few happy stories to emerge from an otherwise difficult year in hip-hop. UGK, the Port Arthur, Tex., duo that influenced a generation of Southern rappers, returned after a five-year hiatus. They came back bearing a sublime single, “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You).” And they came back bearing a great double album, “Underground Kingz” (Jive/Zomba), which made its debut atop Billboard’s album chart.

Then, on Dec. 4, the news arrived: Pimp C — the duo’s flamboyant half, a slick drawler and an even slicker producer — had been found dead in his hotel room. His bereaved musical partner, Bun B, gave a handful of eloquent interviews, trying to explain what he had lost, what fans had lost.

“I appreciate the concern,” he told Vibe. “But I wouldn’t ask anyone to stop their life, because Pimp would’ve wanted us all to keep grinding.”

If you’re looking for a two-word motto for hip-hop in 2007, you could do worse than that: “Keep grinding.” This was the year when the gleaming hip-hop machine — the one that minted a long string of big-name stars, from Snoop Dogg to OutKast — finally broke down, leaving rappers no alternative but to work harder, and for fewer rewards. Newcomers arrived with big singles and bigger hopes, only to fall off the charts after selling a few hundred thousand copies, if that. Hip-pop hybrids dominated the radio, but rappers themselves seemed like underground figures, for the first time in nearly two decades.

Sales are down all over, but hip-hop has been hit particularly hard. Rap sales slid fell 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and that trend seems to be continuing. It’s the inevitable aftermath, perhaps, of the genre’s vertiginous rise in the 1990s, during which a series of breakout stars — Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. — figured out that they could sell millions without shaving off their rough edges. By 1997 the ubiquity of Puff Daddy helped cement hip-hop’s new image: the rapper as tycoon. Like all pop-music trends, like all economic booms, this one couldn’t last.

This was a bad year for hip-hop sales, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad year for the genre. The scrappy New York independent Koch flourished, releasing a couple of great CDs by major-label refugees: “Return of the Mac,” by Prodigy from Mobb Deep, and “Walkin’ Bank Roll,” by Project Pat. (Koch also released “We the Best,” a sanctioned mixtape by DJ Khaled that produced a couple of hip-hop hits, and “The Brick: Bodega Chronicles,” the well-received debut album from Joell Ortiz.)

And then there is Turf Talk, a loudmouthed upstart from Vallejo, Calif., who made arguably the year’s most exciting hip-hop album, “West Coast Vaccine (The Cure).” It came out through Sick Wid’ It Records, which is run by his cousin, the rapper E-40. (The album was released through a distribution deal with Navarre, which sold its music distribution business to Koch in May.) And despite Turf Talk’s flamboyant rhymes, the album has pretty much remained a secret. Without a national radio hit or even a proper music video, Turf Talk has promoted the CD mainly through West Coast regional shows, from San Diego to Tacoma, Wash.

Reached by telephone at his home in Concord, Calif., Turf Talk tried to put the best spin on a mixed-up year. “The independent game is starting to shine again,” he said. But when pressed, he said he would love to cross over to the mainstream, speaking in the third person: “Turf Talk wants to be known all across the world.”

A few years ago that might have seemed like a reasonable goal, and an attainable one. During the boom the industry was flooded with scowling optimists: small-time hustlers with dreams of big-time success. And some dreams came true. In 1998 Juvenile went from a New Orleans secret to a pop radio staple, selling five million copies of “400 Degreez”; two years later, Nelly came from nowhere (actually St. Louis) to sell six million copies of “Country Grammar.” Overall CD sales peaked in 2000, and by then even second-tier major-label rappers were routinely earning gold plaques for shipping half a million CDs.

Because hip-hop is so intensely self-aware, and self-reflexive, it came to be known as big-money music, a genre obsessed with its own success. If we are now entering an age of diminished commercial expectations, that will inevitably change how hip-hop sounds too.

How bad are the numbers? Well, no rapper was more diminished by 2007 than 50 Cent, who challenged Kanye West to a sales battle and lost. His solid but not thrilling recent album, “Curtis” (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), has sold about 1.2 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan; considering that he’s supposed to be the genre’s biggest star, that’s a disaster. (His 2005 album, “The Massacre,” sold more than five million.) In fact “Curtis” has sold about the same as T. I.’s “T. I. vs. T. I. P.” (Atlantic), the underwhelming and underperforming follow-up to his great 2006 album, “King,” which sold about 1.6 million.

This year veterans like Jay-Z and Wu-Tang Clan also returned, pleasing old fans but not, for the most part, making new ones. And Lil Wayne released another slew of great mixtapes — available for free download, not for sale. Meanwhile Mr. West’s “Graduation” (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam), which stands at 1.8 million sold and counting, is the only hip-hop album of the year that really seems like a hit, although he loves to portray himself as outside the hip-hop mainstream. Only one problem: After a year when the hitmaker Fabolous and the bohemian Common sold about equally, as did the BET favorite Yung Joc and the indie-rap alumnus Talib Kweli, it’s not clear that there’s still a hip-hop mainstream to be outside.

And eager newcomers discovered that the definition of success has changed. Rich Boy, Shop Boyz, Plies, Hurricane Chris and Soulja Boy Tell’em all released major-label debuts, buoyed by big, lovable hits: “Throw Some D’s,” “Party Like a Rockstar,” “Shawty,” “A Bay Bay” and “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” But of those only Soulja Boy has managed to sell half a million CDs. Hurricane Chris’s disappointing CD, “51/50 Ratchet” (Polo Grounds/J Records), has sold only about 80,000 copies. To a major label that number is almost indistinguishable from zero. (Despite the hit the No. 1 chart debut and the half-decade of anticipation, UGK’s triumphant double album hasn’t reached the half-million mark either.)

Hip-hop has always had a complicated relationship with full-length albums. They’re both too long (for impatient hit lovers) and too short (for ephemera- obsessed mixtape listeners). And even though the South has been hip-hop’s most fertile region since the 1990s, the industry, based in New York and Los Angeles, harbors a lingering anti-Southern bias. Southern rappers are often viewed as one-hit wonders, and that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time Rich Boy, from Mobile, Ala., tried to drum up interest in his excellent fourth single, “Let’s Get This Paper,” it seemed everybody had already moved on.

At least independent-label rappers have no one to blame. Turf Talk knew from the start that he would have to fight for his album, which he released in June. “I had a lot of hopes for ‘West Coast Vaccine,’ that’s why I’m still pushing it now,” he said, adding that he was finalizing plans for a video. The song he chose was “Popo’s,” a sleek and infectious collaboration with E-40, who adds a memorable touch: a thunderous “Oooh!” In his mesmerizing verses, Turf Talk raps about selling drugs and avoiding the police. His breathless rhymes — “I’m tryna stack every dollar,” he pants — evoke not a kingpin’s confidence but a survivor’s tenacity.

It’s easy to romanticize Turf Talk’s grass-roots approach: his do-it-yourself video shoot, his evident pride in how much he has accomplished on his own, his commitment to the family business. But for him the promise of exposure and the long shot at stardom are too tempting to reject.

“I love the independent money,” he said. “I’m living good, I drive nice cars. But right now, if you asked me, I’d say, ‘Turf Talk wants to go major.’ Because you can always come back to independent.”

That’s what Prodigy discovered. Last year his duo, Mobb Deep, flopped with “Blood Money,” a misconceived CD on 50 Cent’s label, G Unit, an Interscope imprint. This year he went independent for “Return of the Mac,” a hallucinogenic, willfully obscure solo album that evokes the grimy old New York, and the grimy old Prodigy too. (It sold about 130,000 copies.) He has a new album scheduled for next year, though he pleaded guilty in October to gun possession and was sentenced to three and a half years. His new single, “ABC’s,” begins with a halfway defensive boast: “It don’t matter who poppin’ for the moment/P is forever.” If you’re not making hits, why not claim to be making history?

Like Prodigy, Project Pat is a major-label refugee. He emerged from Memphis in the late ’90s and swiftly took advantage of the hip-hop boom. “Chickenhead,” his memorable but medium-sized hit (it peaked at No. 24 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart), helped his 2001 major-label album, “Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin,” sell nearly 1.1 million copies. (Five years ago, in other words, Project Pat sold about as well as 50 Cent sells today.)

After a prison sentence and an underperforming major-label comeback, Project Pat made his Koch debut with “Walkin’ Bank Roll.” The boast in the title track is a defiant (and typically absurd) response to his diminished commercial success: “I’m a walkin’ bank roll/You can rubber-band me,” he keeps shouting, and his glee is infectious. It’s a weird, funny little album; though it has sold only about 40,000 copies, it feels triumphant.

Is it possible to hear a shrug over the phone? Project Pat, when asked about his newfound independence, seemed profoundly unimpressed. “It’s the same old, same old,” he shouted, over the roar of a Mortal Kombat game, though he conceded, “People say they liked it better.” He said he was planning his next album and gearing up for more live dates, which are crucial for independent acts. “Alaska — yessirrr, Anchorage,” he said, sounding a bit like the eccentric rapper from the CDs. “They asked for me per-son-al-ly.”

Under-the-radar releases, weird tour schedules, modest sales figures: none of this is new. The success of Southern hip-hop in the last decade was built on a foundation of independent and independent-minded rappers, many of whom worked with the scrappy regional distributor Southwest Wholesale, which is now closed, like many of the little shops it used to serve. In an earlier era these regional scenes were farm teams for the industry, grooming the top players and then sending them up to the big leagues. But what if there are no big leagues anymore? What if there’s no major label willing or able to help Turf Talk get his platinum plaque? Would his next album sound as brash? Will his musical descendants be as motivated? The mainstream hip-hop industry relies on a thriving underground, but isn’t the reverse also true?

Eventually, a (new?) group of executives will find a business model that doesn’t depend on shiny plastic discs, or digital tracks bundled together to approximate them. But for now the major league is starting to look a lot like the minor one. And in ways good and bad and utterly unpredictable, rappers may have to reconsider their place in the universe, and their audience. Some will redouble their commitment to nonsense, like Project Pat. Some will wallow in their misery, like Prodigy. Some will merely revel in their own loudmouthiness, like Turf Talk, hoping someone will pay attention. But if sales keep falling, more and more rappers will have to face the fact that they aren’t addressing a crowd, just a sliver of one.

On Oct. 14, less than two months before Pimp C’s death, there was another death in the Houston hip-hop family. His name was Big Moe, and he died of a heart attack. He was a much more local figure than Pimp C: a crooner turned rapper and an associate of DJ Screw, who popularized the art of remixing records by slowing them down. (DJ Screw died in 2000.) Big Moe’s best tracks are sublime and disorienting. His was a huge, wobbly sing- rapping voice, often paired with slowed-down drums and lyrics extolling the pleasures of cough syrup.

Big Moe eventually got himself a deal, but his odd and entertaining 2002 major- label debut, “Purple World” (Priority/Capitol), quickly disappeared, and soon he was back to independent releases. It’s no slight to his legacy to say that when news of his death arrived in October, even most hip-hop fans didn’t know who he was. That’s all right. Music that seems lost — there’s a head-spinning selection on “Big Moe Classics Volume One” (Wreckshop) — will be found, over and over again. And after this dispiriting year, it’s not hard to admire Big Moe’s little career. He made secrets, not hits, but so what? He kept grinding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/ar...ic/30sann.html





Beatles for Sale: Rappers, Brands Turn to Fab Four
Susan Butler and Paul Sexton

It's perfectly legal, but it will still seem to some listeners like the sound of someone making off with England's crown jewels.

On rap collective Wu-Tang Clan's new single "The Heart Gently Weeps," a Santana-style rock guitar opening gives way to an almost celestial chorus of something very familiar. There, and throughout the track, is the unmistakable melody of George Harrison's timeless contribution to the Beatles' "White Album" from 1968: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Now, the track is accompanied by Wu-Tang's trademark, uncompromising language, rapping out a gritty street story, even as Harrison's son Dhani plays along.

Meanwhile on the just-finished "Judas," Ja Rule is introducing the rap community to another incongruous musical motif. This is no unthinking appropriation of a classic act's creativity, as has sometimes been the case in rap. As he works at folding the original flavor into the hook of this midtempo treatise on "love, hate, jealousy and betrayal," he's doing so with the help of "Eleanor Rigby."

Forty years and more after the Beatles changed rock music forever, their songs have truly arrived in the 21st century as part of the rap/hip-hop art form -- with the express permission of their publishers. Although there are hundreds of covers of "Yesterday," "Something" and the rest, this approach of "interpolation" -- essentially rerecording a portion of a song -- of the Beatles' compositions represents new access to the most famous catalogue in the world. These developments may ultimately signal a fresh attitude toward Beatles masters appearing in everything from commercials to movies.

Can't Buy Me Love

But don't expect to hear samples of the Beatles' original recordings, which remain strictly under lock and key, for now at least. Instead Sony/ATV, which owns all but a handful of the Lennon/McCartney copyrights, is allowing a select few to license some celebrated compositions and reference them in their own, newly recorded material.

The first lucky participants in these interpolations are acts from the arena of hip-hop and rap, with Ja Rule joining Common -- who used "She's Leaving Home" on "Forever Begins" from his current album "Finding Forever" -- and Jay-Z, who commandeered "I Will" on "Encore" from his 2003 "The Black Album" and "Numb/Encore" on his 2004 collaboration "Collision Curse" with Linkin Park. Meanwhile, Wu-Tang licensed rights from Harrisongs, George Harrison's publisher, for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Ja Rule's "Eleanor Rigby"-appropriating "Judas" will appear on his next album, "The Mirror," due in the first quarter, while the Wu's Harrison-referencing "The Heart Gently Weeps" is the first single from its new album "8 Diagrams," which came out December 11. The song features a re-created backing track plus electric guitar by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante as well as acoustic contributions from Dhani Harrison.

Sony/ATV chief executive Martin Bandier says he's very much in favor of licensing Beatles songs for things that haven't been licensed in the past -- under certain circumstances. Jay-Z, Common and Ja Rule received Sony/ATV's blessing because "they're prominent and well-regarded," Bandier says, but the way the song is used must also be acceptable.

"If Jay-Z interpolates a Beatles song and his album sells 2 million units, it doesn't change the economic structure" of the license deal, Bandier says. "It's wonderful to have that income, but we're more concerned about the possible repercussions of a bad message and something that we might not find tasteful."

The ever-sensitive nature of the Beatles' copyrights is reflected by the reluctance of several key players to participate in this story. Paul McCartney, Dhani Harrison, Jeff Jones (who became Apple Corps' new CEO in April) and EMI Music U.K. and Ireland chairman/CEO Tony Wadsworth were either "unavailable" or declined to comment.

In fact, Sony/ATV is not contractually required to obtain approval by John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, or by McCartney before it can license the compositions, but Bandier says he believes there is a "moral obligation" to speak with them about licensing the songs. In the internecine history of the Beatles' publishing, Lennon and McCartney effectively lost control of the group's song rights even while the group was still a recording entity, in 1969.

That was when Northern Songs, the company established six years earlier solely to publish their joint compositions by English publisher Dick James and Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was sold to British media tycoon Lew Grade's ATV Music. Ownership of ATV subsequently passed to Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes a Court and then, in 1985, to Michael Jackson.

In 1995, Sony came into the picture, forming a joint venture with trusts formed by Jackson, creating a new entity: Sony/ATV Music Publishing. That publishing company includes the Northern Songs catalogue that contains 259 copyrights by Lennon and McCartney. These songs essentially represent everything recorded under the Beatles name by Lennon and McCartney, except for five songs: their first two U.K. singles, "Love Me Do"/"P.S. I Love You" and "Please Please Me"/"Ask Me Why," and "Penny Lane," "gifted" by Jackson to Holmes a Court under a specific provision of Jackson's purchase of the ATV catalogue.

The Long And Winding Road

When it comes to the Beatles' original studio recordings, controlled by EMI-Capitol Records, permission is another matter. After Nike used the Beatles' original of "Revolution" in 1987 for its "Revolution in Motion" TV commercial campaign (in a licensing deal worth $250,000 to the label, according to Nike at the time), Apple Corps and Apple Records sued Nike, its advertising agency and EMI-Capitol for $15 million.

