P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 03-08-06, 12:30 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 5th, '06


































"Copyright is my area of expertise, we weren't going to fold. They tested the waters with us to see if my client was prepared to go the distance. We weren't going to be fooled by the allegations and the threats." – Seyamack Kouretchian


"Every pile of money that is enough to buy a newspaper is disturbing if you look closely enough at it." – Tom Scocca


"There are some upstarts in Los Angeles, but none have achieved the demonstrated scale and performance that Steve has shown. This is the kind of technology that is celebrated, and it is on the scale of the invention of the Steadicam. He’s going to give that kind of freedom to actors and directors." – Richard Doherty


"[On the Internet] information is now shared in a different way, and artists who are getting a bad deal can connect with each other." – Jenny Toomey


"Is that all we get, you bastard?" – White House reporter


"Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime." – A. O. Scott


"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all." – Lukas Grunwald
































Tube à Grande Vitesse

When I lived in France a few decades ago things were so backwards most homes didn't have telephones, let alone computers, and the entire country I think had only three TV channels. It was pathetic actually. They were way behind the rest of the West in adopting information technology. Realizing they had to do something fast the government tried to create the world's most sophisticated telephone network and for a very brief time it almost looked like they were going to succeed. Homes were outfitted with spiffy terminals that hooked into a new centralized phone system and did everything from making calls to making dinner reservations. This was pre-web and foreigners (read Americans) who saw it were impressed, for about a minute. Very soon yanks started connecting to each other on the net and before one could shout "Vite!" France’s centralized, proprietary network started looking very passé…again.

Well you know, things change so fast it's almost impossible to write history. Before the wiki's posted half of it's outdated. In a big technological turnaround Parisians have just been offered what may be the world's fastest consumer internet connection. 100 happy families will test a new package combining TV, unlimited telephone and blazing asymmetrical internet access speeds of 2.5Gbps down and 1.2Gbps up. After a free introductory two month period the service is expected to sell for about $89.00 a month - which happens to be a lot less than I’m paying now for cable TV, phone and much, much slower DSL in the US. The price is great, but it's the speeds that astound.

A big French telco has laid a 60 mile optical fiber across Paris to get into an unregulated business, something their copper monopoly is not. This may all be a sort of PR stunt to impress regulators however so I'm not yet convinced it's going to amount to much in terms of anything substantial anytime soon. While nearly anyone with enough cash can string a few miles of fiber, the really hard part is connecting all those endless individual addresses, and from my perspective that's the essential part of the system. I'm not particularly interested in what a handful of big media company servers are pushing out to consumers, even if the pipes are speedy; what I want are millions of individual users building a blazingly fast community. I don’t see much happening with that scenario in the next five years beyond incremental bandwidth increases (my ISP's speeds have been flat for two years for instance) but the writing's on the wall: speeds will increase at some point, and to something unimaginably fast by today's standards, even if it takes a lot longer to happen than a press release from France Telecom would indicate.

In the society of file-sharers, musing about the changes such speeds will bring is a perennial and enjoyable diversion. Files are ever swelling and unless speeds improve to compensate the net result is a slower transfer. At the sites I frequent lossy mp3s are being replaced by much larger lossless flacs that typically require about 225 MB of storage per album, as opposed to about 60 MB for the mp3 or ogg equivalent. The migration to lossless is occurring because the files are theoretically bit-for-bit duplicates of the original and sound as fine as you'd expect a clone to sound, but their increased bulk does take a while to grab and can dent one's ratio. At the new speeds these lucky French users are getting they could upload one lossless CD every two seconds, thus improving their balances and greatly expanding the general state of online inventories; and if movies naturally take a little bit longer to send we're still looking at unheard of intervals of less than 20 seconds to upload an entire DVD. Downloading of course is twice as fast. Heading to the beach for a petite vacance en Août? Before you go turn on your PC and in fifteen minutes you’ll have 100 new films and 100 new CDs for your month à la plage (et c’est pas mal).

Now to handle such avalanches of data the entire computer from routers to hard drives will have to be enhanced but we can certainly expect continuing work in that area and as long as the ISPs have actual competition - something that's not guaranteed unfortunately - we might even see these network improvements right here in our own neighborhoods. Wouldn’t that be formidable?


















Enjoy,

Jack




















August 5th, '06








Woman Forces US Record Industry to Drop File-Sharing Case

Dangerous precedent set
OUT-LAW.COM

A group of US record labels agreed to drop a music piracy case in the US after the alleged file-sharer argued that it could not be proved that she downloaded any illegal music. The case may set a precedent that undermines scores of other music piracy cases.

Tammie Marson of Palm Desert, California refused to pay the initial $3,500 demanded by a group of record labels and opted to fight the case in court. Marson and her lawyer Seyamack Kouretchian of Coast Law Group argued that the fact that Marson's computer contained illegal music files downloaded over her internet connection was not proof that she had committed a crime.

The record companies – Virgin, Sony BMG, Arista, Universal and Warner Brothers – agreed to dismiss the case and pay their own legal costs.

"They don't take these cases to trial, they either settle or dismiss," Kouretchian told OUT-LAW. "It was our position that they could not ever prove that Tammie Marson downloaded this music or that Tammie Marson made it available. It was just an absolute impossibility. The best they could ever prove was somebody had used Tammie Marson's internet account to download the music or make it available. That's the best they could ever do."

Marson argued that as a cheerleader teacher she had had hundreds of girls through her house, any one of whom could have used her computer. She also used a wireless internet network, meaning that people outside of her house could have used her internet connection. "She doesn't even know what a shared folder is," said Kouretchian.

If this becomes a popular defence it could seriously hamper a huge number of file-sharing lawsuits taken in the US against individuals. It also looks to be a trend in defence against movie file-sharing law suits.

Software executive Shawn Hogan is using a similar argument in his response to a film industry case against him. He has decided to fight the case rather than pay the $2,500 demanded of him, even though it will cost him far more than that. His case is that he did not commit an offence and that the film industry cannot prove that he did.

"They're completely abusing the system. I would spend well into the millions on this [lawsuit]," he told Wired magazine.

Kouretchian said that Marson chose to take a similarly principled stand. "Copyright is my area of expertise, we weren't going to fold. They tested the waters with us to see if my client was prepared to go the distance," he said. "We weren't going to be fooled by the allegations and the threats."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08...esharing_case/





Senate Ratifies Cybercrime Treaty
AP

The Senate has ratified a treaty under which the United States will join more than 40 other countries, mainly from Europe, in fighting crimes committed via the Internet.

The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, ratified late Thursday, is the first international treaty seeking to address Internet crimes by harmonizing national laws, improving investigative techniques and increasing cooperation among nations.

The convention had been signed by 38 European nations plus the United States, Canada, Japan and South Africa, as of the end of 2005. It was opened for signature in 2001.

''While balancing civil liberty and privacy concerns, this treaty encourages the sharing of critical electronic evidence among foreign countries so that law enforcement can more effectively investigate and combat these crimes,'' said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

The convention targets hackers, those spreading destructive computer viruses, those using the Internet for the sexual exploitation of children or the distribution of racist material and terrorists attempting to attack infrastructure facilities or financial institutions.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...ybercrime.html





Music Industry Sues P2P Firm LimeWire
Greg Sandoval

ZDNet Tags: Music Digital rights management (DRM) Peer to peer Lawsuits Digital media Copyright Piracy

After months of issuing warnings, the music industry finally made good on its threat to file suit against peer-to-peer software company LimeWire.

A group of music companies, including Sony BMG, Virgin Records and Warner Bros. Records, have accused LimeWire and the company's officers of copyright infringement, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in New York. LimeWire produces software that's often used to create copies of music recordings and then distribute them over the Web.

The recording industry is asking for compensatory and punitive damages, such as $150,000 for every song distributed without permission.

LimeWire is "devoted essentially to the Internet piracy of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the record companies charge in their suit. "The scope of infringement caused by defendants is staggering."

The recording industry continues to pressure file-sharing companies that refuse to do one of two things: either adopt a business model that compensates record companies, or shut down.

Last week, the makers of the Kazaa file-sharing system agreed to pay the record industry $115 million and use a filtering technology to prevent users from distributing files that infringe on copyrights. Other companies that have either gone out of business or altered their business models are Grokster, WinMx and BearShare.

"Despite numerous efforts to engage LimeWire, the site's corporate owners have shown insufficient interest in developing a legal business model," the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement. "While other services have come productively to the table, LimeWire has sat back and continued to reap profits on the backs of the music community. That is unfortunate and has left us no choice but to file a lawsuit to protect the rights and livelihoods of artists, songwriters and record label employees."

LimeWire representatives could not be reached for comment.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6102509.html





Billy Bragg’s MySpace Protest Movement
Robert Levine

When he is not writing or performing protest songs, the British folk-rocker Billy Bragg is apparently reading the fine print.

In May, Mr. Bragg removed his songs from the MySpace.com Web site, complaining that the terms and conditions that MySpace set forth gave the social networking site far too much control over music that people uploaded to it. In media interviews and on his MySpace blog, he said that the MySpace terms of service made it seem as though any content posted on the site, including music, automatically became the site’s property.

Although MySpace had not claimed ownership of his music or any other content, Mr. Bragg said the site’s legal agreement — which included the phrase “a nonexclusive, fully paid and royalty-free worldwide license” — gave him cause for concern, as did the fact that the formerly independent site was now owned by a big company (the News Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch).

Mr. Bragg said that he himself had kept most of the copyrights to his recordings, licensing them out to the various record companies that have released his albums over the years. “My concern,” he said in a telephone interview, “is the generation of people who are coming to the industry, literally, from their bedrooms.”

About a month later, without referencing Mr. Bragg’s concerns, MySpace.com clarified its terms of service, which now explain who retains what rights. A sample line: “The license you grant to MySpace.com is nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license your content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com).”

Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group for musicians that focuses on intellectual property rights, said the Internet could help musicians warn one another about potential contractual problems. “Information is now shared in a different way,” she said, “and artists who are getting a bad deal can connect with each other.”

Mr. Bragg, who said he never had any direct communication with executives from MySpace, has put some of his music back on the site. And he offered some praise for the site’s effectiveness in spreading his message. “That’s the amazing thing about MySpace,” he said. “If you say something, word gets out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/bu...a/31bragg.html





Delayed Digital Releases Annoy iTunes Users
Brian Garrity

Growing numbers of fans are protesting online when labels delay the digital release of hit radio singles. But these consumer complaints are doing little to stop record companies from deferring the availability of downloads.

Just ask fans of "Hustlin'," the chart-climbing track from rapper Rick Ross.

User forums inside the iTunes Music Store are burning up with posts clamoring for the song, which has been at radio for more than 22 weeks. Ross' label, Island Def Jam, is yet to offer it for sale as a digital download.

Specifically, iTunes shoppers are using the iMix, a community playlist feature intended for music discovery, as a tool to lobby for the track's release.

In recent weeks, iTunes users have created more than 100 iMix playlists that feature titles demanding availability of the single. For example, "!!!!!!!!$$$$$$$$We Want Rick Ross$$$$$$!!!!!" is a typical playlist name.

What is for sale is the video for "Hustlin'," which iTunes offers for $1.99. That too has drawn the ire of some fans.

"The song should have came first -- not the video," one anonymous reviewer writes of the clip, echoing a common refrain voiced in the user comments.

Other users are advising frustrated fans to turn to file-sharing services to get the song.

Similar "protest" playlist campaigns are mounting inside iTunes, calling for the release of surging radio tracks like "SexyBack" by Justin Timberlake. Likewise, emo fans have created hundreds of playlists with titles imploring the release of the catalog of Hawthorne Heights.

Most labels offer tracks for digital sale when a single is released to radio. When they do not, fans quickly react. Playlists demanding the release of "Call on Me" by Janet Jackson and Nelly sprang up when the single was slow to show up on iTunes. It ultimately arrived digitally after more than four weeks at radio.

Whether the songs in the playlist relate to the iMix title (many do not) is beside the point.

In the comments section of the playlist, the iMix creators urge other shoppers to give their protest mix the highest possible rating. That makes their pleas more prominent when others search for the song in question. "Vote 5 stars to get 'Hustlin" and other great songs by Rick Ross," a typical iMix creator's note to other users reads.

Fans are unsure about where to place the blame. The vast majority of consumer wrath is directed at iTunes, not at the labels holding back the music.

Most labels are unmoved by such online outcries. Generally, they are sitting on songs in hopes of driving sales of related products, like ringtones and videos, or -- most important -- to create a bigger first-week pop for the album and the digital single. Thus, "Hustlin"' likely will not surface as a legal download until Ross' album, "Port of Miami," drops August 8.

Island Def Jam is at the forefront of this trend, using the strategy this year with the likes of "SOS" by Rihanna and "So Sick" by Ne-Yo.

In both cases, iTunes users mounted furious playlist protests to no avail. But in the eyes of some music executives the label's strategy worked. Witness Ne-Yo's "In My Own Words," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 after its February 28 release. Similarly, Rihanna's "SOS," released at the end of April, rocketed to No. 1 on The Billboard Hot 100 and set a then-record for one-week sales of a digital track, moving more than 157,000 downloads.

In some cases, exclusives with other retailers can hold up the release of tracks. The arrival of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" was delayed on iTunes, in part, because Epic Records gave Verizon an exclusive. Atlantic pursued a similar strategy with Sprint for T.I.'s "What You Know."

Subscription services like RealNetworks' Rhapsody are attempting to get around the hold-backs by offering to post music on a streaming-only basis ahead of street date. But label response has been limited.

Label executives and iTunes declined comment. But privately, label executives and retailers remain torn over whether hold-backs affect album sales.

The strategy "is just an old-fashioned record business belief that the first-week numbers have to look great," an executive at one leading digital retailer says. "It's about bragging rights in the marketing meeting."

Tim Quirk, GM of music content and programming for RealNetworks, says the practice is self-defeating.

"Conversations I have with labels are, 'Please, let's not be pointless.' When a label says, 'We're not releasing something online,' that just means it's not in the licensed services yet. It is online," he says. "If something isn't there that people want, they will go other places to get it. So you might as well make it available."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-ITUNES-DC.XML





Apple Gets French Support in Music Compatibility Case
Thomas Crampton

The French constitutional council, the country’s highest judicial body, has declared major aspects of the so-called iPod law unconstitutional, undermining some controversial aspects of the legislation.

“ Apple’s lawyers might want to drink a glass of French Champagne today, but not a whole bottle,” said Dominique Menard, partner at the Lovells law firm and a specialist in intellectual property. “The constitutional council has highlighted fundamental protections for intellectual property in such a way as to put iTunes a little further from risk of the French law.”

Released late Thursday, the council’s 12-page legal finding made frequent reference to the 1789 Declaration on Human Rights and concluded that the law violated the constitutional protections of property.

The decision affects Apple’s market-dominant iTunes Music Store by undermining the government’s original intention, which was to force Apple and others to sell music online that would be playable on any device. Apple’s iPod is the only portable music device that can play music purchased on iTunes, which lead rivals to complain about anti-competitive practices.

Although the ruling could still require companies like Apple to make music sold online to be compatible with other hand-held devices, it said that the companies could not be forced to do so without receiving compensation. The council also eliminated reduced fines for file sharing.

“The constitutional council effectively highlighted the importance of intellectual property rights,” Mr. Menard said, emphasizing that Apple and other companies must be paid for sharing their copy-protection technology.

The law, which had been approved by the French Senate and National Assembly last month, was brought for review at the demand of more than 100 members of the National Assembly. The council’s review of whether the law fits within the French Constitution’s framework is one of the final steps before a law is promulgated. It now could take effect as altered by the council or the government could bring it once more before the Parliament.

The French minister of culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, advocated enforced interoperability as a way to ensure diverse cultural offerings on the Internet by limiting technical constraints on digital works.

While the constitutional council highlighted the need for compensation, it was not such good news for Apple and other companies that the principle of forced interoperability remained in place, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal director of the Association of Audionautes, a group opposed to copy restrictions.

“It is good news for Apple because they receive monetary compensation, but much bigger bad news if it forces them to license iTunes,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te...y/29music.html





French iTunes Law Goes Into Effect
AP

A closely watched French law that allows regulators to force Apple Computer Inc. to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings went into effect Thursday.

The Internet copyright law included passed France's parliament June 30. The Constitutional Council threw out several measures last week, concluding that they violated constitutional property protections.

French President Jacques Chirac signed it this week with the body's changes. The law was published in the government's Journal Official on Thursday, formally putting it into force.

Apple, which had described an earlier draft of the copyright bill as "state-sponsored piracy," did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment Thursday. Currently, songs bought on iTunes can be played only on iPods, and an iPod can't play downloads from other stores that rival iTunes' premium music catalog.

In a sign that other governments may follow France's example, recent proposals or regulatory moves to open up iTunes have emerged in Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Poland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-03-08-52-34





Apple Defends iTunes-iPod Compatibility
Jaime Espantaleon

Apple Computer Inc. has struck a defiant stance with Scandinavian regulators, staunchly defending its right to make its iPod the only portable music player compatible with songs purchased from the company's iTunes music store.

Norway's consumer agency on Wednesday released non-confidential portions of Apple's 50-page response to their claims that the company is violating contract and copyright laws in their countries.

The Norwegian regulators expressed disappointment with the limited concessions offered in the response, received Tuesday. In Sweden, Bjorn Smith of the Swedish consumer society said that Apple had "given in to some demands but not to others."

In June, the consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden claimed that the iPod maker's product usage restrictions go against Scandinavian laws. At the time, the Scandinavians said they were considering taking the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to court, possibly seeking an injunction banning iTunes from their markets.

Apple's letter indicated it is not willing to change its business model by opening its iTunes downloads to rival portable players that cannot play music recorded in the iTunes digital format.

It also asserted that the demands of the Scandinavian agencies are outside of their authority, specifically as they relate to copyright and digital rights management rules.

The company argued that it is reasonable to "prevent users from downloading music acquired from Apple Music Store to other digital players" because users can still burn any purchased iTune onto a CD and then freely play it as they deem suitable, provided that they respect copyright laws.

The letter also stressed that a Norwegian law that allows users to "acquire legally obtained works on what the general opinion regards as relevant playing equipment" applies specifically to "copying music from protected CDs to MP3 players," but does not concern "electronic files via Internet."

Consumers "have the freedom of choice and the mechanism does not violate competition laws," Apple's letter also said.

Apple also proposed a meeting to "probe possibilities for a mutual agreement" with the regulators.

"This is not good enough," Bente Oeverli of the Norwegian consumer agency told The Associated Press, but added that "it seems we may reach an understanding on some points."

Oeverli said the two sides still disagree on the crucial point - the ability to download music files to other players than iPod.

Apple's iTunes also face trouble in France, where Parliament passed a hotly debated law on Internet copyright in June that could force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings.

However, a French court last week threw out some measures of the law, leaving it now to French President Jacques Chirac to decide whether to sign the bill with the court's changes or send it back to parliament.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-19-01-20





Carmakers Race To Accommodate iPods
Caroline McCarthy

Apple Computer has partnered with Ford Motor, General Motors, and Mazda Motor to help drivers integrate their iPods into their cars' audio systems.

Owners of Ford, Mazda and GM cars who want to take their iPods on the road may no longer have to worry about purchasing quirky add-ons like the iTrip or chargers that plug into cigarette lighters. Apple announced on Thursday that it has teamed up with the three car companies to incorporate "seamless integration" into new 2007 models that will let iPods be controlled within cars' audio systems and charged whenever the ignition is on.

An internal study by Ford determined that the demand for incorporating digital audio players into consumer vehicles is rising fast: The auto manufacturer predicts that 2009 sales of digital-music players will more than double those in 2005. The market for such devices, despite competition, remains thoroughly dominated by Apple's iPod.

The plans and infrastructure for iPod integration differ among the three manufacturers. Ford, for example, will be incorporating audio input jacks compatible with the iPod and other MP3 players into a majority of 2007 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. For an additional price, beginning early next year, Ford dealers plan to begin selling a system called TripTunes Advanced that will enable an iPod to be stored and recharged in a vehicle's glove compartment while the driver or passenger directs its functions using controls on the radio or steering wheel.

GM, on the other hand, has developed an iPod-specific device called the Personal Audio Link. This gadget, the size of a deck of cards, synchronizes the music player with the car's XM Satellite Radio band so that the XM interface can be used as controls--including displaying the song and artist information on the XM screen.

Like Ford's TripTunes Advanced, GM's iPod integration system will be located in the glove compartment and will also be able to charge the iPod while the ignition is running. The Personal Audio Link will make its debut this October in the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet HHR sport utility vehicles; the carmaker will then gradually introduce the hardware into all 56 of its new car and truck models sold in the United States--mostly by the end of 2007.

GM's device will be an opt-in feature, retailing for about $160 plus installation charges. According to a statement from GM, a subscription to XM Satellite Radio will not be required for the Personal Audio Link to work.

Mazda, which will be introducing iPod integration into all of its vehicles worldwide, was not available for a comment on the specifics of the technology used.

A number of other car manufacturers, both domestic and foreign, have already accommodated some or all of their new models to allow for iPod integration--among them are DaimlerChrysler's Jeep, Volkswagen, BMW and its Mini, and Honda Motor. With the addition of Ford, Mazda and GM, Apple estimates that more than 70 percent of new cars sold in the United States by the end of 2007 will have some kind of iPod integration technology.
http://news.com.com/Carmakers+race+t...3-6101744.html





Verizon Wireless to End Music Download Fee
Bruce Meyerson

Verizon Wireless is eliminating the monthly $15 fee for its music download service in conjunction with the launch of a cell phone featuring an iPod-like click wheel and a memory card that can hold up to 1,000 songs.

The new "Chocolate" handset, made by LG Electronics Inc. of Korea, features software that will let users play their own MP3-format music on the device in addition to songs purchased from Verizon's music store - avoiding the mini-controversy that accompanied the launch of that service early this year.

The company is charging $150 for the phone with a new two-year contract, and an additional $100 to buy an insertable mini-storage card that can hold 2-gigabits of music or other files such as photos.

Songs purchased from the V Cast Music store, priced at $1.99 each, can be downloaded twice: once over the cellular network to the phone, and once over the Internet to a computer.

Wireless music downloads are seen as a robust new source of revenue for cellular operators now that they are investing billions of dollars to upgrade their networks for speedier data connections. So far, carriers have been more inclined to create their own stores to capture more of the profits. Sprint Nextel Corp. also sell music through its own store, charging $2.50 per song for downloads to one phone and one computer.

Songs purchased from V Cast will be formatted to run with Windows Media Player from Microsoft Corp.

But the Chocolate phone also can play songs that users copy from their own music collections in the generic MP3 format.

Verizon drew some howls of protest in January when the software upgrade required to use the new V Cast music store disabled the MP3 player capability on the two compatible phones. Users could still convert their songs to the Windows format and play them on the phones.

At the time, Verizon asserted that the handicap was purely temporary - merely the reflection of software integration challenges, rather than any ploy to force users to buy its songs or to weigh in on larger battles over digital copyright restrictions.

The company is still working on a software upgrade to restore the MP3 capability to the two phones, one an LG and one from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a spokesman said.

Verizon Wireless is jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-01-39-12





Fledgling Music Mogul Goes Online To Sign Acts
Todd Martens

The bass player with Grammy-nominated rock band Fall Out Boy looked no further than his computer screen when signing the biggest act to his fledgling indie label.

Pete Wentz signed Panic! at the Disco to Decaydance Records after listening to the group online. He also secured his first soundtrack deal after reading the blogger-fueled hype the camp Samuel L. Jackson thriller, "Snakes on a Plane," which opens August 18.

"I just called my manager and said I somehow wanted to be involved in this movie," Wentz says. "It didn't really sink in that it was something that we could be a part of. I don't show up on any lists of the most powerful people in Hollywood or anything."

Not yet anyway, but Wentz is creating a budding little pop-punk empire. His label, a joint venture with New York-based Fueled by Ramen -- where Fall Out Boy is signed -- has spawned more than one success story since its launch last year.

Panic! at the Disco's "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out" has sold 831,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Newcomer the Hush Sound is making inroads with its new album, "Like Vines." Also on the roster is Gym Class Heroes, whose album came out July 25.

Panic! was Decaydance's first signing. Wentz found the act when it posted "Time to Dance," one of its first songs, on his LiveJournal blog in late 2004.

Wentz also has taken a page from the Tom Delonge and Mark Hoppus manual for creating a successful punk business. Like the former members of Blink-182, Wentz runs his own clothing firm, Clandestine Industries. The Clandestine line will be available this fall at high-end retailer Fred Segal. The brand is already available online and at Fall Out Boy shows.

With so much on his plate, only his duties with Fall Out Boy, which is in preproduction on a new album, prevent Wentz from becoming a full-time entrepreneur.

"I'm the guy you can reach between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.," he says. "I'm just now learning about marketing and that whole aspect of the label. It's something I'm interested in being involved in, but I'm no expert."

But those who have worked with him hint that he could be a closet businessman.

"He's a rock star first and foremost, but he's more than just a guy in a band," says Jason Linn, executive VP of music at New Line Cinema, which partnered with Decaydance for the "Snakes on a Plane" soundtrack. "He has great ideas, and he understands how to do things without relying on a big machine. He would be an excellent marketing guy for any label."

Wentz says, "I won't lie. I'm a control freak. I want to fly the plane. I want to prescribe myself medicine. I'm real neurotic about that kind of stuff."

Wentz has been heavily involved in the soundtrack to "Snakes on a Plane," choosing the tracks and picking the remixers for the album. Acts on the album include Panic! at the Disco, the Hush Sound, Cee-Lo, the All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy, among others.

The title track features members of the Academy Is . . ., Gym Class Heroes, the Sounds and Cobra Starship, a side project from Midtown singer Gabe Saporta. The song went to radio July 11 and has yet to chart.

Wentz is organizing an album release show for August 16 at the Key Club in Los Angeles. To promote the show and give away tickets, Decaydance is teaming with http://www.friendsorenemies.com, which will post photos of those walking the "red carpet" at the event.

More ambitious is Wentz's long-term vision for the label, which he sees as a sort of social democracy. New bands are signed only after winning a majority vote from those already on the label, and Wentz is formulating a risky plan in which each act would share in the financial success of the other.

"All the bands are given incentives or bonuses of some sort when bands go gold or platinum," Wentz says. "A lot of labels have tried to have a family vibe, but we think it's important to actually have one, and not just have one when we talk in magazine articles."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Music You Can See: Warner Plans to Sell Albums on DVDs
Ethan Smith

The music industry has for years struggled to develop a new physical format that could spark increased sales by replacing the CD. Now Warner Music Group Corp. is planning an aggressive attempt to address the issue by pushing consumers to buy their music on specially outfitted DVDs.

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is in the final stages of securing technical licenses that will enable it to sell a bundle of music and extra features on a single DVD, according to people familiar with the matter. The DVD would include a music album that plays in both stereo and surround-sound on a standard DVD player -- plus video footage that plays on a DVD player or a computer. There will also be song remixes, ring tones, photos and other digital extras that can be accessed on a computer.

The company plans to make the new format available to its subsidiary record labels for product-planning purposes as early as next week and to introduce the discs to consumers with a handful of titles in October. A full-blown launch is planned for early next year. The hope is to fuel increased sales of both new product and catalog titles, in the process lifting the industry just as the 1982 introduction of the CD boosted sales as consumers replaced cassettes and vinyl albums.

Retailers -- who have faced hard times as CD sales have declined in recent years -- have been enthusiastic about the new format. "The CD is getting old and tired," said Jim Litwak, president and chief operating officer of Trans World Entertainment Corp., which owns more than 800 music and media stores, including the Coconuts, Wherehouse and FYE chains. Indeed, MTS Inc.'s Tower Records was recently barred by at least two of the four major music companies from receiving new product, after a dispute over credit arrangements. Interim Tower chief executive Joseph D'Amico didn't respond to requests for comment.

"As a retailer I'm going to be holding on desperately for any compelling physical product," said Eric Levin, who owns two independent stores called Criminal Records in the Atlanta area. "So the introduction of a new format...is cause for excitement." Mr. Levin is also president of the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, a trade association with 30 members, who he said are also pleased by the prospect of the new format. A Warner spokesman declined to comment on specific plans but said the company, broadly speaking, plans to "offer content through a breadth of products to meet consumer needs. And we will remain nimble and innovative in every aspect of our business -- including our digital and physical offerings."

The DVD album is the latest in a parade of would-be successors to the CD, including the surround-sound products Super-Audio CD and DVD-Audio, and most recently DualDisc, which plays like a CD on one side and like a DVD on the other. Warner was one of two companies, along with Sony BMG, to embrace DualDisc last year. But the capacity of both the CD and DVD sides of DualDiscs is limited compared to normal CDs and DVDs. In contrast, the storage capacity of the planned Warner DVDs is up to four times what can be held on the DVD side of a DualDisc. Warner and Sony BMG have sharply scaled back their DualDisc output.

Warner is not proposing any generic name for the new format, beyond simply "DVD album." The company plans to encourage retailers to stock them alongside normal CD albums on shelves, and they would likely carry a higher price tag, though just how much higher will probably be determined by the amount of extras included on any given disc. The company plans to continue releasing albums on CD, too, for the foreseeable future.

But there are some stumbling blocks that may discourage consumers from embracing DVD albums. The new discs would not play on normal CD players, meaning consumers could not simply pop their new discs into their car stereos or other players. And users would not be able to copy the main audio mix onto their computers. On the proposed DVD album, the main audio mix is to be protected by the same software that already protects the content on normal DVDs.

The DVD album would include "preripped" digital tracks of the entire album, ready to be copied onto a user's computer -- a totally separate set of data from the higher-quality, DVD-audio sound that users hear when they slip the DVD in a player. The lower-quality, "preripped" tracks could be copied to a CD.

Richard Greenfield, media analyst at Pali Research, said the DVD album format was unlikely to be of much help to the music industry: "Is it going to be a big deal? I tend to think not, given the failures of previous high end formats. But I don't think it's a bad thing."

People familiar with the situation say Warner is close to a deal with Apple Computer Inc. that would make the digital tracks essentially identical to those the computer company sells through its iTunes Music Store service -- something that has proved elusive for others in the music industry, since Apple has been unwilling to license its proprietary copy-protection software to outsiders. People briefed on the talks said a likely solution would involve Apple creating the digital tracks and Warner putting them on DVDs.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Microsoft: iPod Clone Requires Investment
Allison Linn

Microsoft's plans to offer an iPod competitor could take up to five years of investment, but the spending is worth it in part because it will help the software maker's broader entertainment agenda, a company executive said Thursday.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft Corp.'s entertainment and devices group, told financial analysts that the company's planned Zune product line will require millions of dollars in investment and will not pay off immediately.

"This is something that's going to be a three-, four-, five-year investment horizon," Bach said at a daylong meeting on the company's Redmond campus.

But Bach said Zune is key to Microsoft's overall entertainment ambitions and will capitalize on - and tie into - the company's other entertainment offerings. These include the Xbox video game console, Microsoft's television technology and the media-focused version of the Windows operating system that lets people do things like record and watch live television.

"We're not just introducing Zune to do the same thing that other people do," Bach said in an apparent reference to Apple Computer Inc.'s market-leading iPod music and video player and iTunes store.

Microsoft has been working for years to break into consumer electronics with such products as software to record live television and play games. It has had some success, particularly with the Xbox and its highly popular online game service, Xbox Live.

Bach said Microsoft hopes to create a similar sense of community with Zune that it has with Xbox Live, allowing users to share music playlists and video, and learn about things like upcoming concerts.

Microsoft has offered few details about Zune, which is expected to be in stores this fall. It's expected to be tied to a content service.

The software maker faces tough competition from Apple's iPod and iTunes. Other hardware manufacturers, including Creative Technology Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co., offer portable media players using Microsoft's software, although they've had little success against Apple.

Microsoft has poured resources into its money-losing video game business, particularly with the launch of its Xbox 360 late last year. Bach said Thursday he hopes the games business will be profitable in Microsoft's fiscal year ending in June 2008.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-16-53-36





In Microsoft Plan for Future, All Roads Lead to Internet
Steve Lohr

In a daylong meeting with analysts on Thursday, Microsoft executives detailed how the company was spending heavily to build Internet services into all its products, from operating systems to video games. But they cautioned that any big payoff from those investments would not come for a few years.

Microsoft’s size and broad portfolio of products, the executives said, would prove an advantage in competing against Google, the current leader in Internet services.

Internet search, according to Microsoft, will increasingly become seamlessly integrated into the Windows desktop operating system, Office productivity software, cellphones powered by Windows and Xbox video games.

“Search will not be a destination, but it will become a utility” that is more and more “woven into the fabric of all kinds of computing experiences,” said Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

The company lags well behind Google in tapping online advertising so far, but Microsoft is optimistic about its prospects. The $27 billion online advertising market, analysts predict, will double in size over the next three years. “That’s a great opportunity,” Mr. Johnson said, “and Microsoft is uniquely positioned.”

Analysts attending the meeting said the Microsoft strategy, presented in greater detail than in the past, was a pragmatic one.

“It’s not really about beating Google,” said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs & Company. “But Microsoft has to do well enough to keep people in the Microsoft environment — on the desktop, the Web or gaming online — so they don’t leave the Microsoft environment to go to Google for search.”

As a business, Internet search is crucial because ads linked to search words have been such a fast-growing advertising market — and Google has been the runaway leader.

Microsoft has spent the last two years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, building its own search advertising technology, called AdCenter. The new advertising system was introduced only two months ago. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how the AdCenter system lets advertisers measure clicks on the keywords they purchase by time of day, day of the week and often by the age, gender and geographic location of the person seeing the ad. Microsoft’s MSN services like Web e-mail require users to register and submit some personal information, which Google does not.

“You get better information on what’s working in your ad campaign and better return on investment,” said Yusuf Mehdi, chief of advertising strategy for Microsoft’s Internet services. “That’s something you can’t do on other systems.”

In a demonstration, Mr. Mehdi showed some of the work being done by a group exploring the future of advertising in Microsoft’s research labs. In a digital television prototype, a viewer who liked a dress worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in an episode of “Sex and the City” could click on it, automatically pausing the video, and on the screen an Internet search result would appear, identifying the dress, its maker and a link to buy it.

Still, Microsoft expects its progress in advertising to be gradual. The company projected that in fiscal 2007, which began this month, the revenue from its online services business would grow 7 percent to 11 percent, to $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion. That would be an improvement from last year, when online services revenue fell 2 percent, to $2.3 billion, and the unit lost $77 million.

By contrast, Google, in its recent quarter alone, reported that profit doubled to $721 million while revenue grew 77 percent to $2.4 billion.

Microsoft executives acknowledge that as computing increasingly gravitates to the Web and often toward ad-supported services, it creates both a technical and business challenge for a company whose great strength is in personal computer desktop software.

But the Microsoft vision is that Internet services can complement rather than cannibalize the company’s traditional business if they are built into products like Windows.

“Microsoft’s current offerings represent a huge advantage that we can migrate into this services world,” said Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect.

Despite its struggle to adapt to Internet services, Microsoft as a whole is performing quite well. In the year ended last month, the company’s revenue grew 11 percent, to $44.3 billion, and its operating profit rose 13 percent. to $16.5 billion.

Even though Microsoft has grown fairly strongly for years, its stock price has been stagnant. Investors worry that the future of computing belongs to new Internet-based rivals, like Google.

In private conversations, Microsoft executives said that the skeptics were taking a short-term perspective and that Microsoft had repeatedly proved skeptics wrong.

Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer, noted that in the 1990’s, when Microsoft began to move into corporate data centers with server software, many industry experts scoffed. Microsoft, they predicted, would surely fail.

Last year, Microsoft’s server and tools business reported revenue of $11.5 billion and operating profit of $4.3 billion.

“It took real research and development and a long time to get there,” Mr. Mundie said. “We’re doing that all the time. We make big long-term bets. That’s what’s going on here now, and it’s very different than this general perception that the company isn’t really doing anything interesting.”

At the meeting, Microsoft declined to pledge that Windows Vista, its new operating system, would be shipped to consumers in January, the most recent prediction given. Vista has been repeatedly delayed, and Microsoft said there was no reason yet to push the schedule back further.

But Mr. Johnson, co-president of the platforms and services group, said, “We will ship Windows Vista when the product is ready,” leaving open the possibility of added delays.

Microsoft’s shares fell 2 percent, to $23.87, on Thursday amid concern about the timing of Vista’s debut.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, said the company’s pace of Windows releases would accelerate. “We will never repeat the experience of Windows Vista again,” Mr. Ballmer said. “We will never have a five-year gap in major releases again.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/bu...ss/28soft.html





AOL to Cut 5,000 Jobs

Some 5,000 AOL employees, or about 26 percent of the company's 19,000-person work force, will lose their jobs within six months as a result of restructuring, Time Warner's AOL online division on Thursday.

"At a company meeting this morning, Jon Miller (AOL CEO) told AOL's worldwide work force of 19,000 people that within six months, it was likely that around 5,000 employees would no longer be with the company," AOL said in a statement.

Time Warner on Wednesday announced that the long-struggling AOL plans to make e-mail, instant messaging and other services available at no cost to users with broadband Internet access. The offering marks yet another transition for the venerable Internet service as it tries to move on from an era of dial-up access and subscription-based revenue.

AOL, which is in the process of selling its European Internet access business, employs about 3,000 employees in its access business in Europe, one source said.
http://news.com.com/AOL+to+cut+5%2C0...3-6101824.html





Apple May Restate Results Amid Probe
AP

Apple Computer Inc. says it expects to restate some of its financial results as a probe into its granting of stock options widens, threatening years of profits.

The notice of further evidence of ''irregularities'' comes as Apple has been riding its wildly popular iPod digital music player to the most profitable period in its 30-year history. Fueled largely by steadily rising iPod sales, Apple has reported $3.1 billion in profit during the past four years.

Without providing specifics, the computer and software maker said late Thursday it had uncovered enough evidence of mishandled stock options to raise doubts about the accuracy of its financial statements dating back to Sept. 29, 2002.

The developments threaten to rattle investors, based on how Wall Street has punished other companies that have recently disclosed potential accounting problems caused by stock option improprieties.

Apple shares fell $1.70, or 2.4 percent, to $67.89 in early trading Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, where they have traded in a 52-week range of $42.02 to $86.40. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company's market value has increased by about $55 billion since September 2002.

Apple first raised a red flag about the way it accounted for stock options in late June when it announced an internal investigation into a series of ''irregularities.''

Some of the nettlesome stock options were given to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but he voluntarily canceled those in 2003 before cashing them in.

After digging deeper, Apple uncovered enough new problems to prompt the company to hire an outside lawyer to take over the investigation and notify the Securities and Exchange Commission about its findings.

Apple hopes to complete its accounting review as quickly as possible, said company spokesman Steve Dowling. In the meantime, Apple may miss a deadline for filing its latest quarterly report with the SEC.

The company said it has hired an outside lawyer to lead the investigation.

More than 60 other companies across the country are grappling with similar stock option headaches, but Apple is by far the most prominent of the lot to acknowledge trouble so far.

While Apple hasn't explained exactly how it mishandled stock options, most of the problems at other companies so far have revolved around ''backdating.''

Under this practice, insiders try to make the rewards more lucrative by retroactively pinning the option's exercise price to a low point in the stock's value. Usually, a stock option's exercise price coincides with the market value at the time of a grant to give the recipient an incentive to drive the price higher.

If companies backdate options without accounting for the move, it can cause profits to be overstated and taxes to be underpaid.

The financial manipulation also exposes companies to possible fraud charges.

The U.S. Justice Department has already brought criminal charges against Brocade Communications Systems Inc.'s former CEO, Gregory Reyes, and is actively investigating other cases. Reyes is free on a $2 million bond.

More than 20 of the companies entangled in the stock option imbroglio are in Silicon Valley, where the incentives first became a staple of compensation packages for rank-and-file employees as well as top executives.

As high-tech stocks soared during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, workers began to clamor for even better stock option packages in pursuit of a big jackpot. That hunger for ever-more lucrative stock options is believed to have driven many Silicon Valley companies to resort to backdating as they tried to recruit and retain workers.

To properly account for backdated stock options, companies generally have to recognize more expenses than they originally recorded on their books. Making that adjustment can erase a substantial amount of profit.

In the past month, Mountain View, Calif.-based Mercury Interactive Corp. has erased more than $530 million of past earnings because of stock option backdating.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...k-Options.html





McAfee Security Programs May Expose Data
Dan Goodin

Consumer versions of McAfee Inc.'s leading software for securing PCs is susceptible to a flaw that can expose passwords and other sensitive information stored on personal computers, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerability affects many of McAfee's most popular consumer products, including its Internet Security Suite, SpamKiller, Privacy Service and Virus Scan Plus titles, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer at eEye Digital Security Inc., a competing maker of security products.

McAfee spokeswoman Siobhan MacDermott confirmed the vulnerability and said software engineers were testing a fix. She said officials expected to release the patch Wednesday using a feature that automatically updates McAfee products over the Internet. The flaw does not affect 2007 versions of McAfee products, which were released Saturday, she said.

Maiffret said he has found a way to connect to PCs running the flawed McAfee products over the Internet and make them run code of his choosing. The flaw, if exploited, would make it possible for a criminal to track bank account numbers, and access, modify and delete sensitive files and do other damage on machines running the McAfee products, he said.

The reported flaw came on the same day that McAfee posted an item on its Web site taking a swipe at Microsoft Corp., whose products increasingly compete with the offerings of McAfee, Symantec Corp. and other security companies. It warned that code had been released that exploited flaws in a feature used to automate certain administrative tasks in Microsoft's Windows operating system.

"Microsoft products have always been an attractive target for hackers and malware authors," according a posting on the McAfee Web log.

Maiffret's company, which in the past has discovered embarrassing flaws in products sold by Apple Computer Inc., Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee, said he was withholding technical details of Monday's vulnerability to prevent criminals from learning how to exploit it.

The flaw comes two weeks after Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based eEye disclosed a hole in McAfee program for protecting business computers. In that case, Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee said it had fixed the defect three months earlier but did not warn customers about it until eEye made it publc.

In May, eEye uncovered a similarly dangerous flaw in security software by Symantec.

Neither Maiffret nor McAfee said they were aware of any attacks that target the flaw disclosed on Monday.

"The vulnerability isn't public, so you shouldn't see exploits for it," Maiffret said, adding that users of McAfee products should make sure they are configured to automatically check for updates each day.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-21-55-07





New Program Allows Online Book Browsing
Hillel Italie

HarperCollins, which announced last year that it was digitizing its vast catalog, has set up a "Browse Inside" program that will allow readers worldwide to view online excerpts from books by Michael Crichton, Isabel Allende and several other writers.

"We see it as the next step," HarperCollins president and CEO Jane Friedman told The Associated Press during a recent interview.

Readers wanting to view - but not download - a sample of Crichton's "Prey" or other selected works can visit the HarperCollins Web site and, eventually, the sites of authors and retailers. Friedman is also hoping to establish links with MySpace and other online social networkers.

HarperCollins already participates in Amazon.com's "Search Inside!", a similar program to "Browse Inside," but sees the new initiative as another way of ensuring control of its content at a time when Google Inc. and others are establishing vast online databases of books.

"Browse Inside" formally launched Thursday and the publisher expects to greatly expand its program over the following year. Friedman said the amount of text available from a given book will depend in part on the author's wishes. "Right now, we plan on letting readers view about 5 percent of a book online, but I could imagine some writers wanting to make more available, or even an entire book," she said.

While Friedman says she's determined to make HarperCollins, a unit of News Corp., the "No. 1" online marketer among publishers, she has no plans to become an online retailer. Pearson PLC's Penguin Group USA, Bertelsmann AG's Random House Inc., and other publishers have been selling their books directly to readers, a policy that has angered booksellers.

"We see no reason to duplicate a service that our friends in the retail business already do quite well," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-03-08-18-40





XM Radio Reports Wider Loss
Seth Sutel

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. posted a wider second-quarter loss Thursday and again cut its full-year subscriber forecasts, but its stock rose after the loss came in below what Wall Street had been expecting.

XM's shares have been beaten down this year following a string of bad news announcements, and the rebound in the shares marked a slight reprieve for a company that had once been an investor favorite.

XM, which is based in based in Washington, D.C., lost $231.7 million, or 87 cents per share, in the three months ending June 30, versus a loss of $148.8 million, or 70 cents per share, a year ago. The loss included $105 million in charges for restructuring debt and other non-operating items.

Revenue nearly doubled to $227.9 million from $125.4 million a year ago.

However, XM also cut its full-year subscriber estimate for the second time in two months, saying it now expects to have between 7.7 million and 8.2 million customers by the end of 2006, up from the 7 million it currently has.

XM cited "current marketplace dynamics" and regulatory uncertainty regarding certain of its radio models for the latest estimate cut, and said it would refine that range at the end of the third quarter.

Even with the lower subscriber estimate, XM's CEO Hugh Panero told investors on a conference call that the company was sticking by its target of becoming profitable from operations in the fourth quarter of this year and for the full year 2007, though he added that the goal "becomes very challenging" at the lower end of the range of subscriber estimates.

XM had already lowered its full-year estimates in May, saying at the time that it expected to have 8.5 million subscribers at the end of 2006, down from its previous estimate of 9 million, blaming problems with product availability and soft retail sales.

The latest figures include $82.3 million in losses from restructuring its debt as well as other non-operating losses. Excluding those items, the loss was equivalent to 48 cents per share, smaller than the 67 cents per share that analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting.

XM's shares tumbled in early trading to a three-year low of $9.63 but quickly bounced back, rising 53 cents, or 5.1 percent, to close at $10.89 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

On Monday, the company named one of its board members, Nate Davis, to the newly created position of president and chief operating officer. Davis, a former senior executive at XO Communications, Nextel and MCI, will remain on XM's board, where he has served as a director since 1999.

XM's gross cost for adding each new subscriber increased to $112 in the quarter, up from $98 in the same period a year ago, which CFO Joe Euteneuer attributed to lower-than-expected subscriber additions and added expenses for trying to get certain units to comply with Federal Communications Commission regulations.

The company added 398,012 net subscribers in the period, ending the second quarter with 6.9 million subscribers, an increase of 56 percent over the year-ago period. XM said separately that it now has 7 million subscribers.

Once a stock market darling, XM has fallen out of favor with investors in recent months following the abrupt departure of a director earlier this year over strategic differences with the company, the lowered subscriber forecasts and regulatory inquiries into its marketing practices.

XM also ran into regulatory problems with some of its units that contain FM transmitters, which allow users to hear XM through standard car radios. Its competitor Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. has had similar issues.

Sirius's stock is also down this year, but not as much as XM's - about 41 percent from the beginning of the year, versus 62 percent for XM, before Thursday's announcement.

Bank of America analyst Jonathan Jacoby maintained his "buy" rating on XM's stock in a note to clients Thursday, saying the relatively higher valuation of Sirius wasn't justified. However, he characterized XM's overall report as "not pretty," noting the weak subscriber additions and other factors.

Sirius, which has been gaining subscribers with the addition of shock jock Howard Stern at the beginning of the year, reports its quarterly earnings Aug. 1. Its shares rose 1 cent to finish at $3.97 on the Nasdaq.

Both companies provide more than a hundred channels of radio for fees of about $13 a month, including dozens of channels of commercial-free music as well as talk, sports and news. The services require special receivers and are available nationwide.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-16-37-24





The Wi-Fi in Your Handset
Matt Richtel

What if, instead of burning up minutes on your cellphone plan, you could make free or cheap calls over the wireless networks that allow Internet access in many coffee shops, airports and homes?

New phones coming on the market will allow just that.

Instead of relying on standard cellphone networks, the phones will make use of the anarchic global patchwork of so-called Wi-Fi hotspots. Other models will be able to switch easily between the two modes.

The phones, while a potential money-saver for consumers, could cause big problems for cellphone companies. They have invested billions in their nationwide networks of cell towers, and they could find that customers are bypassing them in favor of Wi-Fi connections. The struggling Bell operating companies could also suffer if the new phones accelerate the trend toward cheap Internet-based calling, reducing the need for a standard phone line in homes with wireless networks.

The spottiness of wireless Internet coverage means that for now, the phones will be more of a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, standard cellphone service. But dozens of American cities and towns are either building or considering wide-area wireless networks that would allow Wi-Fi phones to connect and make free or cheap calls.

“It’s a phone that looks, feels and acts like a cell phone, but it actually operates over the Wi-Fi network,” said Steve Howe, vice president of voice for EarthLink, which is building networks in Philadelphia and Anaheim, Calif.

Later this year it plans to introduce Wi-Fi phone service that Mr. Howe said could cost a fifth as much as traditional cell service.

The technology is in its early stages, and it faces some hurdles to widespread use. But it is being promoted by big technology companies like Cisco Systems and giving rise to new competition in the mobile phone business.

A handful of companies are already using Wi-Fi phones to cut costs within offices or on corporate campuses, and the phones will soon be reaching the consumer market.

Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said last week that four manufacturers plan to begin shipping Wi-Fi phones that are compatible with the service by the end of September. Among them is Netgear, a maker of networking equipment, which plans to charge $300 for its phone; the other makers include Belkin, Edge-Core and SMC.

Skype allows free calls to other Skype users and usually charges pennies a minute for calls to regular phones, although it has made all domestic calls free through the end of the year.

EarthLink plans to sell phones for $50 to $100, then charge roughly $25 a month for unlimited calling. Initially, the service will work only with hotspots where Internet access is provided by EarthLink, either in homes or on its citywide networks.

The major cellphone companies have taken notice of Wi-Fi phones, and some have chosen to deal with the potential threat by embracing it, building it into their business plans.

Cingular Wireless plans to introduce phones next year that will allow people to connect at home through their own wireless networks but switch to cell towers when out and about.

Later this year, T-Mobile plans to test a service that will allow its subscribers to switch seamlessly between connections to cellular towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, including those in homes and the more than 7,000 it controls in Starbucks outlets, airports and other locations, according to analysts with knowledge of the plans. The company hopes that moving mobile phone traffic off its network will allow it to offer cheaper service and steal customers from cell competitors and landline phone companies like AT&T.

“T-Mobile is interested in the replacement or displacement of landline minutes,” said Mark Bolger, director of marketing for T-Mobile. Wi-Fi calling “is one of the technologies that will help us deliver on that promise.”

Major phone manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are offering or plan to introduce phones designed for use on both traditional cell and Wi-Fi networks. Samsung said last week that it had begun to sell its dual-mode phone in Italy.

Wi-Fi not only has the potential to offer better voice quality than traditional cellular service, but it also opens the door to videoconferencing and other data services on mobile devices. Cellphone users are now often limited to the services offered by their carriers, but Wi-Fi phones could have access to a wider range of offerings on the Internet, in some cases at faster transmission speeds than on the carriers’ networks.

But there are enough limits to the technology that it may be some time before people start tossing out their old cellphones to take advantage of Wi-Fi.

The radio signals sent from standard mobile phones connect to tens of thousands of cell sites on towers or attached to buildings, billboards and other structures. These cells have an average range of two miles, allowing them to blanket much of the country.

Wi-Fi hotspots have a much more limited range, usually no more than 800 feet. Unlike the cellphone towers, which are operated by the carriers, the hotspots tend to be controlled by individuals or smaller companies, and are not coordinated or organized into a larger network.

“It’s going to be a long time before you’ll have a reliable Wi-Fi connection anywhere you go,” said Michael Jackson, director of operations for Skype.

A company called Fon, which is based in Spain and is backed by Skype and Google, is trying to accelerate the spread of Wi-Fi by selling cheap wireless routers to anyone who will agree to let other people in the vicinity use them by paying an access fee. The buyers can choose to split the fee with the company.

In October, Fon plans to begin charging about $150 for a wireless router that also serves as a docking station for a Skype-compatible Wi-Fi phone. The phone will connect easily to hotspots operated by Fon members.

“Wireless Internet infrastructure can be incredibly inexpensive,” said Martin Varsavsky, the founder and chief executive of Fon.

Without special software, like that from Fon, however, hotspots may not automatically set up a connection with the new phones. Instead, until the technology is smoothed out, users might have to configure their phones to connect whenever they are in range of a new hotspot.

“If it takes you five minutes to set up at the airport and you save 50 cents, why would you bother?” said Benoit Schillings, chief technology officer of Trolltech, an Oslo company developing software to make these connections easier.

Another wrinkle is that Wi-Fi networks operate over unlicensed radio spectrum. This spectrum is essentially public space, which means that anyone can make use of it, but it also means that the frequencies can be congested, potentially causing interference and dropped calls.

By contrast, the major cellphone carriers paid billions of dollars to the federal government for the right to use their slices of the radio spectrum. They can control who is on their networks, maintain quality standards and limit overcrowding. But the spectrum fees introduce a layer of costs that Wi-Fi calls are not burdened with.

Companies including Clearwire, founded by the cellphone pioneer Craig O. McCaw, are building subscribers-only wireless data networks using a technology called WiMax that has a much greater reach than Wi-Fi, and mobile phone service is part of their plans.
The hotspot technology has inspired a vigorous and complex discussion in the telecommunications world about how the traditional companies should react.

On its face, the technology would seem to present the carriers with a major problem. The more time subscribers spend connected to Wi-Fi hotspots, the less time and money they spend on the cell network.

Yet carriers also recognize that per-minute charges are falling across the industry, and that the loss of revenue they suffer if they allow people to switch onto a Wi-Fi network could be offset by attracting loyal subscribers who sometimes want to connect that way.

Further, some carriers argue that if people connect to Wi-Fi in their homes and offices, where there are close and reliable hotspots, they will enjoy connections that are better than those via cell towers and will not need standard phone lines. In a home, for example, the mobile phone could connect as effectively through Wi-Fi as traditional cordless phones do now to their base stations.

Larry Lang, general manager of the mobile wireless group at Cisco, said Wi-Fi would allow good service in people’s homes “without having to put up big cellphone towers in the neighborhood.” Cisco makes equipment that phone companies use to handle digitized calls.

Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst with Ovum Research, said some carriers were still wary of Wi-Fi service. He said they were concerned that when hotspot reception was not good — whether at home or elsewhere — they would be blamed.

“The guys who don’t want it are predominately Verizon Wireless,” Mr. Entner said. They do not want a customer who is getting poor service at a hotspot “complaining that Verizon service is responsible,” he said.

A spokesman for Verizon Wireless, Jeff Nelson, said the company was looking at Wi-Fi service but had no plans to offer a product in this area. “At this point, we don’t see a great application for customers,” he said.

Further complicating the business discussion for the carriers are the incestuous ownership arrangements in the telecommunications world. For instance, Cingular Wireless is owned jointly by AT&T and BellSouth, while Verizon Wireless is part owned by Verizon Communications, the regional phone giant.

BellSouth, AT&T and Verizon Communications each have an interest in selling high-speed Internet access for homes and offices. If consumers have an incentive to set up wireless networks in their homes — networks that could be used for superior phone service — it could give them another reason to buy high-speed Internet access.

Of course, as many laptop users have discovered, Wi-Fi Internet access is not always something you pay for. Sometimes it is something you just find, as can be the case when people deliberately or unintentionally leave access points open and unsecured. The phones that work with Skype, and most likely others, will turn the free access point in a neighborhood café — or a neighbor’s house — into a miniature provider of phone service.

“It can be very open, decentralized,” said Mr. Entner of Ovum Research. But, he said, such a grass-roots infrastructure presents many challenges. For example, callers could get frustrated when the hotspot they are relying on for a connection stops working and there is no one to complain to.

Mr. Entner said, “You could knock on your neighbor’s door and say, ‘By the way, buddy, I’ve been bumming your Wi-Fi signal to make calls; please turn it back on.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te.../29phones.html





Pay Phones Suffer As Cell Phone Use Rises
Samantha Gross

A stroll along Ninth Avenue in Manhattan reveals an ugly picture of the state of the pay phone these days. The phones are sticky, beat up and scarred, and some don't work at all. A child's change purse is stuffed on one phone ledge, along with a large wad of wrapping plastic. On a nearby ledge, an empty bottle of tequila sits in front of a hole that once held a phone. Empty cans of malt liquor sheathed in brown paper bags are a frequent sight.

With rising cell phone use and vandalism and neglect taking their toll, pay phones are disappearing around the nation. Consumer activists and advocates for the poor have protested the drop in numbers - saying that public phones are necessary in emergencies and represent a lifeline for those who can't afford a cell phone or even a landline.

"If you have a cell phone, you hardly look for the pay phones," said 25-year-old Sayed Mizan, listening to his iPod on a subway platform. "Besides, most of the time if you see the pay phones, they're either out of order or they're too filthy to touch."

Public phone operators insist that the bad reputation of pay phones is undeserved - though they do concede that they have removed many stands in recent years due to falling use.

Nationwide, the number of pay phones has dropped by half to approximately 1 million over the last nine years, according to an estimate by the American Public Communications Council, a trade association for independent pay phone operators.

"If a pay phone isn't covering its costs, we take it out," said Jim Smith, a spokesman for Verizon, which operates more pay phones in New York than any other company. "Toward the late '90s, the wireless phenomenon really got some momentum. That really put the squeeze on the pay phones."

The drop in pay-phone numbers angers advocates, who are quick to point out that cell phones - and sometimes any phones at all - are prohibitively expensive for many people.

A full 7.1 percent of the nation's households had no phone of any kind in November 2005, up from 4.7 percent three years earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

For those people, and for the estimated 43 percent of U.S. residents with no cell phones (as of June 2004), pay phones are especially crucial, advocates say.

"Pay phones are a big deal for them," Sage Foster said of the homeless men and women he works with as a housing counselor. "For most of them, it's their only means of communication."

Pay phones also served an important purpose during two recent catastrophes in New York City - the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the 2003 blackout that darkened much of the Northeast. Cell phones failed during the crises, but many pay phones kept working because of their direct wiring and the phone company's backup power stores.

Ragan Belton remembers queuing up at a pay phone with 30 others to call her daughter on Sept. 11. "God forbid there's an emergency and you have to go several corners to find one that's working," she said.

But public telephones were not always regarded as such a blessing.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, the phones became increasingly unpopular with community boards and local officials afraid of drug dealers. Eventually, Verizon changed all its phones to refuse incoming calls and removed phone booths, which had become grim repositories for trash and human waste.

"There was a time when all kinds of criminal elements would set up a sidewalk office using a pay phone," recalled Smith, the Verizon spokesman.

But the phone stands that replaced them are still magnets for trash and vandalism, and some still smell distinctly of urine.

"Some operators have just abandoned locations," said Willard R. Nichols, president of the independent operators' trade group. "If you've got vandalism and damage, it's very hard to keep the phone in service, because the repair costs are too high."

Despite the rising costs, it is unlikely that pay phones will be phased out entirely, according to industry representatives who say demand remains high in working-class neighborhoods and in locations like truck stops and airports.

Marilyn Ginsberg, a retired city employee who at 63 relies almost exclusively on her cell phone, says she hopes they are right.

"They're important to have around, if for no other reason than if there's an emergency, someone can dial 911," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-27-15-56-58





Big Brother Wants A Window Into VoIP At Any Cost
Nate Anderson

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, has powered its way back onto the front page this summer, and if you 1) live in the US and 2) pay taxes, you might soon be paying to implement it. And if you're a drug-dealing mobster, you might soon be experiencing it.

The FBI wants the ability to tap VoIP calls. To do this, the agency also wants access to all of your network traffic—and it looks like it's on the way to getting it. Following a long set of legal battles, the US Court of Appeals in June upheld 2-1 a newer and broader definition of CALEA's scope that could affect every university and library in the country.

While the case may not be fully settled until the Supreme Court hears it, the Justice Department has announced plans to cut the legs out from beneath it. The DoJ proposed a series of amendments to the original legislation which explicitly give the FBI the authority it seeks. Unfortunately for network operators, these amendments could be costly—and the government has no plans to help them foot the bill. If either 1) the amendments pass or 2) the courts uphold the FCC decision, CALEA will open the floodgates for easy government surveillance of Internet activity, and it could cost taxpayers a bundle.

What's included in the amendments, and how might they affect you? Let's take a look.
From cell phones to VoIP

The FBI wanted greater access to cellular phones in the early 1990s, when the a technology was still in its infancy. Congress gave it to them in CALEA, a law intended to update surveillance authority for new forms of communication. The FBI has taken full advantage of that new authority; in 2005, 91 percent of all government intercepts involved portable devices—mainly mobile phones.

But soon after the new law was written, technology leaped ahead. When the rise of broadband connections and VoIP services became too great to ignore any longer, the FBI pushed to expand CALEA's scope, claiming that it needed the new authority to keep up with high-tech criminals. In a 5-0 vote back in 2004, the FCC voted in favor of the FBI's proposals and opened the door to "wiretaps" of broadband networks, which had previously been excluded from wiretapping requirements.

The new proposals caused controversy because CALEA had included a series of exemptions for Internet systems. The FBI argued that Congress had never meant to preclude the agency from tapping VoIP calls, and the FCC eventually agreed. The EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and other groups opposed the move to extend the law to the Internet. A lawsuit was filed against the FCC which claimed that the regulator had overstepped its authority and had gone beyond the plain spirit of the law.

The courts have now ruled in favor of the FCC, which means that most network operators will need to make their systems wiretap-friendly in 2007. Because of the way the rules were drawn up, the CALEA requirements extend to universities, public libraries, and other institutions that operate networks connected to the public Internet. The rules also make clear that the government will not reimburse operators for the necessary network upgrades.

In the past, the FCC specifically elected to classify broadband Internet as a data service rather than a communications service in order to rationalize deregulation. Expanding the scope of CALEA to include Internet surveillance seems somewhat contradictory, since the language of CALEA clearly indicates that the law was intended only for communications services.

Universities have been vocal critics of the new rules, claiming they will be fabulously expensive to implement. The government responded by allowing institutions to route all traffic through a Trusted Third Party (TTP) that would handle the necessary filtering and compliance. Costs for such a service could be far lower than the alternative, but this would involve passing all the traffic over a campus network to a private company, and not every university will be excited by the prospect.
New CALEA amendments

The government hopes to shore up the legal basis for the program by passing amended legislation. The EFF took a look at the amendments and didn't like what it found.

According to the Administration, the proposal would "confirm [CALEA's] coverage of push-to-talk, short message service, voice mail service and other communications services offered on a commercial basis to the public," along with "confirm[ing] CALEA's application to providers of broadband Internet access, and certain types of 'Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol' (VOIP)." Many of CALEA's express exceptions and limitations are also removed. Most importantly, while CALEA's applicability currently depends on whether broadband and VOIP can be considered "substantial replacements" for existing telephone services, the new proposal would remove this limit.

Also interesting is section 103e, which deals with "network access service assistance requirements." The entire section was added to clarify what, exactly, network operators need to do in order to make their networks wiretap-friendly. The government realizes that it would pose an undue burden on carriers to make them responsible for "looking inside" each packet and filtering it based on content. Instead, the law directs operators to grab the full "stream of wire or electronic communications"—in other words, all network data transmitted by an individual.

This stream would then be passed to the government, which would have the job of sifting through it and extracting only the information covered by the court order (VoIP, e-mail, etc.). A government analysis of this section concludes that such a data stream might be too much for the government to handle in real-time. The analysis notes that "some temporary storage or buffering may be necessary" and network operators must "be capable of storing communications and other information or time period specified by the law enforcement agency as necessary to effectuate the interception or access."

This provision worries the EFF. One of their lawyers tells Ars that "the bill will put the technology in place to buffer packet streams, and places the job of filtering those streams under government control. We know from the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that the government is not limiting itself to access to under court orders, and the CALEA bill must be considered in light of the capacity it generates."

Although the new CALEA amendments make clear that this buffering and filtering will only be used under court supervision, the EFF is justifiably concerned that putting this technology in place on such a broad scale opens the door for abuse. If Congress enacts these CALEA provisions, surveillance can be ordered and analyzed from the comfort of FBI headquarters. Given how easy this could make wiretaps, and given the potential cost of implementation, the question remains: is the new program needed?
"Surveillance state?"

Each year, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts issues a report on wiretapping. The 2005 version makes for fascinating reading, and throws cold water on the idea that the government conducts massive wiretapping operations of 'Net activity. It also throws cold water on the idea that wiretap applications are hard to get.