Paul Russell, former chairman of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, recalls, "Once Sony/ATV was formed, any requests for those songs came to Sony/ATV and not to Michael Jackson.

"(When) those requests came in, serious requests for serious money, for products that we knew were noncontentious, they would come to me and we would form a view, and then we'd go to Michael, even though he didn't have the right to approve it, and say, 'We've received this request, we think it's the right price and an OK use, what do you think?' If somebody had come back to us, either Michael or the Apple people, and said, 'We really don't want you to do this,' we probably wouldn't have done it."

According to a 1988 New York Times report, Apple's attorney Leonard Marks said that "Ono and the (then) three surviving Beatles each own 25% of Apple and that the company required 'unanimity among the four Beatles' interests in order to act.'"

In 1989, it was announced that the dispute had been resolved, in a formal statement that all outstanding lawsuits between the Beatles/Apple and EMI-Capitol-- some of them dating back 20 years -- had been settled. The parties agreed that no further Beatles recordings would be licensed for commercial use, although the Nike commercial can now be seen on YouTube.

Brian Southall, author of "Northern Songs: The True Story of the Beatles' Publishing Empire," published in August in the United States by Omnibus Press, says, "There aren't a lot of Lennon/McCartney songs that appear in adverts since the Nike ad. And you'll never, ever find the Beatles singing as a background to a TV commercial. You could take a song and get it recorded by 'A. N. Other.' But Michael (Jackson)'s attitude in the early days was, 'These are the greatest songs ever recorded, and they ain't gonna end up on a cornflakes ad.'"

Nevertheless, Ono was quoted by Time magazine at the time as saying the "Revolution" commercial was "making John's music accessible to a new generation." That's exactly how Bandier feels today about actively promoting the Beatles via licensing, and others agree that current commercial realities make the eventual appearance of their original recordings in commercials and films much more likely.

The type of licensing that's been the most contentious for music purists is for commercials. But a license for a Lennon/McCartney song -- albeit in a cover version -- not only drives revenue for the advertiser, publisher and writers, it can convey a message in the most powerful way.

Rob Kaplan, director of music production for New York-based advertising agency Mcgarrybowen, has been involved with three commercials using Lennon/McCartney songs licensed from Sony/ATV. In 1998, Europe-based Philips Consumer Electronics had very little brand recognition in the United States, Kaplan says. It was using the tag line, "Let's make things better," and wanted an anthemic song to unify its products and create a corporate identity.

"They needed something that was a big statement, that could cut across generations, was instantly recognizable but also kind of cool and clever," Kaplan says. Since the Beatles recording wasn't available, they had Gomez, then an emerging English band signed to Virgin, record the chorus to "Getting Better," the last seven seconds of which played at the end of every Philips commercial for about three years.

"We literally got thousands of requests from consumers wanting to know where to buy the song," Kaplan says.

Mcgarrybowen subsequently licensed Rufus Wainwright's recording of "Across the Universe" for Canon digital cameras in 2004, as well as a version of "All You Need Is Love" for Chase Bank's 2006 campaign for rewards programs and customized credit cards with partners including Marriott Hotels, Disney and Borders Books & Music.

"What makes a Beatles song special in advertising is that it's one of the few things that you know everybody is going to 'get,' no matter what," Kaplan says. "The lyrics are really clear. There are very few things that cut across every demographic imaginable and are still special. The Beatles really are. There's no comparison."

Such campaigns are even rarer in the Beatles' homeland but in 2000, U.K. bank Halifax used a cover of "Help!" in a six-month TV campaign.

"To get something as anthemic as 'Help!' was a massive coup," recalls Tim Male, the company's head of advertising and media. "We were very surprised when we got it, on the basis that artists like that aren't interested, or the process or cost of doing it makes it prohibitive.

"The thought of a Beatles track being used in anything is abhorrent to certain people," Male adds, "and you've got to be mindful of that."

All You Need Is ... Luvs?

Sony/ATV U.K. says that no applications for British commercial licenses of Beatles songs are in the works, and that the company will take its lead on potential recorded interpolations from the U.S. company. A London representative for Universal Music Publishing Group, which administers "Please Please Me" and "Ask Me Why," says, "We're very selective over any requests and uses of the songs. We would consider commercials if appropriate."

Bandier notes that the publisher's decision to grant a license for a Beatles song can be informed by whether it will take the composition to a new audience. Hence Luvs Diapers' current campaign, which proclaims, "All You Need Is Luvs."

"The thought and the song were ideal for morning TV, when young mothers are watching," Bandier says, adding that the commercial was being aired to young parents who may not know the song or have a sense of the theme. "We thought it was very tasteful."

Since Bandier joined Sony/ATV in March after leaving EMI Music Publishing -- which holds rights in Lennon's solo compositions -- he has strived to ensure that these classic songs reach the next generation of listeners in a myriad of ways, not just from their parents talking about them.

Seemingly the most successful venture to date is the Las Vegas show "Love," a joint production of Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corps using the original Beatles recordings, remixed by George Martin and son Giles. Since the show opened in June 2006, it has drawn more than 600,000 spectators and generated music publishing fees nearing $500,000 per month, according to a source close to the show. Worldwide sales of the accompanying "Love" album, released this time last year, stand at 5 million units, according to EMI in London.

Elsewhere, Beatles lyrics are appearing on clothing, after Sony/ATV sealed a deal with Lyric Culture authorizing use of the lyrics on jeans, T-shirts and other items. The publisher is negotiating other merchandising deals.

On the big screen, Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" -- with a plot based on the Beatles songbook and a soundtrack featuring cover versions of Beatles classics -- was released this fall. It grossed about $24 million in the United States and Canada. (The soundtrack album also just received a Grammy Award nomination for best compilation soundtrack album for motion picture, television or other visual media.)

On TV, a special edition of NBC's "The Singing Bee" was recently dedicated to Lennon and McCartney, while the sixth season's final episode of "American Idol" was a Lennon, McCartney and the Beatles special, with the contestants all singing Beatles songs.

"In all of the years that 'American Idol' has been around, there's never been a Lennon and McCartney song performed on that show," Bandier says. "I thought it was preposterous. We were missing an audience of tens of millions of people.

"It's important that the world knows this music," Bandier adds. "It just can't be hidden forever, otherwise you're going to miss generations of music listeners."
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...48005820080102





A Film Year Full of Escapism, Flat in Attendance
Brooks Barnes

Despite a modest increase in 2007 box office receipts, moviedom is trudging into January with a droop in its shoulders.

Ticket sales at North American movie theaters totaled $9.7 billion, a 4 percent increase over the previous year, according to Media by Numbers, a box office tracking company. But attendance was flat, after a narrow increase in 2006 and three previous years of sharp declines. Movie fans bought about 1.42 billion tickets last year, according to Media by Numbers. The high watermark of the last 10 years came in 2002, when moviegoers bought about 1.61 billion tickets.

The results last year were largely driven by expensive sequels like “Spider-Man 3” (the top-grossing film) and “Shrek the Third” (the runner-up), although a handful of expert marketing campaigns turned some oddball entries like “Alvin and the Chipmunks” into bona fide hits. One surefire franchise was born to Paramount and DreamWorks in “Transformers” (which placed third).

Nine of the Top 10 grossing films were science fiction, fantasy or animation. The sole exception (unless you count the mock-historical “300”) was Universal’s action thriller “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which placed sixth with $227 million in domestic ticket sales.

As the movie industry turns its attention to 2008, the dark “No Country for Old Men” is showing box office legs, and one film in particular is already shaping up as a home run. Early results for “Juno,” about a quirky teenager who becomes pregnant, have outpaced those for the indie hits “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

“The critical acclaim and award recognition have magnified the movie,” said Peter Rice, the president of Fox Searchlight, which is distributing “Juno.”

But box office results are always a game of glass half-full and glass half-empty, and the half-empties this time seem more prominent.

DVD sales continue to slump both domestically and abroad. The private money that has washed over Hollywood in recent years is starting to slow, investment bankers say, as more hedge funds go home with little to show. And movie executives are worried about the impending collision between striking screenwriters and the important awards shows.

The strike, now in its ninth week with no new talks scheduled, is starting to weigh more heavily on the movie business over all. Until now, the damage has been mostly confined to television, which operates with a shorter production pipeline. But as the strike drags on, movie executives — and their corporate bosses — are starting to worry about having enough time to put together their mega-movie slates for summer 2009.

At the box office the happy surprises of 2007 were almost all confined to escapist offerings like “The Game Plan,” a Walt Disney release about an N.F.L. quarterback and his young daughter, or sophomoric comedies like “Superbad,” a Sony release from the producer Judd Apatow.

But studios have instead churned out gloomy message movies, and more are on the way, noted Paul Dergarabedian, the president of Media by Numbers.

“There were some great films, but the appetite wasn’t there,” he said. Movies rooted in the Iraq war or terrorism — “In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” — particularly struggled. A glut of serious-minded awards hopefuls canceled one another out. Signs of trouble lurked even during the blockbuster-packed summer, in which ticket sales surpassed the $4 billion mark for the first time. Sequels, with the notable exception of “Bourne,” the third in a series, were generally not well reviewed and sold fewer tickets than their second or first installments.

“Shrek the Third,” “Spider-Man 3” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” all marked low points for these franchises at the domestic box office when ticket sales are adjusted for inflation, according to Box Office Mojo, another tracking service.

(The studios note that more than half of the ticket sales for each of those titles came from overseas. While there are no reliable independent data for overseas ticket sales, entertainment trade publications estimate that foreign receipts for the six biggest studios increased 9 percent in 2007 over a year earlier, to $9.4 billion.)

Stars did not seem to interest moviegoers, with marquee names playing to empty seats. Angelina Jolie flopped with “A Mighty Heart,” about the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and Nicole Kidman’s career grew chillier with the North American collapse of “The Golden Compass.” Among the men, Tom Cruise struggled to avoid blame for a dead-on-arrival “Lions for Lambs,” and Brad Pitt drew shrugs for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

One big exception: Will Smith cemented his status as a top box office draw — and perhaps the biggest star in the business today — with robust results for “I am Legend,” a Warner Brothers release about a man wandering a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. The picture has sold $195 million in tickets since its Dec. 14 opening, with another $61.3 million coming from overseas, according to Box Office Mojo.

(Denzel Washington also gets credit for helping to turn Universal’s “American Gangster” into a $184 million hit, although he appears to be having a harder time with the just-opened “Great Debaters.”)

Of course results vary by studio, and some are entering 2008 on a high note. Walt Disney, for instance, has played the game better than most.

“Ratatouille” overcame early skepticism about its rat-in-the-kitchen subject to become both a global blockbuster and a critical darling. “Enchanted,” about an animated princess who comes to life, continues to chug away in theaters, and “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” is a slam dunk. That action film, starring Nicolas Cage, sold $124 million in tickets domestically in its first 10 days of release, according to Box Office Mojo.

Mark Zoradi, president of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, cited a recent decision to focus more intently on the company’s brand as a catalyst for its performance. “The Disney name continues to be enormously successful with audiences,” he said.

Twentieth Century Fox appears to be able to sell just about anything. That studio has set the standard for effective Internet marketing by coming up with ways for fans to personalize messages. “The Simpsons Movie,” with its $526 million in total ticket sales around the world, benefited from Simpsonize Me, a Web promotion (simpsonizeme.com) that allowed visitors to animate pictures of themselves. Fox used a similar promotion to fuel “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/movies/02year.html





Judge Will Not Dismiss Evidence in Private Investigator's Hollywood Wiretapping Case
AP

A federal judge refused to suppress evidence in a government case that accused a Hollywood private investigator of illegally wiretapping stars.

U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer issued six separate rulings on Friday that went against private eye Anthony Pellicano and five co-defendants, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

Pellicano is in federal custody pending trial. An indictment accused him of tapping phones and bribing police to get information on celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone and comedian Garry Shandling.

Pellicano and the other defendants have pleaded not guilty to wiretapping and conspiracy.

The motions sought to suppress evidence the defense argued was mishandled or obtained through government misconduct. That included recordings of Pellicano's telephone conversations that were seized in a search of his Sunset Strip offices four years ago.

One of the motions sought to have the entire criminal indictment dismissed.

"We are extremely pleased with the court's ruling," said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

"This investigation was conducted well within the confines of the law ... the investigators demonstrated the highest degree of integrity," he said.

Attorneys for Pellicano declined to comment on the rulings after the hearing.

An attorney for co-defendant Terry Christensen said an appeal will be considered.

"At the very least, we thought we were entitled to evidentiary hearings to determine the seriousness of the government mistakes in this case," attorney Terree Bowers said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...d-Wiretaps.php





World's Smallest Projector Set for Launch

The world's smallest business and personal projector could arrive in stores later this year.
Lance Ulanoff

Just 12 months after demonstrating a working prototype of the world's smallest projector, Redmond, Wash.-based Microvision is unveiling a fully functioning, self-contained prototype that should be available as a real product—possibly from Motorola—later this year.

Dubbed SHOW, the lensless PicoP projector is designed for home and business use, and uses tiny lasers to shoot a WVGA (848 by 480, roughly DVD resolution) image on virtually any surface that isn't a dark color or textured. It can even project onto curved and uneven surfaces. From a distance of two feet, it could project a two-foot diagonal, full-color image on a white T-shirt. From five feet away, it could show a five-foot image on, say, a white wall or ceiling.

"It's a great for-use mode when it comes to spontaneously sharing content with your friends," said Russell Hannigan, Microvision's Director of Product Management for Consumer Projection Displays.

And while last year's prototype relied on some peripheral technology outside the handheld-size projector, SHOW needs no external parts. It includes a rechargeable battery and can charge and power via USB cable, as well.

Hannigan explained that SHOW is plug and play and should work with any video-out capable devices, including laptops, the iPod touch, and some phones.

SHOW is even something of a green product. Hannigan noted that its three colored lasers turn on only when needed. So unlike the powerful lamps in standard business projectors which are always on during operation, SHOW doesn't need a fan to keep the PicoP-based projector cool. Also, the lack of a physical lens allows Microvision to make SHOW as thin or thinner than your standard cell phone. The rechargeable battery on the prototype lasts about an hour and a half, but Hannigan expects the final product's battery to last almost twice as long. Shipping SHOW projectors could sell for between $200 and $300.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2242734,00.asp





Netflix Partners With LG to Bring Movies Straight to TV
Brad Stone

Netflix, the DVD-by-mail company with more than seven million customers, has a new strategy that may one day make those red envelopes obsolete.

The company wants to strike deals with electronics companies that will let it send movies straight to TV screens over the Internet. Its first partnership, announced Wednesday night, is with the South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics to stream movies and other programming to LG’s high-definition televisions.

The partnership will extend a novel feature from Netflix, announced a year ago, that allows paying subscribers to watch any of 6,000 movies and television shows on its Web site free. But that service can be accessed only with a personal computer.

Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said he hoped to strike other such deals and that Netflix would soon be viewed as a movie channel that might appear on myriad devices.

“We want to be integrated on every Internet-connected device, game system, high-definition DVD player and dedicated Internet set-top box,” he said. “Eventually, as TVs have wireless connectivity built into them, we’ll integrate right into the television.”
The move could help transform Netflix from a successful company with a cumbersome dependence on physical media and the Postal Service into an important player in a rapidly emerging digital media landscape.

That landscape has recently been characterized by a frenzy of experimentation, as technology and media companies try to figure out how to bring the unlimited media choices of the Internet to the traditionally restricted confines of the television.

The players include cable, satellite and telephone companies. Newer entrants include Amazon.com, which lets customers buy movies over its Unbox service and download them to their TiVo boxes. Wal-Mart, which experimented with movie downloads on its Web site, pulled the plug on the service last month when Hewlett-Packard, its partner in the project, stopped supporting the technology.

Then there is the digital media heavyweight Apple. At the annual Macworld expo opening on Jan. 15, the company plans to announce a deal to allow users of its iTunes service to rent films from some Hollywood studios and watch them on their computers and iPods.

Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, a market research firm, said Netflix’s model had the virtue of being free to existing subscribers and relatively easy for consumers to understand. “You’re already a subscriber and you don’t pay anything extra. That’s called a slam dunk in most businesses we follow,” Mr. Doherty said.

The companies said LG products with Netflix’s movie service would begin shipping in the second half of this year. They did not say which devices would have it.

Mr. Doherty, who was briefed on the Netflix announcement and LG’s other plans to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, said LG could integrate the Netflix service into a future version of its dual-mode HD DVD/Blu-ray DVD player, which now sells for $799, and a new line of high-definition TVs with wireless connections to the Internet, among other products.

Mr. Hastings said the new service would combine the benefits of an Internet browser with the luxury of watching movies and TV shows on large, high-definition TV screens. He said subscribers would be able to go to the Netflix Web site to create lists of movies they wanted to see. The Netflix service on the TV would offer a simple way to watch those movies.

“We think we have solved the real fundamental problem, which has been that choosing movies on a television has been extremely challenging,” Mr. Hastings said. “Video-on-demand companies worked at it for a long time, but choosing movies on the TV just doesn’t have the power of the Web.”

The Netflix streams will not initially be in high definition, and there are some limits to how many programs customers can watch. For example, customers who pay Netflix’s most popular $17-a-month rate are entitled to watch up to 17 movies on their PC, though a spokesman said the company had been experimenting with unlimited digital viewing.

Netflix says it is able to offer the online service free to subscribers because when customers watch online, the company does not have to spend the money to mail them a DVD.

The deal with LG is something of a strategy shift for Netflix. The company had been experimenting with building its own Netflix-brand set-top box. Last spring, to help create the device, the company hired Anthony Wood, the founder of ReplayTV and a pioneer of the digital video recorder.

But Mr. Hastings said that integrating Netflix into other companies’ devices made more sense. He said Mr. Wood would soon leave Netflix to return to another company he founded, Roku.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with JupiterResearch, said the move was a wise one. “Software and services companies that get into hardware and try to sell hardware usually don’t end up doing particularly well,” he said.

Mr. Hastings said that the company’s new digital effort did not augur the end of its valuable DVD-by-mail business, which helped the company earn around $1.2 billion in 2007. “If anything, we are going to see some extra life and growth in DVD rental,” he said. “This doesn’t reflect a view that DVD rental is going to shrink any time soon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/te...03netflix.html





Bad COPP No Netflix
Davis Freeberg

When In Doubt Blame Microsoft

Even though I'm an HDTV fanatic, it wasn't until this past weekend, that I finally made the jump to an HD monitor. While I don't have HDTV tuners on my Media Center, I do have an HD camcorder and it was important for me to be able to edit my high resolution videos.

After doing a little bit of research, I decided to pick up a SyncMasterTM 226BW from Samsung. Between the new monitor and my ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card, the resolution looks absolutely stunning. Even my home movies look fantastic in HDTV. I really couldn't have been happier with the upgrade.

Unfortunately, Hollywood isn't quite as thrilled about my new HD Media Dream Machine and they've decided to punish me by revoking my Watch Now privileges from Netflix.

I first found out about the problem on New Year's Eve, when I went to log into my account. When I tried to launch a streaming movie, I was greeted with an error message asking me to "reset" my DRM. Luckily, Netflix's help page on the topic included a link to a DRM reset utility, but when I went to install the program, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this warning.

Netflix DRM

The minute I saw"this will potentially remove playback licenses from your computer, including those from companies other than Netflix or Microsoft" I knew better than to hit continue. Before nuking my entire digital library, I decided to call Netflix's technical support, to see if I could get to the bottom of my C00D11B1 error message.

When I called them they confirmed my worst fears. In order to access the Watch Now service, I had to give Microsoft's DRM sniffing program access to all of the files on my hard drive. If the software found any non-Netflix video files, it would revoke my rights to the content and invalidate the DRM. This means that I would lose all the movies that I've purchased from Amazon's Unbox, just to troubleshoot the issue.

Technically, there is a way to back up the licenses before doing a DRM reset, but it's a pretty complex process, even by my standards. When I asked Netflix for more details, they referred me to Amazon for assistance.

Perhaps even worse than having to choose between having access to Netflix or giving up my Unbox movies was the realization that my real problems were actually tied to the shiny new monitor that I've already grown fond of.

Netflix's software allows them to look at the video card, cables and the monitor that you are using and when they checked mine out, it was apparently a little too high def to pass their DRM filters.

Because my computer allows me to send an unrestricted HDTV feed to my monitor, Hollywood has decided to revoke my ability to stream 480 resolution video files from Netflix. In order to fix my problem, Netflix recommended that I downgrade to a lower res VGA setup.

As part of their agreement with Hollywood, Netflix uses a program called COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocal). COPP is made by Microsoft and the protocol restricts how you are able to transfer digital files off of your PC. When I ran COPP to identify the error on my machine, it gave me an ominous warning that "the exclusive semaphere is owned by another process."

My Netflix technician told me that he had never heard of this particular error and thought that it was unique to my setup. When I consulted Microsoft, they suggested that I consult the creator of the program. Since Microsoft wrote the COPP software, I wasn't sure who to turn to after that.

The irony in all of this, is that the DRM that Hollywood is so much in love with, is really only harming their paying customers. When you do a DRM reset, it's not your pirated files that get revoked, it's the ones that you already paid for that are at risk. I'm not allowed to watch low res Netflix files, even though I have the capability to download high def torrents? How does this even make sense? It's as if the studios want their digital strategies to fail.

While I understand the need for the studios to protect their content, I believe that these measures go too far. It makes little sense to block my ability to copy low res internet movies, when I can always rip the DVD straight from my Netflix discs instead. By blocking access to my Netflix membership, Hollywood is once again punishing their customers by pushing defective DRM.

--
Look, when the shit comes down I'm gonna be prepared and you're not - that's all I'm saying.
http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/...pp-no-netflix/





Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2007
Ernesto

2007 is almost over so it’s time to make a list of the Top 10 “public” BitTorrent sites getting the most traffic this year. Mininova is out in the lead followed by IsoHunt and The Pirate Bay. TorrentSpy, the most popular BitTorrent site last year, has dropped down to 6th place.

The list is based on Alexa’s traffic rank, and this data was backed up by reports from quantified sites on quantcast and traffic reports from some of the site admins.

Here is the list, as of December 29, public BitTorrent sites only.
1. Mininova

Without a doubt the most visited BitTorrent site. In November, Mininova reached a milestone by entering the list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet.

Alexa rank: 46
2. IsoHunt

IsoHunt continued to grow this year. In September they were forced to close their trackers to US traffic because of the issues they have with the MPAA, but this had no effect on the visitor count.

Alexa rank: 143
3. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay has been in the news quite a bit this year and remains not only the most used BitTorrent tracker, but also one of the most visited BitTorrent sites. At the moment they are fighting with IsoHunt for the second place in this list.

Alexa rank: 147
4. Torrentz

Torrentz is the only “torrent site” in the top 10 that doesn’t host .torrent files. Several improvements and new features have been introduced over the past year such as a comment system, private bookmarks and a cleaner layout.

Alexa rank: 160
5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie was one of the fastest risers last year and continued to grow throughout 2007. Last month they were, like many others, forced to leave their ISP (LeaseWeb), but the transition to a new host went smoothly and didn’t result in any downtime.

Alexa rank: 445
6. TorrentSpy

TorrentSpy was the most popular BitTorrent site of 2006, but dropped to sixth place due to legal issues with the MPAA. To ensure the privacy of their users, TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US, causing their traffic to plunge.

Alexa rank: 461
7. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year, but that probably is a good thing. Like most other sites they have grown quite a bit in 2007.

Alexa rank: 481
8. GamesTorrents

It’s quite a surprise to see GamesTorrents in the list of 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. This Spanish BitTorrent site had a huge dip in traffic earlier this year but managed to secure 8th place.

Alexa rank: 583
9. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor.net has been around for quite a while, four years to be exact, and is still growing.

Alexa rank: 604
10. BTmon

BTmon was one of the newcomers in 2006, and it is the youngest BitTorrent site in the top 10 this year.

Alexa rank: 673
Honorable Mention: Demonoid

For being one of the most visited BitTorrent sites until they pulled the plug in November.
Top 5 Newcomers
1. SumoTorrent

SumoTorrent launched this April and quickly became one of the more popular BitTorrent sites.

Alexa rank: 1021
2. SeedPeer

SeedPeer launched in September and is formerly known as Meganova.

Alexa rank: 2924
3. Zoozle

A BitTorrent meta-search engine, launched in January.

Alexa rank: 2987
4. Extratorrent

Launched a year ago, it got a serious traffic boost when it was indexed by Torrentz.com.

Alexa rank: 5304
5. BitTorrent.am

BitTorrent.am is also indexed by Torrentz.com, and was launched early 2007.

Alexa rank: 6903

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is not perfect. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.
http://torrentfreak.com/10-most-popu...f-2007-071229/





YouTube Videos of the Year - Most Memorable Weren't the Most Viewed
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Like everyone else YouTube has an end of the year list, but there's something a little strange about all the media coverage today on the "top YouTube videos of 2007." These aren't the most viewed videos of the year. They are YouTube's selection of the "most memorable."

The most popular videos on YouTube this year were a bunch of major label music videos - not the user generated content the site would like to be known for. Ultimately there's plenty of room for both, but let's get our story straight.

The most viewed video on YouTube this year was Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend, an examination of predatory female adolescent heterosexuality. Embedding is turned off for Girlfriend, but below (in a single playlist) are all of the videos on YouTube's Most Memorable List that can be embedded, followed by the videos that were most viewed this year. You can also check out ReadWriteWeb's commentary in August of the Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time.

Both lists are fun to watch - even if the mega-classic Shoes was somehow not included on either. (I mean, "these lists SUCK.") I suppose to be fair, Shoes was a 2006er - as was Dick in a Box, but do any of the videos below come close to the awesomeness of either of those videos?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...f_the_year.php





Noontime Web Video Revitalizes Lunch at the Desk
Brian Stelter

In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings.

The trend — part of a broader phenomenon known as video snacking — is turning into a growth business for news and media companies, which are feeding the lunch crowd more fresh content.

In some offices, workers coordinate their midday Web-watching schedules, the better to shout out punch lines to one another across rows of desks. Some people gravitate to sites where they can reliably find Webcasts of a certain length — say, a three-minute political wrap-up — to minimize both their mouse clicks and the sandwich crumbs that wind up in the keyboard.

“Go take a walk around your office” at lunchtime, said Alan Wurtzel, head of research for NBC. “Out of 20 people, I’m going to guarantee that 5 are going to be on some sort of site that is not work-related.”

The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that have young journalists as hosts and are meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.

The trend has swept across large as well as small independent sites. Yahoo’s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. At MyDamnChannel.com, a showcase for offbeat videos, programmers have been instructed to promote new videos around noon, right when the two-hour traffic spike starts.

“Based on the traffic I’m seeing,” said Miguel Monteverde, executive director of AOL Video, “our nation’s productivity is in question.”

From an apartment in Greenwich Village, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan are hosts and producers of a three-minute daily Webcast, Political Lunch, done around 10 a.m., followed by an hour and a half of editing, in time for uploading just before noon. Political Lunch, which was introduced in September and appears on several Web sites, is viewed 10,000 to 20,000 times a week, with a peak in traffic from 1 to 3 p.m.

“It’s an Internet version of appointment viewing,” Mr. Millis said.

One man who takes his midday video schedule seriously is Jason Spitz, a merchandise manager for a major record label in Los Angeles. He trades links to videos with his friends all day — usually low-budget sketch comedy bits from FunnyOrDie.com or CollegeHumor.com — and stockpiles them to watch during lunch breaks. He and his colleagues like to look at the same videos at the same time from their separate desks, turning the routine into a communal activity.

“The clips are shorter than a full 30-minute TV show, so we can cram several small bites of entertainment into one lunch break,” Mr. Spitz said. “The funniest moments usually become inside jokes among my co-workers.”

Noah Lehmann-Haupt, the founder of an upscale car rental company in New York, said that video snacking on short clips is “a good excuse to stay at my desk during lunch, which I prefer since it keeps the momentum of the day going.” He often watches segments from “The Daily Show,” now that Comedy Central has put eight years’ worth of episodes online for free viewing.

Plus, the format leaves both hands free to consume the day’s takeout meal. “I can’t exactly surf while eating, and it’s healthy to step away from e-mails and work for a few minutes a day,” he said.

Some content plays better over lunch. CNN.com, which draws an average of 69 million video plays each month, tends to promote lighter videos in the middle of the day. (“Cloned cats glow in the dark” and “Bulldog straps on skateboard” were among the most popular on a recent weekday.)

At NBC.com and other network Web sites, shorter videos draw more lunchtime traffic than longer ones, which are more often downloaded at night. For that reason, sites like NBC.com emphasize short-form highlights during the day and entire half-hour or hourlong shows in the evening.

From an advertiser’s perspective, the Web is a more flexible medium than television, because technology makes it easy to monitor people’s behavior and adjust programming accordingly. Better still, marketers have found that consumers are up to 30 percent more likely to make a purchase after viewing an advertisement at lunchtime than at other times of the day.

“Not only is advertising volume and Internet use increasing during the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time period, but people are actually buying and purchasing and reacting to advertising,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president for analytics at Atlas Solutions, a unit of Microsoft that helps companies with digital marketing campaigns.

Sticking to a set schedule turns out to be almost as important on the Web as it is on television. At blip.TV, a video-sharing site, Mike Hudack, the chief executive, encourages his producers to post videos at the same time each day or week.

“Continuity and consistency is incredibly important,” Mr. Hudack said.

“If you want to attract a loyal audience, you have to give them what they expect when they expect it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/bu...a/05video.html





TorChat a Anonymous Instant Messenger
Posted by toni66

TorChat

TorChat is a peer to peer instant messenger with a completely decentralized design, built on top of Tor's location hidden services, giving you extremely strong anonymity while being very easy to use without the need to install or configure anything.

TorChat just runs from an USB drive on any Windows PC. (It can run on Linux and Mac too, in fact it was developed on Linux with cross platform usability in mind from the very first moment on, but the installation on other platforms than Windows is a bit more complicated at the moment)

Tor location hidden services basically means:

* Nobody will be able to find out where you are.
* If they are already observing you and sniff your internet connection they will not be able to find out
o what you send or receice
o to whom you are sending or receiving from
o where your contacts are located

Installation
Windows

There basically is no need for any installation or configuration. It just runs out of the box, all batteries are included. Download and unzip the complete archive to somewhere on your harddisk or USB-Drive. The program is inside the folder "bin". Just doubleclick the blue earth symbol named "torchat" or "torchat.exe" and you are done.

Linux

You will also need python2.5, python-wxgtk2.8 (aka wxPython) and Tor. Download and unzip the archive. Configure a Tor hidden service pointing to localhost port 11009 and start Tor. Edit TorIM.py and change OWN_HOSTNAME to the .onion name of your hidden service. (only the 16 characters without the ".onion"). If you have Tor running on a separate machine, configure the other settings in TorIM.py accordingly. Start torchat.py
It doesn't work?

Please let me know about every unexpected behaviour, I need your feedback! There have been a few versions which under certain circumstances didn't work at all. At the moment I upload a new version every few days and with every version it is becoming more stable and robust. You can also always try the latest version from SVN, they usually work because i try to avoid committing totally broken revisions.

Usage

This is how it should look like:


You will see a window with your contact list. One of the contacts is labled "myself". This 16 numbers and letters are your unique address inside the Tor-Network. Wait a few minutes until the icon becomes green. Give this address to your friends so that they can add you to their list or add your friends address to your list. It all basically behaves like you would expect from an instant messenger.

After starting TorChat it can sometimes take up to 15 Minutes until you will become available. There is a hardcoded time-to-live of 15 minutes for already fetched service descriptors inside the Tor proxy. I have yet to find a way to invalidate this cache without restarting Tor.