1,773 intercepts were recorded last year, while a single one was rejected by the courts. Though many people imagine that "the Feds" do the bulk of such surveillance, reports shows that state police and prosecutors requested far more wiretaps than did their federal counterparts (1,148 to 625). Wiretap operations take, on average, 43 days, though the largest investigation of the year (involving mobsters in New York) took 287 days and netted 51,712 cell phone calls. Encryption was encountered only 13 times, all of them by state officials. None of the encryption systems prevented authorities from getting at the "plain text" of the messages.

The vast majority of all wiretaps targeted cellular phones. Electronic taps accounted for only 23 cases, and only eight of those involved computers. This fact alone calls the CALEA expansion into question. If the government does so little electronic surveillance, and has no trouble getting the required court orders, why is it necessary to force every major computer network in the country to spend money to become wiretap-friendly?

The FBI can do taps without the new CALEA authority, after all; that was the whole point behind the development of its Carnivore system (the agency now uses off-the-shelf tools). While this requires more work to set up each time a tap is needed, it was done fewer than 10 times last year—hardly a burden for the agency.
Court-sanctioned searches aren't the only kind

One of the most interesting bits in the 2005 wiretapping report concerned the nature of the alleged offenses. Most of the wiretaps—81 percent—dealt with drug crimes. Second on the list was racketeering. Homicide came third. Gambling was fourth. What's missing here? Terrorism.

Given the government's current preoccupation with ferreting out terrorists and stopping potential attacks in their planning stages, it's interesting that terrorism doesn't show up more frequently (it's not even a category on the official chart). Obviously, this raises questions. Is the government truly doing few terrorism-related wiretaps? Or is such information being gained without judicial oversight?

The EFF and other civil liberty groups believe that the latter is true. The public's odds of getting definitive answers wouldn't look good to a Vegas gambler, especially after the recent dismissal of the ACLU's case against AT&T, but there's still the possibility that some information will come to light. The EFF's case against the telecom giant is still alive, and it may only be through such cases that the public ever learns just how much of its government's surveillance goes on without oversight—and whether it wants to trust that same government with even broader powers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7372.html





Hackers Clone E-Passports
Kim Zetter

A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.

The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery. But Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy.

"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Grunwald says. "From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."

Grunwald plans to demonstrate the cloning technique Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

The United States has led the charge for global e-passports because authorities say the chip, which is digitally signed by the issuing country, will help them distinguish between official documents and forged ones. The United States plans to begin issuing e-passports to U.S. citizens beginning in October. Germany has already started issuing the documents.

Although countries have talked about encrypting data that's stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.

"And of course if you can read the data, you can clone the data and put it in a new tag," Grunwald says.

The cloning news is confirmation for many e-passport critics that RFID chips won't make the documents more secure.

"Either this guy is incredible or this technology is unbelievably stupid," says Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow at Privacy International, a U.K.-based group that opposes the use of RFID chips in passports.

"I think it's a combination of the two," Hosein says. "Is this what the best and the brightest of the world could come up with? Or is this what happens when you do policy laundering and you get a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions about technologies they don't understand?"

Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country's e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.

In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker -- Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies -- but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.

He then launched a program that border patrol stations use to read the passports -- called Golden Reader Tool and made by secunet Security Networks -- and within four seconds, the data from the passport chip appeared on screen in the Golden Reader template.

Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader -- which can also act as a writer -- and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.

As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.

The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.

Although he can clone the tag, Grunwald says it's not possible, as far as he can tell, to change data on the chip, such as the name or birth date, without being detected. That's because the passport uses cryptographic hashes to authenticate the data.

When he was done, he went on to clone the same passport data onto an ordinary smartcard -- such as the kind used by corporations for access keys -- after formatting the card's chip to the ICAO standard. He then showed how he could trick a reader into reading the cloned chip instead of a passport chip by placing the smartcard inside the passport between the reader and the passport chip. Because the reader is designed to read only one chip at a time, it read the chip nearest to it -- in the smartcard -- rather than the one embedded in the passport.

The demonstration means a terrorist whose name is on a watch list could carry a passport with his real name and photo printed on the pages, but with an RFID chip that contains different information cloned from someone else's passport. Any border-screening computers that rely on the electronic information -- instead of what's printed on the passport -- would wind up checking the wrong name.

Grunwald acknowledges, however, that such a plot could be easily thwarted by a screener who physically examines the passport to make sure the name and picture printed on it match the data read from the chip. Machine-readable OCR text printed at the bottom of the passport would also fail to match the RFID data.

Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services at the State Department, says that designers of the e-passport have long known that the chips can be cloned and that other security safeguards in the passport design -- such as a digital photograph of the passport holder embedded in the data page -- would still prevent someone from using a forged or modified passport to gain entry into the United States and other countries.

"What this person has done is neither unexpected nor really all that remarkable," Moss says. "(T)he chip is not in and of itself a silver bullet.... It's an additional means of verifying that the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom that passport was issued by the relevant government."

Moss also said that the United States has no plans to use fully automated inspection systems; therefore, a physical inspection of the passport against the data stored on the RFID chip would catch any discrepancies between the two.

There are other countries, however, that are considering taking human inspectors out of the loop. Australia, for one, has talked about using automated passport inspection for selected groups of travelers, Moss says.

In addition to the danger of counterfeiting, Grunwald says that the ability to tamper with e-passports opens up the possibility that someone could write corrupt data to the passport RFID tag that would crash an unprepared inspection system, or even introduce malicious code into the backend border-screening computers. This would work, however, only if the backend system suffers from the kind of built-in software vulnerabilities that have made other systems so receptive to viruses and Trojan-horse attacks.

"I want to say to people that if you're using RFID passports, then please make it secure," Grunwald says. "This is in your own interest and it's also in my interest. If you think about cyberterrorists and nasty, black-hat type of guys, it's a high risk.... From my point of view, it should not be possible to clone the passport at all."

Hosein agrees. "Is this going to be the massive flaw that makes the whole house of cards fall apart? Probably not. But I'm not entirely sure how confident we should feel about these new passports."

Grunwald's technique requires a counterfeiter to have physical possession of the original passport for a time. A forger could not surreptitiously clone a passport in a traveler's pocket or purse because of a built-in privacy feature called Basic Access Control that requires officials to unlock a passport's RFID chip before reading it. The chip can only be unlocked with a unique key derived from the machine-readable data printed on the passport's page.

To produce a clone, Grunwald has to program his copycat chip to answer to the key printed on the new passport. Alternatively, he can program the clone to dispense with Basic Access Control, which is an optional feature in the specification.

Grunwald's isn't the only research on e-passport problems circulating at Black Hat. Kevin Mahaffey and John Hering of Flexilis released a video Wednesday demonstrating that a privacy feature slated for the new passports may not work as designed.

As planned, U.S. e-passports will contain a web of metal fiber embedded in the front cover of the documents to shield them from unauthorized readers. Though Basic Access Control would keep the chip from yielding useful information to attackers, it would still announce its presence to anyone with the right equipment. The government added the shielding after privacy activists expressed worries that a terrorist could simply point a reader at a crowd and identify foreign travelers.

In theory, with metal fibers in the front cover, nobody can sniff out the presence of an e-passport that's closed. But Mahaffey and Hering demonstrated in their video how even if a passport opens only half an inch -- such as it might if placed in a purse or backpack -- it can reveal itself to a reader at least two feet away.

Using a mockup e-passport modeled on the U.S. design, they showed how an attacker could connect a hidden, improvised bomb to a reader such that it triggers an explosion when a passport-holder comes within range.

In addition to cloning passport chips, Grunwald has been able to clone RFID ticket cards used by students at universities to buy cafeteria meals and add money to the balance on the cards.

He and his partners were also able to crash RFID-enabled alarm systems designed to sound when an intruder breaks a window or door to gain entry. Such systems require workers to pass an RFID card over a reader to turn the system on and off. Grunwald found that by manipulating data on the RFID chip he could crash the system, opening the way for a thief to break into the building through a window or door.

And they were able to clone and manipulate RFID tags used in hotel room key cards and corporate access cards and create a master key card to open every room in a hotel, office or other facility. He was able, for example, to clone Mifare, the most commonly used key-access system, designed by Philips Electronics. To create a master key he simply needed two or three key cards for different rooms to determine the structure of the cards. Of the 10 different types of RFID systems he examined that were being used in hotels, none used encryption.

Many of the card systems that did use encryption failed to change the default key that manufacturers program into the access card system before shipping, or they used sample keys that the manufacturer includes in instructions sent with the cards. Grunwald and his partners created a dictionary database of all the sample keys they found in such literature (much of which they found accidentally published on purchasers' websites) to conduct what's known as a dictionary attack. When attacking a new access card system, their RFDump program would search the list until it found the key that unlocked a card's encryption.

"I was really surprised we were able to open about 75 percent of all the cards we collected," he says.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71521-0.html





Lenovo Aims to Calm Fears Over Security
Mickey Meece

Less than six months into his new job as president and chief executive of Lenovo, William J. Amelio, faced his first big public relations test. The company, founded in China, had acquired the personal computer business of I.B.M. last year after passing a national security review. But this spring it ran headlong into security fears in Washington.

In the end, the State Department agreed to keep 16,000 desktop PC’s it bought from Lenovo off its classified networks. During a recent interview, Mr. Amelio, 48, discussed the episode, Lenovo’s branding and strategy. Following are excerpts:

Q. How did the State Department decision play out?

A. It’s dying down dramatically. I personally spent time in Washington, along with other key executives, to help educate a lot of the lawmakers. The issue isn’t associated with hardware at all. It’s associated with a common problem in the industry: the potential or ability for someone to put viruses in PC’s. We’re confident all our Lenovo computers don’t possess any backdoor surveillance equipment, spy chips or the like.

Q. It wasn’t that they inspected your computers and found something wrong?

A. There was never anything found. We do not want this to become a flashpoint for United States and China trade. When you view our company, we’re global in every sense of the word. We have a C.E.O. who is American. Our board has five United States citizens on it. Three from Hong Kong and four of the original founders of the Lenovo company. There has been no change in the machines since we made the acquisition of the I.B.M. division.

Q. How did you try to turn the dust-up into an opportunity?

A. This is not an issue unique to any manufacturer. This is an industry issue. Let’s get the rest of the industry together — which we’re working on right now — to say, “How do we combat this issue of hacking?”

Q. How’s the acquisition so far?

A. In the first year out of the chute, our China business accelerated. The business outside of China, which was the previous I.B.M. PC Division, in fact, shrunk a lot less than anticipated by industry experts. There were estimates of a 20 to 30 percent hit, but revenues shrunk 7 percent and we actually grew unit shipments 2 percent. Over 95 percent of our customers stayed with us, so we’re pretty excited about those results.

Q. What percentage of sales comes from China?

A. We’re upwards of a $14 billion company today; less than $4 billion in China, the rest outside.

Q. What is Lenovo’s strategy?

A. Our strategy is fourfold: 1) to get our supply chain outside of China to be as effective as it is inside China. 2) to get our transaction business ramped up as quickly as we can in markets outside of China, especially in the high-growth segments for PC’s, which are notebooks, very-small-business and small-business customers. 3) to get our desktops as highly competitive outside China as they are inside. 4) brand: you can imagine we have one of the most difficult branding jobs in the world right now as we’re transitioning some brand equity from the I.B.M. brand to the Lenovo brand.

Q. How are you building the brand?

A. First, we were top sponsors in the Olympics in Torino, and we will be in Beijing. We went 16 days with flawless execution and we had the whole I.T. responsibility for the Torino Olympics. On the heels of that, we announced the Lenovo 3000, which are Lenovo-branded desktops and notebooks sold outside of China. Q. You bought the right to use the I.B.M. name, are you moving rapidly to take that name off the ThinkPad?

A. We have a contract with I.B.M. to sunset the use of the I.B.M. logo. We reached an agreement to keep it exactly the way it is now for another two years. We will do that. However, there are large accounts that are very interested for us to pull the logo off now, which we will do.

Q. How important is ThinkPad ?

A. We’ve announced 18 new versions of ThinkPads over the last year. We’ve demonstrated to all our large accounts that we’ve had a very good stewardship of the ThinkPad brand.

I travel a lot and I carry a bag of red dots, the ThinkPad TrackPoints. When I’m in an airport and I see somebody with a ThinkPad, I’ll walk up to them and quiz them and get some instant customer feedback. Then I give them a few red dots. If I give them my card, too, they never believe who I am.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/te...interview.html





German Efficiency

The German movie industry’s campaign to scare people from illegally copying movies and other copyrighted material (”Hart aber gerecht“, translates to something like “tough but just”) has experienced a real blow to its public image, again.

The image put forward by the campaign strongly contrasts with the supposed level of technical knowledge within the organization as well as their webhosters: for a period of about 21 hours the server’s DocumentRoot was open to the public. Everyone interested could peek at (drastic, if not hilarious) anti-piracy campaign videos, server logfiles and such. German blogs already have been eager to analyse and comment.

Most delicate is the matter of eCards, though: the website offers a service to send “scary postcards” with campaign motives to people you chose - without any kind of sender oder receiver verification (no opt-in, which is de facto illegal in Germany). And of course, all the addresses used and texts sent via the card service since April 2006 were logged in cleartext, and have already attracted some considerable attention. ;-)

Needless to say there is no privacy disclaimer at all on the website…

There are several backups of the logfiles availabe: HTTP (uncompressed / 47MB), HTTP (2,2MB compressed) and eDonkey.
http://netzpolitik.org/2006/die-logf...nd-verbrecher/





How The Piratebay Raid Changed Sweden

A lot of things happened after the Swedish police attempted to take down The Piratebay. It’s time to recap and look ahead.

Torrentfreak asked Mathias from Piracy Unlimited (and Sweden) to give an overview of the things that happened, and the things that will happen.

First of all, the attack against the Pirate Bay was highly unsuccessful - they only stayed down for a couple of days before they were back in full force. Stronger than ever thanks to the widespread media attention. Subsequently several sources reported that the MPAA initiated the attack, by directly influencing Swedish authorities on governmental level, in this case the Ministry of Justice, to intervene in this specific case, which is considered illegal in Sweden (the term is “minister rule”). It also turned out that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down, something that should’ve made the Swedish government move even quicker. What they did was that they hinted to the prosecutor in this case that the government ‘expected quick results’ in this matter. The prosecutor had written a PM a while back that it was impossible to convict the Pirate Bay, but after some letters from the MPAA and this not so subtle hint from, what I think was the Secretary of State, he changed his mind.

When Swedish television published documents that proved this, there was some intense outburst for a while in the media, and this only worked to give the piracy movement more sympathies. Their anthology, Copy me, sold out and a new edition will be released in a few days.

Piratbyrån, which is a Swedish pro-piracy think tank, had their server seized at the same time and it was in police custody until just the other day. Between the legal efforts to get their equipment back and other other lobbying, Piratbyrån managed to gather similar and supporting groups around Scandinavia to launch an international lobby organization, which was given the name Pro Piracy Lobby. Right now, PPL is in contact with groups in a dozen countries that is interested in joining.

Secondly, the Pirate Party had already existed for about half a year, but all this attention also gave wings in their sails, and they had thousands of new members in a matter of weeks. Suddenly, they had transformed into the largest party without parliament seats. In Sweden, you get seats in the parliament if you get four percent of the votes. As we speak, the Pirate Party has almost as many members as the Green Party, which is a party that supports the current government, and without them, the current government can’t maintain their majority This leads the Pirate Party to believe that if they get into the parliament they can fill such a vital role, and thereby make a big difference. Worth noting is that some unofficial gallups from various sources indicate that the Pirate Party is the most likely party for a Swedish first-time voter to choose on election day.

This success has also led to pirate parties forming in a number of other countries: France, Italy, USA, Belgium, Austria, and very recently also Germany, Spain and Russian. There is also one forming in the UK. Together, they have founded PP-International, which is an international collaboration forum/group to exchange experiences, ideas and such, and Sweden has a very important role here.

The general elections are being held in the end of September, and the election campaigns are becoming hotter and hotter. The Pirate Party has decided that what they have now, ideas and ideology, strategy and policies, is what they’re going to run, no need to do any additions or changes now - all energy is put on the election campaign, and the work will be focused very strongly on this until after the election.

What happens after that will depend completely on how the election turns out, and here are many alternatives:

On one scenario, the Pirate Party gets their 4%, which few within the party doubt they will. In that case they will move to become influential in the forming of the government. In Sweden, the prime minister is elected by the parliament, which means that he or she must have a majority of the MPs behind him/her. No party ever gets that many seats, and so, a party that will form a government must seek support from another party, who then gets a situation where they can influence the government. This is a position that the Pirate Party seeks. Their parliamentary work will depend heavily on whether they succeed or not.

Outside the parliament, there is much to be done. If a party gets more than 2.5% of the votes, they will have state subsidiaries that allow them to employ a few people full-time to work for them. The amount of money rises with, I think, every extra .5% of the total votes. These will of course be used to have people working full time on strenghthening the party, and help with the local groups - up to now, all members of the Pirate Party works without pay for this idea that they support. A few full-timers would be nice to do alot of the foot-work.

Also, more and more local groups will be formed, and these will do the work locally, mostly making the Pirate Party seen in their surroundings, as the Pirate Party won’t run in local elections. There will be a lot of local organizing being done.

Also, they will probably put down alot of work in helping the pirate parties around the world via PP-International.

In the long run, the Pirate Party will aim for the election to the European Parliament in 2009, where it’s easier to get in. A party that receives 1% of the votes in an election has the right to have their ballots placed at voting locations by the election authorities at that place. Thus, there is a good possibility the Pirate Party gains even more in the EP elections than in the Swedish general ones.

In any way, there is an exciting few years we have ahead of us.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pira...hanged-sweden/





The Politics of Piracy Emerge in Sweden
John C. Dvorak

Overlooked by the major media is the weird situation in Sweden, where a political party and lobbying organization has cropped up with the sole purpose of overturning the current crop of copyright and patent laws and creating something more modern and realistic: the Pirate Party and the Pro Piracy Lobby. This movement, while unlikely to have any effect in the U.S., could change things so dramatically in parliamentary democracies that we'd feel the aftershock anyway.

This all began with the recent shutdown of The Pirate Bay, a famous quasi-legal Web site run out of Sweden. The Pirate Bay has been playing various games with the government over the past year, moving its server around. The site can best be described as the Napster of BitTorrent sites, one of a few mega-sites where kids manage their P2P file sharing. It's used mostly for music and movie trading in violation of copyright, and everyone knows it. But under Swedish law, it may not be doing this illegally. It's a middleman.

Apparently various record industry interests (and movie folks, too) put a bunch of leverage on the Swedes to shut these folks down. But the Swedish system of such law enforcement is arcane and apparently not effective against an operation like this, since it is in a legal gray area. Enter Uncle Sam.

The U.S. government, after getting a bunch of complaints from Hollywood and the record industry, allegedly threatened Sweden (though some diplomatic channel), telling the country that it would be blacklisted in the World Trade Organization if it didn't shut down the Pirate Bay once and for all. Of course, there would have been a huge fuss in Europe if Sweden was indeed blacklisted, and a trade war would have ensued, so I doubt the threat was serious. After all, the WTO's main purpose is preventing trade wars. And we must have our Volvos. Nonetheless, that's the way the story has been played in the news, and the idle youth of Sweden—and now, perhaps, all of Europe—are politicizing around the issue.—Continue reading...

Let me tell you something. You do not want youth politicizing. Not that the kids shouldn't take part in politics. You just don't want to get them all jacked up over an issue like this. There are lots of them. They often have a lot of spare time. En masse they can ruin things for the "establishment." Luckily, they tend to be lazy and cynical and seldom take to the streets or the ballot.

Well, it looks like the boneheads in Hollywood and the RIAA, along with onerous new copyright laws such as the DMCA and other restrictions, are triggering change. I'd be cautious. Today's youth internationally are not like anything we've seen before. Their view of the world is skewed by the media and new realities. When they see all these restrictions, they see them done on behalf of fat guys who are flying around in private jets with a cabin full of high-class hookers while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. They see rappers in limos wearing diamonds and having their teeth removed and replaced with gold for no apparent reason other than to spend the suckers' money. They see mega-yachts and homes that are the size of a small college all bought and sold on the backs of the kids buying music. Indeed, they are seeing a different world than most of us did when we were growing up. It's nuts. It looks unfair or, worse, exploitative.

Then they see old ladies arrested for copyright violations because a grandkid downloaded a song. Dead people are indicted in hysterical sweeps. Kids are threatened with ruination for song-swapping.

They're not going to put up with it for long, I can assure you. While I think any outrage will fall short of storming the compounds of the rich and burning their homes, once the next-generation youth finally figure out that they can take over at the ballot box, all hell will break loose.

In a parliamentary system, a group like the Pirate Party, which will quickly surpass Sweden's Green Party, doesn't have to win a majority of seats to have an effect. In multiparty systems (unlike in the U.S.), you have to form coalitions to rule, and all sorts of deals are made for anything to get done. And I suspect that a lot of older politicos are tired of being pushed around by U.S. intellectual-property monopolists and would love to side with the Pirate Party on the excuse that they "had to."

Links to the current situation are on my blog here. To American ears, this all seems and sounds silly. But the moniker for the Pirate Party in Swedish, Piratpartiet, actually has a nice ring to it.

I'm not sure how far any of this will go, and perhaps this new up-and-coming youth culture will get caught up in chat rooms or online games or green-tea cultivation instead of fighting this fight. But this much I can tell you: If they decide to make a fight of it, they'll win, and things will indeed change. Stay tuned.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1996840,00.asp





News From The North



The TankGirl Diaries


30.7.2006

The Brussels Journal published at June 22 this good sum-up story of the Swedish situation. Since June 22 the membership of Pirate Party has grown to 7607 from the mentioned 7136. The membership of the closest rival The Green Party (Miljöpartiet) has stayed at the mentioned 7862.

Pirates Enter Politics:
Filesharing Swedes Attack Copyright Laws


Sweden appears to have a full-fledged pirate movement. In addition to The Pirate Bay it also has a Pirate Office and a Pirate Party. The latter are considering entering Swedish politics by taking part in this year’s elections for the Swedish Riksdag and may very well obtain a seat.

The pirate movement started in the summer of 2003 with the establishment of the Pirate Office (Piratbyrån). Its name refers to the Svenska Antipiratbyrån, the lobbying group which was set up by media companies to investigate breaches of copyright and take these to court. The Pirate Office believes that there should be no obstructions to the copying of information and culture, and wants to start a public debate on the issue. In November 2003 the group Bittorent-tracker established The Pirate Bay, which has continued independently since October 2004.

On 1 January 2006 Rickard Falkvinge opened a website announcing the intention to start a Pirate Party (Piratpartiet, pp) and a prototype of the party programme. On 15 February the party already had the 1,500 signatures needed for official registration as a political party. Today it has 7,136 members. Not bad compared with the 7,862 members of the green party Milieupartit (mp), one of the two leftwing parties, with 17 seats in the Riksdag supporting the social-democratic minority government of Göran Persson. The razzia on 31 May by the Swedish police against The Pirate Bay led to a 50% increase in its membership.

The Pirate Party’s programme can be summed up in three main points: personal integrity should be protected, culture should be free, patents and private monopolies are harmful to society. The party’s position is that in modern society individuals are monitored in all kinds of ways, especially in the digital world. It claims that current legislation is totally outdated and hampers creativity, hence all restrictions on copying information for private purposes should be lifted. This means that copying an MPG- or MP3-file for personal use or for a friend should be made legal, but does not comprise the total abolition of today’s copyright and patent laws. The party acknowledges that such legislation is reasonable and necessary for companies and commercial interests.

The party has no opinions on any other issue and has announced that its vote in the Riksdag will be available in exchange for the realisation of its programme. The party adopts a neutral position between the two large blocs in Swedish politics: the Alliance for Sweden which groups four parties of the right, and the bloc on the left comprising the governing social-democrats with the Greens (mp) and the Left (v). These blocs are on a par in the opinion polls, and the Pirate Party hopes that in the elections it may be in a position where it can shift the balance. Some polls indicate that there is a chance of it gaining a seat. The minimum number of votes required to gain a seat (4%) is 225.000, and the party is hoping to glean these from the 800,000 to 1.1 million Swedes who use file sharing.

Already, however, the Pirate Party’s influence is being felt in Swedish politics. The Greens, the Left and the Moderaten (m) have made adjustments to their programmes to prevent voters from switching to the Pirate Party. Thomas Bodström, the Swedish Justice Minister, clearly concerned by the advent of the Pirate Party, suggested altering the law to make filesharing legal in exchange for an extra tax on the use of broadband. The Pirate Party’s response to this was negative. They said this was not an acceptable solution but one which indicates that the traditional politicians have still not grasped the problem.

30.7.2006

The Myths of Filesharing

Norbottens-Kuriren runs a story on the myths of filesharing.

"The law against filesharing is a fact, the debate is in foll bloom, and everybody wants to have a solution. But what will eventually happen? How shall we consume music five years from now? On the other side is the industry, [justice minister] Bodström and the law enforcement. On the other side are the Pirates: both the Bureau and the Party. The pirates want to ditch the copyright law and legalize all filesharing. The industry is fighting with at any cost against free filesharing and refers to the legal download sites available. The situtation appears to be locked. But solutions have to be found - that is the only thing the two parties agree on."

With this introduction the newspaper the newspaper poses the question to Rogel Wallis, a professor from the Royal Technical University, who also happens to be the chairman in Skap, the organization of Swedish pop music composers, and a composer himself. How shall we average music consumers buy our music five years from now?

The question makes Wallis to take first a deep breath. "Five years is a long time. I don't think there is any possibility to stop filesharing." He compares the present situation to the moment in the beginning of the last century when public radio broadcasts started in the USA. At the time the music publishers wanted to prevent the playing of music in the radio. They argued that if music could flow freely and if people could hear what they wanted, their market of printed scores would collapse. The issue was solved with a license of a sort, and with it the American version of Stim (the Swedish royalty collection organization for musicians) got started.

"Now many are looking for a similar solution. A license fee targeting all broadband users, to compensate the copyright owners the losses from their presumably reduced sales. But it is not at all certain that copyright owners, record and movie companies are suffering any major economical damage due to filesharing", says Roger Wallis. "The myth that every downloaded song or film equals a lost CD sale or an unsold movie ticket has no truth whatsoever. This much we know from research." Instead Wallis thinks that Internet works today much like radio worked earlier: through Internet people hear music that they end up liking, and then they go to buy either the song or the album.

As for the future options, the two alternative extremes are either to liberate it all or to keep pursuing filesharers. Neither of these is particularly attractive to Roger Wallis. He characterizes the present situation as 'moral panic'. "Moral panic tends always to overshoot, and is later replaced by more pragmatic business solutions. But this panic has been exceptionally powerful. On this particular case there has been an unforeseen amount of lobbying, and there is a huge amount of money in the background. This battle will continue for a long time."

31.7.2006

Austrian Pirate Party Goes Official

The fast spreading of the political pirate movement from Sweden to whole Europe appeared initially to surprise even the Swedes themselves. They had been focusing so much on their own election campaign and domestic debates that it took a moment for them to realize what was actually happening. European sister parties started to pop up here and there, basically copying their agenda and signing to the same powerful pirate symbolism. As to be expected, these were merely small grassroot organizations of a few activists, with little more than a website and a discussion forum to begin with.

After the initial surprise the Swedish mother party quickly assumed a leading and consulting role, helping the newcomers in various organizational and political issues. And it seems that in this time, and for this movement, the grassroot can quickly grow into official. The Austrian Pirate Party - Piraten Partei Österreichs - will be the first party to follow Swedish Piratpartiet in becoming an official national party. The Austrian Pirates will be handing over their basic principles to the Austrian Ministery of Inner Affairs today and they have promised to provide further information about their plans in coming press releases.

1.8.2006

Pirate Party Now Larger Than Greens in Sweden

With its 7633 members Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) is now clearly larger than the Green Party (Miljöpartiet) with its 7249 members. Actually Pirate Party had reached the Greens already a few weeks ago but the earlier publicly announced member count of the Greens included people who had stopped paying their membership fees, and now these people have been cleaned away from the register.

This is by no means an insignificant political achievement. The Greens have 17 seats in the Swedish parliament and together with Social Democrats and Left Party they form the ruling coalition in Sweden. Without Greens the government would lose its majority in the parliament where seats are split to seven different parties. And this is precisely the sort of situation the Pirates are trying to achieve in the September 17 election: to get a balance of power position from where they can trade their support to any potential coalition that is willing to realize their agenda.

1.8.2006

What Goes Around Comes Around

Metro is Sweden's most popular morning paper with over a million daily readers. The newspaper is running an interesting story about what can happen in music business in the promised land of pirates. The story is about Wille Crafoord, a popular Swedish musician who in early 90s was founding one of the first hip-hop bands in Sweden, JustD. Later on he has released a number of solo albums with jazz, soul och pop influences, and since 2003 he has been a member in a two-man group Griniga Gamla Gubbar ('Whiny Old Men') which sings rap in Swedish.

Due to his popularity there have been some bootleg recordings made from his gigs, and unsurprisingly some of these bootlegs have found their way to Pirate Bay's generous music offerings. One of the bootlegged songs being distributed on Pirate Bay was 'Bögdisco' - a humorous little song that Wille liked to play on his gigs but never seriously intended to record. However, some Swedish individuals with producing and remixing skills found the song from Pirate Bay and liked it enough to make a good disco version of it. And as it happened, the artist himself liked the pirate version so much that he 'stole it back' from Pirate Bay and is releasing it officially. He also managed to contact the initially unknown contributors, and all parties are happy about the idea of an official release. Wille tells Metro that he found the guys so cool that he might even do more musical co-operation with them in the future.

When asked what Wille thinks about filesharing, he told Metro's reporter that he takes the idea of filesharing very positively, and to prove it, he even started to sing in the telephone a fresh song 'Share files, share files' that he was working on.

3.8.2006

Austrian Pirate Party Gets Wind Into Its Sails

The Austrian Pirate Party (Piraten Partei Österreichs) that went official a few days ago has started to get plenty of local media coverage. The news about the new party started to break out in the media yesterday afternoon, and the party's website got almost 20.000 hits yesterday alone. TV channel Pro7Austria has been interviewing party members and will run the interview in its evening news today. The party has also been offered a chance to make a 2 hour radio show on its own conditions - an offer they are unlikely to refuse.

4.8.2006

Pirates at Stockholm Pride

Piratpartiet, together with most Swedish political parties, has been present at the big annual Stockholm Pride festival. The festival is organized by the Swedish GLBT (gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual) communities in co-operation with hundred or so companies and other organizations. Its programme extends well beyond the sexual minority themes, and the numerous festival events attract a large number of domestic and international visitors. The main site, Pride Park, is packed with activities, music, restaurants, and its is also a place where organizations like parties and trade unions can present themselves to the audience. In other words, a great event to make political work, and that's precisely what the pirates have been doing there.

The reports from the pirates working at the festival have been very positive. Lots of campaign material has been handed over to interested people, and there have been numerous discussions on political themes with festival guests.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=247766

http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com/





Apple Meets Scandinavia's Reply Deadline
Katarina Kratovac

Apple Computer Inc. met a Tuesday deadline to respond to Scandinavian regulatory claims that Apple is violating their laws by making its market-leading iPod the only compatible portable player for iTunes downloads.

Apple's response, however, was not immediately made public as regulators considered the company's request to keep parts of it confidential. Authorities would not comment on the content of the 50-page response letter.

Consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden have threatened to take the Cupertino, Calif., company to court on charges of violating contract and copyright laws.

The action could lead to a ban on iTunes from Scandinavian markets if Apple does not allow songs purchased through its iTunes Music Store to be heard on other portable music players and not just the iPod.

The Scandinavian troubles for iTunes come as the French Parliament in June passed a hotly debated law on Internet copyright that could force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes online store compatible with rival offerings.

A French court last week threw out some measures of the law, though appearing to leave the thrust of it intact.

It is now up to French President Jacques Chirac whether to sign it with the court's changes or send it back to parliament.

In Sweden, Bjorn Smith of the consumer agency said Apple's response arrived by mail on Tuesday.

He said Apple had "requested that specific parts of the letter be treated as confidential."

The agency would review whether the request was in line with Swedish law, which says confidentiality clauses can be placed on parts of commercial correspondence dealing with business secrets or court matters.

If the agency decided that Apple's demands were unjustified, the letter may be made public as early as Friday, Smith said.

"It is good Apple responded in time. It was their obligation to answer," Smith said, adding that the reply is not necessarily an indication that Apple would meet Scandinavian demands.

Smith said the Scandinavian agencies would need several days to decide their next move.

In Oslo, Arne Odden, Apple's manager for Norway, declined to comment on why the company asked for confidentiality.

In California, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris confirmed it filed a response to the Scandinavian agencies, saying only that Apple was "looking forward to resolving this matter."

Intellectual property experts have said that Apple may be able to claim that its licensing contracts with music publishers dictate the restrictions on how and where it can sell songs on iTunes.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-12-59-29





When Good Demos Go (Very, Very) Bad
Eric Auchard

Eleven years after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in his 1995 book “The Road Ahead“ predicted humans would one day talk to their computers rather than have to type, the future appeared to be at hand.

At Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Vista product manager Shanen Boettcher set out to show just how easy to use the speech recognition technology built into upcoming Windows Vista software will be. Like, for example, dictating aloud a simple, heartfelt letter to mom, and having one’s voice automatically transcribed into a computer.

The result was a disaster.

Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.

It was not just a perfect refutation of the problems of making machines understand human speech. What other features of Microsoft Windows Vista pose trouble, the audience was left to wonder? “The crashing demo didn’t do a lot to instill confidence in the new Windows product,” one Wall Street analyst, who was present at the demo, said.

Windows Vista, already five years in the making, has been postponed by Microsoft several times. Delays have put off the consumer version of Windows until early 2007 — after the crucial holiday shopping season. Vista is scheduled to ship to corporate customers this November, that is, unless more problems are uncovered.

Later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer blamed the failed speech recognition product demonstration on “a little bit of echo” in the room, which confused the speech-to-text system. To be sure, a second demonstration during the meeting showed how effectively speech recognition can be for navigating around applications, like Microsoft Outlook.

Structured menus appear to work fine. But recognizing random, natural speech still has quite a ways to go, by all appearances: “Let’s set so double the killer delete select all.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/07/28/...very-very-bad/





Text Mining The New York Times
Roland Piquepaille

Text mining is a computer technique to extract useful information from unstructured text. And it's a difficult task. But now, using a relatively new method named topic modeling, computer scientists from University of California, Irvine (UCI), have analyzed 330,000 stories published by the New York Times between 2000 and 2002 in just a few hours. They were able to automatically isolate topics such as the Tour de France, prices of apartments in Brooklyn or dinosaur bones. This technique could soon be used not only by homeland security experts or librarians, but also by physicians, lawyers, real estate people, and even by yourself. Read more…

Let's start with the introduction of this UCI news release — and forget the marketing hype.

Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.

Here is a quote from one of the researchers.

"We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier," said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. "To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians."

Now, let's look at a real example and as how the team discovered links between topics and people. Below is a graph showing "topic-model-based relationships between entities and topics. A link is present when the likelihood of an entity in a particular topic is above a threshold." (Credit: UCI)

Here is another example picked from the UCI news release.

For example, the model generated a list of words that included "rider," "bike," "race," "Lance Armstrong" and "Jan Ullrich." From this, researchers were easily able to identify that topic as the Tour de France. By examining the probability of words appearing in stories about the Tour de France, researchers learned that Armstrong was written about seven times as much as Ullrich.

But what exactly is 'topic modeling'?

Topic modeling looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics. Older text-mining techniques require the user to come up with an appropriate set of topic categories and manually find hundreds to thousands of example documents for each category. This human-intensive process is called supervised learning. In contrast, topic modeling, a type of unsupervised learning, doesn't need suggestions for an appropriate set of topic categories or human-found example documents. This makes retrieving information easier and quicker.

This research work has been presented by Newman and his colleagues during the IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (ISI 2006), which was held in May in San Diego. Here is a link to their technical paper, "Analyzing Entities and Topics in News Articles Using Statistical Topic Models" (PDF format, 12 pages, 248 KB). The above graph has been extracted from this paper.

For more information about the topic modeling technique used by these scientists, you can look at the works done by Mark Steyvers and his Memory and Decisions Laboratory (MADLAB).

In particular, you can try the software available from this Topic Modeling Toolbox. And as you might not have the archives of the New York Times at your disposal to do some experiments, start with something smaller and see what kind of topics you discover — using the contents of this blog for example.

Sources: University of California - Irvine, July 26, 2006; and various web sites
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=304





UCI researchers 'text mine' the New York Times, demonstrating evolution of potent new technology
Press Release

Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.

The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.

"We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier," said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. "To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians."

Text mining allows a computer to extract useful information from unstructured text. Until recently, text mining required a great deal of preparation before documents could be analyzed in a meaningful way. A new text-mining technique called "topic modeling" - which UCI scientists used in their New York Times experiment - looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics - all with minimal human effort.

UCI researchers didn't invent topic modeling, but they developed a technique that allows the technology to be used on huge document collections. They also are among the first to demonstrate its ease and effectiveness by applying it to a newspaper archive. The results reveal few surprises, but the application demonstrates the ability of topic modeling to spot trends and make connections in a way that could be applied to more complicated and cumbersome documents such as those used by medical researchers and lawyers.

Newman and UCI researchers Padhraic Smyth, Mark Steyvers and Chaitanya Chemudugunta presented their research at the recent Intelligence and Security Informatics conference in San Diego.

The topic model, applied to the collection of news articles published from 2000 to 2002, identified patterns of words that occurred together in the stories. From those words, researchers were able to identify topics. Information associated with those topics was charted over time, allowing the scientists to pinpoint what months of the year certain topics were most in the news and how much ink they received from year to year.

For example, the model generated a list of words that included "rider," "bike," "race," "Lance Armstrong" and "Jan Ullrich." From this, researchers were easily able to identify that topic as the Tour de France. By examining the probability of words appearing in stories about the Tour de France, researchers learned that Armstrong was written about seven times as much as Ullrich. Charting information over time, researchers discovered that discussion of Tour de France peaked in the summer months but decreased slightly year to year.

"If I were interested in advertising a product related to the Tour de France, I might want to know whether interest in the Tour de France is increasing or decreasing," Newman said. "This might be very important knowledge."

Including the Tour de France, the model automatically identified a total of 400 topics ranging from renting apartments in Brooklyn and diving in Hawaii to voting irregularities and dinosaur bones. As for newsmakers, topics included Tiger Woods, Elian Gonzalez, Denzel Washington and Barbie.

"Text mining is an incredible tool," Newman said. "It already allows a doctor to identify the common thread in old and new medical research. With topic modeling, connections can be drawn faster and more efficiently in large volumes of text."

About topic modeling: UCI researchers performed their experiment using a statistical topic model based on a text model developed at UC Berkeley in 2003. Thanks to an improved solution technique proposed by Mark Steyvers and a research partner, this model has advanced from academic use to something that is now widely used in the research community. Topic modeling looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics. Older text-mining techniques require the user to come up with an appropriate set of topic categories and manually find hundreds to thousands of example documents for each category. This human-intensive process is called supervised learning. In contrast, topic modeling, a type of unsupervised learning, doesn't need suggestions for an appropriate set of topic categories or human-found example documents. This makes retrieving information easier and quicker.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/new...ew_press?id=51





From Maher to Movie To . . . Groceries?

Profit Problems Send Amazon in Strange Directions
Frank Ahrens

No longer content to remain in the online retail market, Amazon.com is heading into the movie business, even as the company's profit projections disappoint and its stock tumbles.

The Seattle-based giant -- which launched in 1995 as a bookstore and is now the world's largest online retailer, selling everything from breakfast bars to ball bearings -- has purchased the rights to turn the best-selling novel "The Stolen Child" into a feature-length film.

The move into multimedia comes only days after Amazon reported second-quarter earnings were down nearly 60 percent compared with the same period last year, despite a rise in revenue and traffic. It was the sixth consecutive quarter the company showed a decline in profit, sending the company's stock price down 22 percent Wednesday in Nasdaq trading.

Amazon did not disclose how much it paid author Keith Donohue for the movie rights. The deal, which has caused many analysts to scratch their heads, follows other investments in content and technology that have been criticized. Amazon recently said, for instance, that it was moving into the grocery business, typically a low-margin arena.

Even as Amazon struggles financially, it continues to morph. In order to bring more traffic to its Web site and hold visitors longer, Amazon has begun offering original content, following the lead of other Web sites. Last summer, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, Amazon streamed a live show on its site featuring comedian Bill Maher and a performance by Bob Dylan.

The company recently tapped Maher to host "Amazon Fishbowl," an interview program streamed on the Web site with such bands as Soul Asylum and authors such as Donohue.

The debut novel by Donohue, who lives in the Washington area, concerns a young boy who is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced with a changeling. Two narrators tell the parallel stories of the young human living with the mythical creatures while the impostor learns the ways of humans. The novel was inspired by an 1886 poem by William Butler Yeats.

The book, which was published in May by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of German media giant Bertelsmann AG, was slow to be reviewed by mainstream outlets. But Amazon sent galleys to 100 of the site's top customer reviewers, who lauded it. That helped propel the book to the top of Amazon's fiction list, much the way bloggers and other non-mainstream media outlets such as YouTube create groundswells of their own. Positive reviews followed, in The Washington Post, USA Today and elsewhere.

Amazon also placed more than 2 million sticker ads for the book on the sides of boxes shipping other books to Amazon customers, said Nan Talese. Amazon did not require the publisher to pay for the advertising, she said, though many bookstore chains do charge publishers for prime placement in their stores. Also, the publisher flogged the book on fantasy blog sites. "We do as much guerrilla marketing as we can on the Internet," Talese said.

The book has sold more than 30,000 copies, an impressive figure for a debut novel by an unknown author. Amazon hopes to translate that success to the movie screen. The company is seeking studio partners that would produce and distribute the movie, but would not name studios it is talking to.

If the film is made -- far from a sure thing -- Amazon would use its platform to market the movie and sell DVD copies. The book's fantastical story line could play well on the screen, thanks to special effects, and might be able to tap into the audience that turned the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" novels into blockbuster films.

"People like the book, and we wanted to listen to our customers who were passionate about it," said Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener. "We wanted to make sure an equally great movie was made from the book."

Donohue, who works for the federal government, said he was skeptical when his literary agent asked to send galley copies to United Talent Agency in Hollywood, which had worked with Amazon on the Maher project.

"I would hear from time to time, it's at this production company or that production company," said Donohue, who calls his book a psychological fairy tale. "I kind of dismissed all of that. It's all kind of mysterious to me."

Amazon ended up buying the film rights because the company "bit so hard" on the book, Donohue surmised. He also noted: "I've been a customer since 1995 when they first started, and I've been kind of interested in how they expand and contract and go in different directions."

Donohue would not disclose how much he was paid for the rights to his book, but offered, "I'm still here," meaning his day job.

As for Amazon, the company's woes also include a recent lawsuit loss to Toys R Us Inc., which ended Amazon's exclusive rights to sell the company's toys on the Web. Analysts say Amazon is over-investing in technology and content and that the company's recently announced price-slashing may not make up lost profits.

For instance, Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co., lowered his rating on Amazon shares from "market perform" to "underperform." Shares of Amazon closed up 30 cents, at $26.56, yesterday.

"Amazon.com remains heads-down focused on creating the best possible experience for our customers and to helping them find, discover and buy anything online," Herdener said. "This is our goal with 'The Stolen Child.' "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072701808.html





Making the testers pay

Microsoft to Charge For Office Beta
Dawn Kawamoto

Microsoft plans next week to charge a nominal fee for Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads, in a move that runs counter to the practice held by most software companies.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

"Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

Although Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the "technical refresh," or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the spokeswoman said.

Those who want to test drive Beta 2 to review how it works can access the software for free. But if they need to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required.

"This is the first time Microsoft has charged for an Office beta, and it's not something that is planned for on a repeat basis," the spokeswoman said.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+cha...3-6099987.html





Is a 'Perfect Storm' of Mac Sales on the Horizon?
David Morgenstern

PC users don't really get the Mac and have never gotten the Mac. Since most of the world talks Windows, it's no surprise that few in the industry really appreciate the windfall that's in store for Apple Computer over the next 18 months.

The big deal for Mac users will be upgrades, primarily meaning the transition of the installed base of Mac users to the Intel-based machines. The first sign of the pent-up demand for newer, faster Macs can be seen in Apple's latest quarterly results. The sales of some 800,000 notebooks—almost all the high-priced spread—represents a 61 percent increase from the year-ago quarter.

"We know all about that," you say, of course. It was almost a year ago that Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked onstage at the company's WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) and announced the switch.

With our internal clocks it feels as if it all must have happened by now. But it's only just beginning. For example, Apple's super-loyal base of professional content creators haven't yet received their Intel machines.

What chip will power Apple's next-generation workstations? Could it be Intel's new Xeon processor or the Core 2 Duo? Click here to read more.

However, this cycle isn't your usual processor upgrade cycle that comes every time Intel or Advanced Micro Devices tweaks a process. This is a major shift that affects all parts of the Mac customer-developer-vendor ecology.

Longtime Apple watchers can count two earlier events of similar magnitude.

The first such transition occurred in March 1994 with the arrival of the PowerPC architecture. The Motorola 680x0 architecture that had served the Mac platform for a decade was quickly supplanted by a set of new, more powerful machines.

Along with the CPU came the PCI expansion bus, which replaced a wonderful, but proprietary, bus called NuBus that Apple had used for ages. Customers that had a significant investment in NuBus cards were forced to upgrade their boards to PCI versions.

At the same time, the software that ran on the new machines needed changing as well. At such times customers are open to pitches, and a "sidegrade" war broke out, with software vendors offering all kinds of deals to folks running the competition's titles.

We can expect much of the same this time around.

The second mega-upgrade cycle hit with the PowerPC G3 (the PowerPC 601 through PPC 604 waves were considered the first two generations). The initial version of the G3 was more than 30 percent faster than the fastest G2 chip and many operations were boosted way beyond that range. Forget that the G3 didn't support multiprocessing—it was a lot faster.

To protect its access to these upgrade customers, Steve Jobs killed its Mac OS licensing program—canceled all agreements and paid off the claims. That shows how big a deal these major platform shifts are to Apple.

This coming Intel transition may prove to be a triple high biorhythm for the Mac. Along with the new Intel models, the Mac market will be bolstered early in 2007 by the arrival of Mac OS X "Leopard" (v10.5) and later in the spring with Intel-compatible versions of major Mac software platforms, such as the Adobe Creative Suite 3 products.

The base of professional content creators will likely wait for the software to arrive and then follow with a hardware purchase.

Wild cards in the Intel transition mix are "switchers," the customers persuaded by the demonstrations of content creation in the Apple stores. Will this trend with Windows users switching to Mac continue after the arrival of Windows Vista and its prettier face? Maybe.

With Vista missing the holiday and back-to-school seasons, many customers are buying Macs. A family in my neighborhood has been all PC since the PC XT. But the eldest son is going off to college and says he wants a Mac. It's the vanguard of a new generation gap. He's never owned a Mac but he's gotta have one—a good sign for Apple.

In addition, there are the many longtime Mac veterans who often skip the first couple of models in a major hardware transition and let early adopters shake out the hardware bugs or design flaws. It remains to be seen whether these buyers will enter the transition earlier or later.

My estimate is that it will be earlier.

But it's the demand for performance across the segments that creates the most misunderstanding between Mac and PC owners. All owners of Macs want more performance and need more performance. This is because the content creation and display applications that are core to the Mac experience can take all the bandwidth, processor power, memory and storage that you can throw at them and ask for more.

On the other hand, the PC market is focused on price and commoditization. This holds true for the enterprise and for consumers. For example, this week's Dell advertisement in the New York Times is all about systems costing around $500. By comparison, all Macs, even the entry-level models, are thicker and more performance-minded machines.

That is because Mac users want more performance and are willing to pay a premium for that performance.

The predilection for thinner clients in the Windows market may be worrying Microsoft a bit, especially when it comes to Windows Vista upgrades. Microsoft wants to figure out how to get the PC market excited about thicker machines running performance-driven applications.

At its partner conference, Microsoft backed away from giving release dates for its Expression family of Web design products. Click here to read more.

I received a slide from a presentation given by Michael Sievert, the Windows client marketing boss, at the WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) in Boston earlier in July. It covers this very topic.

The slide describes Windows Vista "scenarios" for consumer, small business and enterprise/midmarket segments. By scenario, he means a value or application that would drive thick Vista sales in that segment.

For the enterprise, Microsoft points to the need to optimize desktop infrastructure; to find, use and share information; to support a mobile work force; and to improve security and compliance.

For small businesses, the slide suggests that the drivers for thicker computing are backup, security, sales and marketing, financial management, collaboration, and mobility.

For the consumer segment, Microsoft points to "memories," or content creation and management; viewing TV and movies; gaming; music; "communications," or the connection of messaging content between handhelds and PCs; and productivity.

However, these targets are just that: There's no strategic vision from Microsoft or specific plans built around these bullet points, right now.

On the other hand, Apple over the past five years has executed successfully on a technology and business strategy that puts a thick computing platform in the middle of digital workflows. This plan was articulated before the release of Mac OS X.

The company now offers its users an elegant hardware platform, a robust graphics foundation in its operating system, support for rich content standards, and most importantly, a solid list of solution-based programs for content creation and management from Apple and its software developers.

Guess what? Real customers, not just gamers, want performance, will buy performance and can use it. Apple is counting on it.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1995493,00.asp





Best Dell Bug Ever Or Is It A Feature :-)
Wellington, New Zealand

Chris here at work just found this cool bug on all our Dell Optiplex GX520. It was so cool in fact that we decided to capture a video and post it online.

The bug appears when you put your mobile phone close to the cd-rom unit of the dell and then recieve a sms/txt.

What happends is it goes into some sort of suspension mode from which you can't bring it back without breaking power or holding down the power button for four seconds.

It worked with all the new dells here in the office and with any mobile phone. Just make sure to save all of your work before you try it at home.

The only remaining question is: Is it a bug or feature?

Update: I can see from my google analytics that this is still popular and finding it's way around the world one city at a time. If anyone else has tried this i'd enjoying knowing the results... just flick me an email from the contact page form (you can be anonymous)
http://www.rickardliljeberg.com/blog.php?itemID=153





Another reason to use WASTE

Pentagon Keeps Eye On War Videos
Richard Allen Greene

The Pentagon is keeping a close eye on what its troops post online, with special attention being paid to videos that show the aftermath of combat.

There is no specific policy that bans troops from posting graphic material.

But troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are hearing the message that they should consider carefully what videos they upload to the web.

Sites such as YouTube and Ogrish.com have hundreds or thousands of clips from soldiers, some set to rock music.

At their most graphic, they show the aftermath of suicide bombings and gunfights between coalition forces and insurgents.

Many include troops using foul language.

One soldier who served in Iraq in 2005 told the BBC there was "a tight watch" being kept on video and pictures posted to MySpace, with civilian contractors monitoring the internet on behalf of the Pentagon.

Images 'misused'

The BBC has not been able to confirm that contractors are scouring the internet for inappropriate material from the military.

But US Central Command - which is responsible for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - does have a team reading blogs and responding to what they consider inaccuracies about the so-called war on terror.

And a longstanding military public affairs officer in Iraq said the Pentagon is also worried about some of the images that are appearing online.

"There's continuing concern about the use of these videos and stills being used by our enemies to propagate the false notion that our military members are barbaric, warmongers - which is unequivocally not the case.

"And... many of these videos and photos can harm force protection and operational security measures."

Ward Carroll is the editor of Military.com, which has a section called Shock and Awe where combat videos are posted.

One of the most popular is called Hostile Demise.

In it, US forces watch what seem to be insurgents depositing weapons in a field, discuss what to do and then get permission from their commander to shoot three people dead and destroy their two vehicles.

"It's very graphic. At some level, it's a view of what happens when you pull the trigger," Mr Carroll, a former Navy officer, told the BBC.

"It's sobering, it's energising, it can be off-putting."

'War is grotesque'

He said the US Department of Defense would prefer that his website not have such videos.

"The military has an interest in its reputation and its image. When the popularity of these prurient, violent videos starts to eclipse their ability to control the image, then a concern arises."

Military.com exists to celebrate the military, he said, and would never post a video showing dead Americans or innocent bystanders.

"We have had stuff submitted where you could see the aftermath of the explosion. We ruled that has no value in our mission," Mr Carroll said.

But such images are precisely the mission of Ogrish.com, according to co-owner Hayden Hewitt.

"There is a distinct misapprehension in the West about what war is like. They think it's a gentlemanly thing. People have forgotten how grotesque war is."

Mr Hewitt estimated that his website has about 1,000 separate items from Iraq - many more from insurgent websites than from coalition forces.

He said he did not know how many coalition troops had posted video to his site.

But he said it was clear to him why they did so: "Some people don't want infamy or fame. They just want people to know what they have been through."

And he said no policy would stop service members from posting material online if they were determined to do so.

"Clamping down is probably a very bad move," he said.

One soldier who posted a video summarising his tour of duty in Afghanistan agreed.

"I don't remember them telling me not to post anything but I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to," said the veteran, who asked to be identified only as Mike.

"But I posted it when I got out of the military. I'm not sure if I would have posted it or not if they told me not to."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/5226254.stm





A Counselor Pulled From the Shadows
Gary Rivlin

LARRY W. SONSINI, Silicon Valley’s most feared and sought-after lawyer, dresses in fine Italian suits even as the rest of the Valley — other high-priced attorneys included — ply their trades in chinos and blue Oxford shirts. He is soft-spoken and restrained, sometimes eerily quiet, in contrast to the brash and kinetic entrepreneurs and financiers who otherwise dominate the landscape.

While the Valley can be a chummy, clubby place where even adversaries freely trade tales of children and outside activities, Mr. Sonsini would no sooner share personal information about himself, a longtime legal rival said, than a soldier at war would fraternize with an enemy combatant. In a land in which even the top executives and most successful venture capitalists generally use verbal mallets to drive home a point, he is a surgeon, adroit at using an intellectual and legal scalpel to win an argument or get his way.

Silence, in Mr. Sonsini’s case, has been golden. During his 40 years as a lawyer, Mr. Sonsini, 65, has served as legal counsel to the most prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. He helped to bring public many of the leaders of the technology boom, including Netscape Communications, Pixar, Google, Apple and Sun Microsystems. The investment banking firm of Robertson Stevens, based in San Francisco until it closed its doors in 2002, handled more than 500 initial public offerings over a 30-year period, and Mr. Sonsini was there for most of them.

“In one way or another, Larry was involved in almost every deal we underwrote,” said Sanford R. Robertson, founder of the bank that bore his name. Mr. Sonsini, who briefly served on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, is not just the area’s most influential lawyer, Mr. Robertson said, “He’s probably the most powerful person in Silicon Valley.”

Powerful, but discreet. Powerful, but rarely center stage. While Mr. Sonsini is hardly a shrinking violet, he cultivates the image of Silicon Valley’s most ubiquitous supporting player, often preferring to say his lines behind the scenes. “It’s not my job to be in the newspapers,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I think my clients like me to be a trusted adviser with a high degree of integrity and stay out of the limelight.”

BUT many of Mr. Sonsini’s clients are currently in the limelight because of a growing scandal involving possible improprieties or illegalities relating to the backdating of lucrative stock options. Mr. Sonsini and his firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, based in Palo Alto, Calif., represents or represented “just under 50 percent” of Silicon Valley companies implicated in the scandal, according to a spokeswoman for the firm. That representation included offering advice on corporate governance issues like the proper handling of stock options.

Mr. Sonsini has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal, nor is it even clear that he will be swept up in the investigation of questionable options policies that his clients adopted. But at least one former client that federal prosecutors have charged with criminal wrongdoing, the chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems, noted earlier this year that Mr. Sonsini advised the company on its stock options policies. The executive, Gregory L. Reyes, has declined to comment more recently; Brocade’s attorney described Mr. Sonsini as a “giant” and “brilliant lawyer.”

Mr. Sonsini declined to comment about Brocade and said that he was also “a little reluctant” to discuss the options investigation more broadly. “Not because I’m defensive, but because we represent a number of companies involved and it’s not appropriate for me to get out ahead and comment on things,” he said.

Even so, this man who has stuck mainly to the shadows now finds that the regulatory and prosecutorial spotlight aimed at his clients is casting a glare on his own actions. And Silicon Valley’s technorati are suddenly chattering about Mr. Sonsini, the éminence grise of high tech, with a frequency usually reserved for Google, the precinct’s venture capitalists or its hottest start-ups.

Those who have worked with Mr. Sonsini, including several rival attorneys who have sat across the table from him in negotiations, generally describe him as a wise man with a strong moral compass.

“You can hear rumors, and people talk, but his reputation has been durable in the more than 20 years since I’ve been here,” said Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit, the business software company and one of Mr. Sonsini’s longtime clients.

Robert V. Gunderson Jr., a founding partner at Gunderson Dettmer, another prominent Valley firm, stated: “Larry is a fierce but honorable competitor.”

Despite the hubris that permeated Silicon Valley during the tech boom of the mid- to late 1990’s, most companies there managed to avoid the public fates that later turned Enron, WorldCom and Tyco International into shorthand for corporate greed. But now Silicon Valley is emerging as the center of gravity for this latest inquiry into corporate abuse. Federal investigators are examining the extent to which top executives fudged dates — and then hid the fact that they did so — so that stock options they granted themselves and their employees would provide a bigger financial windfall when they chose to cash them in.

And one man at the center of it all is Larry Sonsini.

Mr. Sonsini’s firm provided legal counsel on corporate governance issues like the proper handling of stock options to roughly a dozen of the 25 Silicon Valley area companies implicated so far in the widening probe. Those 25 companies are either under federal investigation or have announced their own internal reviews.

FEDERAL prosecutors filed criminal charges against two former executives of Brocade Communications, a data storage equipment maker based in Silicon Valley, 10 days ago, claiming that the two officers backdated options. Wilson Sonsini served as outside counsel to Brocade and Larry Sonsini himself was a member of Brocade’s board and sat on the compensation committee until stepping down from the board last year.

Prosecutors have accused Brocade’s former chief executive, Mr. Reyes, of defrauding not only investors but also its board by doctoring documents, including board minutes. Mr. Reyes, through his attorney, Richard Marmaro, denied any wrongdoing, dismissing as clerical errors any alleged forgeries. But prosecutors, questioned at a news conference, said that they had not ruled out the possibility that Mr. Sonsini could be charged at a later date. In February, Mr. Reyes told BusinessWeek that Mr. Sonsini encouraged him in 1999 to assume sole authority to award Brocade options through the creation of a so-called committee-of-one.

Mr. Sonsini did not deny Mr. Reyes’s contention so much as muddy the waters. “I’m not so sure the committee-of-one didn’t exist before becoming counsel to Brocade,” he said.

Committees-of-one are typically established in intensely competitive job markets like the one the Valley presented in the late 1990’s, where speed and oversize compensation packages were essential to recruit top people. They are legal, but they can also place public companies on dangerous ethical ground because of the potential for abuse.

One member of the Valley’s legal profession, who requested anonymity because he sees Mr. Sonsini regularly and said he wanted to maintain good relations with him, said that he also had helped Valley companies create committees-of-one. But once you confer that much power on a single individual, he said, “you better watch what the guy does.”

When read that quote, Mr. Sonsini said that “you should not assume that those issues were not addressed,” suggesting that he was monitoring Mr. Reyes but could not possibly have known that the executive might have been forging dates and documents.

It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Sonsini and other lawyers at his firm played in the legal woes of some of their clients, but over the last several years, the S.E.C. has aggressively pursued penalties against lawyers who give clients bad advice.

“It’s a frontier area right now,” said Alan R. Bromberg, professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The S.E.C. is pushing toward holding lawyers responsible even if they give bad advice, rather than fraudulent advice.”

But Mr. Bromberg also said that serving as outside counsel to a company while sitting on the company’s board was not usually a problem. “It’s essentially a disclosure issue,” he said. “You need to make sure that everybody that is involved in the decision-making process is aware of the two hats an individual is wearing.”

Just as it would be difficult to exaggerate the breadth of Mr. Sonsini’s reach across Silicon Valley, it would be hard to overstate his influence inside his own firm. Mr. Sonsini dominates Wilson Sonsini as few lawyers ever dominate a firm.

Allen Morgan, a former Wilson Sonsini partner who worked there between 1982 and 1997 (he is now a prominent Valley venture capitalist), estimated that Mr. Sonsini’s own practice was at least three to four times as large as that of the firm’s next closest partner — an estimate that Mr. Sonsini did not dispute. For nearly three decades, Mr. Sonsini served as the firm’s chief executive, until ceding the post to a younger partner last year. He is still the firm’s chairman.

“He’s like the Hollywood lawyers,” said Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor who has known Mr. Sonsini 25 years. “He acts like a counselor and a consigliere. He’s the deal maker and the deal arranger.”

When Carleton S. Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, came under attack by her board in 2001 after she announced plans to purchase Compaq Computer for $25 billion, she relied heavily on Mr. Sonsini to help her counter opposition to the deal. He has also advised Steven P. Jobs of Apple and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, among others.

Clients say that they can phone Mr. Sonsini at 11:30 at night, and say they are equally certain he would make himself available at 5 in the morning. Like a legal Zelig, he has been present at many critical moments in the Valley’s history, though his central role in those events usually surfaces only after corporate or legal documents are filed or when tongues begin wagging over a few glasses of fine California cabernet.

“Larry has the ability to make C.E.O.’s feel like they are his only clients,” said Craig W. Johnson, Mr. Sonsini’s partner for 19 years until leaving the firm in 1993. Mr. Johnson, quoting another former Wilson Sonsini partner, said Mr. Sonsini could juggle so many demanding clients because he performs like “a machine gun with every bullet hitting the center of a moving target.”

Mr. Sonsini is not one to offer encouraging pats on the back or ask after colleagues’ children, acquaintances say. “He’s not someone prone to expressions of emotion,” said Kenneth P. Wilcox, who, as chief executive of the Silicon Valley Bank, has worked closely with Mr. Sonsini for several years.

Mr. Morgan, the former Wilson Sonsini partner, said that he did not recall Mr. Sonsini ever raising his voice in the 15 years that they worked together. But Mr. Sonsini’s clients, some so young they seemed barely out of short pants, have not always proved as calm. It is then, when a client is in the midst of an outburst, that the Valley’s superlawyer might be at his best, acquaintances say.

“He’ll be representing a guy who’s pounding the table and beyond mad,” Mr. Robertson said. “But Larry, who has a very quiet style anyway, will calmly take this person through the situation, and patiently explain what the law is and what is possible. I’ve witnessed this on many, many occasions.”

WHEN Mr. Sonsini graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966, he chose to join a four-lawyer firm in a backwater whose very name, Silicon Valley, had yet to be coined. Over the following decades he orchestrated the firm’s transformation into a 600-lawyer juggernaut.

“Larry Sonsini is a guy who grew with, and then helped to define, Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Campbell of Intuit.

Mr. Sonsini studied securities law at Boalt and from the start of his career he made that his specialty, catering to the Valley’s venture capitalists, some of whom would send a start-up his way that they thought might be ready to go public. In turn, Mr. Sonsini parlayed his ties to the area’s most promising start-ups into a lucrative relationship with the country’s top investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.

“The investment banks wanted to build relationships with certain law firms who were in the industry,” Mr. Sonsini said. “As I got to know these banks, it enabled me to introduce clients to them.”

Mr. Sonsini’s ability to ingratiate himself with those in a position to throw business his way partly explains his rise to the top of the Valley’s legal food chain. So, too, does his business acumen. He is an entrepreneur in a land of entrepreneurs who, by all accounts, has about as a good a feel for corporate strategy as his most gifted clients.

“He’s as good a businessman as he is a lawyer, and he’s built the dominant law firm in Silicon Valley,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a former Securities and Exchange commissioner who now teaches at Stanford Law School. “That gives him lots of credibility with executives also looking to build successful businesses.

“He gets them, and they get him,” Mr. Grundfest added.

Mr. Conway, the prominent Valley angel investor best known for his early investment in Google, first met Mr. Sonsini around 1980 and said that the lawyer had an immense, unrivaled network of contacts. Mr. Sonsini can open those doors for those he represents — and slam doors shut and cause fits of anger or panic among those who oppose him.