You can run TorChat from an USB-Drive and no matter where you are, you always have the same address as long as you don't delete the files in the folder tor\hidden_service. The contents of this folder are your key. They must always be kept secret. If someone wants to impersonate your identity he must and will try to steal the contents of this folder from you. Keep this always in mind. It would probably be a good idea to use TorChat in conjunction with something like TrueCrypt or at least a password protected USB-Drive to protect your key file.

http://torchat.googlecode.com/files/...e-0.9.9.59.zip
http://torchat.googlecode.com/files/...s-0.9.9.59.zip

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24392





Proof the iPod's White Earbuds Don't Suck...That Much

We had a plan. After years of bitching and moaning about crappy, stock Apple earbuds, we were going to put Apple in their place, and once and for all, prove what a lousy product they were packaging with their iPods—the one kink in their plan of global music player dominance. Obviously, the $30 stock earphones in the iPod would get destroyed versus more expensive competitors like those from Shure, Ultimate Ears or V-Moda. So we ordered a bunch of earbud-style headphones all under $20 for "testing". We use those quotes because we really meant "slaughter". Who would have thought that the disrespected Apple earbuds would hold their own?

1. Maxell Digital Earbuds 191208

Better fit, deep in the ear. Volume control on wire. But soft sound levels, and a slight static. Music was in the other room, not my ears.
Price: $15.95
Verdict: Staticky, NOT BETTER

2. Genius HP-02 Live

Once again, deep ear fit. These bad boys are exploring places of my body I didn't know I had. Sound doesn't have a bad balance, but once again, nothing spectacular here.
Price: $9.99
Verdict: Frisky but NOT BETTER

3. Philips SHE2650

Design is very similar to iPod headphones, as is the sound. But these are just a hair less sparkling than Apple's headphones with even less impressive lows.
Price: $7.99
Verdict: Has a case, NOT BETTER

4. Jlabs JBuds Hi-Fi

These had the strongest bass of any model we tested. And they gave Bolero, our test song, more of a stage feel. But fidelity was lacking. So while the headphones sound "big" they don't always sound so clear.
Price: $19.19
Verdict: NOT BETTER

5. Coby Super Bass CV-E92

The balance reminded me of the jLab model we tested, possibly with even better clarity in some ranges. There is certainly more bass in these headphones than Apple's offerings, but while it makes us crave more lows in the iPod stock earbuds, Coby doesn't touch the present highs to mids of Apple. They're a pretty sweet deal for $5 though.
Price: $4.88
Verdict: A bargain, but NOT BETTER

6. Koss BDZ1 Two-Pack Earbud Headphones with Case

Unresponsive. Very quiet at a given volume level compared to the ipod earbuds. But for this price, you get TWO sets of earbuds and a case.
Price: $8.01
Verdict: (NOT BETTER X 2) + Case

7. Philips SHS3201/37 Flexible Earhook w/ Bud -White

I'd expected these fancy white headphones to sound better, given Philips' reputation and the solid placement coming from the earhooks, but they were loud, but less clear than the iPod's.
Price: $8.38
Verdict: White, impossible to Shake Off, but NOT BETTER

Also of note, the iPod earbuds fit the Nano a lot better than competitors. We think this is mostly because the earbud jack isn't bent on Apple's model, unlike all the other models which bend at a 90-degree angle before the wire. A non-bending plug translates to less cord rotation and subsequent static/pops.

As for fitting the ears, most models on the market now offer multiple sized earplug adapters. If Apple's earbuds aren't fitting you correctly, then don't think twice about finding something more comfortable or just using the black foam inserts. You'll never get optimal sound out of any headphone that doesn't fit you properly, anyway.

At the end of the day, Apple might not give us the best headphones around with our iPods, but they're not highway robbery either. Given that they were better than quite a few $20 and under models, we're thinking that $30 isn't the most ludicrous price in the world, and "free with iPod" is looking pretty freaking decent.
http://gizmodo.com/338299/proof-the-...-suckthat-much





The Airport Security Follies
Patrick Smith

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.

To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For several reasons — particularly the awareness of passengers and crew — just the opposite is true today. Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back. Say what you want of terrorists, they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure. And thus the September 11th template is all but useless to potential hijackers.

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”

Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers’ readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in The Register explored the extreme difficulty of mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Green conferred with Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist who has closely studied the type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters.

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ‘24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”

The threat of liquid explosives does exist, but it cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping away from planes. Certain benign liquids, when combined under highly specific conditions, are indeed dangerous. However, creating those conditions poses enormous challenges for a saboteur.

“I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s 1994 detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” an Al Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”

Yet that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. The three-ounce container rule is silly enough — after all, what’s to stop somebody from carrying several small bottles each full of the same substance — but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of T.S.A.’s confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly.

But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures T.S.A. has come up with, possibly none is more blatantly ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work.

These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. The fact that crew members, many of whom are former military fliers, and all of whom endured rigorous background checks prior to being hired, are required to take out their laptops and surrender their hobby knives, while a caterer or cabin cleaner sidesteps the entire process and walks onto a plane unimpeded, nullifies almost everything our T.S.A. minders have said and done since September 11th, 2001. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not suggesting that the rules be tightened for non-crew members so much as relaxed for all accredited workers. Which perhaps urges us to reconsider the entire purpose of airport security:

The truth is, regardless of how many pointy tools and shampoo bottles we confiscate, there shall remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle dangerous items onto a plane. The precise shape, form and substance of those items is irrelevant. We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

Thus, what most people fail to grasp is that the nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes is not really the job of airport security at all. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. It’s not very glamorous, but the grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far off stage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it’s too late.

In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of protest rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbled resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.

The airlines, for their part, are in something of a bind. The willingness of our carriers to allow flying to become an increasingly unpleasant experience suggests a business sense of masochistic capitulation. On the other hand, imagine the outrage among security zealots should airlines be caught lobbying for what is perceived to be a dangerous abrogation of security and responsibility — even if it’s not. Carriers caught plenty of flack, almost all of it unfair, in the aftermath of September 11th. Understandably, they no longer want that liability.

As for Americans themselves, I suppose that it’s less than realistic to expect street protests or airport sit-ins from citizen fliers, and maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from a press and media that have had no trouble letting countless other injustices slip to the wayside. And rather than rethink our policies, the best we’ve come up with is a way to skirt them — for a fee, naturally — via schemes like Registered Traveler. Americans can now pay to have their personal information put on file just to avoid the hassle of airport security. As cynical as George Orwell ever was, I doubt he imagined the idea of citizens offering up money for their own subjugation.

How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.” Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.
http://jetlagged.blogs.nytimes.com/2...urity-follies/





We Have Everything to Fear From ID Cards
Andrew O'Hagan

We start the year in Britain with a challenge to our essential nature, for 2008 might turn out to be the year when we decide to rip up the Magna Carta.
Video: Phil Booth on what the Government isn't telling us

Among the basic civil rights in this country, there has always been, at least in theory, an inclination towards liberal democracy, which includes a tolerance of an individual's right to privacy.

We are born free and have the right to decide what freedom means, each for ourselves, and to have control over our outward existence, yet that will no longer be the case if we agree to identity cards.

Britain is already the most self-watching country in the world, with the largest network of security cameras; a new study suggests we are now every bit as poor at protecting privacy as Russia, China and America.

But surveillance cameras and lost data will prove minuscule problems next to ID cards, which will obliterate the fundamental right to walk around in society as an unknown.

Some of you may have taken that freedom so much for granted that you forget how basic and important it is, but in every country where ID cards have ever been introduced, they have changed the relation between the individual and the state in a way that has not proved beneficial to the individual. I am not just talking Nazi Germany, but everywhere.

It is also a spiritual matter: a person's identity is for him or her to decide and to control, and if someone decides to invest the details of their person in a higher authority, then it should not be the Home Office.

The compulsory ID card scheme is a sickness born of too much suspicion and too little regard for the meaning of tolerance and privacy in modern life.

Hooking individuals up to a system of instantly accessible data is an obscenity - not only a system waiting to be abused, but a system already abusing.

Though we don't pay much attention to moral philosophy in the mass media now - Bertrand Russell having long been exchanged for the Jeremy Kyle Show - it may be worth remembering that Britain has a tradition of excellence when it comes to distinguishing and upholding basic rights and laws in the face of excessive power.

The ID cards issue should be raising the most stimulating arguments about who we are and how we are - but no, it is not: we nose the grass like sheep and prepare to be herded once again.

It seems the only person speaking up with a broad sense of what this all means is Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has devoted much of his new year message to underlining the sheer horribleness of the scheme.

He has said he will go to jail rather than bow to this "expensive, invasive and unnecessary" affront to "our natural liberal tendencies".

I have to say I cheered when I heard this, not only because I agree, but because it is entirely salutary, in these sheepish times, to see a British politician express his personal feelings so strongly.

Many people on the other side of the argument make what might be called a category mistake when they say: "If you've nothing to hide, why object to carrying a card?"

Making it compulsory to prove oneself, in advance, not to be a threat to society is an insult to one's right not to be pre-judged or vetted.

Our system of justice is based on evidence, not on prior selection, and the onus on proving criminality is a matter for the justice system, where proof is of the essence.

Many regrettable things occur as a result of freedom - some teenage girls get pregnant, some businessmen steal from their shareholders, some soldiers torture their enemies, some priests exploit children - but these cases would not, in a liberal society, require us to end the private existence of all people just in case.

If the existence of terrorists, these few desperate extremists, makes it necessary for everybody in Britain to carry an ID card then it is a price too high.

It is more than a price, it is a defeat, and one that we will repent at our leisure. Challenges to security should, in fact, make us more protective of our basic freedoms; it should, indeed, make us warm to our rights.

In another age, it was thought sensible to try to understand the hatred in the eyes of our enemies, but now it seems we consider it wiser just to devalue the nature of our citizenship.

What's more - it won't work. Nick Clegg has pointed to the gigantic cost and fantastic hubris involved in this scheme, but recent gaffes with personal information have shown just how difficult it is to control and protect data.

A poll of doctors undertaken by doctors.net.uk has today shown that a majority of doctors believe that the National Programme for IT - seeking to contain all the country's medical records - will not be secure.

In fact, it is causing great worry. Many medical professionals fear that detailed information about each of us will soon be whizzing haphazardly from one place to another, leaving patients at the mercy of the negligent, the nosy, the opportunistic and the exploitative.

"Only people with something to hide will fear the introduction of compulsory ID cards."

That is what they say, and it sounds perfectly practical. If you think about it for a minute, though, it begins to sound less than practical and more like an affront to the reasonable (and traditional) notion that the state should mind its own business.

In a just society, what you have to hide is your business, until such times as your actions make it the business of others. Infringing people's rights is not an ethical form of defence against imaginary insult.

You shouldn't have to tell the government your eye colour if you don't want to, never mind your maiden name, your height, your personal persuasions in this or that direction, all to be printed up on a laminated card under some compulsory picture, to say you're one of us.

You weren't born to be one of us, that is something you choose, and to take the choice out of it is wrong. It marks the end of privacy, the end of civic volition, the end of true citizenship.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../01/do0101.xml





Airport Profilers: They're Watching Your Expressions
Paul Shukovsky

If a pair of Transportation Security Administration officers strolling by a Sea-Tac Airport ticket counter wish you happy holidays and ask where you're traveling, it might be more than just Christmas spirit.

Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.

TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program -- called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) -- that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

"In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip," said Maccario from his office in Boston. "When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, ... there are behavior cues that show it. ... A brief flash of fear."

Such people are referred for secondary screening, which can include a pat-down search and an X-ray exam. The microfacial expressions, he said, are the same across many cultures.

Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

Maccario will not say whether the teams have disrupted any terrorist operations. But he did say that there are active counterterrorism investigations under way that began with referrals from the program.

SPOT began spreading out to airports across the nation two years after initial testing began in 2003 in Boston, Providence, R.I., and Portland, Maine. It's now at more than 50 airports and continues to grow.

Lynette Blas-Bamba manages Sea-Tac's 12-officer behavior-detection team. Since the program started here in November 2006, more than 600 people have been referred for secondary inspections, she said. Of those, 11 were arrested.

The officers ask simple questions:

"How are you today?"

"Where are you heading?"

"Is this all your property?"

"It's almost irrelevant what your answers are," Maccario said. "It's more relevant how you respond. Vague, evasive responses -- fear shows itself. When you do this long enough, you see it right away."

Maccario emphasized that the program takes into account the typical stress many of us experience when traveling, especially during the holidays.

Ordinary people who are feeling anxious are "much more open with their body movements and their facial expressions as compared to an operational terrorist (thinking) 'I've got to defeat security,' " Maccario said. "We're looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public."

The detection teams look for those indicators to spike when a traveler with something to hide approaches security checkpoints.

Blas-Bamba and her team were trained in fall 2006. She says she did behavioral detection of a sort in her last job as a probation officer. "We all do it to a degree. It's just a matter of understanding and articulating what we see."

Part of the training is a cultural awareness component, Maccario said. For example, in some cultures people don't make eye contact with people in authority.

And to emphasize the sensitivity TSA is bringing to the program, he recalled a meeting with an association for people with Tourette's disorder to assure them that having a tic will not result in a pat-down.

The TSA considers the program a powerful tool to root out terrorists, but also an antidote to racial profiling.

"We don't care where you are from," Maccario said. "It's no longer subjective. If you are acting a certain way, that's what is going to attract our attention.

"There is no reliable picture of a terrorist," he added, citing American terrorists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and "the fact that al-Qaida continues to recruit people that blend into society."

The program, however, has raised privacy and civil liberties concerns.

"The problem is behavioral characteristics will be found where you look for them," the American Civil Liberties of Massachusetts legal director John Reinstein told The Washington Post.

But Naseem Tuffaha, political chairman of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Seattle chapter, looks at the program as a potential step away from racial profiling.

"Our message in working with federal and local authorities has been to make behavioral-based decisions rather than ethnic-profiling decisions. Our message is to really focus on suspicious behavior rather than suspicious-looking people," he said.

But Tuffaha warned that if the TSA "only looked hard when somebody is Middle Eastern-appearing ... then you are still conducting racial profiling under a different name."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...rofiler26.html





The U.S. is Now an "Endemic Surveillance Society"
Kyeann

Pass the Freedom Fries! The French are still filmed, monitored and intercepted less than we are, but barely. Their status also "deteriorated" in 2007.

The U.S. has been downgraded from "Extensive Surveillance Society" to "Endemic Surveillance Society," according to Privacy International's 2007 International Privacy Ranking released on Friday. We now share the "Endemic" distinction with China, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the UK:

In terms of statutory protections and privacy enforcement, the US is the worst ranking country in the democratic world. In terms of overall privacy protection the United States has performed very poorly, being out-ranked by both India and the Philippines.
It's worth noting that Canadian and EU papers have reported on this, but I have yet to find coverage in a U.S. newspaper. It's up to you and me to let our friends and family and presidential candidates know that we rank at the bottom when it comes to:

• Legal protections
• Privacy enforcement
• Use of identity cards and biometrics
• Visual surveillance
• Communications interception
• Workplace monitoring
• Medical, financial and movement surveillance
• Border and trans-border issues

Take a gander at the report for a thorough explanation. Then think about where you'd like to live!

Romania and Canada are in the best shape (though Canada is slipping due in part to cooperation with U.S. data gathering and border programs). Greece stands out as a the only country with "adequate safeguards" against abuse.

Hmm... I could live on Kalamata olives... What did you say? You'd like some "freedom feta" with that? Yum.

~~ Privacy International Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007
Canada better than U.S., U.K. at protecting citizens' privacy: study
http://www.sixhoursaweek.com/2007/12...urve.html#more





Computer Forensics Faces Private Eye Competition
Deb Radcliff

The Internet is boundless and cybercrime scenes stretch from personal desktops across the fiber networks that circle the globe. Digital forensic investigators like Harold Phipps, vice president of industry relations at Norcross Group in Norcross, Ga., routinely slip across conventional geographic jurisdictions in pursuit of digital evidence and wrongdoers.

Lawmakers across the Savannah River in Columbia, S.C., have different ideas, however. Under pending legislation in South Carolina, digital forensic evidence gathered for use in a court in that state must be collected by a person with a PI license or through a PI licensed agency.

If the law passes, the highly specialized task of probing deep into computer hard drives, network and server logs for telltale signs of hacking and data theft would land in the hands of the same people who advertise in the Yellow Pages for surveillance on cheating spouses, workers' compensation fraud and missing persons. Otherwise, digital evidence collected by unlicensed practitioners could be excluded from criminal and civil court cases. Worse yet, those caught practicing without a license could face criminal prosecution.

"It's an ambush," says Phipps, a 31-year FBI veteran now with Norcross Group, a digital e-discovery business. "Under the South Carolina statute, only a handful of licensed PIs across that state have the years of information system and tools experience needed to do true digital forensics with repeatable processes of documentation and chain of custody. This is the only group that stands to gain."

South Carolina isn't alone in considering regulating digital forensics and restricting the practice to licensed PIs. Georgia, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington are some of the states going after digital forensic experts operating in their states without a PI license.

Tools and training for digital forensics have existed for years, but the process of forensics remains a relative unknown art among the information security profession. It's a growing field, though, given the ever-increasing amount of cybercrime, identity theft, data leakage and regulatory landscape around data protection. Digital forensic specialists perform critical tasks ranging from identifying sources of data compromises and holes in security infrastructure, to collecting evidence for employee disciplinary actions, to testifying in criminal prosecutions.

With much of today's evidence lingering on computers and handhelds, PIs see this is as a lucrative field to pursue, even if they lack the requisite experience, contend digital forensic experts like John Mellon, founder of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners (ISFCE) based in Brentwood, Tenn. IT professionals also feel that putting forensics into the hands of what are mostly inexperienced, one-off divorce and surveillance PIs will ultimately bring the evolving, highly specialized field to its knees.

All but six states have PI licensing laws on the books, according to Jimmie Mesis, publisher of PI Magazine, 32 of which could be interpreted to include digital forensic investigators. While their languages differ, these licensing laws essentially consider a PI to be anybody engaging in the business of securing evidence to be used in criminal or civil proceedings.

"In April [2007], the state attorney general opined that even if you never set foot in South Carolina, if you're collecting evidence to be used in court here, you still need a South Carolina [PI] license," says Steve Abrams, a licensed independent PI and computer forensic examiner based in Sullivans Island, S.C. "Licensing authorities in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Oregon have opined the same way."

As one of eight permanent members of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Private Investigations Business Advisory Committee, Abrams is a key promoter and developer of the South Carolina PI licensing legislation. He is also one of a handful of state professionals Phipps refers to who can successfully dovetail digital and conventional PI skills into a single business. In addition to legal and computer programming background, Abrams has PI licenses in South Carolina and New York, and he's looking into getting a license in Utah.

The state PI measures are not meant to be punitive against ethical, skilled forensic professionals working on behalf of their corporations, Abrams contends. Rather, they are being established to protect and preserve the integrity of evidence.

Abrams' concerns about digital evidence integrity are not unfounded.

Defense attorneys have used lapses in the chain of custody of evidence, poorly documented evidence collection techniques and lack of credibility of forensic investigators as means to have evidence thrown out of court cases. Conversely, computer security specialists have quietly complained that prosecutors and government investigators—particularly the FBI—rely heavily on the naivety of defendants and their attorneys in computer-related cases. In some cases, an attorney doesn't know enough to challenge the validity of digital evidence presented by the state.

"The problems in South Carolina occur when folks from national [law] firms come into South Carolina, seize digital evidence, have that evidence analyzed in a lab in some other state, and then send it back to South Carolina for litigation," Abrams says. "The state has no mechanism to hold them accountable if they screw up, which I see all the time in cases."

A Matter or Jurisdiction

Computer forensics is more often used as an internal investigatory tool. In other words, probes and evidence collected inside the firewall stay inside the firewall. In these cases, none of the proposed or existing state laws requiring PI licenses apply. That is, until the case spills outside the enterprise domain—to a partner network or an Internet service provider, for instance.

At this point, most organizations should be turning investigations over to law enforcement or licensed PI agencies anyway, Abrams says. Maybe so, but history doesn't support Abrams' perspective, and IT experts and forensic consultants say most enterprises would rather keep their investigations quiet than risk public disclosure by going to law enforcement.

At greater risk of exposure, however, are security and network management service providers, which often conduct investigations on behalf of their clients. In this case, they would be considered PI firms and need licensing in a majority of states, confirm Abrams and others.

Neither of these interpretations offers much comfort to forensic professionals or IT executives who hire them. And Abrams makes no bones about his desire to see South Carolina start prosecuting violators as soon as the ink dries on requirements amendments to South Carolina law, which could be as early as February. South Carolina's statute proposes fines of up to $5,000 and a year in jail for practicing without a license.

Because most organizations hire outside consultants to do their digital forensic processing, such interpretations could also call into question every piece of digital evidence enterprises gather through consultants that winds up in court, says William Boni, corporate vice president of information security and protection at Motorola. This, he says, would put a great burden on enterprise organizations and potentially paralyze their investigations.

"Anytime courts start interpreting statutes like these so narrowly, there should be concern," Boni says. "IT professionals at large, multinational organizations believe they could be challenged under these laws whenever they take a case to court. They've been particularly concerned over the outcome of the Sony case in Texas."

In the Sony case, a defendant of a copyright infringement lawsuit in Texas filed a motion last July to disqualify evidence because the investigative firm, MediaSentry (since acquired by SafeNet), did not have a private investigation license required under state law.

Sony dropped the case last month. Some speculate that this was the result of the bad publicity accumulating regarding the hefty six-figure fine that would have been levied against the elderly defendant. Had it gone to court, Abrams and others believe MediaSentry would have been subjected to the Texas licensing law because the digital evidence was gathered by a digital forensic consulting firm acting on behalf of a client.

The Recording Industry Association of America wouldn't say whether the counterclaim had any bearing on Sony's decision to drop the case. However, the RIAA doesn't believe that the absence of a PI license had any bearing on the admissibility and reliability of evidence. State PI laws cannot stop the collection of public digital evidence across cyberspace because it's "boundaryless," according to the RIAA.

"There may requirements that PIs be licensed in Texas, but we do not believe the absence of a license has any impact on the admissibility and reliability of the evidence that was collected," says Cara Duckworth, spokesperson for the RIAA. "The information [MediaSentry is] collecting is being distributed in cyberspace, which is larger than even Texas."

This is a situation that slices both ways because evidence presented in the case should have been called into question, says John Stoneham, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid in Beaumont, Texas, who filed the motion in July on behalf of Rhonda Crain, whom he describes as a "grandma" and a Hurricane Rita victim. The evidence presented, he contends, was incomplete, since it consisted merely of records taken over a public file-sharing system but did not investigate Crain's computer to see if it had been infected with a remote control program, which he suspects it had.

Incomplete or bungled evidence could just as easily be submitted by a PI, say forensic practitioners who feel such mistakes will become more common if private eyes try to embark on or oversee these kinds of digital probes.

"Forensics is a very new field. And now, anyone with a PI license can take an EnCase class [a popular computer examination tool] and declare themselves a forensic expert," Phipps says, citing the years of platform, system and forensic tool skills required to make a good technician that he says the vast majority of gumshoes lack.

Skill Certifications VS. Licensing

Do a keyword search on "Digital Forensics and Private Investigation" in any state private investigator database and you'll see that the listings do reflect poorly on the reputation of digital forensics. Most are for cheesy divorce and personal monitoring firms advertising, "Is your spouse cheating on you?"

Quality control around digital forensics is a major issue. Private investigators and IT experts alike say they are worried about protecting the evolving profession and are looking for ways to institute measurable quality controls.

"Requiring digital forensic experts to obtain PI licenses does not serve the public's best interest," says Toby Finnie, executive officer of the High Tech Crimes Consortium (HTCC). "Instead, digital forensic examiners should be required to show demonstrated levels of competencies, based on standards and practices developed by peers."

HTCC, a law enforcement assistance network with more than 1,800 members in 37 countries, is drafting a briefing paper to provide background information and guide state legislators in their development of independent practical regulatory controls for forensics that can keep pace with the dynamic discipline.

"Like a doctor who's gone to medical school, works in his field, takes continuing education and maintains his medical licenses—that's the level of accountability we need for digital forensics," says Stan Kang, a principal in the Forensics and Investigative Response Practice of Verizon Business Services in Norfolk, Va. "Since most companies outsource digital forensics to consultants, they need a way to know that chain of custody and other rules of legal evidence are applied."

Because they are already licensed by their industry-specific agencies, certified accountants, medical examiners and engineers are exempt from state PI requirements, Abrams explains. IT professionals are pushing for the same thing for forensics, but Abrams contends that states don't want the cost and overhead of setting up another independent licensing body.

In South Carolina, an ad-hoc advisory committee is revising the state's computer forensic regulation under its PI laws to include definitions and guidelines for digital forensic professionals, which will go to legislature by end of January, according to Abrams. These guidelines are being modeled after the Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina guidelines. The North Carolina guidelines are currently in committee. Both the Georgia and Nevada guidelines have died in committee, but expect them to be back, says Finnie.

States are looking to the failed Nevada legislation as a model for defining these qualifications. The attempted revision to the proposed statute defined a digital forensic professional as "a person who engages in the business of, or accepts employment using, specialized computer techniques for the recovery or analysis of digital information from any computer or digital storage device, with the intent to preserve evidence, and who as a part of his business provides reports or testimony in regards to that information."

Nevada's qualification guidelines include 18 months' experience, a Bachelor's degree in computer forensics, and a Certified Computer Examiner (CCE) credential or its successor equivalent. South Carolina won't have a requirement for any particular degree, but will require minimal training, CCE certification and annual continuing education to remain licensed, according to Abrams.

At present, the CCE is the most recognized forensic certification available to the private sector and the only one open to the private sector being considered in state PI licensing laws. The credential requires professionals to abide by a strict code of ethics and pass a stringent certification exam that tests skills and knowledge. There are about 1,000 CCEs, of which about 70 percent are in the private sector and the balance in law enforcement, says ISFCE's Mellon.

Mellon acknowledges that the ISFCE and his training firm, Key Computer, have a lot to gain through such legislation. The exams are offered at a modest $300 fee, he says, so they're not a big money maker. Still, experts question the ability of one organization to meet the demand.

The ISFCE is currently considering reorganizing itself into a non-profit to be more flexible in structure, Mellon says. As a non-profit, he notes, the ISFCE can take a stronger political stand against the takeover of his profession by private eyes.

"Forensic examiner licensing can only be a good thing," says Mellon. "But you don't want it to fall on 50 state PI licensing agencies to manage. So, we're reaching out to our listserve of CCEs telling our members how to reach their legislatures and what to tell them."

All state examiners need to get together with their digital forensic communities to develop a unified exam for the states before it's too late, says Norcross Group's Phipps. He adds, "Under an independent exam, we [digital forensic professionals] can control our own destiny."
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/...2242720,00.asp





Opinion: I Want to Live in a Surveillance Society
Mike Elgan

In my first year as a reporter for a local newspaper back in the year (mumble, mumble), I sat down to interview three candidates for city council who were running as a "slate." I pulled out my tape recorder, and one of them said, "I'm sorry, but we're not willing to do the interview if you're going to record it." When I asked why, he said, "Because we don't want to be misquoted."

The candidates didn't trust me because the editorial page of the newspaper I worked for had endorsed their opponents. But the encounter always bothered me. How can a verbatim record of a conversation increase the chance of being misquoted?

At the time, I hesitated for a moment and considered walking away from the interview. But I changed my mind and put the tape recorder away. In hindsight, I should have said, "Look, I can't take notes as fast as my tape recorder can. Why don't you go grab a tape recorder, too. We'll both tape it. If I misquote you, you can prove it."

The problem they had -- and one problem with surveillance in general -- is that it upsets the balance of power. Whoever has the tape has the power to use, not use, selectively use or misuse the information or proof or evidence recorded.

The opposite of privacy

Privacy advocates warn of a wide range of new assaults on our freedoms facilitated by new technologies. Among these, the growing ubiquity of surveillance cameras -- especially in the U.K. and the U.S., which now have "endemic surveillance," according to a new report. Our freedoms are threatened because technology dramatically improves the efficiency with which they can monitor us, yet we often have no counterbalancing way to monitor them.

Privacy advocates fight hard to oppose secret phone taps, surveillance cameras and other intrusions based on the idea that some things are private and Big Brother has no business always watching you.

I support those who fight for our right to privacy. But I think they're fighting only half the battle. In addition to the right to keep private what should be private, we also need to fight for our right to make public what should be public.
Reverse police surveillance

A teen murder suspect named Erik Crespo complained during his recent trial that he was inappropriately interrogated by New York City Police Detective Christopher Perino. The teen claimed that during the interrogation, the detective told him that he wouldn't be allowed to see a judge unless he signed a confession. He also claimed that the detective tried to talk him out of speaking with a lawyer.

But the detective claimed -- under oath -- that he never even interrogated Crespo.

Conflicts like this happen in court all the time. People lie to spin events in their favor. Sometimes the best liar wins. Sometimes the most credible source wins. An experienced police detective, for example, might be considered by a jury as more credible than some 17-year-old kid.

It turns out, however, that the detective was lying through his teeth. We know this because the teenager secretly hit the "record" button on his MP3 player during the interrogation. His lawyer produced the recording in court after the detective committed 12 counts of perjury.

In this case, justice was served for one and only one reason -- a recorder in the control of the suspect was running during the interrogation. And, although I can't prove it, I believe the suspect was "extra honest" about the interrogation, too, for the very same reason. When people know an event or a conversation was or might have been recorded, they tend to be very honest about it later on.

Crespo was able to record the interrogation only because he did so secretly. If he had announced at the beginning of the interview his intention to record, the police could and would have taken it away.

Shouldn't recording your own police interrogation be a constitutionally protected right, like the right to an attorney? If not, why not?

A mobile nanny cam

A few years ago, the parents of a 9-year-old with both Down syndrome and ADHD suspected a school bus driver of abusing their son, so they secretly stashed a tape recorder in the boy's backpack. Sure enough, the recorder captured evidence of abuse.

It was legal for the parents to hide the recorder, but the tape was ruled inadmissible in court because Wisconsin state law prohibits the use of "intercepted conversations." What made the tape an "intercepted conversation" was the fact that the adults doing the recording were not themselves on the bus. The law exists to protect the privacy of those recorded. But is a special-needs bus really a "private space" for the bus driver?

Shouldn't parents be able to secretly record the actions of their children's caregivers if they suspect abuse and to use those recordings in court against the abusers? If not, why not?

There are many situations where I'd like to see surveillance legalized, normalized or even required, including:

• Interaction with police: When we get pulled over, it should be perfectly legal to openly videotape the entire conversation, as well as when we're questioned or interrogated. They've got a dash cam or interrogation room camera pointed at us. We should have one pointed at them, too. (The knowledge that such cameras are allowed might prevent abuse like this.)
• Any interaction between caregiver and child: When babies and children or seniors or others who for whatever reason aren't able to defend themselves are potential targets for abuse, it should be legal for their parents or other relatives to secretly tape encounters with caregivers and use those recordings as evidence in court.
• Anytime politicians meet with lobbyists: Why not use required surveillance to expose or prevent backdoor wheeling and dealing? When our representatives meet with special interest groups, corporate executives or other people out to buy influence, it's not something that's personal or private for the elected politician. There should be special lobbyist meeting rooms with cameras running 24/7. If congressmen and others meet with lobbyists outside the rooms, they go to jail for corruption. This is the people's business, and we have the right to know all about those conversations.
• Court: It should be our right to record any public hearing or courtroom proceeding. If the public is invited, then banning video cameras and voice recorders is only to reduce the accountability of the judge (rather than, say, to protect the privacy of the accused). Why should judges be granted this protection?
• Your own phone calls: It's legal to secretly record your own phone calls in 38 states (plus the District of Columbia). But it's illegal in the other 12 states: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. You can record calls only if you get the consent of the other person on the phone. But I think all rights and protections involving your home (such as the right to keep security cameras and other cameras running without announcing the fact to visitors) apply to your home phone as well -- and your cell phone, too, for that matter.

Surveillance technology is on the rise. Powerful organizations -- law enforcement, corporations, governments and others -- have demanded and won their right to videotape the public, often secretly. They do this in order to hold individuals accountable for their actions.