“He has access to every C.E.O. in the Valley,” Mr. Conway said. “They’ll pick up the phone for him immediately.”

As an example, Mr. Conway offers Google, which was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and which is run by Eric Schmidt. “If you’re going to go crossways with him, you’ve got a problem, because if it’s an issue at Google, he’s going to call Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey,” Mr. Conway said. “Or he’ll call David Drummond, who used to work with him and is now a honcho at Google. He has influence everywhere.”

SOME say Mr. Sonsini is a much better deal maker than he is a lawyer. But one prominent rival, Bruce Alan Mann, a senior partner at Morrison & Foerster of San Francisco, dismissed that criticism as unfounded. He said that Mr. Sonsini, who taught securities law at Boalt Hall from the mid-80’s until last year, could quote the intricacies of Delaware case law from memory.

“Anyone who says Larry isn’t much of a lawyer is being jealous,” Mr. Mann said. “He’s as on top of the law as any lawyer I know.”

Others in the Valley describe Mr. Sonsini as a walking conflict of interest, a problem they say is born out of the sheer breadth of companies he and his firm represent. For example, he represents not only Hewlett-Packard but also Sun Microsystems, which he incorporated in 1982 and helped take public in 1986 — and there are no two fiercer rivals in Silicon Valley than those two.

Still, some clients say Mr. Sonsini’s omnipresence does not bother them. “If you really believe this guy isn’t trustworthy, if you believe he can’t silo his approach to giving you advice, then don’t use him,” Intuit’s Mr. Campbell said. Mr. Sonsini, he said, has often told him that he cannot help him because of a conflict. “I trust him,” Mr. Campbell said.

Perhaps Mr. Sonsini’s most pointed potential vulnerability amid the current options scandal is a trait that clients and others generally offer as a compliment: so deep is his understanding of the issues that management is facing that it is often difficult to tell where his legal advice ends and his business counsel begins.

“Larry is a master in my mind of knowing what’s important for the client, and focusing on it, and not letting the legal niceties get in the way of accomplishing the client’s goal,” Mr. Mann said. “He doesn’t let legal issues that can be resolved kill a deal.”

But sometimes such niceties are critical to keeping a client out of hot water. Mr. Sonsini may have offered astute business advice when he helped companies like Brocade contend with the hiring crunch that now lies at the root of the Valley’s options problems — but such advice has also drawn the attention of investigators and regulators who are examining whether it was legally sound.

Although it remains unclear exactly who or how many may have crossed the legal line during the Valley’s boom years, veterans of the dot-com craze said that those swept up in it found themselves in the midst of a financial whirlwind.

“It was a very peculiar time when some of this stuff happened,” Mr. Gunderson, the Valley attorney, said. “I think people to a certain extent lost their bearings.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/bu...30sonsini.html





All the Internet’s a Stage. Why Don’t C.E.O.’s Use It?
Randall Stross

CHIEF executives are inclined to avoid activities generally deemed to be high-risk: Sky diving. Cliff jumping. Motorcycle racing. And blogging.

Two years ago, when Jonathan I. Schwartz, then the president and chief operating officer at Sun Microsystems, inaugurated a blog that made him the most senior executive at his company to venture onto such a publicly visible platform, he embraced the risks. “Hey, life is short,” he wrote on the first day, as if he were about to leap from a plane. The title of that first post was “Head First.” Mr. Schwartz not only survived the plunge, he turned out to be a natural. In a voice that is refreshing in its unprocessed directness, he discusses big-picture trends in the computer industry, promotes Sun’s wares and tweaks competitors, and reports on the odd epiphany experienced while on the road or engaged in intellectual combat with industry friends and adversaries. The regularity of his posts, which blend serious content and an informal writing style, and their wide-ranging scope make this blog the apotheosis of expository writing: thought made visible.

When Mr. Schwartz was promoted to the top job at Sun this spring, he automatically became a member of an elite group: Fortune 500 C.E.O. bloggers. He is the only active member.

Where is everyone else?

Capital markets function as they should when the flow of information is strong and unimpeded. Mr. Schwartz has shown ably that for the chief executive sincerely interested in increasing information flow to the fullest range of stakeholders, a blog is a hydraulic wonder.

Many companies, eager to claim that their dearest wish is to draw ever closer to outside constituencies, boast that they encourage blogging among employees. Microsoft, for example, says that it has more than 3,000 employees who maintain blogs on the company’s Web site, an impressive number. But a large company is an outsize elephant, and each employee works within a tiny wrinkle on the hide. Only the chief executive is in a position to sit astride the beast and share the widest perspective. The fact that Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and its chairman and former chief executive, Bill Gates, have chosen not to blog leaves an embarrassing silence at the top that the combined clacking of those underlings cannot fill.

It is not just Mr. Ballmer who is conspicuously absent. Other chief executives in the computer industry, the place most at ease with the technology, are also missing. Those who would like to read a blog maintained by Steven P. Jobs at Apple Computer must settle for a parody, “The Secret Life of Steve Jobs,” started in June by an anonymous wag. (In almost every post, the fictional Mr. Jobs recounts an unpleasant encounter with someone else, from state troopers to Steven Spielberg, which includes his exasperated refrain: “I invented the friggin’ iPod, O.K.? Have you heard of it?”)

Outside the technology field, only one other Fortune 500 company has had a C.E.O. who has called himself a blogger, John P. Mackey of Whole Foods Market. Mr. Mackey has made a total of six posts over the course of 10 months, and these consist of reprints of speeches and interviews and similar materials created originally for a different purpose. Using blogging software to park a reprint once every two months does not a blog make.

In contrast, Mr. Schwartz has posted his thoughts, very much on the fly, five times a month for two years. Over time he has earned credibility by his willingness to put in public view his unfiltered ruminations on a regular basis.

That credibility was needed last week, when he sought to put a positive spin on Sun’s quarterly earnings, his first as chief executive. One-time charges combined to produce another loss for the quarter — the company has reported losses for the past five fiscal years — but revenue was up significantly.

After the earnings release, Mr. Schwartz itemized on his blog the many positive developments that he sees in the company’s business. Viewed alone, it would be easy for unhappy investors to dismiss. But read as the latest installment of candid self-evaluations of the company’s strategic initiatives and performance, Mr. Schwartz’s optimism exerts a tonic effect.

C.E.O. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz’s example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive’s work week. In an exhortatory piece, “If You Want to Lead, Blog,” published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that “having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today.”

“My No. 1 job is to be a communicator,” Mr. Schwartz told me last week. “I don’t understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.”

Assuming that other chief executives are willing to make their thoughts just as visible as Mr. Schwartz’s, the blog provides a highly efficient medium of publication. Mr. Schwartz, for instance, simultaneously reaches shareholders, software developers and current and prospective customers. With posted responses, these groups easily reach him as well as one another.

Debbie Weil, author of “The Corporate Blogging Book,” which Portfolio Hardcover is to publish this week, tries to persuade reluctant executives with the argument that blogging would save the time they now spend on hundreds of daily e-mail exchanges. “Why not do it more efficiently?” she asks in her book. “Instead of a one-to-one message, why not a communication from one to many thousands?”

American executives are accustomed to relying on professionals to write speeches and books in their name. The temptation to do the same with a blog may seem irresistible, but it would only end badly. Mr. Schwartz warned fellow executives who were considering hiring a ghost writer for their blogs not to bother. “It’s like hiring someone to write your e-mail,” he said.Mr. Schwartz does not brag about his own style, but it is difficult to imagine a surrogate who would know how to cover a mix of topics that encompass, to pick a few at random, Java’s strategic similarity to electrical light bulbs, a “Harry Potter” movie and network loads, chip multithreading, cold calls and the California Department of Transportation’s Windows-centric Web site.

Swipes at competitors like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell and Red Hat provide an entertaining display of pugilistic skill, with all blows above the belt. And when industry alignments shift, as they always do, and yesterday’s foe becomes today’s partner, Mr. Schwartz has said nothing that could create an embarrassment.

When he is composing his postings, Mr. Schwartz said that he had to keep in mind nontechnical as well as technical readers, from “my mom and dad to a kernel geek working at a competitor.” He also has to affix legal boilerplate if he happens to make forward-looking statements about the company, but he does not have Michael A. Dillon, Sun Microsystems’ general counsel, review every post before it goes out.

Mr. Dillon said his office gave a one-time briefing about the relevant securities laws to all Sun employees — about 3,000 of them are blogging — and then trusted them to stay out of trouble. It’s not the blogs that worry Mr. Dillon but the employee e-mail messages sent without the thought or consideration that goes into a blog post.

WHEN an employee of a publicly traded company publishes regularly on a business blog, something valuable for outside observers is created: a firsthand chronicle. This deserves to be called something special, a primary blog — that is, a primary source, created by a participant or eyewitness — that distinguishes it from all the other blogs (and, yes, from all other newspaper columns, too) that are written at a remove by commentators. Primary blogs maintained by Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s would provide the most vital information to investors.

Ms. Weil, the author, spoke with me last week about the reluctance of Fortune 500 executives to share their thoughts on a public blog, and could find no acceptable excuse for their silence.

“They should come down from the mountain and communicate in their own words — without handlers,” Ms. Weil said. “For what they’re paid, is that too much to ask?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/bu...ey/30digi.html





Interns, the Founts of Youth
Maureen Tkacik

IT was a typical Sweet 16 70’s-theme party. Drama geeks in vintage bell-bottoms circled the rink at the Cherry Hill Skating Center in southern New Jersey, a disco ball spun overhead and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting that read “Happy Birthday Claire” sat beneath balloons in the corner. Then someone made the inevitable call for a game of spin the bottle.

“Spin the bottle?” cried out Rose Luardo, a rail-thin guest in a platinum Afro wig, as she looked up from the Diet Coke she was sipping through a Twizzler. Will Christianson, 16, a tall boy in a patchwork sweater and a mop of blond highlights who was sitting beside her, laughed mockingly.

Ms. Luardo, after all, is 34 years old. And she had come to be among this sea of dewy-faced high schoolers not as a chaperone or older sister, but because Will is her personal unpaid intern and, in her words, B.F.F., best friend forever. She met him when he came to see her band play in Philadelphia last winter. They subsequently got to know each other through MySpace and instant messaging, and when Ms. Luardo needed to channel the voice of a teenager for a marketing project, she enlisted Will’s help.

Since then he has been her point man for keeping up with all things young. In turn she has been spending many a weekend shuttling him from his home in Moorestown, N.J., to parties, concerts and the occasional summer blockbuster.

At one time there was no way to better broadcast one’s failure to thrive as an adult than to hang around high school kids. It meant that the world beyond senior prom had shut its doors, forcing a return to a place in which your value was determined solely by your ability to drive a car and procure beer. But now, according to young professionals working in fields in which fluency in the dialects and habits of teenagers is paramount, hanging out with high schoolers is cool, and sometimes even professionally advantageous.

Often these teenagers are known as “the intern.” They are working for little or nothing at clothing labels, guerrilla marketing firms and one-person event-planning operations, making coffee, opening mail and tagging along with their employers in environments they deem interesting. While they get college-résumé-boosting work experience, not to mention entree into clubs and parties, their employers get around-the-clock muses and ambassadors to youth culture.

“I don’t need to look at the Internet anymore, I just look these kids straight in the eyes and they tell me everything I need to know,” said Ms. Luardo, a former buyer for Urban Outfitters who is now a musician, part-time sales representative and freelance marketer. A few weeks ago, Ms. Luardo, Will and one of his friends, Dot Goldberger, were eating enchiladas at a restaurant in Center City Philadelphia.

“Rose doesn’t know anything about music,” Dot said, as Will sneaked a sip of Ms. Luardo’s blood orange margarita. Besides the fact that he likes hanging out with Rose, Will said he was glad to help her because it kept him busy and might look good on a college application. Will’s father, Allan Christianson, said he was just thankful that Ms. Luardo was willing to share the task of driving his son around. “At first I thought, ‘Gee, she’s a little older,’ ” Mr. Christianson said, “but a lot of people get old only because they think they are.”

There is no way to quantify how many young professionals are employing high school students, but Mark Oldman, a founder and a co-president of Vault.com, a career-information Web site, said his firm estimates that the number of high school students doing internships has increased 30 percent in the past five years. “It’s one very potent way of diversifying your high school portfolio” on a college application, he said.

And Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies internships in communication industries, said that because small media, entertainment and arts companies often don’t offer formal internship programs, high school students are filling informal roles in such businesses, especially because “they are locked out of traditional internship programs that offer credit for college.” While some high schools offer course credit for internships or even require them, most don’t.

To employers desperate for a hot line into the Clearasil demographic, the young interns offer both cheap labor and the frisson of authenticity. “It’s amazing how working around teenagers just injects a buzz into the office,” said Doug Kennedy, 36, the founder of Reverb Communications, a marketing firm. He employs seven high school interns for $7 an hour — and unlimited junk food — to test video games and write positive reviews of them on message boards. (He also takes them on office field trips, like the one they took earlier this month to see the Warped Tour in San Francisco.)

Tina Wells, 26, the founder and chief executive of Buzz Marketing, a youth-centered market research and promotions firm in New York that employs four unpaid interns, including two 12-year-olds, said all the cross-generational bonding is a natural part of any youth-oriented industry. “These kids are so savvy,” she said. “They know that they’re creating the culture that we’re all consuming, that everyone wants to be younger and younger and we’re all obsessed with the same characters on ‘The Hills.’ ”

But beyond the office, young interns have also become popular companions, conferring a certain status on the 20- and 30-somethings who let them tag along after hours. “There is something exotic about teenagers,” said Julie Gerstein, a 27-year-old D.J. and college writing instructor in Philadelphia. A friend of Ms. Luardo’s, she is using Will’s intern services to help craft a syllabus for a freshman writing seminar.

Ms. Gerstein said she can’t “personally, like, throw down with a 16-year-old.”

“I’m too much of a mom figure,” she said. “But I know lots of people who hang out with teenagers just as friends.”

Christopher Noxon, the author of the book “Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up,” thinks there can also be something craven about adults’ desire to find out what teenagers know. “There is sort of this desperate, pathetic need to keep up with fads that reminds me of the women in ‘Absolutely Fabulous,’ ” he said.

At the same time, Kristen Cabido, a 24-year-old who has managed employees from 17 to the late 20’s at the Lower East Side outpost of American Apparel, thinks the age gap between people her age and teenagers is becoming more and more negligible. “More than ever,” she said, “people in their 20’s are living at home or getting their bills paid by their parents and going out and getting wasted like it’s 1995, so hanging out with 15-year-olds is not outside the realm of normal.”

But hanging out with high schoolers has its own complications: Do you buy beer for them? Make them drive? Is it O.K. to be attracted to the intern? Ms. Luardo sets boundaries up front: she won’t buy them beer or hand over her keys, but they “mostly just want to go to all-ages shows” and other events her older friends are too tired to attend. And though age and gender differences may conjure up unsavory images of sexual dalliances, the people involved in these arrangements say the relationships don’t typically cross over into romantic territory.

One exception is 16-year-old Cory Kennedy, who since last fall has been working as an unpaid intern for the Los Angeles party photographer Mark Hunter, 21. Since her job began, she has become both his girlfriend and something of an Internet phenomenon thanks to Mr. Hunter’s Web site, www.thecobrasnake.com, which is dominated by pictures of her with her signature unbrushed hair and improbable outfits.

While Cory said that her internship with Mr. Hunter involved its share of drudgery, she is also getting credit at her charter high school, where she was able to label her work an independent study in photojournalism. Most enticing, though, it gave her an entree to hip fashion and entertainment industry parties. “I was just leading this crazy exciting new life,” she said. (Her mother, Jinx, said she was keeping a close eye on Cory, but in general thought Mr. Hunter was a good influence.)

Indeed, many students find that these internships, and the people serving as their mentors, play more influential roles than a college education in shaping their futures. Claudia, a 37-year-old graffiti writer and fashion designer who goes by the name Claw Money and works in the East Village, has two interns. She hired Greg Passuntino, now 20, and later Harry McNally, now 21, when they were 16 and 19, respectively. Mr. Passuntino spotted Claudia, whose last name is not used because of legal issues involving her graffiti, dancing at an East Village nightclub, and they struck up a friendship. “And then all my friends started getting internships and jobs, so I was like, I need an internship,” he said.

While Claudia said she “lobbied heavily” for Mr. Passuntino to go to college, he dropped out of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Both he and Mr. McNally, who met her through Mr. Passuntino, found better prospects working for Claudia at wages she described as “much better than retail or T.G.I. Friday’s” and on assorted side projects. (Mr. Passuntino does Web design; Mr. McNally has a fledgling T-shirt label called Pegleg.)

But it’s not all mutual flattery and admiration. “It’s really illusory sometimes, where you’ll have a moment and be like, this person was born after ‘Star Wars,’ ” said Ben Velez, a 35-year-old D.J. and the vice president for marketing for the clothing label Triple Five Soul in New York. Mr. Velez employs a 17-year-old intern from Scarsdale, N.Y., named Gus Vaisman and spends much of his working life in the company of people a decade or two younger than him, but tries to gravitate toward people his own age socially. “I don’t talk to teenagers very often,” he said. “The pop cultural references that they’ll use as ironic, I lived through.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/fa...s/30CANDY.html





Lights Going Out On Aging White House Press Room

The following witness story is about the life and times of the aging press room at the White House, which has been the scene of countless key announcements over the years and is soon to be closed for some months for a make-over. It is by Steve Holland, who has covered the White House for Reuters since 1990.

Steve Holland

After 35 years of grave announcements, political hardball and just plain old spin, the curtain goes down this week on the White House press room.

The broken-down chairs will be removed, the coffee-stained carpet ripped out, the last sandwich wrapper swept up and the vermin chased out -- namely, the reporters, photographers and camera crews who make the place a second home.

This is the place the television cameras do not show, at least in detail, when they beam White House news of note and lesser note from the presidential spokesman, who stands at a podium with a slick-looking backdrop of blue curtains and the official seal.
It is not quite a complete tear-down but pretty close. The briefing room and adjacent press offices, a tight warren of cubbyholes, will be torn out and only the walls and floor left standing. It will be the most extensive makeover since the facility was built in 1970 over Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool.

For anywhere from seven to nine months and perhaps longer, the White House press corps will be disconnected from the mother ship, exiled across Pennsylvania Avenue to temporary quarters, where the spokesman's briefings will take place.

The old briefing room is officially unplugged on Friday. A proper send-off is being prepared for Wednesday with former presidential press secretaries in attendance.

The main reason for the work is to install a new air conditioning system and address a feared asbestos problem.

Some paranoid reporters fear President George W. Bush will fulfill a dream of many presidents and permanently dislodge the press and loosen up some prime office space close to the boss.

Steve Scully of C-SPAN, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said the press corps will be vigilant in making sure "the Bush White House keeps its promise to move us back in a timely basis."

"We have no reason to believe we will not be back in our old space next spring, but we're reporters, so we always approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism," he said.

A Tight Squeeze, With Fungus Too

Officials from Bush on down say the press corps will be back -- and with newfangled, fiber-optic accessories. The last makeover was in 1981 and the place is like a dingy garage compared to the museum-like White House itself.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the cramped nature of the briefing room has its dividends as it brings the press secretary and reporters close up and encourages a spirit of collegiality.

"The good news is that once this thing is renovated you'll still have that proximity but you'll also have a functioning heating and air conditioning system along with wiring that meets code, and carpets that do not contain every known bacterium and fungus," he said.

Back in the old days, reporters lounged in leather chairs in the West Wing lobby, then darted to a bank of phones to file reports in what is now the national security adviser's office.

President Richard Nixon got tired of having his visitors accosted by the press, and workers slapped together a room in a corridor linking the White House residence to the West Wing.

Thus was born a room where famous news events have been announced and political spin found a prominent launching pad.

With the end of an era nigh, White House veterans are recalling some of the more dramatic events and jousting that took place in the venerable old briefing room.

"The iconic moments usually relate to stories, in the sense that the briefing room was often the place you heard it first," said former White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

In the high tension on the day President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981 by would-be assassin John Hinckley, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig rushed to the briefing room and announced, "As for now, I'm in control here."

Mike McCurry spent hours at the podium fending off queries about President Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and defending his initial statement that Clinton did not have an "improper relationship" with her.

As spokesman in the latter years of Ronald Reagan's presidency and all of the first George Bush's four-year term, Fitzwater had many announcements at all hours of the day and night, such as, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun" in 1991.

He chuckled the other day at the memory of rounding up reporters at 5 a.m. to announce the United States had attacked an oil rig in the Gulf, but that he had no more details.

"Is that all we get, you bastard?" shouted one reporter.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-scienceNews-2





Nothing Is Rotten In The State Of Denmark...

If you're looking for happiness, go and live in Denmark.

It is the happiest country in the world while Burundi in Africa is the most unhappy, according to a report by a British scientist released Friday.

Adrian White, an analytical social psychologist at the University of Leicester in central England, based his study on data from 178 countries and 100 global studies from the likes of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

"We're looking much more at whether you are satisfied with your life in general," White told Reuters. "Whether you are satisfied with your situation and environment."

The main factors that affected happiness were health provision, wealth and education, according to White who said his research had produced the "first world map of happiness."

Following behind Denmark came Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas.

At the bottom came the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Burundi. The United States came in at 23rd, Britain was in 41st place, Germany 35th and France 62nd.

Countries involved in conflicts, such as Iraq, were not included.

"Smaller countries tend to be a little happier because there is a stronger sense of collectivism and then you also have the aesthetic qualities of a country," White said.

"We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th, and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being."

He admitted collecting data based on well-being was not an exact science, but said the measures used were very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes.

Regular studies by academics across the globe using the same tests would allow researchers to better understand what factors affected happiness and White said he hoped every country in the future would carry out bi-annual checks.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsar...Art-R2-Today-9





CBS Appeals Fine For Janet Jackson Breast Flashing
Jeremy Pelofsky

CBS Corp. asked an appeals court on Friday to overturn a Federal Communications Commission fine for the network's broadcast of pop singer Janet Jackson's breast flash during the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast.

The FCC ruled that the incident was legally indecent and fined 20 stations owned by CBS $550,000.

"We disagree strongly with the FCC's conclusions and will continue to pursue all remedies necessary to affirm our legal rights," CBS said in a statement.

"CBS has apologized to the American people for the inappropriate and unexpected half-time incident, and immediately implemented safeguards that have governed similar broadcasts ever since," the network said.

Last month, President George W. Bush signed a new law that raises fines tenfold for radio and television broadcasters that air extensive profanity or sexual content that the FCC determines violate U.S. decency standards.

Congress approved the increase in fines -- to as much as $325,000 per violation -- in response to the Super Bowl incident. Some television viewers were outraged by the half-time entertainment during the game when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped off part of duet partner Janet Jackson's costume and briefly exposed her breast.

CBS said it was required to pay the $550,000 fine as a procedural step in order to appeal the FCC ruling.

The FCC said it would "vigorously defend" its decision.

"CBS' continued insistence that the halftime show was not indecent demonstrates that it is out of touch with the American people. Millions of parents, as well as Congress, understand what CBS does not: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" was indeed indecent," FCC spokeswoman Tamara Lipper said in a statement.

U.S. television and radio broadcasters are barred from airing obscene material and are limited from broadcasting indecent materials between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., a period of time when children are likely to be watching. The restrictions do not apply to cable or satellite services.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Libraries Say More Maps Missing Than Those That Were Stolen
AP

Elite libraries have told the FBI that more antique maps are missing than those stolen by E. Forbes Smiley III, who admitted in June to stealing nearly 100 maps.

The British Library, Yale and Harvard report more maps missing from their collections than those the map dealer has admitted to taking. The most valuable maps are within Smiley's area of interest - early maps of North America - and several are copies of maps he has admitted stealing.

"We continue to entertain serious doubts about the completeness of the investigation and the extent of Mr. Smiley's cooperation with the authorities," Clive Field, director of scholarship and collections at the British Library, recently wrote to the FBI. "We note that he has admitted to stealing only one map from our collections but are not persuaded that this exhausts the limits of Mr. Smiley's involvement in our thefts."

Smiley, 50, who lives on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in New Haven on June 22 to one count of theft of major artwork in the theft of a map from Yale University. He admitted taking 97 maps over eight years from the New York and Boston public libraries, the Newberry Library in Chicago, Harvard University library and British Library in London.

He later pleaded guilty to three larceny charges in state court in the Yale thefts.

The British Library suspects Smiley of taking three additional maps and has hired a Philadelphia lawyer to take up its case.

Harvard on Friday released the names of five additional maps missing from its collection, following the lead of Yale and the British Library in making its thefts public.

Richard Reeve, Smiley's lawyer, said his client has furnished complete information to the FBI and worries that the libraries have found a scapegoat on whom to pin additional thefts.

"Either the maps have legs themselves or there are other people taking maps," he said.

Prosecutors defended their work and invited the libraries to produce additional evidence.

"If they're uncovering more information, we'll be more than happy to take a look," said Tom Carson, a spokesman for Connecticut's U.S. attorney.

Librarians and the FBI are scheduled to meet in New Haven on Aug. 7 to sort out issues related to the case before Smiley's sentencing in September. He faces up to six years in prison, but the judge could impose more jail time if proof emerges that he stole more than the nearly 100 he has already confessed to taking.

The oldest maps dated to the 1500s and some are the first records of settlements, territories and discoveries in America, experts say.

Poor record-keeping by the libraries limited the FBI's investigation. Investigators also had difficulty tracing maps, which were printed in multiple copies, to a single owner.

Investigators say that without Smiley's cooperation they would have recovered only a fraction of the maps they ultimately obtained.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-30-12-37-02





At 60, Sony Focuses On Rebuilding Brand
Yuri Kageyama

Three years ago, Sony Corp. launched the Qualia line of luxury gadgets that included a tiny $3,300 digital camera and a $13,000 audio console that automatically centered a compact disc regardless of how carelessly it was tossed into the player.

Problem was, Sony engineers seemed more enamored with the extravagantly priced technology than consumers were, and the products meant to highlight Sony's fine-tuned prowess received little interest beyond the initial gee-whiz.

The gadgets were a sign of a growing gap between Sony creations and consumer sensibilities at the company that brought the world the Walkman portable music player. The company, which turned 60 this year, appeared to be losing touch with its customers.

"Sony used to be a company that had superior technology and cool design and created products that other companies didn't have," said Akihiko Jojima, author of "Sony's Sickness." "Sony has become merely a brand for brand's sake."

A turnaround effort led by Chief Executive Howard Stringer, who a year ago became the first foreigner to head the Japanese company, is showing early signs of paying off. Stringer - the former head of Sony's U.S. unit and previously a top executive at CBS - adopted a two-pronged strategy of downsizing and focusing on growth areas.

It's no simple task. Sony has sprawling operations spanning everything from electronics and video games to Hollywood movies, financial services and a music joint venture.

Stringer says Sony can't allow itself to grow obsolete.

"Any time a company is 60 years old, it has to say to itself: Are the advantages of age outweighed by the weaknesses, and the weaknesses are that you get stuck in your ways and you get conservative? The opportunities to reinvent yourself are the ones that have to be taken," Stringer said. "You adapt or you die."

One of his first moves was to pull the plug on the Qualia line.

He also reversed some decisions of his predecessor Nobuyuki Idei, a marketing expert who helped raise Sony's stature but never achieved the lucrative "synergy" he had repeatedly promised would come between electronics and the movie, music and other content businesses.

Stringer has ordered 10,000 job cuts by March 2008, of which 9,600 have already occurred. That amounts to about 6 percent of Sony's global payroll of 158,500.

Sony also has sold off $975 million of assets and lowered its stake in a Japanese retail chain that sells candy, cosmetics and other trinkets unrelated to electronics. It also scrapped its Aibo pet robot division and stopped making plasma TVs.

In February, the company stopped promoting retired executives to advisory positions, a common practice at Japanese companies. It removed 45 advisers who served a symbolic purpose but required a chauffeur-driven car.

Jojima and other analysts say Sony is faring better under Stringer. But more time is needed to assess whether the Tokyo-based company can make a full recovery to its heyday that ran from the 1960s through the 1980s, when it scored hits with the transistor radio, Walkman, videotape recorder, compact disc, color TV and other pioneering products.

There have been some successes.

On Thursday, Sony posted a $276 million profit for its fiscal first quarter, compared with a $65.2 million loss last year. In the most recent period, it credited strong sales of liquid-crystal display TVs, digital cameras, camcorders and laptops.

Even its electronics division, which accounts for more than two-thirds of overall revenue, returned to the black. Still, the unit hasn't posted a profit for a full year since fiscal 2002. And Sony shares are worth only about half of what they were five years ago.

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi, who heads the electronics business, believes that TVs and portable music players are two products in which Sony must show it's a winner.

"If we lose in either category, it's inevitable that people are going to have doubts about Sony," he said.

Sony has fallen behind Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod in portable digital music players: Sony has sold one-fifth as many players as the 58 million iPods that consumers have snapped up.

A book on Sony by Japan's top business daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, said the success of the iPod and the iTunes download service made Sony's brand power "a thing of the past."

"As an outsider to the music industry, Apple acted extremely quickly," according to the book "Sony Versus Sony." "Sony, which had its own music division, worried about possible damage to CD sales and could not act as quickly."

One error Sony made was sticking to a format for music files called ATRAC3, which protected against illicit copying. Sony only belatedly adapted to the more widely used MP3 file format. The iPod played MP3s from its inception.

Although Sony won't say much more about its plans for future music players, Stringer is giving more say to software designers and requiring greater interaction among the various teams developing products.

Late last year, Sony brought Tim Schaaff from Apple and appointed him senior vice president of Sony's software development. Schaaff oversaw interactive media at Apple and the development of Apple's QuickTime media player for computers.

Sony has scored in one category, the TV, with new flat-panel models that have commanded top global market share in the category during some periods.

A venture for liquid crystal displays Sony set up with Samsung Electronics of South Korea in 2004 has helped Sony play catch-up and boost profits, but it also demonstrated Sony had fallen too behind to go at it alone.

Chubachi acknowledged Sony had grown overly confident of its cathode-ray tube TV technology, failing to see how slimmer TVs were "an entirely new category."

In fact, Sony had grown arrogant about designing products that anticipated, rather than followed, consumer tastes, Chubachi said. Some colleagues were appalled when he started a basic customer-satisfaction push within the ranks.

The original Walkman, which sent on sale in 1979, was long heralded as an innovative product that was ahead of its time. Many, even within Sony, had predicted the Walkman would never catch on, warning that consumers wouldn't want to be seen wearing earphones.

They couldn't have been more wrong. But over the years, Sony grew complacent about its ability to come up with cutting-edge products and lost sight of the consumer.

"Producing a hit without listening to customers is inefficient, and we may even strike out," said Chubachi.

Stringer also has made "Sony United" the company motto to encourage Sony to take advantage of the full scope of its businesses. Mistakes were made - like the digital music player - when Sony's section working on computer chips or software development failed to work closely with its other product designers, officials say.

Mitsuhiro Osawa, analyst with Mizuho Investors Securities, believes Sony has been humbled.

"In the past Sony was overly confident that whatever it would make would sell," he said. "Sony acted like it was a samurai king in business."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-29-17-14-42





Sentry Insurance Says Customer Data Stolen

Personal information on 72 worker's compensation claimants was stolen from Sentry Insurance and later sold over the Internet, the company said.

The data sold included names and Social Security numbers but not medical records, Sentry said. Data on an additional 112,198 claimants was also stolen but there is no evidence it was sold, the company said.

Sentry said it notified everyone affected and was providing credit monitoring services to help prevent fraud.

The thief was "a lead programmer/consultant with a nationally recognized computer contractor" hired by Sentry, based in Stevens Point, company officials said Friday.

Sentry said the consultant was arrested outside Wisconsin by the Secret Service and faces federal felony charges.

Secret Service representatives did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press seeking comment Saturday.

Mary Weller, corporate communications director for Sentry, would not say where or when the arrest occurred, or give details about when the theft occurred or how it was discovered.

It was the first theft of claimants' personal data from Sentry, Weller said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-29-15-57-59





ATube

AOL to Revamp Its Video Portal
Anick Jesdanun

AOL is revamping its video portal this week to give visitors one-stop access to clips from around the Internet, including those at rival sites like YouTube.