Yet the rights of individuals to use similar technology to do the same are often restricted. Why should shoppers, pedestrians, bank customers and citizens be held accountable, but politicians, police, judges and others are not? What kind of democracy is that?

As we fight and argue, vote and campaign for keeping private business private, let's also make sure we claim and win the right to use our own ubiquitous camera phones, recording devices and other technologies to keep public business public.
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...tsrc =hm_list





Man Tasered For Filming Warrantless Police Search

A man from Portland Oregon is suing police for unlawful seizure with excessive force after officers fired a Taser and bean bag rounds at him when he refused to stop filming a warrantless search of his neighbour's property last year.

According to a report in The Oregonian, Frank Waterhouse claims that on May 27, 2006 he was brutally assaulted by police when officers followed a sniffer dog onto the property in pursuit of a fleeing suspect.

Waterhouse says that the dog keyed on a car, prompting officers to break out a window which upset residents who maintain that no one ran onto the property. It was at that point that an angry resident grabbed a video camera and started to film the police search.

The Oregonian report states:

When one woman was told to stop recording, she gave the video camera to Waterhouse. He walked to the edge of the property, climbed up a dirt embankment and continued to record. At one point, he yelled to his friend, "Yes, I got it all on film. They had no right to come on this property."

He says in the suit that police immediately came after him, and yelled at him "put it down." Officers moved towards him, and he said, "Don't come after me." Waterhouse said seconds later he was shot with a bean bag gun and a Taser and fell to the ground.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7f3_1192644197





UK Gov Sets Rules for Hacker Tool Ban
John Leyden

The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called "hacking tools".

The controversial measure (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01...r_crime_revamp) is among amendments to the Computer Misuse Act included in the Police and Justice Act 2006. However, the ban along with measures to increase the maximum penalty for hacking offences to ten years and make denial of service offences clearly illegal, are still not in force (http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2...-little-longer) and probably won't be until May 2008 in order not to create overlap with the Serious Crime Bill, currently making its way through the House of Commons.

A revamp of the UK's outdated computer crime laws is long overdue. However, provisions to ban the development, ownership and distribution of so-called "hacker tools" draw sharp criticism from industry. Critics point out that many of these tools are used by system administrators and security consultants quite legitimately to probe for vulnerabilities in corporate systems.

The distinctions between, for example, a password cracker and a password recovery tool, or a utility designed to run denial of service attacks and one designed to stress-test a network, are subtle. The problem is that anything from nmap through wireshark to perl can be used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, in much the same way that a hammer can be used for putting up shelving or breaking into a car.

Following industry lobbying the government has come through with guidelines that address some, but not all, of these concerns about "dual-use" tools. The guidelines establish that to successfully prosecute the author of a tool it needs to be shown that they intended it to be used to commit computer crime. But the Home Office, despite lobbying, refused to withdraw the distribution offence. This leaves the door open to prosecute people who distribute a tool, such as nmap, that's subsequently abused by hackers.

The Crown Prosecution Service guidance (http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/section12/chapter_s.html), published after a long delay on Monday, also asks prosecutors to consider if an article is "available on a wide scale commercial basis and sold through legitimate channels". Critics argue this test fails to factor in the widespread use of open source tools or rapid product innovation.

IT and the law are never easy bedfellows. While the guidelines probably make it less likely the security consultants will be prosecuted by over-zealous lawyers for actions they don't understand are legitimate, they are still a bit of a mess.

Richard Clayton, a security researcher at Cambridge University and long-time contributor to UK security policy working groups, has a useful analysis of the proposals here (http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2...nally-appears).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01..._ban_guidance/





A Wi-Fi Virus Outbreak? Researchers Say it's Possible
Robert McMillan

If criminals were to target unsecured wireless routers, they could create an attack that could piggyback across thousands of Wi-Fi networks in urban areas like Chicago or New York City, according to researchers at Indiana University.

The researchers estimate that a Wi-Fi attack could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York City within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.

"The issue is that most of these routers are installed out of the box very insecurely," said Steven Myers, an assistant professor at Indiana University, who published the paper in November, along with researchers from the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy,

The researchers theorize that attack would work by guessing administrative passwords and then instructing the routers to install new worm-like firmware which would in turn cause the infected router to attack other devices in its range.

Because there are so many closely connected Wi-Fi networks in most urban areas, the attack could hop from router to router for many miles in some cities.

The team used what is known as the Susceptible Infected Removed (SIR) model to track the growth of this attack. This methodology is typically used to estimate things like influenza outbreaks, but it has also been used to predict things like computer virus infections, Myers said.

Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36% of passwords can be guessed using this technique.

Even some routers that use encryption could be cracked, if they use the popular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm, which security experts have been able to crack for years now. Routers that were encrypted using the more-secure WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard were considered impossible to infect, Myers said.

Myers' model is based on data compiled from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE), a volunteer-run effort to map Wi-Fi networks around the world, which has over 10 million networks in its database.

Using this data, they were able to map out large networks of made out of Wi-Fi routers that were each no more than 45 meters (49 yards) from the network -- in other words, close enough for an infection to spread. The largest such network in New York included 36,807 systems; in Boston it was 15,899; and in Chicago: 50,084.

Because New York is such a dense city with a relatively low percentage (25.8%, according to the researchers) of encrypted routers, it was particularly susceptible to this type of attack. San Francisco, on the other hand, where 40.1% of routers are encrypted and which had a lower density of routers was less susceptible.

Myers says that because the attack would be technically complex, he doubts that criminals will attempt it any time soon. There are simply too many other, easier ways to take over computers, he said.

Still, he thinks hardware makers should take note. "The bigger point for developers and people making wireless information technology is to realize that there are serious security issues."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...searchers.html





Eased Rules on Tech Sales to China Questioned
Steven R. Weisman

Six months ago, the Bush administration quietly eased some restrictions on the export of politically delicate technologies to China. The new approach was intended to help American companies increase sales of high-tech equipment to China despite tight curbs on sharing technology that might have military applications.

But today the administration is facing questions from weapons experts about whether some equipment — newly authorized for export to Chinese companies deemed trustworthy by Washington — could instead end up helping China modernize its military. Equally worrisome, the weapons experts say, is the possibility that China could share the technology with Iran or Syria.

The technologies include advanced aircraft engine parts, navigation systems, telecommunications equipment and sophisticated composite materials.

The questions raised about the new policy are in a report to be released this week by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an independent research foundation that opposes the spread of arms technologies.

The administration’s new approach is part of an overall drive to require licenses for the export of an expanded list of technologies in aircraft engines, lasers, telecommunications, aircraft materials and other fields of interest to China’s military.

But while imposing license requirements for the transfer of these technologies, the administration is also validating certain Chinese companies that may import these technologies without licenses.

Five such companies were designated in October, but as many as a dozen others are in the pipeline for possible future designation.

Mario Mancuso, under secretary of Commerce for industry and security, said the new system of broadening the list of technologies that require licenses, but exempting some trustworthy companies from the license requirement, results in more effective protections.

“We believe that the system we have set up ensures that we are protecting our national security consistent with our goal of promoting legitimate exports for civilian use,” he said in an interview. “We have adopted a consistent, broad-based approach to hedging against helping China’s military modernization.”

But the Wisconsin Project report, made available to The New York Times, asserts that two nonmilitary Chinese companies designated as trustworthy are in fact high risk because of links to the Chinese government, the People’s Liberation Army and other Chinese entities accused in the past of ties to Syria and Iran.

One of the Chinese companies, the BHA Aero Composites Company, is partly owned by two American companies — 40 percent by the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing and 40 percent by the aerospace materials maker Hexcel. The remaining 20 percent is owned by a Chinese government-owned company, AVIC I, or the China Aviation Industry Corporation I.

“In principle, you could find companies that would be above suspicion, but in this case they haven’t done it,” said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project. “If you just look at the relations these companies have, rather than be above suspicion, they are highly suspicious.”

The Wisconsin Project report also charges that both Boeing and Hexcel have been cited for past lapses in obtaining proper licenses for exports.

Spokesmen for Boeing and Hexcel said in interviews that they are fully confident that BHA has no ties to the Chinese military and that its use of aircraft parts and materials were strictly for commercial and civilian ends.

“Boeing is not involved in any defense activities in China,” said Douglas Kennett, a company spokesman. “All our activities in China are in compliance with U.S. export laws and regulations.”

Both companies also say that the past failure to get proper licenses has led to tighter controls and, in any case, was the result of improper paperwork affecting products that continue to be exported as licensed.

Mr. Milhollin said that research by his staff had uncovered several links with the Chinese military establishment involving both BHA and another of the five companies, the Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics Company.

AVIC I, the Chinese government entity that owns a minority share of BHA, also produces fighters, nuclear-capable bombers and aviation weapons systems for the People’s Liberation Army, the report says. The State Department has cited another AVIC subsidiary, the China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation, for links to arms sales to Iran and Syria.

The report also says that Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics is majority owned “through a corporate chain” by the China Electronics Corporation, which the report says is a government conglomerate that produces military equipment along with consumer electronics. It has a unit, the report says, that procures arms for the military.

Mr. Milhollin said that the new policy granting companies the right to import some technologies without prior licenses was adopted quietly as “a stealth attack on export controls.”

But Mr. Mancuso, the Commerce Department official who oversees the program, noted that the department proposed it publicly in mid-2006 and adopted it a year later after lengthy public comment by interested parties and members of Congress.

In addition, he said, no Chinese company can receive certain technologies — as part of a category known as “validated end-users” — without a vetting of its record by the State, Energy and Defense Departments and by relevant intelligence agencies. The five companies designated in October, he said, were approved without dissent by these units of the government.

In general, the Commerce Department tries to make it easier for American companies to export to markets overseas, and there has been a particular emphasis on selling to China. The United States is expected to show a trade deficit with China of nearly $300 billion in 2007.

At the same time, at least since the 1990s, Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders have called on the Bush administration, and the administration of President Bill Clinton, to exercise more vigilance toward China as it seeks to modernize its aerospace defense network.

“China is a huge market for our commercial technology exports,” said Mr. Mancuso. “Yet there are real security risks we are mindful of. We take that concern very, very seriously.” Only those companies that have “a demonstrable record of using sensitive technologies responsibly” are approved, he said.

Beyond that, he said companies for which licensing rules have been lifted are subject to additional disclosure obligations, including on-site visits by American government personnel.

Groups that advocate greater technology-sharing with China in civilian aeronautics and other areas say the administration has been cautious in its policy, choosing Chinese companies with American partners or owners.

The three other Chinese companies named “validated end-users” in October are Applied Materials China, a subsidiary of Applied Materials, a maker of semiconductors based in California; Chinese facilities operated by the National Semiconductor Corporation, another American company; and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, based in Shanghai.

William A. Reinsch, head of the National Foreign Trade Council, which promotes international trade, said the administration over all had tightened controls on China and called the lifting of license requirements on only five firms “a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.”

Mr. Reinsch administered export controls as an official in the Clinton administration.

A House Republican staff member had a similar view. “We were told by Commerce that they were going to make some very safe choices,” he said, speaking anonymously because of the delicacy of the subject.

The Commerce Department says that, out of $55 billion in American exports to China in 2006, only $308 million were items requiring licenses to make sure the Chinese military could not use them. The five companies named as “validated” accounted for $54 million of those goods.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/te...htransfer.html





China Finds American Allies for Security
Keith Bradsher

In preparation for the Beijing Olympics and a series of other international events, some American companies are helping the Chinese government design and install one of the most comprehensive high-tech public surveillance systems in the world.

When told of the companies' transactions, critics of China's human rights record said the work violated the spirit of a sanctions law Congress passed after the Tiananmen Square killings.

The Commerce Department, however, says the sophisticated systems being installed, by companies like Honeywell, General Electric, United Technologies and IBM, do not run afoul of the ban on providing China with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment." But the department has just opened a 45-day review of its policies on the sale of crime-control gear to China.

With athletes and spectators coming from around the world, every Olympic host nation works to build the best security system it can. In an era of heightened terrorism concerns, it could be argued, high-tech surveillance will be an indispensable part of China's security preparations for the Olympics, which runs August 8 to 24. And given China's enormous economic potential, corporations are always eager to get a foothold here; the Olympics provides a prime opportunity.

But China's regime, the most authoritarian to hold an Olympics since the Soviet Union's in 1980, also presents particular challenges. Long after the visitors leave, security industry experts say, the surveillance equipment that Western companies leave behind will provide the authorities here with new tools to track not only criminals, but dissidents too.

"I don't know of an intelligence-gathering operation in the world that, when given a new toy, doesn't use it," said Steve Vickers, a former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who now leads a consulting firm.

Indeed, the autumn issue of the magazine of China's public security ministry prominently listed places of religious worship and Internet cafes as locations to install new cameras.

A Commerce Department official who insisted on anonymity said that the agency was reviewing its entire list of banned exports, including military equipment, although the sale of crime control gear to China is on a special, fast-track review. Asked whether equipment identified as commercial by Western manufacturers could have crime control applications, the official replied, "There may be users in China who figure out law enforcement uses for it."

Multinationals are reluctant to discuss their sales to China's security forces, but they say they have done everything necessary to comply with relevant laws.

Information is not easy to come by, but an outline of China's mammoth effort can be found in interviews with engineers at the public security ministry's biennial convention, in visits to Chinese surveillance camera factories and police stations, and in reports on China prepared for member companies of the Security Industry Association, a trade group based in Alexandria, Va.

Interviews with security experts and executives in Asia and the United States also provided previously unknown details about the systems American companies are providing.

Honeywell has already started helping the police to set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts, where several Olympic sites are located.

The company is working on more expansive systems in Shanghai, in preparation for the 2010 World Expo there--in addition to government and business security systems in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Changsha, Tianjin, Kunming, and Xi'an.

General Electric has sold to Chinese authorities its powerful VisioWave system, which allows security officers to control thousands of video cameras simultaneously and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running. The system will be deployed at Beijing's national convention center, including the Olympics media center.

IBM is installing a similar system in Beijing that should be ready before the Olympics and will analyze and catalog people and behavior.

Julie Donahue, IBM's vice president for security and privacy services, told a technology news service in early December that by next summer IBM would install in Beijing its newly developed Smart Surveillance System, a powerful network that links large numbers of video cameras. Company officials declined repeated requests to answer questions about the system or discuss Donahue's remarks.

United Technologies flew three engineers from its Lenel security subsidiary in Rochester to Guangzhou, the biggest metropolis in southeastern China, to customize a 2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010. The company is also seeking contracts to build that network.

Critics argue that all these programs violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the American law written in response to the military crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Commerce Department, charged with developing regulations that put the law in effect, stands by its rules. The department bars exports whose sole use is law enforcement, like equipment for detecting fingerprints at crime scenes. But video systems are allowed if they are "industrial or civilian intrusion alarm, traffic or industrial movement control or counting systems," according to the regulations.

Since multinationals increasingly manufacture some security systems in China, export rules are irrelevant. But the post-Tiananmen law also prohibits companies from using American security technology anywhere in the world to supply China with banned products.

The companies note that the products they provide are not banned by the government. Honeywell said that it complies with the letter and spirit of the laws in every country where it operates. GE said it had reviewed the VisioWave sale to China and believed that it has complied fully with both the letter and spirit of the law.

United Technologies said that the equipment it is selling for Guangzhou is not banned under the legislation. IBM said only that it complies with American regulations.

James Mulvenon is the director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a government contractor in Washington that does classified analyses on overseas military and intelligence programs. He said the companies' participation in Chinese surveillance "violates the spirit of the Tiananmen legislation."

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said United States companies "obviously don't know the meaning of decency if they're seeking out ways to wriggle through the loopholes in our laws to capitalize on the market opportunities presented by the Olympics."

He added that his committee would continue its investigation into what he sees as American corporate assistance for political repression.

Mulvenon said that the pace of technological change means that products with mainly civilian applications, like management computer systems with powerful video surveillance features, had blurred the distinction between law enforcement and civilian technologies. But he said the Commerce Department tended to define narrowly the technologies that qualify as crime control and prevention under the Tiananmen legislation.

The Commerce Department official said the department's Bureau of Industry and Security had prevented the export of a "medium-tech" product to China for the Olympics that was clearly intended for law enforcement use. The official declined to identify the product and insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the department.

Olympics security spending increased rapidly this year, after China's little-noticed decision last winter to create a nationwide "safe cities" program, establishing surveillance camera networks in more than 600 cities.

A table in the security ministry's magazine suggested the number of surveillance cameras needed in each community, based on its size, international prominence and location--from 250,000 to 300,000 cameras in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai to 1,000 to 5,000 cameras for small towns and rural counties.

London already has as many as 500,000 cameras, if the count includes video systems at banks, supermarkets, and other commercial locations. But government agencies in London have installed smaller, separate systems of a few hundred cameras at a time, in contrast with the highly integrated approach of the Chinese government.

By comparison, in New York City, the police are trying to assemble a network of 3,000 public and private cameras below Canal Street to discourage terrorism in Lower Manhattan; they are starting with 100 cameras.

Even China lacks enough security guards to watch the video feeds from so many cameras. So authorities have been shopping for foreign computer systems that automatically analyze the information, security executives said.

At this year's security equipment convention--in Shenzhen, the center of China's security industry--multinationals competed with Chinese companies to offer high-tech products, as police officials from around the country browsed the booths.

Part of the sales pitches from American companies is that their systems can protect the local police in incidents of alleged police abuse. When a car in Beijing hit an elderly foreign tourist, the police used Honeywell systems to check a nearby street camera and discovered that the tourist had been jaywalking, said He Han, a Honeywell engineer who had worked on the system.

"We were one of the first to introduce foreign advanced products and management practices," He said. "We have the biggest user network in China."

If American companies do not sell security systems here, Chinese companies will; the Shenzhen conference drew a handful of American companies, but about 800 of the nearly 1,000 exhibitors were Chinese--and they were aggressively pursuing contracts.

The young engineers in jacket and tie at the American booths stood in sharp contrast, for example, to a Chinese company's booth with a half-dozen young women in black patent-leather boots and metallic silver micro-mini dresses.

China is likely to emerge from the Olympics with remarkable surveillance capabilities, said Vickers, the former Hong Kong police official.

"They are certainly getting the best stuff," he added. "One, because money talks, and second, because whatever the diplomatic issues, the U.S. wants to supply the Olympics."
http://www.news.com/China-finds-Amer...3-6224200.html





The 5 Most Annoying Programs on Your PC
Ian Smith

Elephantware. That is what we are talking about. Bloated programs that make brand new PCs boot like Pentium 2s with 64 MBs of RAM.

This is software that causes your screen to freeze while it works, consumes enough system resources to display a reminder box letting you know there is a new, even bigger, version available for download. Software we've been forced to install so we can read some special document format, enjoy some DRM infected piece of media, or communicate with others who also live with the same brand of behemoth riding on their backs.

We all have it. We are all stuck with it. And, aside from a glimmer or two of hope, we can't expect to escape their boot screens, quick launch icons, or update reminders anytime soon.

This is the worst of the worst.

1. Acrobat Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is like a stocky frat guy you never want to invite to your Halloween parties, because he'll show up wearing a giant gift-wrapped box with a "To: Women, From: God" label on top. He thinks he is all that, but he really just wore a costume so big he can't get through the front door and has to stay outside by the fire all night (true story!).

Back on topic though, Acrobat reader does one thing poorly -- read PDFs. To do this it needs to download updates at least twice a month. Acrobat's other big feature is the ability to bring your system to a roaring halt while it boots up its massive amount of plugins and libraries. All this to display (wait for it) -- a page.

FoxIt Reader is a much better solution. Download it, and you'll no longer cringe each time your accidentally click on a PDF link while browsing the internet.

2. iTunes

I CAN HAZ MANY HOURS OF IPOD SYNCING? KTHXBYE!

For the love of Apple, why is iTunes such a cow of an application? It is a media player! It should be light and the media should be heavy. Instead we have a bloated and increasingly complex application that takes so long to load, is so ugly, and takes up so much memory the only option is to not use it and pull up Pandora. And let's not even talk about the painful process of syncing a new iPod using this pile of cowplop.

3. Real Player

Real Player could have been YouTube. Instead it is, well, Real Player. Like a pushy kid on your front lawn trying to sell you a magazine subscription, Real Player just doesn't leave you alone. It is constantly trying to take over all the media on your hard drive, your web browser, and your MP3 Players. To make matters worse it continuously tries to upsell you on Rhapsody and SuperPass. Yeah, let's just SuperPass on those options. Thanks.

You might try Real Alternative instead.

4. Internet Explorer

Yes, the great drunk-and-raving-at-family-Christmas-gatherings granddad of bad software. Will Microsoft ever fix this? Sure IE 7.0 is better than IE 6.0, but that is only in a "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" sort of way. It is still evil. Can't believe it? Ask any web developer to explain how many hours they've spent in the last month getting their site to work in IE and you'll get the picture.

If you aren't using FireFox, do.

5. Microsoft Outlook

Hello Microsoft! Please! It is nearly 2008! How is it possible GMail and Yahoo Mail are so much faster and so much more feature-rich than your flagship mail client? How is it, in the world of 500 spam messages a day, that Outlook becomes pitch-drip slow as soon as you have a couple thousand messages? How is it your business contact manager is always trying to do mysterious things, always failing to do them, and always complaining about it in the middle of startup? And how, oh please tell us how, can you justify a message search that scans a folder at the same speed we do?

Let's face it, no matter how fast your processor, how big your hard drive, or how many Gigs of RAM you have -- your PC will still never run like a gazelle. With junk like the aforementioned software cluttering up your C Drive from day one, you'll always be stuck waddling along at Winnie-the-Pooh speeds. And if that is too fast for you, perhaps a downgrade to Vista is in order.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/01...ms-on-your-pc/





Long Live Closed-Source Software!

There's a reason the iPhone doesn't come with Linux.
Jaron Lanier

If you’ve just been cornered by Martha Stewart at an interdisciplinary science conference and chastised for being a wimp, you could only be at one event: Sci Foo, an experimental, invitation-only, wikilike annual conference that takes place at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There is almost no preplanned agenda. Instead, there’s a moment early on when the crowd of scientists rushes up to blank poster-size calendars and scrawls on them to reserve rooms and times for talks on whatever topic comes to mind. For instance, physicist Lee Smolin, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and I talked about the relationship between time and math (touching on ideas presented in my October 2006 column).

The wimp comment was directed at me, and Martha was right. I hadn’t stood up for myself in a group interaction. I’ve always been the shy one in the schoolyard. Back in the 1980s, I was drawn to the possibility that virtual reality would help extend the magical, creative qualities of childhood into adulthood. Indeed, the effect of digital technology on culture has been exactly that, but childhood is not entirely easy. If Lee hadn’t forged through the crowd to create our session, I never would have done it. What made Martha’s critique particularly memorable, though, is that her observation was directly relevant to what emerged from Sci Foo as the big idea about the future of science.

It wasn’t official, of course, but the big idea kept popping up: Science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of “Web 2.0,” becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux. And that goes double for synthetic biology, the current buzzword for a superambitious type of biotechnology that draws on the techniques of computer science. There were more sessions devoted to ideas along these lines than to any other topic, and the presenters of those sessions tended to be the younger ones, indicating that the notion is ascendant.

It’s a trend that seems ill-founded to me, and to explain why, I’ll tell a story from my early twenties. Visualize, if you will, the most transcendentally messy, hirsute, and otherwise eccentric pair of young nerds on the planet. One was me; the other was Richard Stallman. Richard was distraught to the point of tears. He had poured his energies into a celebrated project to build a radically new kind of computer called the LISP Machine. It wasn’t just a regular computer running LISP, a programming language beloved by artificial intelligence researchers. Instead it was a machine patterned on LISP from the bottom up, making a radical statement about what computing could be like at every level, from the underlying architecture to the user interface. For a brief period, every hot computer-science department had to own some of these refrigerator-size gadgets.

It came to pass that a company called Symbolics became the sole seller of LISP machines. Richard realized that a whole experimental subculture of computer science risked being dragged into the toilet if anything happened to that little company—and of course everything bad happened to it in short order.

So Richard hatched a plan. Never again would computer code, and the culture that grew up with it, be trapped inside a wall of commerce and legality. He would instigate a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, program: the Unix operating system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could control software culture. Eventually a kid named Linus Torvalds followed in Richard’s footsteps and did something related, but using the popular Intel chips instead. His effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded open-software movement.

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Richard told me his plan, I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.
Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed software-development shop on Earth?

There were plenty of calls at Sci Foo for developing synthetic biology along open-source lines. Under such a scheme, DNA sequences might float around from garage experimenter to garage experimenter via the Internet, following the trajectories of pirated music downloads and being recombined in endless ways.

A quintessential example of the open ideal showed up in Freeman Dyson’s otherwise wonderful piece about the future of synthetic biology in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. MIT bioengineer Drew Endy, one of the enfants terribles of synthetic biology, opened his spectacular talk at Sci Foo with a slide of Freeman’s article. I can’t express the degree to which I admire Freeman. Among other things, he was the one who turned me on to an amazing 11-sided geometric figure (see Jaron’s World, April 2007). In this case, though, we see things differently.

Freeman equates the beginnings of life on Earth with the Eden of Linux. Back when life first took hold, genes flowed around freely; genetic sequences skipped around from organism to organism in much the way they may soon on the Internet. In his article, Freeman derides the first organism that hoarded its genes as “evil,” like the nemesis of the open-software movement, Bill Gates. Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. Freeman suggests that the coming era of synthetic biology will be a return to Eden. Species boundaries will be defunct, and genes will fly about, resulting in an orgy of creativity.

But the alternative to open development is not necessarily evil. My guess is that a poorly encapsulated, communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely guarded species for the same reason that the Linux community didn’t come up with the iPhone: Encapsulation serves a purpose.

Let’s say you have something complicated like a biological cell, or even something much less complicated, like a computer design or a scientific model. You put it through tests, and the results of the tests influence how the design will be changed. That can happen either in natural evolution or in a lab.

The universe won’t last long enough to test every possible combination of elements in a complicated construction like a cell. Therefore, the only option is to tie down as much as possible from test to test and proceed incrementally. After a series of encapsulated tests, it might seem as though a result appears magically, as if it couldn’t have been approached incrementally.

Fortunately, encapsulation in human affairs doesn’t need lawyers or a tyrant; it can be achieved within a wide variety of political structures. Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

The politically incorrect critique of Freeman’s point of view is that the restrictions created by species boundaries have similarly made billions of years of natural biology more like hardware than like software. To put it another way: There won’t be an orgy of creativity in an overly open version of synthetic biology because there have to be species for sex to make sense.

I seem to hold a minority opinion. I’ve taken a lot of heat for it! I can’t hire Martha Stewart as a life coach, so the one thing I hope synthetic biology won’t import from the open-software world is the cultlike mania that seems to grip so many open-source enthusiasts.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec...urce-software/





How to Surf the Web Even if Internet Explorer is Disabled
Brad Linder

Ever find yourself sitting in front of a computer that's been locked down by an overzealous IT administrator who won't let you install any software or even open Internet Explorer or Firefox? If that PC is running Windows XP, there's a good chance you can still visit Download Squad (or other sites if that sort of thing appeals to you).

All you have to do is launch a Windows application like Calculator, and then click the Help button. Under Help, click "Help Topics," which will bring up a help window. Next, all you have to do is right click on the title bar and select "Jump To URL." Now you can type in any web address you like, but make sure to include "http://" at the beginning. Basically what you're looking at is Internet Explorer 6 inside a help window, but this version of the program isn't quite as smart as IE6. It won't automatically add the http:// for you. And of course, there's no bookmarking feature.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/01...r-is-disabled/





Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats
time961

In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are "less secure", which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward "Do you really want to do this?" dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/01/137257





Fedora 8: An Assault On Ubuntu
Matt Hartley

"(Preview) - Lately, I have been looking into other distributions that, like Ubuntu, are working to make strides to attract new users. I still have Debian Etch burned to a CD, waiting for a test in our lab. Next up is going to be Fedora. In the past, I have never been too impressed with RPM-based distributions, but to be fair, most of this came from nightmare scenarios with Mandriva and SuSE. And the last time I really took Fedora for a solid run was with Fedora 5, so it has been a while since I tested the Red Hat supported distro."

But I can only take so much of Debian's minimalist approach when it comes to describing features and why I should care to use the distro. After looking into what Fedora has done , I think it is clear which distribution is really working hard to attract new users.

Could Fedora Outperform Ubuntu for Casual Users? With the upcoming release of Fedora 8 (at the time of press time), I see solid indications that Fedora could dethrown Ubuntu with its latest release. I especially like what I'm reading about their work on issues, such as notebook suspend/resume working, power consumption and perhaps most of all, PulseAudio . This rationale really struck me, and while a user could potentially install this into Ubuntu Gutsy, props to the Fedora guys for just getting in there. After reading this thread and how one Ubuntu user even saw significant improvement using PulseAudio, I found myself becoming intrigued further. From what I can gather, it is still under heavy development, but having better control over your sound device is just what popular Linux distros need right now.

Then we have the CodecBuddy, Fedora's approach to dealing with restricted codecs. What I found most refreshing was educating the user in the immediate space rather than merely telling them they might be breaking the law and then providing a link to another page. Very cool. And of course, this page just made my day because the person who wrote it did so by speaking plain English, instead of boring us with maybes and possibilities regarding legalities. Providing me as a user with a clear reason why I should be using open formats was really quite refreshing.

Restricted Codecs Mess in Linux

Fedora Spins. I love this idea - a Fedora release for gamers, developers and those who are interested in working with electronics outside of just computing. If there is one thing that is becoming obvious to me, it is Fedora's attack on Ubuntu.

Then we have their new theme. OK, let's be honest, I'm getting pretty tired of the same old Ubuntu theme over and over. Yes, it takes just a minute to change it, but when trying to attract new users, it helps to have something attractive to look at. And I must admit, Fedora's Nodoka is definitely a clean look without being totally boring. Sweeet!

Not Interested Fedora in the Past, Could This Be Changing in the Future? I was never that swept up with past releases of Fedora. There was nothing compelling about it. But for the first time, I cannot help but feel that the Fedora team has been spoon fed an extra helping of Wheaties , which has put them into overdrive with their accessibility efforts.

In the coming weeks, I will be looking to do an all out review of Fedora 8. From what I have seen thus far, I'm definitely interested in seeing what they have in store and if they can catch up with PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu and other distros that have bent to the needs of the growing beginner-friendly userbase.
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=8094





2008 Killer Apps - Tools for Managing Multiple Social Networks
Ujwal Tickoo

Managing scattered online Social Life on multiple Social Networking sites, I sense, will become a Killer App Category 2008. There are several startups now in the "Social Network Aggregation" space and this App Category should diversify and catch momentum in 2008. Some startups are focusing on identity consolidation, others on messaging consolidation and on tracking friends. Some like Profilefly offer consolidation of multiple things like Profiles, Contacts and Bookmarks.

Note that I am not talking about Open Social initiative by Google which focuses on providing "A platform for building applications that can be run on multiple social networking sites at the same time...Doesn’t require developers to learn (many) new tricks." Nor am I talking about OpenID which will esentially help users have a single login-password mechanism. (more in another post)

The need for users to be a member of not just one but multiple social networks can be understood through Barry Wellman's concept of "networked individualism". PEW Internet report "The Strenght of Internet Ties" explains networked individualism well:

Rather than relying on a single community for social capital, individuals often must actively seek out a variety of appropriate people and resources for different situations.

In simple words you might be an amateur photographer sharing tips and getting advice about wide angle lenses on Flickr but for your job related networkin/mobility you would depend on LinkedIn. If some of your good friends from high school are on MySpace while the grad school folks went to Facebook you now have 4 Social Networks to Manage! Thats why my predication that tools for helping users manage their memberships across Social Networks will emerge as a Killer App category. This means more funding dollars, acquisitions and even more creative startups.