AOL envisions becoming a television guide for online video and will initially showcase more than 45 video-on-demand channels featuring free and for-pay video from partners like A&E, Nickelodeon, National Lampoon and the WNBA women's basketball league.

Clips not featured will still appear through AOL's video search tool, which incorporates technology from a video search startup it bought this year, Truveo Inc. Those could include free, user-contributed video at sites from YouTube Inc. and Google Inc.

A "beta" test version of the portal is scheduled to launch Friday, with the main launch expected later in August.

The move represents AOL's latest efforts to build on its strengths in online video as it seeks to boost traffic to its ad-supported sites and make up for declines in its subscription business for mostly dial-up access.

Executives say the new portal has been in the works for more than a year, long before any serious discussions about making free even more of AOL's services, including AOL.com e-mail accounts. AOL LLC and its parent company, Time Warner Inc., plan to announce details on that Wednesday.

AOL historically has emphasized news, chat rooms and other features exclusive to paying customers. The company began the shift to free in late 2004, but only after Google and Yahoo Inc. had a stronghold online.

"It's fair to say we came to market late with a portal," said Kevin Conroy, executive vice president for AOL. "We are focusing here on what's next. We believe we're hitting the market at exactly the right time to take a leadership role in the next-generation portal experience, meaning a video portal."

Earlier this year, AOL won a broadband Emmy for last July's "Live 8" concert special - delivered in seven separate feeds, all without the meltdowns common with early online video events.

AOL later launched with Warner Bros., also a Time Warner unit, the "In2TV" broadband network featuring free viewing of dozens of old television shows like "Welcome Back Kotter," "Sisters" and "Growing Pains."

But AOL faces immense competition.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Google Video offer clips for sale, generally $1.99 for an episode of a television show. YouTube, meanwhile, has become the leader in user-generated video and has at least a year's head start on AOL's own video-sharing site, UnCut Video.

AOL executives say the company won't try to steer AOLVideo.com visitors away from rival offerings, figuring it's better to create a user-friendly experience that would grow the market for everyone, including AOL.

"We want to increase awareness, usage," said Fred McIntyre, vice president for AOL Video. "We want this to be the place people come to start when they think video."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-01-38-19





CNN.com Creates User Submissions Section
Anick Jesdanun

With camera phones and other gadgets a greater part of everyday life, CNN wants to make it easier for viewers to submit images they happen to capture as they witness news in the making.

CNN and other news organizations have long accepted submissions from the public, but until now the tools at CNN's Web site have been made available in response to specific stories or events.

"It was much more ad hoc," CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin said Monday. "We haven't had a formal place for people to submit any type of user-generated content."

CNN is creating a permanent place, at CNN.com/exchange, where so-called citizen journalists can submit any photos, graphics, audio and video. It is also accepting submissions via e-mail.

Contributors will not be paid, however.

Visitors to the site can view other people's submissions, including ones that CNN does not use on television or elsewhere.

The initiative comes amid the growing popularity of video-sharing sites, particularly YouTube.com.

In recent days, Internet users have been posting on YouTube unfiltered images of how the fighting in Israel and Lebanon is affecting people caught in the middle. Examples include graphic images that are not usually seen in TV news reports - the mangled bodies of children, a person on fire in a road during an attack.

Martin said the CNN Exchange initiative was in the works long before the Mideast developments.

"The timing of everything is just so ripe with users being much more comfortable with gathering video and having the means," Martin said, noting that many cell phones and digital cameras these days can capture video.

One key difference, though, is that CNN's staff will vet every submission and post only those it deems authentic and appropriate.

"All the submissions on CNN Exchange will be reviewed and held up to the same editorial (standards) that all reporting is," Martin said.

MSNBC.com said it is also expanding its citizen-journalism efforts, but won't announce details until later this year.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post and other Web publishers are adopting technology that could lead visitors to articles from competing news organizations.

Inform Technologies LLC will aggregate news from various traditional news outlets and Web journals and help direct readers to related articles, no matter where they are located. The idea is to keep readers from defecting to search engines to find such information.

Other participants include The New York Sun and The Oklahoman newspapers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...07-31-15-59-22





Sports’ Greatest Hits at One Web Site (but There’s a Catch)
David S. Joachim

It’s a sports fan’s dream: instant, on-demand access to classic sports moments like Muhammad Ali’s knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965 or Dwight Clark’s leaping catch in the back of the end zone to take the 49ers to the Super Bowl in 1982 or Kirk Gibson’s last-gasp home run to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers.

ESPN took a major step toward this goal last month when it consolidated many of its archives in its online video service called ESPN 360. The hitch is that you have to be a subscriber to Verizon, Adelphia or another of a handful of regional broadband providers to have access to all the film in the ESPN 360 service.

ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, is the most visible player in a much larger experiment being played out across the Internet, where programmers are trying to figure out how to bring expensive old-media-style content, and its revenue models, to the Web.

At least three of the biggest broadband providers — Comcast, Verizon and Adelphia — are striking deals for television programs, music and video games that cannot be readily found elsewhere on the Web. In this way, they are applying the cable TV model to the Internet by providing a distribution vehicle for entertainment programming.

The deals signal a larger strategic shift among broadband providers, which for years competed on the basis of the speed and reliability of their Internet connections. Turning to the cable TV model to attract new customers is one way to maneuver away from the price wars that have defined that business.

“On TV 50 years ago, you had four or five channels,” said Ron Feinbaum, a senior vice president at Scripps Networks, which is in discussions to license to Web portals content from the Food Network and the Home and Garden cable channels. “Then came cable, then pay channels. On the Web, over time, we will see different levels of access and potentially different grades of content.”

These strategies are reminiscent of early online services like AOL, which offered dial-up access and gated content for a monthly subscription. (Paradoxically, AOL has since put nearly all of its content on the Web, available to any Internet user.)

Last year, Verizon began offering its 5.7 million broadband subscribers an option of home pages from three content providers: Disney/ESPN, Yahoo and MSN. Each monthly subscription includes a package of services that would otherwise cost about $200 a year. For example, the Disney package includes ABC News Now, ESPN 360 and Movies.com MAX, with full-screen movie trailers and video reviews from Ebert & Roeper.

Comcast — the biggest broadband provider, with nine million customers — offers video streams of live National Hockey League games, behind-the-scenes tours of HBO series like “Rome,” the Rhapsody streaming music service and a service from Nascar offering live broadcasts of races, in-car audio and telemetry tracking. The services, valued by Comcast at roughly $300 a year, are included in the $43 monthly subscription price.

Adelphia, which has about 1.8 million subscribers and will become part of Comcast and Time Warner starting tomorrow, is taking a slightly different approach. Rather than including exclusive content as part of its $43-a-month subscription price, it is offering a content package, called NetPack, for an extra $10 a month. It includes ESPN 360 and subscriptions to the game site Shockwave.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, American Greetings, MLB.com and Weather.com.

Although some analysts are particularly skeptical of Adelphia’s add-on packages, Craig Leddy, a senior analyst at Interactive TV Works, a media market analysis firm, said the network distribution model had worked over many decades in television, particularly for ESPN.

“Of all the models out there,” he said, “the licensing model has worked pretty well for them, and helped them in turn offset the huge sports rights fees they have to pay. So if you went directly to consumers, it would be a long battle before you could get them to really pony up for it.”

For the media companies providing the content, these deals represent a potential new source of revenue from largely existing properties. Verizon, for example, pays ESPN for each broadband customer (although the companies will not divulge the terms of their deal) and the companies share in the ad revenue. Some broadband providers also offer some teaser content in the hope of “upselling,” or directing the user back to the original content provider. For example, when a user is persuaded to buy extra content from Disney, Disney shares that revenue with Comcast.

“Content costs money, and there are a lot of rights issues involved,” Mr. Leddy said. “It’s up to the media companies and distributors to figure out the models that will make sense for consumers and not impede on the benefits of the Internet.”

For years before merging its video offerings in June, ESPN offered three separate video services on its Web site: Motion, a free service with short clips like news, game highlights and the network’s Mike and Mike cartoons; the original 360 service for long-form video like documentaries, full episodes of ESPN programs and movies, extended interviews and some live games like World Cup soccer; and a pay-per-view package for live college football and basketball games and specials like the World Series of Poker.

The 360 portion, as before, is available only to those who get their Internet connections from one of ESPN’s broadband partners. That amounts to about eight million potential viewers today. And ESPN is continuing to digitize large parts of its film library at its headquarters in Bristol, Conn., as it works out arrangements with the leagues, syndicates, film libraries and other content owners to distribute film more broadly at ESPN.com — no small task when you consider that partners like Major League Baseball want to build their own franchises online.

“ESPN has to serve a number of masters,” Mr. Leddy said. “They have to keep the sports leagues and their teams happy, they have to keep cable operators happy, and they have the advertisers. And oh, by the way, they have to please consumers. It gets complicated, more so than other content providers.”

Not all broadband providers are making bets on proprietary content. Some, like EarthLink, BellSouth and Cox, are sticking to their technical roots.

“Exclusivity is one of many competitive strategies to consider, and you have to be very thoughtful about it,” said Bob Wilson, senior vice president for programming at Cox. “Otherwise you and your competitors can end up just trying to ‘out-exclusive’ each other, and all you accomplish is bidding up your costs and making the content providers rich.”

Craig Forman, president of EarthLink’s value-added services unit, said the best content on the Internet was produced by the common user. “There is a huge amount of pain and failure in anyone who has tried from a programming perspective to come up with the ‘I Love Lucy’ of the Internet,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te...y/31cable.html





Camera System Creates Sophisticated 3-D Effects
John Markoff

In a darkened garage here, Steve Perlman is giving digital actors a whole new face.

A former Apple Computer engineer who previously co-founded WebTV Networks and the set-top box firm Moxi, Mr. Perlman is now putting the finishing touches on Contour, a futuristic camera system that will add photorealistic three-dimensional effects to digital entertainment. The new system will be introduced today at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Boston, and effects created with it could start appearing as early as next year.

The system could change the nature of cinematography in several ways, according to leading Hollywood producers and technologists who are planning to use the system. For example, it will make it possible to create compellingly realistic synthetic actors by capturing the facial movements of real actors in much greater detail than is currently possible.

David Fincher, who directed the films “Fight Club” and “Panic Room,” is planning to use Contour next year when he begins filming “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a movie based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which Brad Pitt will play a character who ages in reverse.

“Instead of grabbing points on a face, you will be able to capture the entire skin,” Mr. Fincher said. “You’re going to get all of the enormous detail and the quirks of human expression that you can’t plan for.”

The technology will let filmmakers transform the appearance of actors in the computer, raising the possibility of a new form of digital video in which the viewer can control the point of view — what is being described in Hollywood as “navigable entertainment.”

The Contour system requires actors to cover their faces and clothes with makeup containing phosphorescent powder that is not visible under normal lighting. In a light-sealed room, the actors face two arrays of inexpensive video cameras that are synchronized to simultaneously record their appearance and shape. Scenes are lit by rapidly flashing fluorescent lights, and the cameras capture light from the glowing powder during intervals of darkness that are too short for humans to perceive.

The captured images are transmitted to an array of computers that reassemble the three-dimensional shapes of the glowing areas. These can then be manipulated and edited into larger digital scenes using sophisticated software tools like Autodesk’s Maya or Softimage’s Face Robot.

“Steve is really on to something here,” said Ed Ulbrich, vice president of Digital Domain, a Hollywood special-effects company in Venice, Calif. “The holy grail of digital effects is to be able to create a photorealistic human being.”

Until now, realistic digital actors have required significant amounts of computing power, at great expense.

“It’s been used in stunts and big special-effects scenes,” Mr. Ulbrich said. “Now you can use it for two actors sitting at a table and talking. You have the ability to tell stories and have close-up scenes that make you laugh and cry.”

Mr. Perlman’s system is a leap forward for a technology known as motion capture, now widely used in video games and in movies like “The Polar Express,” which starred Tom Hanks in various digital guises.

Motion capture cuts the costs of computer animation while creating more natural movement. Today’s motion-capture systems work by tracking the locations of hundreds of reflective balls attached to a human actor. This permits the actor’s movements to be sampled by a camera many times per second. But the digital record is limited to movement, and does not include the actual appearance of the actor.

The difference offered by Mr. Perlman’s technology is in the detail. Standard motion-capture systems are generally limited in resolution to several hundred points on a human face, while the Contour system can recreate facial images at a resolution of 200,000 pixels. The digital video images produced by the system are startlingly realistic.

Mr. Perlman, who helped develop Apple’s QuickTime video technology, said the computer-generated animation techniques pioneered by Pixar Studios were reaching a visual plateau and, as a result, losing some of their audience appeal.

But an important hurdle to commercial success for the Contour system is whether it will be the first low-cost technology to cross what film and robot specialists refer to as the “uncanny valley.”

That phrase was coined in the 1970’s by Masahiro Mori, the Japanese robotics specialist, as he sought to describe the emotional response of humans to robots and other nonhuman entities. He theorized that as a robot became more lifelike, the emotional response of humans became increasingly positive and empathetic — until a certain point at which the robot took on a zombie-like quality, and the human response turned to repulsion. Then, as the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human, the response turns positive again. Critics were quick to point out the eerie look of the characters in “Polar Express.”

“We are programmed from birth to recognize human faces,” Mr. Perlman said.

There are some limits to the new technology. For example, the Contour system can capture eyebrows, mustaches and short beards, but it is not able to capture freely moving strands. It is also not able to capture areas where makeup cannot be applied, like the eyes or the inside of the mouth. The Contour developers are now experimenting with plastic teeth molds with embedded phosphor powder.

If the Contour system can be commercialized, it will allow digital film directors to easily and inexpensively control camera angles and generate elaborate visual fly-throughs in movies. It will also lower the cost of creating fantasy characters like Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

In addition to films, the new system will be valuable in creating more realistic video games, Mr. Perlman said. A major video-game development company has committed to use the system in future games, he said, adding that he could not give its name at this time.

The Contour system has been developed by a small team of software and hardware engineers that Mr. Perlman has assembled in the garage of his home in Palo Alto, Calif., over the last three years. He rewired the garage to handle the power requirements of the lighting system and a small graphics supercomputer that was built from scratch. Contour will be distributed by Mova, one of a group of start-up firms that Mr. Perlman has assembled since he left WebTV in 1999, after it was purchased by Microsoft.

Contour is not the only attempt to develop more advanced digital cinematography techniques, said Richard Doherty, a digital media consultant who is president of Envisioneering Inc., in Seaford, N.Y.

“There are some upstarts in Los Angeles, but none have achieved the demonstrated scale and performance that Steve has shown,” Mr. Doherty said. “This is the kind of technology that is celebrated, and it is on the scale of the invention of the Steadicam. He’s going to give that kind of freedom to actors and directors.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te.../31motion.html





Developer’s Son Acquires The New York Observer
Katharine Q. Seelye

Jared Kushner, the 25-year-old son of a wealthy New Jersey developer who was sentenced to prison last year, has bought The New York Observer, paying what one person familiar with details of the sale said was nearly $10 million for a majority stake in the weekly newspaper.

“I own The New York Observer,” he said yesterday.

Mr. Kushner said that he bought the newspaper because it was a marquee property in the media capital of the world, and that the opportunity to buy a newspaper did not come around very often. The paper’s relatively small circulation — 50,000 — belies its influence, particularly in New York’s media, political and real estate circles.

He also said The Observer was a good brand that could one day make a lot of money, though it now loses about $2 million a year.

Because every side of the transaction is private, it is difficult to precisely determine the financing behind the deal. It is not clear how much of a stake Mr. Kushner bought, but Arthur Carter, the current publisher of The Observer, is retaining some interest and will be offering the new owner strategic advice.

The Kushner name is well known to readers of The Observer and other media outlets, which have given thorough coverage to federal charges against his father, Charles B. Kushner, who was a major Democratic fund-raiser and contributor to James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey.

Charles Kushner was sentenced last year to two years in prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. He also admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and having a videotape of the encounter sent to his sister, the man’s wife, in an attempt to get back at her for cooperating with a federal investigation into his business activities.

The elder Mr. Kushner now lives in a halfway house in Newark run by the Department of Corrections and is expected to be released in late August. A spokesman for his real estate company, Kushner Companies, said that the son, Jared, had worked for the company until recently.

Jared Kushner said he was proud of his father, but that he was his own man.

“I love my father,” Mr. Kushner said, “but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on. The only difference is that this is far more public,” he said of his purchase of The Observer.

Mr. Kushner pledged to stay out of the editorial process and focus instead on improving the paper’s bottom line.

“I am here to help build the paper in a way that will lead to the best and most honest reporting, regardless of who is involved,” he said. “It is up to the editors and reporters to decide what should be in the paper. The headline in everything we do should be integrity.”

Peter W. Kaplan, the editor of the paper, said that Mr. Kushner had no agenda, adding, “He told me that he will not interfere with the paper, that editorially, the paper is ours.”

Mr. Kaplan said Mr. Kushner had told him that he had three objectives: to market the brand name of The Observer; to build its Internet traffic; and to provide resources for more news beats so that the paper could have what Mr. Kaplan called “a stronger paper with more constituencies and more advertising.”

He said that Mr. Kushner represented the 21st century in the newspaper industry. “In that sense,” Mr. Kaplan said, “his 25-ness is a huge asset. He is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom.”

Mr. Kaplan said yesterday that he would be confirming the news of the sale to the newspaper employees on Sunday night and Monday.

“It’s a large part of my task to convey to them that Jared is very much a guy building a new business,” he said. “I’m not going to put the weight of any history on his shoulders.”

At least one staff member, Tom Scocca, a senior editor and the Off-the-Record columnist, said he was sanguine about Mr. Kushner owning the paper. “I don’t think that there’s any great sense of dread or fear about this,” he said. “I think Arthur has had the paper these many years because he cares about it, and I’d be very surprised to discover that he had sold it in a way that’s rash or ill-considered.”

Mr. Scocca also said that Mr. Kushner was not particularly tainted because of his father.

“Every pile of money that is enough to buy a newspaper is disturbing if you look closely enough at it,” he said. “But I don’t think he has any reason or need to protect the existing press barons from scrutiny. This is an exciting move.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/bu...1observer.html
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 03-08-06, 12:33 PM   #2
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

Moguls of New Media

The MySpace member with a million 'friends.' The receptionist with a production deal. Some of the Web's amateur entertainers are becoming powerful players.
John Jurgensen

On the popular Web site MySpace.com, members set up profiles with information about their interests and then network across the site, recruiting other members to link to their pages. Often, the teens and 20-somethings who dominate the site have dozens or hundreds of these registered "friends."

Then there's Christine Dolce, whose MySpace page boasts nearly one million friends -- making her arguably one of the most connected people on the Internet. A 24-year-old cosmetologist who until a few months ago worked at a makeup counter in a mall, she now has a manager and a start-up jeans company and has won promotional deals for two mainstream consumer brands.NEW-MEDIA POWER LIST

As videos, blogs and Web pages created by amateurs remake the entertainment landscape, unknown directors, writers and producers are being catapulted into positions of enormous influence. Each week, about a half-million people download a comedic video podcast featuring a former paralegal. A video by a 30-year-old comedian from Cleveland has now been watched by almost 30 million people, roughly the audience for an average "American Idol" episode. The most popular contributor to the photo site Flickr.com just got a contract to shoot a Toyota ad campaign.

While online stardom can sometimes be fleeting, and some measures of audience size are subject to debate, a look at the rising stars in this world shows how the path to entertainment success is being redefined. Traditional media companies and marketers are already in pursuit of some of these new faces.

"It's an awesome feeling," says Ms. Dolce, who built her MySpace profile with a page that panders to the site's young demographic with a mix of confessional commentary, provocative photographs of herself, celebrity images and music.

She joined MySpace in September 2003, adopting the name "Forbidden" for her home page. As one of the first 15,000 members to join the site, launched in July 2003 (MySpace now has 96 million members), she built an early following that grew along with the site's membership. Because users' pages list their friends in chronological order, being an early member has also meant that Ms. Dolce appears near the top of many friend lists.

"I saw the vision that MySpace was growing bigger and bigger and I thought, wow, great," Ms. Dolce says.

While some members are choosy about whom they will accept as friends, Ms. Dolce decided after about a year on the site to accept anyone who put in a friend request. She also took on a manager -- Keith Ruby, another MySpace member with whom she developed a friendship online. A former concert promoter from Calgary, Alberta, he advised her on ways to capitalize on her online popularity. He helped broker deals with companies like Axe body spray and Zippo lighters. In recent months, she's appeared in online promotions for both brands. She commands rates of as much as $5,000 to appear at events like auto shows. In March, she quit her job at the makeup counter.

Advertisements for Ms. Dolce's outside Web site and assorted business ventures, like her jeans business, line the page. Seeing her entire home page requires pressing "page down" about two dozen times on a large computer monitor -- and that page is followed by some 24,000 additional pages holding the photos of all her friends.

Mr. Ruby says Ms. Dolce has never used a computer program to artificially boost her friend list -- a practice that has plagued sites like MySpace in the past. MySpace takes steps to prevent the use of computer-generated mass friend requests, such as limiting users to a few hundred outgoing friend requests a day. Mr. Ruby says Ms. Dolce briefly tried software that automatically accepted requests from others, but now instead relies on family and friends to help her process them all.

Popular members like Ms. Dolce represent something of a dilemma for MySpace. The site says it has no problem with the photographs and content on Ms. Dolce's page, which, while racy, stop short of being pornographic. Recently, however, MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., has been working to promote a family-friendly image to appeal to potential advertisers -- some of whom could be leery of sexually suggestive pages like Ms. Dolce's.

Ms. Dolce's commercial deals have occasionally run afoul of MySpace's rules. The service doesn't allow using the network for direct commercial gain; because of the site's regulations, Ms. Dolce is prohibited from sending mass messages to her MySpace friends about the products she's paid to endorse.

Some of the people who have emerged as digital stars online are true amateurs, people who have simply videotaped themselves in their living rooms and posted the results online. Others are quasi-professionals with some experience in the entertainment industry: writers of a TV pilot that didn't get picked up; first-time filmmakers who were praised on the film-festival circuit but never found distribution or stand-up comedians who couldn't graduate from coffee houses and small clubs.

The creators of one of the Web's most popular video podcasts fall somewhere between these categories. Each week, about half a million people watch a two- or three-minute video starring a man in a ninja costume that includes a Lycra ski mask bought for $6. He typically delivers a sarcastic comic monologue in response to a ninja-themed question a viewer has emailed in. ("Do ninjas catch colds?" was a recent topic.) The weekly series, called "Ask a Ninja," appears on the creators' Web site, as well as on iTunes and video-sharing sites like YouTube and Revver.

Its creators are Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who first recorded the skit in November. Both in their early 30s and living in Los Angeles, the two had dabbled in the entertainment industry: Mr. Nichols had worked as a production assistant on a few TV pilots and Mr. Sarine had spent some time as a paralegal for Disney. Together, the pair, who had met in 2000 at an acting workshop, had written a script for an anime series they hoped to make for the Web, but they grew discouraged by the expense of producing it.

Then they noticed a video online. Titled "Lazy Sunday," it was a sketch that had first aired on "Saturday Night Live," but was being emailed all over the Internet: Millions of people saw it in a matter of weeks. They decided to try an online video series of their own. Around Thanksgiving, Mr. Sarine donned a makeshift ninja costume, and the two wrote and improvised a loose script. Mr. Nichols filmed Mr. Sarine against the wall of his West Hollywood apartment, using a six-year-old camcorder. He edited it on his laptop and posted it on their personal blog and on YouTube.

The skits got little response initially, but in early January, Messrs. Nichols and Sarine submitted the podcast to iTunes and launched an official Web site for it. Editors at iTunes quickly selected the series as a "new and notable" podcast, giving it featured placement on its podcasts page. That positioning landed "Ask a Ninja" a spot on iTunes's list of top-subscribed podcasts, which meant it was one of the first titles anyone browsing for podcasts came across. Mentions in a number of blogs helped to boost viewership as well.

Now the two are trying to turn their podcast into a viable business. In May, "Ask a Ninja" launched an online store and now sells about 150 T-shirts a week, Mr. Nichols says. They'll soon begin selling premium subscriptions at $1.50 a month to fans who want early access to new episodes. This month, they added their first advertisement to the series, a mention of the Sony movie "Little Man" at the end of an episode.

The ad was placed by Podtrac, an agency that links advertisers up with podcasters, and brought "Ninja" revenue "in the thousands" of dollars, according to Mr. Nichols. He hopes to draw more based on the show's popularity and viewer demographic: 90% male, between the ages of 13 and 24, according to a Podtrac survey.

In the spring, Crista Flanagan, a castmember on the Fox comedy show "Mad TV," contacted the duo through their MySpace page and the three decided to collaborate on a new podcast. The resulting series called "Hope Is Emo," features Ms. Flanagan as an emotional young woman in black clothing and eye makeup, frequently moved to tears by items like discarded pizza boxes. After being featured on the Ninja homepage and on YouTube, the first episode of "Hope is Emo" quickly drew more than one million views.

The two see branching out beyond "Ninja" as key to long-term success. "'Ask a Ninja' was always kind of a proof of concept for us," says Mr. Nichols. "We've looked at others who have been successful but they didn't know how to work with new talent and bring fresh ideas into the fold. Dick Clark makes more money in his sleep producing things than he ever does on camera."

Messrs. Nichols and Sarine are looking for a way around a problem that affects virtually every Internet star. Even if they become wildly popular, amateur podcasters and video producers can rarely make a living from their newfound fame. Podcasts and do-it-yourself videos are generally free to watch online, and even those few creators who manage to attract advertisers seldom make much money. According to research firm eMarketer, current ad spending on online video is expected to double by 2007 to $640 million, but most of that goes to large media companies rather than to amateur videos.

The greatest hope of most Web amateurs is to cross over into "old media" outlets like TV networks and Hollywood. The flagship crossover star in digital entertainment is known by one name: Brookers.

Type the word "Brookers" into the search field of YouTube.com, and a list of some 1,240 videos will appear. Thirty-one of them are videos made by 20-year-old Brooke Brodack of Holden, Mass., who has posted a range of videos starring herself under the screen name "Brookers." In large part, the other 1,200 or so are Brookers tributes, critiques and imitations, posted by Ms. Brodack's fans and detractors in response to the clips she's made.

Though Ms. Brodack's videos have a distinctly amateur feel -- they feature her lip-synching songs, dancing goofily around her bedroom and occasionally adopting silly character voices -- they inspire a passionate following. Many are drawn to her blend of good looks and unselfconscious antics. But she says she can't explain why her videos have been so popular. "I'll never understand it," she says.

Last month, Ms. Brodack, who works as a receptionist, got an email from an executive at the development company of former MTV star Carson Daly. Mr. Daly had seen her videos and liked her performances and production techniques, which typically involve wild camera angles and overlays of text and images over the video pictures. He signed her to a deal to develop entertainment ideas with his production company for TV and the Web. Mr. Daly, who has only spoken to Ms. Brodack over email, says he's still working out what exactly she'll be doing for his company. When it comes to hiring talent from the digital world, he says, "There's no manual. Everybody wants to lock them up and figure it out later."

Ms. Brodack says some of her friends have resented her newfound success. She's also dealt with a downside of viral video stardom that many people on sites like YouTube encounter. Because anyone who watches her videos can post a comment, she's constantly confronted with criticism in a public forum about issues from her appearance to her dancing skills. She sometimes responds to these comments in her videos.

Mr. Daly's company has sent her some new equipment to help her enhance her videos, including a new laptop and extra hard drive, and plans to get her a higher-quality video camera, but Ms. Brodack is nervous about professionalizing her videos. "I don't want it to look too slick," she says. "I'm trying to keep it simple and think of it the way it was eight months ago."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...l?mod=rss_free





The Next Gonzo Journalism
Chris Dahlen

I keep hearing the same gripe from the critics of the critics of pop culture: Today's writers eat it. Nobody knows how to cover music, or movies, or video games, or any of the other media that matter. We need someone to swoop in and save us: We need a new Lester Bangs, or a new Hunter S. Thompson-- one of those guys who made criticism and alternative journalism seem so vital back in the 1960s and 70s. Where they hell did they go?

Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire about the failure of the gaming press to cough up a single critic who embodies whatever Bangs was doing when he told people to listen to the Troggs. Old school fans of music crit watch the field slip into the morass of mp3 blogs, message boards, and kids who just shout, "Hey, can you YSI that to me?" every time a new album leaks-- and they wonder, what happened to the great critics? They want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments.

But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.

Oh sure, we cover tons of stories about technology. We write up every new thing from could-be-big trends-- whatever happened to the podcast revolution, anyway?-- to tiny but buzzworthy ones, like that "personalized" Jessica Simpson download they're selling at Yahoo! Music. The problem is that every time we write about some new technology like podcasting, we go through the basic template-- explain how it works, decide whether grandmothers will care about RSS feeds, and so forth-- and we quote the same types of people: The early adopter, the industry analyst, the skeptic. And no matter what context the story falls into and how important the subject may seem, the overall tone is always the same: whatever it is, it's "neat."

In fact, all tech is "neat." Maybe we can see some ill effects on the horizon-- would federal endorsement of the destruction of embryos for stem cell research open the door to greater exploitation of humanity down the road? Can iPods damage your hearing?-- but we only throw in the storm clouds for effect, to give the story some yang and make it more engaging. In the end, science is good, and progress is inevitable-- so there's no way that the technology we're covering could be anything but good.

It was much easier for Hunter S. Thompson to write about drugs. I would argue that technology colors our pop culture far more than the drug culture affected the 60s, but let's still look at what made Thompson's job so cushy. Technology is the province of geeks, a sterile, above-board, carefully marketed phenomenon; drugs are underground, illegal, and risky. You can call Apple if your iPod falls in the toilet, but if you lose your stash, you're on your own. Hiding pot from your parents is daring, while programming their TiVO for them is not. So if you were to try to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but update it as Fear and Loathing at the E3 Expo-- well, you can tell how compelling that ain't.

But there's another reason drugs make a better subject than technology: People understand and accept how drugs affect us, but we think we're safe from our electronics. It's a cliché to write a screed about the first time you got high, or to shoot a movie that simulates or stimulates an acid trip. But with all of these drugs, we still believe they have a compelling effect on human beings. Pot makes you slow and stupid. Heroin is destructively addictive. Acid makes you smell colors and fart light.

Technology also affects us-- biologically, deeply, and psychologically. The web screwed up my short term memory; why do I need to keep movie trivia in my head if I can just look it up at imdb.com? And 9/11 was a technology story, because almost none of us were there-- but we saw the images filtered through television and the internet. I first heard about 9/11 when I booted my laptop and read a terse, text headline about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. Five years later, every morning, I still open my browser and read the headlines, and I'm always wondering: What blew up last night? When will the other shoe drop?

The pop culture we're supposed to be covering understands this better than we seem to. The Matrix and cyberpunk got us started, and it's only gotten better: The Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" combines a rigorous allegory for the war on terror with a war against technology, where the enemy is a mob of computers that knows us, imitates us, and gets inside our heads. In music, bands like the Books blur the once-obvious lines between the electronic and the acoustic to create an organic fusion of the two. And we play video games and they play us: The console and the gamer affect each other in hundreds of ways, stimulating our sight and blurring our hearing, and teasing us with the illusion of control and then yanking it away.

So what are the scribblers missing? People seem to be unhappy with modern music crit, maybe because we haven't digested the real changes in the music we're listening to: after all, nothing in music today-- from the recycling of old trends, to the flattening of the historical timeline, to the rise of self-made artists-- makes sense without the Internet, yet we've barely taken a yardstick to its impact.

Games crit is another great example. Chuck Klosterman-- and he's far from the first-- bemoaned the lack of good game critics, but of course, plenty of people make a living writing serious and sometimes striking reviews. I'm guessing the root cause of Klostermann's argument is that no great critics have emerged, and by that he means he's never been at a big lit/journo cocktail party and heard anybody say, "You've gotta read THIS WRITER. I could give a damn about gaming, but whoa, s/he writes about games like a house on fire!" Nobody has shown up with that bowl-you-over voice that takes a seemingly alien and marginal activity-- an activity that, like drugs, many in the audience will never even try-- and turns it into a must-read experience.

Instead, tech magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints. And who else is out there in the popular press? We know that our readers probably play an Internet-enabled XBox 360 that can pipe movie trailers while they're listening to an iPod and instant messaging their friends on a laptop. But what's the real story-- that we're entertained? We almost need a refresher course in media studies, á la Marshall McLuhan. We should start with McLuhan's quote-- "After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace"-- and step by step, relearn our relationship to the world.

‘Cause it's only getting stranger from here. On the horizon, we can already see new shifts in our self-understanding with the 3-D virtual worlds of World of Warcraft or, stranger still, Second Life. Men give birth. Gamblers lose at Russian Roulette. Celebrities pretend they're nobodies. And everybody has sex with everything. This isn't a novelty, or a fetish: It's self-psychoanalysis, and it draws on everything from sexuality to art to commerce to leisure. And as we spend more of our lives online, more of our experience of the world takes place entirely in our own heads-- and our imagination is being rewired by computers.

The tech press says we're at a buffet of gadgets and gizmos; but we should be knocking over the table and eating off the floor. We have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us. And whoever does that, wins the title of "the next..."
http://pitchforkmedia.com/article/fe..._Your_Mouth_27





Celebrity News Site Breaks Gibson Story
Sandy Cohen

Breaking the Mel Gibson arrest story was the latest coup for Harvey Levin and his staff of 25 at the fledgling entertainment Web site TMZ.com.

On Monday, Levin spoke to more than 40 news outlets, from CNN to The New York Times, about how TMZ got the Gibson exclusive.

But this isn't the first story the site has broken. The day it was launched last November, it posted video of the fender-bender Paris Hilton and then-boyfriend Stavros Niarchos III were in outside a Hollywood nightclub. TMZ was also the first to obtain Suri Cruise's birth certificate and court documents in Michael Jackson's custody case, Levin said.

"We're not into doing these kind of wax figures on the red carpet (stories)," Levin told The Associated Press on Monday. "We're not beholden to publicists. We've kind of created our own path here."

The site, a partnership between Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Telepictures Productions, was designed to report "entertainment news in real time in an unvarnished way," said Levin, 55, an attorney who has worked as a journalist for 30 years.

Besides breaking stories, TMZ features video clips of spontaneous celebrity encounters, star gossip, music and film blogs and links to dozens of other entertainment Web sites.

"I think it's having an impact because we're not doing things the same way as everybody else," Levin said. "We're a real, functioning newsroom that publishes on demand. We don't have time periods like TV shows and we don't have publishing cycles like newspapers and magazines have."

Still, the site is scrupulous about its facts, Levin said.

"Every single word is fact-checked and also lawyered," he said.

That makes it journalism, said Bryce Nelson, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.

"Anything that's accurate and newsworthy is journalism," he said. "If Web sites break things that conventional media is interested in, they're having an effect on journalism."

Conventional news outlets often feel pressure to match or follow stories first reported on Web sites, Nelson said.

After learning of Gibson's arrest Friday, Levin said his staff started getting tips about Gibson's inflammatory language and a possible Sheriff's Department cover-up. Even though Levin was "100 percent" sure of the story, he said he still had "a knot in (his) stomach" when he sent it into cyberspace.

Jim Bankoff, executive vice president of AOL, said he expected TMZ to be popular because of the insatiable thirst for celebrity news and the absence of a broadband video channel devoted to it.

Still, the 9-month-old site has "exceeded my high expectations," Bankoff told the AP.

Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions, said that breaking the Gibson story gives visitors an idea of the potential of TMZ, which stands for Thirty Mile Zone - a film industry term referring to the immediate area around Los Angeles where filming can occur without added out-of-town labor costs.

"The Mel Gibson story establishes us as a legitimate, credible journalism institution," he said. "We're covering the world of entertainment and celebrities but it's more than just gossip. We also cover the news in a very credible way."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-09-09-38





Google, AP Disclose News Payment Deal
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. is paying The Associated Press for stories and photographs, settling a dispute with a major provider of the copyright news that the online search engine finds and displays on its popular Web site.

Both Mountain View-based Google and New York-based AP disclosed the business relationship Wednesday. But neither would divulge financial terms or other details because of a nondisclosure agreement.

Google indicated AP's content will serve as the foundation for a new product that will be introduced in the coming months as complement to its popular Google News service.

That aspect of the deal could be intended to support Google's long-held stance that it doesn't owe anything for simply pointing out news stories and photographs posted on Web sites - an activity that the company's lawyers maintain is protected under "fair use" protections under copyright law.

That posture prompted another news organization, Agence France Presse, to sue Google in federal court last year. It is seeking at least $17.5 million in damages for alleged copyright infringement.

Google has denied AFP's allegations, citing its fair use arguments.

"Google News is fully consistent with fair use and always has been," the company reiterated in a statement Wednesday.

Still, AFP is hoping the AP licensing agreement will bolster its argument as the suit winds its way through a Washington, D.C. court, said Joshua Kaufman, a lawyer for the French news agency.

For its part, Google depicted the AP deal as business as usual.

"Google has always believed that content providers and publishers should be fairly compensated for their work so they can continue producing high quality information," the company said in a statement.

Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said this isn't the first time the company has paid media for content, noting that the search engine already shares some of its revenue with broadcasters and book publishers to sell some of their copyrighted material on the site.

Google's deal with the AP began several months ago, said Jane Seagrave, the AP's vice president of new media markets.

Both Seagrave and Boralv declined to say if Google is paying AP a flat fee or a commission based on traffic.

Google might be using the AP agreement as a testing ground to share some of its ad revenue with organizations that produce content just as it does with Web sites that publish the information, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. During the first half of this year, Google distributed $1.5 billion to the thousands of partners participating in the ad network that generates virtually all the search engine's profits.

"I would be shocked if Google is paying for the status quo," Zittrain said.

Google has argued that news providers benefit from their stories being highlighted in its searches since it drives traffic to their Web sites, where they can earn per-click advertising revenue. The AP does not have a news site of its own and its stories typically are accessed through the sites of newspapers, broadcasters and other customers.

While AFP sued to protect its rights, the AP chose to negotiate terms with Google, which, after just seven years of existence, is nearly 10 times larger than the 160-year-old news cooperative in terms of revenue. The AP, a not-for-profit organization owned by U.S. news companies, had revenues of $654 million in 2005. Google, a publicly owned company, reported $6.1 billion in revenue last year and is on a pace to exceed $9 billion this year.

By agreeing to pay AP for content, Google falls in line with the owners of other popular news sites like Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, which have been anteing up for years.

"We are happy to be dealing with Google as we are with all the major superpowers on the Internet," Seagrave said. "We are always looking for new ways to innovate."

The AP also has been plumbing new sources of revenue more aggressively in recent years as newspapers and broadcasters - traditionally the cooperative's main source of money - have been squeezed financially by the rise of the Internet.

Seagrave said online sources now account for about 20 percent of the AP's revenue.

The percentage "is growing fast and the increase will hasten in the next few years," Seagrave predicted. "It is clear the Internet is changing the way business is being conducted."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-21-34-21





Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites
Bob Tedeschi

Want the latest news on Floyd Landis’s positive drug test from The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times or USA Today?

Soon, it will all be on Washingtonpost.com.

The Washington Post, The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoman, in Oklahoma City, have contracted with an online news aggregator, Inform.com, to scan hundreds of news and blog sites and deliver content related to articles appearing on their Web sites, regardless of who published those articles. Links to those articles will appear in a box beside the site’s original article or within the text of the story.

Newspaper Web sites, which commonly post articles from sister publications, wire services and even blogs, have typically stopped short of providing generous doses of news from competitors. The move made by these papers is not a result of cooperation across the industry as it is a counterattack by publishers against Google and Yahoo, which have stolen readers and advertisers from newspapers in recent years, both with their search engines and their own news aggregation services.

“This lets us be a search engine,” said Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, which publishes the Oklahoman and its Web site, NewsOK.com. “We look at it like we just hired 30,000 journalists, because now we can give you our story and what the rest of the world is saying about it.”

The site’s roughly 700,000 registered users view about 36 million pages online each month, with each user viewing three to five pages per visit. And that is not enough to satisfy the demands of advertisers. Because Inform gives readers an easy way to find related stories that were published earlier on NewsOK.com, Ms. Fry said she expected the number of page views on the site to increase by at least threefold.

“People aren’t just reading one story,” she said. “They’ll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site.”

For a newspaper industry that has watched its advertisers flee to cable television, junk mail and Web sites like Google, Yahoo and Craigslist, online advertising revenues have become Topic A in boardrooms and newsrooms alike. While growing, these Web sales have not been enough to offset the cash lost to other media.

Online media outlets like Slate or Salon prominently feature their links to other sites and some, particularly blogs, are built around the strength of their links. But newspapers have been reluctant to direct readers outside their own gates. These deals with Inform are but one indication that newspapers may be reconsidering long-held beliefs about how to compete, and cooperate, with other publishers.

“Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites,” said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. “But ultimately, people will go where they want to go.”

“To the extent we can provide them more Washington Post video or more information from around the Web, we’re all for it,” Ms. Little added. “And we get the benefit of that, too, because we get a lot of referrals from the Web, also.”

Inform, which is privately-held and based in New York, would not say how much revenue these deals were expected to generate. The company says it was able to convince publishers to try its linking service because newspapers had already seen success in putting up related content, but found no reliable or easy way to automate the process.

This, analysts say, is the selling point of services like Inform, which costs between a few thousand and tens of thousands of dollars monthly. A site like NewsOK.com attracts frequent users, but they only read a few pages per visit, hardly the kind of audience that will help newspapers replace revenues from their shrinking paper editions.

The amount of revenue gleaned from a newspaper’s Web site varies widely depending on the publication, but according to the Newspaper Association of America, 5.5 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenues come from their online divisions.

“Newspaper sites have a lot of rich content, but they have trouble helping people see all that’s there on their sites,” said Greg Sterling, an online media analyst. “This creates many more opportunities for readers to drill down on a topic, and that means more opportunities for advertising revenue.”

Web sites that already work with Inform, like the Daily Oklahoman’s Web site, surround stories with related links from the newspaper’s current edition and its archives, as well as links to related stories, videos, blogs, slide shows and podcasts from other sites. Links also appear in the text of stories.

For instance, a story last week about an injured Marine returning home to the state was mostly bordered by links to stories from the Daily Oklahoman about the war in Iraq. But links on the left of the story and highlighted words within the story also led to a list of articles from Newsweek, The New York Times and smaller regional publications, as well as blog postings.

These links did not whisk readers away to another site. They instead opened a new window in the browser with the new story so readers could keep their original NewsOK page up.

Ms. Little said the Washington Post Web site would begin using Inform’s service in September or October, and would initially surround its stories with related content from other Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive sites, like Slate.com, Newsweek.com and BudgetTravelOnline.com. After that, it would include links to stories from around the Web, possibly from other nationally-oriented newspapers.

There are instances where the Post’s Web site already links to stories from these competitors. For instance, in the online version of his “White House Briefing” column last week, Dan Froomkin included a link to a New York Times story from the previous week. According to Jim Brady, the executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, reporters or Web producers can insert links to another paper’s site when they see fit.

“We think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Brady said. “It seems limiting to tell people about something another news organization has reported and not point them to it. It goes against the Web’s DNA.”

But the Inform service will generate links automatically. To put a link within or near a story now (as Mr. Froomkin’s did), most publications must do so manually or at least review the link that its technology system has suggested. Inform’s technology scans each story from a client’s Web site as well as other content from the Web, then automatically inserts links on the client’s site. Inform also updates the links continuously to point readers to more recent content.

Inform’s executives said that competing publishers are generally pleased to be linked to, given that it helps attract readers they might not otherwise find.

The New York Times has no plans to use Inform, according to Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman. Ms. Mathis said the Web site planned to link to bloggers on various topics in the future, using technology from Blogrunner, which the Times bought last year for an undisclosed sum.

“So we have both of the elements of Inform,” Ms. Mathis said. Not only does the company link to related stories from within the Times organization, but “we have the ability to go outside and grab other high-quality information on related topics that would be useful to a reader.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te...gy/31ecom.html





U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records
Adam Liptak

A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday.

The 2-to-1 decision, from a court historically sympathetic to claims that journalists should be entitled to protect their sources, reversed a lower court and dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.

The dissenting judge said that the government had failed to demonstrate it truly needed the records and that efforts to obtain reporters’ phone records could alter the way news gathering was conducted.

The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take against two Islamic charities, Holy Land Foundation in Texas and Global Relief Foundation in Illinois. Though the government contended that calls from the reporters tipped off the charities to impending raids and asset seizures, the investigation appears to be focused on identifying the reporters’ sources. No testimony has been sought from the reporters, and there has been no indication that their actions are a subject of the investigation.

“No grand jury can make an informed decision to pursue the investigation further, much less to indict or not indict, without the reporters’ evidence,” Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote for majority, in an opinion joined by Judge Amalya Lyle Kearse. “We see no danger to a free press in so holding. Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes/searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential, or even common, to journalism.”

George Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, disputed the majority’s characterization. Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, he said, “were conducting their journalistic duties by getting reaction to an ongoing story.”

Mr. Freeman added: “The move against the charities was not a surprise. No one has ever alleged that any federal agent was hindered or hurt or didn’t succeed.”

Mr. Freeman said The Times had not decided whether to pursue an appeal, either to the full appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, or to the United States Supreme Court.

Ms. Miller, who retired from The Times last year, said she was very disappointed. “That this was 2-to-1 showed how close these issues are and the need for a federal shield law to protect journalists, their telephone numbers and hence their sources,” she said.

In an unrelated case last year, a federal appeals court in Washington ordered Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, to testify before a grand jury about conversations with their sources. They did so after receiving their sources’ permission, though not before Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald was the prosecutor in both cases, though he acted as United States attorney in Chicago in the charities case and as special counsel in the Washington case. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.

While yesterday’s decision represented a clear loss for The Times, the majority ruled for the paper on several subsidiary points and left open the possibility that it would protect reporters’ sources in cases involving other kinds of reporting.

The majority said, for instance, that the paper had been entitled to bring a civil suit in New York to challenge a grand jury subpoena in Chicago. It also said that whatever protections the reporters had against being called to testify about their sources also extended to their phone records. And it said that “courts can easily find appropriate means of protecting the journalists involved and their sources” where “government corruption or misconduct” is involved.

But the court rejected The Times’s central argument, saying that neither the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, which considered the scope of the protections offered by the First Amendment, nor later developments in other areas of the law provided the paper with the ability to protect the phone records at issue in the case.

The majority ruled that the government could overcome any privilege that even a broad reading of the Branzburg decision allowed. It also declined to adopt a so-called common-law evidentiary privilege based on the shield laws almost all states have adopted, saying the government could similarly defeat any plausible version of such a privilege.

In seeming to acknowledge the existence of privilege, though one subject to a balancing test, the decision differed from the one issued by the federal appeals court in Washington last year that sent Ms. Miller to jail.

“There is a lot more to be heard from the courts before this issue is resolved one way or the other,” said Floyd Abrams, who represented The Times in both cases.

In his dissent, Judge Robert D. Sack said the government had not shown that the phone records contained important information that could not be obtained elsewhere. Judge Sack added a cautionary note about the consequences of unfettered access to reporters’ phone records.

“Reporters might find themselves,” he said, “as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs — by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate.”

Judge Winter was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Kearse by President Jimmy Carter and Judge Sack by President Bill Clinton.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/wa...rtner=homepage





Blog Feeds May Carry Security Risk
By Joris Evers

Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warns.

Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics, said Thursday in a presentation at the Black Hat security event here.

The problem doesn't affect only blogs--any kind of information feed using any kind of format could potentially be used to transmit malicious content to a subscriber, Auger said. People, for example, subscribe to mailing lists and news Web sites via RSS, he said, noting "this is about the entire concept of Web feeds."

SPI Dynamics examined a number of online and offline applications used to read RSS and Atom feeds. In many cases, any JavaScript code delivered on the feed would run on the user's PC, meaning it could be vulnerable to attack, Auger said. JavaScript is a scripting language that experts say is increasingly causing security concerns.

Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, Auger said. "A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said.

Also, attackers could send malicious code to mailing lists that offer RSS or Atom feeds and commandeer vulnerable systems that way, Auger said. Feeds are popular because they let people consolidate information streams from multiple sites, such as blogs, in one application, called a feed reader, removing the need to surf to multiple sites.

Many of the popular feed reading applications are faulted because the designers have failed to add valuable security checks, Auger said. In particular, the applications should not allow JavaScript that is included in feeds to run. Instead, it should be filtered out, he said.

Additionally, some reader software on Windows systems uses Internet Explorer to display feed content, but doesn't use basic security settings that isolate the content. Instead, the JavaScript is downloaded to the PC and has full access, which can fully expose a person's PC, Auger said.

"A large percentage of the readers I tested had some kind of an issue," he said. In his presentation, Auger listed Bloglines, RSS Reader, RSS Owl, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader as vulnerable.

As protection, people could switch to a nonvulnerable reader. Also, feed publishers could ensure that their feeds don't include malicious JavaScript or any script at all, Auger said. Some services, however, rely on JavaScript to deliver ads in feeds, he noted.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6102171.html





Facts Refute Filmmaker’s Assertions on Income Tax in ‘America’
David Cay Johnston

Aaron Russo, the producer of films like “Trading Places” and “The Rose,” promotes his new film, “America: From Freedom to Fascism,” which opened Friday, as having had its international premiere before a packed audience “during the Cannes Film Festival.”

The film was not on the program at Cannes, however, not even for screenings made under the festival’s aegis without being in the awards competition. Mr. Russo, the film’s director, writer and producer, just set up an inflatable screen on a beach. Photographs posted at one of Mr. Russo’s Web sites depict an audience of fewer than 50 people spread out on a platform on the sand.

Hyping films with fanciful claims is nothing new in Hollywood. But examination of the assertions in Mr. Russo’s documentary, which purports to expose “two frauds” perpetrated by the federal government, taxing wages and creating the Federal Reserve to coin money, shows that they too collapse under the weight of fact.

Still, at free showings the film has drawn long lines of people eager to watch a documentary that feeds on the estrangement many Americans feel from their government, especially those who believe they played by the rules and yet see their finances strained or broken. Many of the reviews in major newspapers have accepted as having some factual basis the film’s main contention, that the government illegally extracts income taxes, even though every court that has ever ruled on these issues has upheld the constitutionality of the income tax.

The film’s appeal, Mr. Russo said during a phone interview last week, is not left or right, but concentrated among those who see the United States evolving into a police state ruled by an oligarchy that has tricked Americans into paying taxes.

Not mentioned in the film is that Mr. Russo has more than $2 million of tax liens filed against him by the Internal Revenue Service, California and New York for unpaid federal and state taxes. Mr. Russo declined to discuss the liens, saying they were not relevant to his film.

Early in the film Mr. Russo, the narrator, asserts that every president since Woodrow Wilson and every member of Congress has perpetrated a hoax to tax people’s wages and issue them dubious currency. All of the federal income tax revenue, the film says, goes to these bankers to pay interest on the national debt, even though by the broadest measure the federal government’s interest payments are less than 40 percent of the individual income taxes, according to an examination of every federal budget since 1995.

The film opens by calling the 16th Amendment and its subsequent income tax and the Federal Reserve the product of a “silent coup d’état” in 1913 by “international bankers.” In the style of low-budget television documentaries, photographs appear on screen of J. P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D. Rockefeller.

The documentary includes interviews with a host of people who are presented as experts, scholars and whistle-blowers. All deny the legitimacy of the income-tax laws, including Irwin Schiff, now serving his third prison term for tax crimes.

The cornerstone of Mr. Russo’s case is whether any law requires Americans to pay income taxes on wages.

Near the film’s beginning Mr. Russo says, and others appear on screen asserting, that the Internal Revenue Service has refused every request to show any law making Americans liable for an income tax on their wages.

Yet among those thanked in the credits for their help in making the film is Anthony Burke, an I.R.S. spokesman. Mr. Burke said that when Mr. Russo called him asking what law required the payment of income taxes on wages, he sent Mr. Russo a link to documents, including Title 26 of the United States Code, citing the specific sections that require income taxes be paid on wages. Title 26 says on its face that it is law enacted by Congress, but Mr. Russo denied this fact.

“Title 26,” Mr. Russo said in an interview last week, “is not the law, it is I.R.S. regulations and to be a law it has to be passed by Congress.” Mr. Russo added that he had studied the matter closely and was confident that he had the facts.

Arguments made in court that the income tax is invalid are so baseless that Congress has authorized fines of $25,000 for anyone who makes them. But even though the penalty was quintupled, from $5,000, it has not deterred those who assert this and other claims that Congress and the courts deemed “frivolous arguments.”

The film also states repeatedly that people are tricked into paying income taxes because no law makes them liable for taxes. The tax code uses the word impose, whose definition includes the concept of liability, courts have held in published decisions.

The film includes the voice of this reporter, off camera, asking the I.R.S. commissioner, Mark W. Everson, to answer protesters outside the Treasury building who wanted to know what law makes them liable for taxes. Mr. Everson then makes rambling comments without, as the film notes, answering the question.

Mr. Russo also said that “Congress has no authority to tax people’s labor.” Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution begins with the phrase “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes.”

Only three limitations are placed on that power, none of which bars a tax on wages. One limitation, however, was a requirement that taxes be “apportioned among the several states.”

The 16th Amendment repealed apportionment, but Mr. Russo says in the film that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified and thus a tax on wages is unconstitutional. This claim has been made in various forms by thousands of tax protesters since 1913, and so far their batting average with the courts is .000.

To buttress the claim that the 16th Amendment is invalid, the film displays a quotation from a federal district judge, James C. Fox. But the transcript from which the judge’s words were taken shows that while he spoke those words, they were in the context of laying out issues and that the conclusion he reached was the opposite of the words quoted.

Judge Fox, the transcript shows, concluded that no court would accept any argument that the 16th Amendment was not properly ratified and therefore invalid.

The film includes a brief interview with Sheldon Cohen, who was I.R.S. commissioner in the Johnson administration. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Russo used editing that “ twists my views” to create a false impression. Mr. Russo said he considered the assertion laughable.

Mr. Russo was Bette Midler’s manager for seven years early in his career and has produced music as well as films. He also sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president in 2004 but dropped out because of ill health.

Despite hundreds and perhaps thousands of tax protesters going to prison, and many more losing their homes and life savings, the movement appears today to be more widespread than ever.

“The tax protest movement is like a cult,” said J J MacNab, a Maryland insurance analyst who is writing a book about protesters and who has sat through six trials of people prosecuted for refusing to pay taxes under the theories espoused by Mr. Russo’s film.

One tax protester featured in the film, Irwin Schiff of Las Vegas, is now serving his third prison sentence after being convicted of tax evasion crimes. Mr. Schiff introduced into his criminal case the notes of his psychiatrist, who wrote that Mr. Schiff was a successful tax shelter salesman until a con artist ripped him and his clients off. The psychiatrist concluded that Mr. Schiff became delusional, believing he alone could properly interpret the tax code, as a way to avoid acknowledging reality.

Later, one of Mr. Schiff’s confederates, who was also later convicted and sent to prison, sent e-mail messages to supporters saying that the psychiatrist’s notes were introduced as part of a ruse to help Mr. Schiff escape prosecution.

Ms. MacNab, who has testified before Congress, said that at each of the trials prosecutors showed how the accused took out of context sections of the law and court decisions while ignoring other sections, including those shown to them by I.R.S. agents.

“People who are drawn into this movement just refuse to acknowledge facts that show their beliefs have no basis in fact,” she said. “Most of them have failed, their business has failed, their marriage has failed, and instead of taking responsibility for it they want to blame the government.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/movies/31russ.html





Live Nation to Buy Fan-Club Web Site

Concert promoter Live Nation said Monday it would take a majority stake in Musictoday, a six-year-old company that connects music fans and artists. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Live Nation, which was spun off from Clear Channel Communications late last year, said Musictoday had more than $100 million in sales in 2005.

Musictoday runs fan-club Web sites for bands such as Nine Inch Nails and the Backstreet Boys. Its founder, Coran Capshaw, will continue to run the company, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

In early July, Live Nation agreed to buy House of Blues, which operates a chain of live music venues, for $350 million in cash.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=5892





Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, Music & Comedy
Wobbel

Free Movies & Films
• Free Documentaries
• Free Instructional & Educational Films
• Free Cartoons & Animations
• Free Music (live concerts mostly)
• Free Stand-up & Entertainment Shows

Yup, all free & public domain, so no (more) copyrights
http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=10270






Federal Judge Throws Out Minnesota's Video Game Law
Martiga Lohn

A federal judge on Monday threw out a pending state law that would have fined minors for obtaining adult-only video games, saying it was unconstitutional.

The law - one of several attempts across the country to prevent minors from getting gruesome or sexually explicit video games - was scheduled to take effect Tuesday.

It would have fined youths under age 17 $25 for renting or buying video games designed for adults - those rated "M" for mature or "AO" for adults only. The law also would have required stores to post warning signs about the fines.

Video game makers sued to stop the law, saying it violated the right to free speech.

U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum agreed. His ruling also said the state failed to show that the graphic video games are harmful to children.

"There is a paucity of evidence linking the availability of video games with any harm to Minnesota's children at all," he wrote.

He also said: "It is impossible to determine from the data presented whether violent video games cause violence, or whether violent individuals are attracted to violent video games."

Attorney General Mike Hatch said he was disappointed by the ruling and will probably appeal.

"There's been some pretty good evidence that children who use these excessively violent video games really learn inappropriate behavior and they're rewarded for inappropriate behavior - how many people do you kill and things like that," Hatch said.

Minnesota lawmakers hoped their approach - penalizing the minors who got the games, instead of the retailers who sold or rented them - would have fared better in court than overturned state laws that went after retailers in Illinois, California, Michigan and elsewhere.

At a news conference earlier this year, the bill's sponsors played clips that showed players killing, dismembering, urinating on and setting fire to characters to score points.

"One of the most popular games in America teaches a little boy how to have sex with a prostitute and then beat her to death, and then rewards that," said Rep. Jeff Johnson, who sponsored the bill in the House. "I think some small restriction on that is reasonable."

But a 2003 ruling by a U.S. Court of Appeals panel for the 8th Circuit, which covers Minnesota, will make an appeal difficult, said Paul Smith, who represented the Entertainment Software Association and the Entertainment Merchants Association in the lawsuit.

That ruling said video games are a protected form of expression.

"The lawmakers are very much aware that they're passing laws that are of very doubtful constitutionality," Smith said. "It doesn't seem to affect their decision-making."

The video game industry has a voluntary ratings system of six categories, ranging from "EC" for early childhood to the adults-only tag.

In a prepared statement, EMA president Bo Andersen said video game retailers enforce the ratings, preventing minors from getting mature games against their parents' wishes.
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/15165094.htm





Cell phone picture called obstruction of justice

Man Arrested For Shooting Photo Of Police Activity

A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.

The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone's camera. They told their story to Harry Hairston and the NBC 10 Investigators.

"I was humiliated. I was embarrassed, you know," Cruz said.

Cruz, 21, told the NBC 10 Investigators that police arrested him last Wednesday for taking a picture of police activity with his cell phone.

Police at the 35th district said they were in Cruz's neighborhood that night arresting a drug dealer.

Cruz said that when he heard a commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell phone to see what was happening. He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture of the scene.

"I opened (the phone) and took a shot," Cruz said.

Moments later, Cruz said he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his back yard gate.

"He opened the gate and took me by my right hand," Cruz said.

Cruz said the officer threw him onto a police car, cuffed him and took him to jail.

A neighbor said she witnessed the incident and could not believe what she saw.

"He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, 'You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'" said Gerrell Martin.

Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

"They threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of an investigation. … They said, 'You were impeding this investigation.' (I asked,) "By doing what?' (The officer said,) 'By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone,'" Cruz said.

Cruz's parents, who got him out of jail, said police told them the same thing.

"He said he was taking pictures with his cell phone and that was obstructing an investigation," said Aracelis Cruz, Neftaly Cruz's mother.

The NBC 10 Investigators asked the ACLU union how they viewed the incident.

"There is no law that prevents people from taking pictures of what anybody can see on the street," said Larry Frankel of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I think it's rather scary that in this country you could actually be taken down to police headquarters for taking a picture on your cell phone of activities that are clearly visible on the street."

Frankel said Cruz's civil rights might have been violated.

"He was unlawfully seized, which is a violation of the 4th amendment the last time we checked," Frankel said.

Cruz, a Penn State University senior, said that after about an hour police told him he was lucky because there was no supervisor on duty, so they released him.

"They said if the supervisor was there I wouldn't be a free man and that he is letting me go because he felt that I was a good person," Cruz said.

Police told Hairston that they did take Cruz into to custody, but they said Cruz was not on his property when they arrested him. Police also denied that they told Cruze he was breaking the law with his cell phone. Cruz's family said they have filed a formal complaint with the police department's Internal Affairs division and are requesting a complete investigation.
http://www.nbc10.com/news/9574663/detail.html





Boston Plans To Have Nonprofit Run Citywide Wi-Fi Network
Mark Jewell

The city is considering an unusual approach to creating a citywide, low-cost wireless Internet network: putting a nonprofit organization, rather than a private service provider, in charge of building and running the system.

A task force on Monday recommended that Mayor Thomas Menino assign an as-yet unidentified nonprofit to raise the $16 million to $20 million in private money that the city estimates it will need to build and begin running the Wi-Fi network.

Other cities have generally relied on a single private contractor to assume upfront costs and financial risk for a chance to expand its business.

Although Boston's strategy depends on the willingness of foundations and businesses to come forward with cash donations, officials believe having an existing or newly formed nonprofit in charge is the best way to ensure the project meets its civic goals and steers clear of special interests.

"We believe the nonprofit route may be the best way to bring low-cost service to every neighborhood while providing a platform for innovation unlike any in the nation," Menino said at a news conference where he received a task force's recommendations.

Other U.S. cities launching wireless initiatives have created various layers of oversight to ensure private contractors serve the public interest by keeping prices down, expanding access to low-income neighborhoods, and, in some cases, opening up the network to rivals.

But Boston appears poised to go further than any other U.S. city by putting a nonprofit in charge as the network's developer and owner, outside experts said.

"I'm glad they've done something a little more creative than just having a private provider do it," said Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, a Web portal for information on municipal wireless projects.

But Glenn Fleishman, editor of the daily Web journal Wi-Fi Networking News, said he was not sure other cities would mimic Boston when they are "able to put out requests for proposals and getting companies knocking on their doors with offers to pay for the networks."

Philadelphia, for instance, chose EarthLink Inc. to build, manage and own its system and act as a wholesaler and retailer. The system there could start operating next year.

Boston is one of more than 250 communities nationwide that are preparing or have deployed Wi-Fi service, which uses radio waves to connect users to the Internet at high speeds. No major U.S. city has yet begun to offer citywide service, and organizers of Boston's initiative have no estimate when they will be able to bring wireless coverage to the city's 590,000 residents spread across 49 square miles.

Boston's proposal aims to reduce the price of broadband Internet access for city residents from an average of roughly $40 a month to $15 by having the nonprofit act as a wholesale seller of network capacity to existing sellers of Internet access. Those companies could offer low-cost or free ad-supported online connections.

City officials hope that even if some Internet providers do not participate, they would face pressure to cut prices for the existing services.

"We've identified a highly disruptive business model," said Rick Burnes, one of three co-chairs of a task force that spent five months developing the proposal. "By harnessing new technologies and implementing a unique network model, we can eliminate much of the cost of delivering broadband, thus providing an inexpensive platform for entrepreneurs while also bringing cheaper service to underserved populations."
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleA...bostonwifi.php





Wi-Fi for the Building? Depends on the Landlord
Alison Gregor

When the technology firm BlueSwitch needed new offices last year, it sought space offering wireless Internet access to minimize downtime during the relocation.

BlueSwitch, a 20-person company that specializes in Web sites and Web-based software, needed to provide services to clients continuously when relocating from its previous office in Downtown Manhattan, so the firm took about 3,000 feet at 61 Broadway, at Exchange Place. Broad Street Development, the landlord, has been retrofitting the entire 653,000-square-foot office building for wireless Internet at the request of tenants.

“We really had zero downtime,” said Alex Paskie, a co-owner and director of BlueSwitch. “We were able to access the Internet immediately, and even though we didn’t have furniture or soda to drink, we did have connectivity. For us, that’s the most important thing.”