Recent research data from Compete confirms that people are tending to have multiple Social Network Memberships. E.g. 20% of MySpace members are also Facebook Members.

Compete further gives these interesting data points

• 64% of Facebook members also belong to MySpace. (MySpace has nearly 3x the unique visitors of Facebook and a few years head start.)
• Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster all share more than 49% of their members with MySpace
• LinkedIn shares 42% of its members with Facebook and 32% with MySpace
http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2007/1...ory_tools.html





From Geek to Gods: Why Have “Social Rock Stars” Emerged?

Forget Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison - there’s a new breed of rock star in town. They might be not able to play the guitar, but they still know how to work a crowd. They are “social rockstars” - the power users on social news sites.

There has been a lot of talk about “social rock stars” and their importance to the process of submitting content to social news sites. SEOMoz found that the top 100 Digg users control 56% of the homepage. More recent statistics show that the top 100 Digg users are responsible for 48% of the content that appears on the home page. This isn’t just the case with Digg; if you looked at all social news sites the results would be fairly similar.

While there has been lots of analysis on the power of these “social rock stars”, little attempt has been made to identify exactly why power users are now so important or even why they are needed. The argument is that if a site were truly democratic then content would rise to the top, no matter who submitted it. However, few people have looked at the cultural reasons behind the emergence of these power users.

The simplistic answer is that these power users work hard to build their reputation on the various social news sites and that other users come to trust them because of the quality content they submit. While this is true, it still overlooks the cultural reasons for their emergence.

Now, if you’re going attempt to analyse the cultural changes that technological developments can bring, there’s probably nobody better to base your ideas on than Marshall McLuhan.

Social media is a return to oral culture

McLuhan was perhaps the world’s foremost expert on media and communication. His books and ideas continue to shape media theory even today. McLuhan thought that all technology is an extension of ourselves, for example, a hammer is an extension of our arm and a knife is an extension of our teeth.

McLuhan popularised the term, “global village” in the 1960’s and saw how technology was about to change the landscape of western society. Instead of a visual culture, the new technology would bring about a return to oral/aural tradition.

We still have elements of a visual culture, after all, we have, Youtube, photographs and blogs and emails are written in text. But, in order for those to reach large numbers of people they all need to be talked about.

Yes, blogs are text based, but people linking back to your article and leaving comments is a return to oral tradition. Instant messengers, Twitter and Facebook all use text as the primary method of communication, but they are still all part of a conversation.

These social media tools are an extension of our mouth. Because these social media tools revive an oral tradition, it should come as little surprise that the idea of the tribe leader is also revived from the oral society.

The power user is essentially the new tribe leader.

By understanding that we’re moving away from the visual culture to an oral/aural culture, it becomes easier to see why power users have emerged on social media sites. To see the rise of the power user we can look to McLuhan’s Tetrad of media effects.

The “Tetrad of media effects” was devised by McLuhan as a way of understanding the effect technology has on society. While McLuhan stressed the importance of analysing the technology over the content of the medium, it’s still a useful model to examine cultural trends.

The key questions the tetrad asks you to consider are:

• What is enhanced?
• What is made obsolete?
• What is retrieved that had been made obsolete earlier?
• What is reversed when pushed to extremes?

If we apply these four questions to the emergence of power users on social media sites we might end up with something like this:

What is enhanced? - The idea of an authority for the collective. When we have lots of people speaking it is the voice of authority and experience that commands attention.

What is made obsolete? - The power of the individual is lost. The average social media user becomes redundant. Of course, s/he can still work their way up to being a power user in time, but the average user is left with little or no power and is forced to rely on top users in order to be “heard”.

What is retrieved that had been made obsolete earlier? - Brings back the idea of the shaman or tribe leader.

What is reversed when pushed to extremes? - Back to “master and servant” methods of information retrieval. When pushed to its extremes more users will go back to using search engines. The social media power user is in itself a reversal of search engines - from lots of information sources to trusted sources.

So what does McLuhan’s Tetrad model tell us?

If we use McLuhan’s model we can see that there is a reason why a majority of stories that make it onto the homepage are from a small number of users. The power users have simply filled a hole that exists because we are returning to an oral/aural culture.
McLuhan’s Tetrad shows that the idea of a “tribe” leader is being revived with these tools. Some marketers have recognised this are have seen the need to build relationships with the top users.

Marketers know they’ll have a better chance of making the popular pages if these power users submit their content. It’s the equivalent of having a quiet word with a tribe leader before a meeting and asking them to bring up a particular topic. The power user is holding the conch and speaking on your behalf because they have more authority among the rest of the group than you do.

The Tetrad also shows that there will inevitably be a backlash against power users. People feel frustrated that their voice isn’t being heard, but that is the nature of the oral society. Not everyone can shout loud enough to be heard.
http://socialmediatrader.com/from-ge...stars-emerged/





Saudis Confirm Detention of Blogger of Social Issues
Katherine Zoepf

An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for “purposes of interrogation,” the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday.

Gen. Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman reached by telephone, said that the blogger, Fouah al-Farhan, was “being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws.” Mr. Farhan’s blog, which discusses social issues, had become one of the most widely read in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Farhan, 32, of Jidda, was arrested Dec. 10 at his office, local news sources reported. Two weeks before his arrest, he wrote a letter to friends warning them that it was imminent.

“I was told that there is an official order from a high-ranking official in the Ministry of the Interior to investigate me,” read the letter, which is now posted in English and Arabic on Mr. Farhan’s blog.

Since his arrest, friends have continued to blog on his behalf under a banner that reads “Free Fouad” and features his picture. The blog’s Web address is www.alfarhan.org.

“The issue that caused all of this is because I wrote about the political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia, and they think I’m running an online campaign promoting their issue,” the letter continued, saying that Mr. Farhan had been asked to sign a statement of apology.

“I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that,” he wrote. “An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government is a liar when they accused those guys to be supporting terrorism?”

Ahmad al-Omran, a blogger and a friend of Mr. Farhan, said that Mr. Farhan had been the first Saudi blogger to be detained by state security. The arrest created widespread anxiety among other Saudi bloggers and advocates, he said.

“An incident like this has its effect,” Mr. Omran said by telephone. “It’s intimidating to think you might be arrested for something on your blog. On the other hand, this means that these voices on the blogosphere are being heard. But it’s really sad that a blogger who is writing about important issues out in the open would get arrested, while there are extremists who call for violence and hate, and the government is not doing much.”

Mr. Omran said that Mr. Farhan was one of the first Saudi bloggers to post items in Arabic and to use his real name. At the top of Mr. Farhan’s blog is a call in Arabic for “freedom, dignity, justice, equality, public participation and the other lost Islamic values.”

The Interior Ministry would not say specifically why Mr. Farhan had been arrested.

“The violation is not a security matter,” General Turki said. “He is not being jailed. He is being questioned, and I don’t believe he will remain in detention long. They will get the information that they need from him and then they will let him go.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/wo...2saudi.html?hp





Al Jazeera No Longer Nips at Saudis
Robert F. Worth

When a Saudi court sentenced a young woman to 200 lashes in November after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her, the case provoked outrage and headlines around the world, including in the Middle East.

But not at Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s leading satellite television channel, seen by 40 million people. The station’s silence was especially noteworthy because until recently, and unlike almost all other Arab news outlets, Al Jazeera had long been willing — eager, in fact — to broadcast fierce criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s rulers.

For the past three months Al Jazeera, which once infuriated the Saudi royal family with its freewheeling newscasts, has treated the kingdom with kid gloves, media analysts say.

The newly cautious tone appears to have been dictated to Al Jazeera’s management by the rulers of Qatar, where Al Jazeera has its headquarters. Although those rulers established the channel a decade ago in large part as a forum for critics of the Saudi government, they now seem to feel they cannot continue to alienate Saudi Arabia — a fellow Sunni nation — in light of the threat from Iran across the Persian Gulf.

The specter of Iran’s nuclear ambitions may be particularly daunting to tiny Qatar, which also is the site of a major American military base.

The new policy is the latest chapter in a gradual domestication of Al Jazeera, once reviled by American officials as little more than a terrorist propaganda outlet. Al Jazeera’s broadcasts no longer routinely refer to Iraqi insurgents as the “resistance,” or victims of American firepower as “martyrs.”

The policy also illustrates the way the Arab media, despite the new freedoms introduced by Al Jazeera itself a decade ago, are still often treated as political tools by the region’s autocratic rulers.

“The gulf nations now feel they are all in the same boat, because of the threat of Iran, and the chaos of Iraq and America’s weakness,” said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. “So the Qataris agreed to give the Saudis assurances about Al Jazeera’s coverage.”

Those assurances, Mr. Alani added, were given at a September meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, between King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and top officials in the Qatari government. For the meeting, aimed at resolving a long-simmering feud between the nations, the Qataris brought along an unusual guest: the chairman of Al Jazeera’s board, Sheik Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani.

Al Jazeera’s general manager, Waddah Khanfar, did not reply to phone and e-mail requests for comment. But several employees confirmed that the chairman of the board had attended the meeting. They declined to give their names, citing the delicacy of the issue. The governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia have remained silent on the matter.

Repercussions were soon felt at Al Jazeera.

“Orders were given not to tackle any Saudi issue without referring to the higher management,” one Jazeera newsroom employee wrote in an e-mail message. “All dissident voices disappeared from our screens.”

The employee noted that coverage of Saudi Arabia was always politically motivated at Al Jazeera — in the past, top management used to sometimes force-feed the reluctant news staff negative material about Saudi Arabia, apparently to placate the Qatari leadership. But he added that the recent changes were seen in the newsroom as an even more naked assertion of political will.

“To improve their relations with Qatar, the Saudis wanted to silence Al Jazeera,” he wrote. “They got what they wanted.”

The changes at Al Jazeera are part of a broader reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In December, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, announced that Saudi Arabia would send an ambassador back to Qatar for the first time since 2002. Also in December, the Saudis attended the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Doha, Qatar’s capital, which they had refused to do the last time it was held there. The Saudis have also indicated that they may allow Al Jazeera to open a bureau in Riyadh.

The feud between Qatar and its much larger neighbor, for all its pettiness, has had real consequences. It led to the creation of Al Jazeera in the first place, which in turn helped shape perceptions — and, perhaps, realities — across the Arab world and beyond over the past decade.

The feud began in the mid-1990s, when the Qatari leadership accused the Saudis of supporting a failed coup attempt. Soon afterward, Al Jazeera was founded with a $150 million grant from the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and began reshaping the Arab media. The station was helped when the BBC’s Arabic-language television station, co-owned by a Saudi company, collapsed, thanks in part to Saudi censorship demands. The BBC journalists flocked to Al Jazeera.

The mere establishment of the station was a challenge to the Saudis, who since the 1970s had used their oil wealth to establish control over most of the pan-Arab media in an effort to forestall the kind of populist media campaign led in earlier decades by Gamal Abdel Nasser when he was Egypt’s president, said Marc Lynch, a professor of political science at George Washington University and the author of a book about Al Jazeera’s role in reshaping the Arab media.

But the feud grew worse in 2002, after Al Jazeera broadcast a debate on Saudi Arabia’s policy on the Palestinian question, shortly after the unveiling of a peace initiative for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by King Abdullah, who was then the crown prince. The debate included fierce criticisms of the Saudi ruling family, and the Saudis, deeply offended, responded by withdrawing their ambassador from Qatar.

Al Jazeera’s lengthy broadcasts of videotapes by Osama bin Laden — whose cherished goal for years has been to overthrow the Saudi monarchy — also provoked the Saudis. Al Jazeera has often been accused of helping make Mr. bin Laden into a celebrity, and indirectly helping him to recruit more people across the Arab and Islamic world to his cause.

An added frustration was the way Qatar benefited from Al Jazeera’s anti-Americanism, even as American military support and money poured into the tiny country.

“Qatar became immensely popular during the 2003 war, because of Jazeera — despite the fact that the planning for the war was all taking place at Centcom, in Qatar,” said S. Abdallah Schleifer, a veteran American journalist and a professor emeritus at the American University of Cairo, referring to the United States Central Command.

Al Jazeera’s coverage gradually evolved and grew more moderate, partly for internal reasons and partly in response to American pressure. In 2003, Al Arabiya was founded, largely as a Saudi answer to Al Jazeera. It has sometimes countered Al Jazeera’s criticisms of Saudi Arabia with attacks on Qatari policy, as have other Saudi-owned media outlets.

But the recent changes underscore how much Iran’s nuclear ambitions have affected the region.

“It was the fear of a possible Iranian reprisal action, should it be attacked by the U.S., that ultimately appears to have persuaded the Qatari leadership to underline G.C.C. solidarity by mending relations with Saudi Arabia and rein in Al Jazeera’s coverage,” said Neil Partrick, a gulf analyst with the International Crisis Group, referring to the Gulf Cooperation Council. On a smaller scale, the Qataris clearly wanted the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting to be a success, which it would not have been without Saudi involvement, Mr. Partrick said.

Some members of Al Jazeera’s newsroom staff say they believe that the station would not ignore or play down major news developments in Saudi Arabia, whatever promises the management may have made. But other Arab journalists said Al Jazeera’s seeming willingness to toe the Saudi line was proof that there still were no truly independent media outlets in the region.

“The Arab media today still play much the same role as the pre-Islamic tribal poets, whose role was to praise the tribe, not tell the truth,” said Sulaiman al-Hattlan, a Dubai-based media analyst and the former editor in chief of Forbes Arabia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/wo...agewanted=2&hp





The Pirate Party of the United States Endorses Presidential Candidate Barack Obama
Press release

Since you’re reading this, you clearly understand the value and importance of the internet and what it can be used for. It is a tool for aggregating and making available hordes of information; it is a networking and social forum which brings people together instantaneously; it facilitates business, commerce, and is fast becoming an essential part of everyone’s lives. That’s why it’s important that our government protects and nourishes this vital technology. As senator Ted Stevens made apparent, we cannot rely on just anyone for this task, and that’s why the Pirate Party of the United States endorses and supports presidential candidate Barack Obama, as he is the candidate which expresses legitimate concern for the continued improvement of technology, as well as the other key issues of importance: patent and copyright reform.

Mr. Obama has promised to keep the nation up to date with ever improving technologies, ensuring that the United States remains at the forefront of innovative thought. Unlike the current administration which refused to devote funds to certain areas of scientific research, Mr. Obama promises to create permanent tax breaks for the research and development sector which will help improve growth in the sciences and technologies. Furthermore, he has promised to bring the internet to even the poorest of regions and improve broadband speeds, and in these endeavors do we support him. Mr. Obama clearly understands the important role that the internet plays in delivering information and communications in general, and his stance on privacy reflects this, saying at a speech given at the Google campus, “I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality." Network neutrality is an issue of critical importance, which as of yet, has no legislation to protect this fundamental idea which has thus far governed the internet. However, as commercial interests push to increase their own profits, they will attempt to commoditize the information itself, restricting access to the poor. The ability to access public information must be considered as fundamental as the right to freedom of speech, lest we end up living in a dictatorship. Barack Obama seems to be the leading candidate best qualified to tackle these issues as they arise and promote the advancement and expansion of the internet- as he himself says, "the internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way."

As for the matters of copyright and patent reform, in his technology position paper, Barack Obama clearly outlines methods of improving the current systems in order to improve efficiency, promote discourse, and avoid litigation. He advocates updating these systems into the digital age and exposing them to greater peer review. We believe he will negotiate and strike the inevitable balance between producers and consumers of these commodities, where artists and inventors will get their fairly deserved dues, and consumers will not suffer the penalty for it. With independent thought and planning, a fair solution is easily achievable, and Mr. Obama has promised to create one, without bowing to special interests. We believe that Barack Obama will be able to ethically lead our nation into an even greater technological age while preserving and upholding the rights of the citizens of this country.

About the Pirate Party of the US
The Pirate Party of the US was established in July 2006. The basic idea of the Pirate Party is simple - the government should encourage, rather than smother, creativity and freedom. The Pirate Party of the US does not support nor condone any unlawful distribution of copyrighted works.
http://www.pirate-party.us/files/PPU...ase_010308.pdf