Other companies, however, may have more difficulty than BlueSwitch in finding wireless Internet access, particularly in Manhattan. Even in a business world where executives are increasingly mobile and working on laptops, most landlords say they have not experienced strong enough demand to warrant their investing in a system to provide wireless Internet in their buildings.

Most tenants are satisfied with offices hard-wired with broadband Internet access, landlords say.

“We have reviewed Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, a number of times,” said Robert Kantor, president of Time Equities, which has office properties around the country. “Our experience has been that Wi-Fi is used by people who are transient users, and even in our own office, where we thought about putting it in, there doesn’t seem to be a need.”

The Rockefeller Group, another nationwide owner of commercial space, announced in 2003, when the technology was relatively new, that it would install wireless Internet access in five of its office buildings. The company has since backed off.

“None of our tenants were really demanding it at the time,” said Brian Mahoney, a company spokesman.

The Rockefeller Group does have Wi-Fi, however, in the sunken plaza of the McGraw-Hill Building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas. Some landlords have chosen to offer the service in lobbies or plazas to attract users to the spaces, said Stephen D. Heyman, president of Realinsight, which does project management for company relocations, including coordination of information technology services. “If you’ve got a plaza area, it’s a nice amenity to have,” Mr. Heyman said.

Some huge mixed-use complexes built by commercial development companies in recent years have included multimillion-dollar infrastructures providing wireless services, but this service seems aimed primarily at potential buyers of very high-end apartments. The Related Companies, developer of the Time Warner Center at 10 Columbus Circle, which includes the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and luxury condominiums, and Vornado Realty Trust, which built 731 Lexington Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets, which also includes luxury condominiums, have provided wireless service that goes well beyond Internet access.

These wireless distribution systems, installed by InnerWireless, a company in Richardson, Tex., cost anywhere from 75 cents to $2 a square foot to put in — which could reach into the millions of dollars for a very large development.

The antennas installed as part of such a system can be used with many kinds of wireless communications, like mobile phones and hand-held computing devices, which often lose signals in office buildings, along with two-way radios and public safety devices.

InnerWireless has also provided wireless distribution systems for a dozen large companies in New York City and the surrounding area, though company representatives would not reveal names.

When tenants need nothing more sophisticated than simple Internet access, however, many simply set up their own systems, and this may be dissuading landlords from making the investment, Mr. Heyman said. “I don’t think anybody’s looking for the landlord to do it,” he said.

He said some businesses with frequent visitors or sales agents popping in and out might benefit from the convenience of wireless Internet, but its role as a technological advance might be minimal.

“Over the years, buildings have set themselves up and called themselves ‘intelligent buildings,’ but you have to separate the whipped cream from the sundae,” he said.

Gregg Popkin, a senior managing director at the commercial real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis, said the current market for office space in Manhattan and some other major cities was so tight — with vacancy rates in the single digits — that landlords had no need to provide an amenity like Wi-Fi.

“Years ago, landlords might have sought to incorporate this type of technology into their building and then sell the service back with a markup,” he said.

Nowadays, the landlord might even charge the tenant for use of a building’s vertical riser to run the antenna needed to disperse the wireless signal. But typically, the landlord would not want to be involved in providing the service, because he “doesn’t want any liability if the system goes down,” Mr. Popkin said.

Wireless routers can cost as little as $100, so many businesses install their own. For larger businesses, with 100,000 square feet or more, installing wireless Internet access might be less costly than hard-wiring all work stations, Mr. Popkin said.

Still, Broad Street Development has received so many requests from tenants for Wi-Fi at 61 Broadway — especially smaller tenants ranging from 4,000 to 5,000 square feet — that in the future it plans to outfit all of its office buildings with wireless Internet, including a 296,000-square-foot building at 370 Lexington Avenue.

“It’s an investment into the real estate, but what we’ve found is it sets us apart in terms of appealing to tenants,” said Daniel M. Blanco, executive vice president of Broad Street Development.

The company providing the wireless Internet infrastructure at 61 Broadway, which is 33 stories tall, is Advanced Digital Networks, which typically charges $2,500 to $10,000 a building, said Tamer Zakhary, the company’s president and chief executive. While operating this system costs landlords nothing, other wireless infrastructures can have annual operating costs of 12 to 15 percent of the installation cost, he said.

Besides Broad Street Development, Advanced Digital Networks has done work for New York City landlords like the Rudin Management Company, and for commercial real estate services companies like GVA Williams, Newmark Knight Frank and Cushman & Wakefield, Mr. Zakhary said.

But, in general, New York City is said to be behind many of the country’s other large cities in offering wireless Internet to tenants of office buildings. “New York City is not even close to other cities,” Mr. Zakhary said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/re...al/02wifi.html





Choo choo ch-boogie

Wireless Train Hits Rails In California
Rachel Konrad

The nation's first mass-transit train with wireless Internet access rolled through Silicon Valley this week, offering laptop-lugging testers access to the Web and e-mail without forcing them to peck at tiny phone or BlackBerry keyboards.

Nomad Digital Ltd. and Intel Corp. outfitted the Caltrain light-rail vehicle with WiMAX-based technology, which provided continuous high-speed Internet access between the popular Millbrae and Palo Alto stations. The train reached 79 mph while testers from the companies watched streaming video, composed e-mail and completed a large file download at broadband speeds.

The system links the train to track-side wireless base stations, with radios located every few miles along the rail. Caltrain might also use the technology to monitor train speeds and security cameras.

Randy Rudolph, Caltrain's chief information officer, said the successful debut means the company can introduce the technology along the entire line, from Gilroy north through San Jose to San Francisco. It will likely be available within two months. Caltrain does not plan to charge extra for the service.

Hexham, England-based Nomad has installed similar systems in the United Kingdom and Holland, and now is working on wireless projects in China, the Middle East and South America.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-18-33-19





The Green WiFi Mission
Web Copy

Green WiFi is committed to providing solar powered access to global information and educational resources for developing nation K-12 school children striving for knowledge in a digitally divided world. There are approximately 3 billion people under the age of 15 living in developing nations. 42 percent of the developing world's population is below the age of 15. Green WiFi was founded on the principle that the welfare of our world is dependent, in large part, on providing these children with free and open access to the world's information.

As business people, we recognize the inherent infrastructure and associated cost challenges of providing free and ubiquitous internet access to developing nations. This is why Green WiFi has developed a WiFi solution that leverages low cost components, the latest advancements in solar power technologies, open source software and Java to deliver a self sustaining, self healing, WiFi grid network solution that is cost effective and easy to deploy.

Why Green WiFi? A number of non profit entities focus on addressing the digital divide by providing internet access to developing areas. Green WiFi addresses one of the biggest barriers to success: the lack of reliable electricity in developing areas required to power the network. Green WiFi has developed a low cost, solar-powered, standardized WiFi access solution that runs out-of-the-box with no systems integration or power requirements. All that is required is a single source of broadband access. Green WiFi nodes can then be deployed on rooftops to form a self-healing network that hops the source signal over a virtual 802.11b/g grid. Because these nodes require no fixed installation or power tie-ins, these nodes can form an unplanned, mobile grid that can grow or be relocated as needed. Green WiFi aims to compliment and extend the power and promise of initiatives such as the UN/MIT One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, Intel's World Ahead Program and other NGO efforts dedicated to providing affordable computing capabilities to developing areas by providing critical last mile access; last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun.
http://www.green-wifi.org/





Hacked Mac

Experts Discuss Wireless Vulnerability
Dan Goodin

Some computers with wireless Internet capabilities are vulnerable to attacks that could expose passwords, bank account details and other sensitive information even if the machines aren't actually online, researchers said here Wednesday.

The researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a computer-security conference, showing how to take complete control of a MacBook from Apple Computer Inc. But the two researchers, David Maynor, 28, and Jon Ellch, a 24-year-old who prefers to go by his hacker handle Johnny Cache, said the technique will work on an array of machines, including those that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and the free Linux operating system.

"The problem itself isn't really an Apple problem," said Maynor, a researcher at SecureWorks Inc., a network-monitoring company. "This is a systemic problem across the industry."

The technique, detailed during the first day of the Black Hat conference, has broad implications for the large number of people who over the past five years have grown accustomed to connecting to the Internet wirelessly while sitting in airports, hotels and cafes.

"It's an alarming weakness," said Phil Zimmermann, a software engineer who specializes in data security. "Now I would rather connect using an ethernet cable," he said, referring to the term for wired Internet connections.

Maynor and Cache showed a room of about 300 attendees a video in which they dropped what is known as a "root kit" into a MacBook by exploiting a weakness found in a wireless card, a component that uses radio waves to connect to the Internet. A root kit is a virtually undetectable program that criminals can use to do things such as log passwords and gain access to sensitive files.

Maynor was able to create, read and delete files on the Apple laptop. The MacBook, which was running a fully patched version of the latest Apple operating system, showed no indication that it had been compromised.

The MacBook used in the demonstration was not using the wireless gear that shipped with the computer. Instead, they used a third-party wireless card that they declined to name.

Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox declined to comment.

The researchers were not identifying the makers or models of wireless devices that are vulnerable, so that manufacturers have a leg up on criminals who might use that information to exploit the vulnerabilities. But Maynor said the flaws are so common that he'd have no trouble walking into the typical Internet cafe and finding someone vulnerable.

"I have no doubt," he said in an interview following his presentation.

He said the technique could be useful in targeting specific people or specific groups of people who are in close proximity to an attacker - for instance, a cafe that is frequented by executives of a particular company.

The researchers declined to demonstrate the attack live because they said radio receivers in the room could allow people to detect their techniques and use them to commit crimes.

A computer need not be connected to the Internet to be infected. All that's required is that it have certain wireless devices installed and that those devices be turned on.

Wednesday's demonstration came four days after Intel Corp., the world's biggest chip maker, released security fixes for wireless capabilities it includes with many of the laptop processors it sells. One of the vulnerabilities fixed would have allowed someone to gain control over a computer using the Intel wireless gear.

Maynor said during his presentation that he and Cache did not provide technical details of the attack to Intel but couldn't rule out a connection between the findings and the Intel patch.

"It's pretty interesting, the timing of it," Maynor said. "It seemed a bit suspicious."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-21-56-49





Press Release

Worst Ever Security Flaw Found In Diebold Ts Voting Machine
Alan Dechert
Reference: Pictures

“This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner compared to the tested and certified version.

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS -- and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

Open Voting Foundation is releasing 22 high-resolution close up pictures of the system. This picture, in particular, shows a “BOOT AREA CONFIGURATION” chart painted on the system board.

The most serious issue is the ability to choose between "EPROM" and "FLASH" boot configurations. Both of these memory sources are present. All of the switches in question (JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2 and SW4) are physically present on the board. It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts votes. This could be done before or after the so-called "Logic And Accuracy Tests".

A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the "external flash" memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.

This is not a minor variation from the previously documented attack point on the newer Diebold TSx. To its credit, the TSx can only contain one boot profile at a time. Diebold has ensured that it is extremely difficult to confirm what code is in a TSx (or TS) at any one time but it is at least theoretically possible to do so. But in the TS, a completely legal and certified set of files can be instantly overridden and illegal uncertified code be made dominant in the system, and then this situation can be reversed leaving the legal code dominant again in a matter of minutes.

“These findings underscore the need for open testing and certification. There is no way such a security vulnerability should be allowed. These systems should be recalled”
http://openvotingfoundation.org/





Pinch My Ride

Ignition keys equipped with signal-emitting chips were supposed to put car thieves out of business. No such luck – but try telling that to your insurance company.
Brad Stone

Last summer Emad Wassef walked out of a Target store in Orange County, California, to find a big space where his 2003 Lincoln Navigator had been. The 38-year-old truck driver and former reserve Los Angeles police officer did what anyone would do: He reported the theft to the cops and called his insurance company.

Two weeks later, the black SUV turned up near the Mexico border, minus its stereo, airbags, DVD player, and door panels. Wassef assumed he had a straightforward claim for around $25,000. His insurer, Chicago-based Unitrin Direct, disagreed.

Wassef’s Navigator, like half of all late-model domestic cars on the road today, is equipped with a transponder antitheft system: The ignition key is embedded with a tiny computer chip that sends a unique radio signal to the vehicle’s onboard computer. Without the signal, the car won’t start. And Wassef still had both of his keys.

The insurance company sent a forensic examiner to check out the disemboweled SUV in an impound lot. The ignition lock, mounted on the steering column, had been forcibly rotated, probably with a screwdriver. The locking lug on the steering wheel, which keeps it from being turned when the truck is not in gear, had also been damaged. But the transponder system was intact. The car could have been shifted and steered, the investigator concluded, but the engine couldn’t have been turned on. “Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported,” the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying.

“I got shafted, basically,” Wassef says. He’s not the only one. US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by “transponder immobil-izers” can’t be driven without the proper keys – or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend. So car companies advertise their security systems as unbreakable, insurers and consumers believe these assertions, and then folks like Wassef find themselves engaged in all-out war when their cars vanish.

The insurance companies have good reason to be suspicious. They lose $14 billion to auto fraud every year in the US; by some measures, 20 percent of all stolen-car reports are trumped up. But when it comes to transponders, their faith is misplaced. Auto antitheft systems are usually secure for only a few years, until thieves crack the system. “The carmakers are calling these passive antitheft systems, but they’re not,” says Rob Painter, a Milwaukee-based forensic locksmith who has testified in dozens of auto insurance court cases, for both sides. “They are just theft deterrents. Tell me a car can’t be stolen and I’ll show you how to do it.”

Two years ago, my white 2003 Honda Civic – which my wife and I had affectionately named Honky – disappeared from the street in front of our San Francisco home. It has a transponder, and all three of our keys were accounted for (including the spare valet key). Police were polite but not much help; they speculated that thieves had towed the car away or hoisted it onto a flatbed truck and broken it down for parts.

But Honky materialized two weeks later on a side street near the ocean. It was out of gas and littered with cigarette butts and pirated Pantera CDs, but otherwise undamaged. The ignition cylinder was intact, and our keys still worked. The car was a living, gas-sipping rebuke of modern antitheft technology.

Mystified, I wrote up my experience for Newsweek’s Web site in early 2004. I figured that would be the end of the story, but I got hundreds of emails from people with similar tales. I’m still getting them – type “stolen car” into Google and my article is in the top 20.

The most stirring notes were from those who got spurned by their insurance companies. John Hutton, an architect from Fairfax, Virginia, lost his Acura RSX last fall and was reimbursed only after six months of aggressive wrangling with Geico. “The inspector treated me like I was a liar and a criminal,” Hutton says. “It all kept going back to the transponder system and their belief that ‘You can’t steal it! You can’t steal it!’” Sally Nguyen’s Acura TL went AWOL last New Year’s Eve and was later found gutted and submerged in the Sacramento River. When an investigator from her insurance company, Esurance, dropped by her house, he left a business card on which he’d scrawled, “Regarding your ‘stolen’ Acura.” Six months later, Esurance denied the claim, citing her car’s security system. Esurance wouldn’t talk to me about her case. Mohammad Awan lost his 2002 Ford Explorer last year; his son wrote to tell me that his insurer, Progressive, felt the existence of a transponder system – plus other “red flags,” like Awan’s outstanding debt – amounted to enough evidence to deny the claim. “Your vehicle is equipped with an immobilizing trans-ponder system which will not allow it to start without the use of a proper transponder key,” read the denial-of-claim letter.

Perhaps no story was worse than Wassef’s as he tried to deal with his stripped Navigator. Unitrin subjected him to a day-long deposition process called an “examination under oath.” Investigators asked about his collapsing marriage and demanded financial documents and telephone records. Wassef complied, believing he had nothing to hide. By June, with no reimbursement in sight, he filed a breach of contract suit. Meanwhile, he’s still paying $825.39 a month for an undrivable car. Unitrin did not return multiple calls regarding Wassef’s case.

Compared to Wassef, I got off easy – a couple hundred dollars for a detail job to eliminate the cigarette smell. But I found myself wrestling with a high tech quandary: What really happened to Honky? In other words, how do you steal the unstealable car?

The 1986 Corvette had the first electronic antitheft system, the Pass Key I. General Motors embedded a small pellet in the base of each key blade; when the key was inserted in the ignition slot, the car’s computer detected the electrical resistance of the pellet. There were just 15 assigned values, but Pass Key still revolutionized automobile security. For the first time, a crucial piece of a vehicle’s antitheft system existed outside the car.

The high lasted only a few years. People started complaining about not being able to replace lost keys easily, so GM opened a back door. Dealers and locksmiths got permission to stock key blanks, and by the early ’90s police were arresting car thieves who had rings of all 15 GM keys.

Of course, no security system is impreg-nable. Even the toughest wall safe is rated in terms of how long it would take a sufficiently motivated crook to bust it open with tools or a torch. As thieves gain experience, they can crack the safe faster and faster. Every security system goes through the same natural history. When new, it’s nearly unbeatable. But then users ask for more convenience and the keepers of the system relax the rules, or smart attackers study the system long enough to breach it. The system begins to fail, creating an evolutionary pressure that ultimately results in the development of a new model – and the cycle starts all over again.

That’s what happened a decade ago, when the rise of eastern European black markets sent auto theft rates skyrocketing in Europe. German insurance companies asked for new security precautions, and in 1995 BMW debuted a sophisticated antitheft system based on radio frequency identification chips. US and Japanese manufacturers quickly embraced the technology in their high-end models. Most of these new transponder-immobilizing systems – including the one in my Civic – use a “fixed” code. Insert the key into the ignition and a transceiver in the steering column pings a microchip in the key’s thick black plastic handle. The chip radios back an alphanumeric identifier of up to 32 characters, one of billions of possible combinations. The signal is only strong enough to travel about 7 inches, but when the car’s computer gets the right code, it activates the other onboard electronics. More expensive cars, like some Mercedes and Lexus models, use sophisticated “rolling” codes, generated anew after each start, passed to the key, and fed back for authorization during the next ignition cycle.

Like the Pass Key, the new RFID technology was extremely effective for a few years. Thefts of the 1997 Ford Mustang, one of the first US cars with a transponder, dropped 70 percent from 1995 levels. (The rest were attributed to tow-aways and stolen keys.) Insurance firms were elated. “There was -pretty much a God-given belief that if a car with a transponder was stolen, the owner was sunk,” says Larry Burzynski, a senior special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau. “The perception was that the theft had to be owner involvement.” Insurers pressed auto-makers to deploy the technology, and even now the most frequently stolen cars in the US were built before the transponder era – like the ’95 Civic and the ’89 Camry. Newer models make the list only when manufacturers forgo transponders.

TO car thieves, smart keys became little more than the latest challenge. By 2000, forensic locksmiths like Painter were demonstrating for juries how crooks were getting past the transponders in Fords: Pop the hood and pull a certain fuse from the power relay center in the upper left corner. Zap, you’re in.

Meanwhile, transponder-equipped cars were being resold to new owners, and keys were disappearing behind couch cushions. Auto-repair supply and locksmithing companies started selling devices like the Code-Seeker and the T-Code, which allow anyone to create a new set of keys for a fixed-code transponder-equipped car. The Jet Smart Clone (catchphrase: “Clone the uncloneable!”) duplicates any fixed-code RFID chip by reading its code and imprinting it onto the blank chip of a new key with the same mechanical cut.

In the fall of 2005, Bay Area Mercedes dealerships were targeted by a regional theft ring with a clever, seemingly primitive tactic. A thief posing as a customer would express interest in a top-of-the line model and go for a test-drive. Afterward, when the salesperson went for the paperwork, the thief would replace the car’s keyless starter transponder with an identical-looking mock-up from his own pocket. Then he’d leave and return later to nick the car.

That’s what happened in mid-November at a Bay Area Mercedes lot in Pleasanton. A $78,000 black S430 disappeared overnight; police traced the car’s GPS unit to the parking lot of a Fry’s Electronics, but when they arrived at the store, they found not the missing Pleasanton car but another S430 stolen from a Monterey car lot earlier that year. They also found its driver, a 25-year-old San Jose man named Naheed Hamed. He took off in the car, leading a freeway chase that reached 100 miles per hour and ended when he took an off-ramp too fast and rammed into a tree.

A few days later, police found the Pleasanton S430 near Hamed’s home and towed it back to the dealership. Inside the car, mechanics discovered a technological treasure trove: an original Mercedes electronic ignition system and custom Mercedes fuses, all wired with alligator clips to the dashboard and to the fuse box underneath the driver’s seat. The car also held a Pelican PDA carrying case and a wireless RFID-signal-sniffing antenna. Investigators suspect that Hamed spliced in his own ignition system and power source, then used the PDA to upload pirated software to the car’s computer to disable the transponder and swap the two cars’ GPS tracking numbers. Of course, he also believed he could beat the cops in a car chase. “Yeah, the guy’s an idiot,” says auto security expert Mike Bender, a consultant on the case. “But you have to be a brainiac to understand the stuff that this guy had.”

That kind of technology is too expensive and too complicated for your basic chop-shop crew, but they usually don’t need it anyway. For the past few years, Bay Area cops have pursued a ring of thieves that break into Hondas and Acuras with “jiggle” keys – keys with the teeth shaved down so they can turn the tumblers inside any car’s door lock. After the thieves gain access, they shuffle through the glove compartment and snatch the manual, where dealers – unbeknownst to many car owners – often leave an extra valet key.

Ivan Blackman, the manager of the Vehicle Information and Identification Program for the NICB, says that insiders are gradually getting over their dogmatic belief in the invincibility of transponder systems. “Companies are slowly realizing that the cars can be stolen,” Blackman says. Maybe he’s right – though things aren’t changing fast enough for Emad Wassef and Sally Nguyen.

I still didn’t know what happened to Honky. Maybe someone at the dealership or a valet had cloned my key with a device like a Jet Smart Clone, then showed up later to take the car. It was also conceivable that someone grabbed the vehicle identification number off the dash, went to the dealership, pretended to be me, and had an extra key produced. Still, either scenario seemed like it would require an awful lot of footwork for a Pantera- and nicotine-fueled joyride.

Then I heard about another possibility. Earl Hyser, the superintendant of State Farm Insurance’s Vehicle Research Facility, told me that some transponder-equipped cars came with a secret “cheat” code designed to allow people who lose their keys to drive back to the shop. I asked the SFPD about it and was referred to Ken Montes, famous in Bay Area street racing circles for a souped-up 1992 Honda Civic he built as part of a tuner team called the Benen Brothers. The SFPD told me the team called the car Spanky, which instantly made me feel a certain kinship.

I went to see Montes at his custom motor-cycle shop about a half hour south of San Francisco and asked him how someone could have stolen my car. He just laughed. “If I want to take your Civic, I’ll do it in 10 seconds,” he said. Then he confirmed Hyser’s story. The mythical Honda override exists: It’s a series of presses and pulls of the emergency brake. Each car, it seems, has a unique override code, which correlates to the VIN.

“You want to get yours?” Montes asked.

Sure, I said.

He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.

I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.

Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.

I had just jacked my own car.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html





Scratched CDs? No Problem!
Ben Hayes

We’ve all been there, bought a preowned game, put it excitedly into the console, then shouted “OMFGz0rWTF!?!?” as the console wouldn’t recognise the game. Or perhaps you have a CD which contains important data, and M$ Windoze gives you a “Cyclic Redundancy Check” error (fancy way of saying ‘Your disc is bloody SCRATCHED’).

Whatever your problem is, it’s caused by the same thing: A scratch. A scratched CD or DVD is just annoying!

So I took it upon myself to perform an experiment, to determine the very best way of dealing with a scratched disc. The limit I set myself, though, was that whatever I did it with must be somewhere in my house, and can’t take longer than 5 minutes, including waiting time for things to dry, etc.

I thought of three main ways to cope with scratches:

1. Use an oily substance, or a gel, to fill in the scratch so that the laser goes straight through. This is the easiest option of the three.
2. Use a mild abrasive to round the edges of the scratches so that the laser doesn’t get scattered as much. This is probably the most feasible option of the three.
3. Somehow take off a thin layer of plastic, removing the scratches altogether. This is the hardest, and probably impossible in 5 minutes with household items.

I burnt 5 CDs with 6 songs on them:
Kings of Leon - Razz
Kings of Leon - Soft
The Libertines - What Katie Did
Kings of Leon - The Bucket
Kings of Leon - Velvet Snow
Kings of Leon - Taper Jean Girl

I then proceeded to scratch a few of the CDs with a pair of scissors, nothing deep, just enough to make the XBox in which I was playing them get annoyed.

The first thing I tried was plain old water, I know, sounds stupid… But the day before, I bought a game, which was scratched (not dirty, scratched). The first thing I tried was water, which I rubbed in gently, so that it stayed in the scratches, it then worked perfectly.

Next I had to rub it. The only way to rub something off a CD, is with a lint free cloth, going out in spokes from the centre.

Ok, so that didn’t work too well on my test discs… Next up was, deodorant. I decided to use this, because it contained something oily (isopropyl myristate) which was dissolved in something volatile (denatured alcohol, propane, butane, isobutane, basically loads of hydrocarbons). So when I sprayed it on, I was hoping for the alcohols to evaporate while the isopropyl myristate separated into isopropyl and myristic acid to become oily and viscous, and stay in the cracks.

I rubbed it in gently, just to get it into the cracks, but not to remove it, and then let it sit for two minutes. It evaporated, and when held against the light, the “rainbows” got scattered less. It looked hopeful. But it didn’t work.

Ok, next up is something I use to clean the fretboard on my guitar, Lem-oil. It’s viscous and oily, and smells of lemon. I sprayed it on and this time had to rub slightly more vigourously, as it wasn’t volatile enough to fit in with my 5 minute limit.

I rubbed it in, and it sort of worked. The XBox loaded the CD, and played it, but it was really crackly and noisy. So it kind of worked, but Caleb sounded pissed off and sort of like a monster.

Next I tried the method that a lot of people talk about: the toothpaste method. Toothpaste is a mild abrasive, and using it you should be able to round off the edges on the scratches. This method looked like it would work if I carried on, as the light was getting less scattered by the scratches, but I set myself a strict 5 minute time limit. To apply the toothpaste take the tiniest bit on the tip of your finger, and without touching the CD with your finger its self, apply the toothpaste to only the scratched area (and just around it). Now put it under the tap and dribble water on it, so that the toothpaste goes sort of mushy. Now tilt the CD over a sink very gently so that the water runs off, but the toothpaste stays. Now, like all the other methods, rub it in with a lint free cloth, but this time you really need to go to town, as you are actually trying to round off the scratches. This is my CD after the toothpaste was applied (the light makes it look really thick, but it isn’t, and the light also makes some of the dripping water look like toothpaste):

That didn’t work either. In a crazy futile attempt, I tried mixing the above four together:

That contained water, deodorant, lem oil and toothpaste. Needless to say it didn’t work.

Next I tried a mixture of 3 parts water to one part olive oil (I know they don’t mix, but shake!) That almost worked. I mean that the light wasn’t scattered when I held it against the light, but my XBox couldn’t read it, probably because it was yellow. This made me think that the oily/gel idea was the best way to go. I looked around the bathroom cupboard for somthing similar, and found this:

Yes, hair gel, and guess what… It worked!

I applied it in much the same way as the toothpaste, except I didn’t dribble water on it. I rubbed it first. Even though I applied it to one area, it ended up evenly spread around the whole disc. I then dribbled water on to loosen it up so I could rub the excess off.

So, the secret to scratch free CDs is……

Hair Gel!-Ben

DISCLAIMER: I, Ben Hayes, take no responsibility or liability for any personal damage, financial damage, or damage to property caused by the actions of the individual replicating what was mentioned in this guide.
http://www.om3ga.co.uk/2006/07/27/sc...ds-no-problem/





Super Battery
Victor Limjoco

Ever wish you could charge your cellphone or laptop in a few seconds rather than hours? As this ScienCentral News video explains, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a battery that could do just that, and also might never need to be replaced.

The Past is Future

As our portable devices get more high-tech, the batteries that power them can seem to lag behind. But Joel Schindall and his team at M.I.T. plan to make long charge times and expensive replacements a thing of the past--by improving on technology from the past.

They turned to the capacitor, which was invented nearly 300 years ago. Schindall explains, "We made the connection that perhaps we could take an old product, a capacitor, and use a new technology, nanotechnology, to make that old product in a new way."

Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. "That's an effective way to store a large amount of energy," he says, "but the problem is that after many charges and discharges ... the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it."

But capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery's electrodes, so even today's most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Similar to how a thick, fuzzy bath towel soaks up more water than a thin, flat bed sheet, the nanotube filaments increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today's batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors.

"It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and ... it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours," he says.

This technology has broad practical possibilities, affecting any device that requires a battery. Schindall says, "Small devices such as hearing aids that could be more quickly recharged where the batteries wouldn't wear out; up to larger devices such as automobiles where you could regeneratively re-use the energy of motion and therefore improve the energy efficiency and fuel economy."

Schindall thinks hybrid cars would be a particularly popular application for these batteries, especially because current hybrid batteries are expensive to replace.

Schindall also sees the ecological benefit to these reinvented capacitors. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 3 billion industrial and household batteries were sold in the United States in 1998. When these batteries are disposed, toxic chemicals like cadmium can seep into the ground.

"It's better for the environment, because it allows the user to not worry about replacing his battery," he says. "It can be discharged and charged hundreds of thousands of times, essentially lasting longer than the life of the equipment with which it is associated."

Schindall and his team aren't the only ones looking back to capacitors as the future of batteries; a research group in England recently announced advances of their own. But Schindall's groups expects their prototype to be finished in the next few months, and they hope to see them on the market in less than five years.

Schindall's research was featured in the May 2006 edition of Discover Magazine and presented at the 15th International Seminar on Double Layer Capacitors and Hybrid Energy Storage Devices in Deerfield Beach, Florida on December 2005. His research is funded by the Ford-MIT Consortium.
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles...e_id=218392803





Vonage 2Q Loss Deepens 17 Percent
Brian Bergstein

In its first earnings report as a public company, Internet phone carrier Vonage Holdings Corp. said Tuesday its losses increased 17 percent in the second quarter as customer-acquisition costs stayed high.

The results illustrated the challenges facing Vonage, which raised nearly $500 million with a May 24 initial public offering that was disastrous for investors. The stock debuted at $17 per share and dropped immediately, recently lingering below $7.

Vonage's loss from April through June was $74.1 million, or $1.16 per share, compared with a loss of $63.6 million in the same quarter last year.

The consensus forecast of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for a loss of 56 cents per share this time, but the predictions fell in a very wide range, from a loss of 38 cents to a loss of $1.18.

Revenue was $143.4 million, short of Wall Street's forecast of $148.3 million. Vonage's revenue was $59.4 million in the same quarter a year ago.

Vonage shares dropped 32 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $6.77 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

A pioneer in selling inexpensive phone service using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, Holmdel, N.J.-based Vonage has attracted 1.9 million subscribers who use their broadband connections to make calls with regular phones.

But Vonage has spent heavily on marketing and is under competitive assault from cable TV companies that are using VoIP to offer attractive phone plans. Meanwhile, computer-based services such as eBay Inc.'s Skype program offer free voice chats.

As a result, Vonage's pains are expected to continue for some time. Wall Street envisions losses of $2.11 per share this year, $1.47 in 2007 and 94 cents in 2008.

Vonage's marketing costs were $90 million in the second quarter, 46 percent higher than a year ago. The cost of acquiring a new subscriber was $239, up from $236 last year.

However, Vonage's CEO, Mike Snyder, said the company sees the quarter "as a key inflection point on our path to profitability." He said Vonage expects to begin generating "adjusted operating profits" by the first quarter of 2008.

Vonage's 1.9 million subscribers at the end of the quarter marked a 16 percent increase from the previous quarter and more than doubled from 848,000 a year ago.

One important measure of how Vonage capitalizes on that base, monthly revenue per line, rose to $27.70 from $26.63 a year ago. Vonage said the increase came partly from attracting new customers to premium calling plans, but also from a new fee to recover the costs of providing 911 service. VoIP services like Vonage are not automatically linked to 911 as traditional landline phones are.

Vonage and other VoIP carriers also must soon begin paying into the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone coverage in rural areas. That figures to cut into Vonage's price advantage over traditional phone carriers - although Vonage has said customers will see only slightly higher bills, because a separate phone tax will be ending.

In the first half of 2006, Vonage showed a loss of $159.3 million on revenue of $262.3 million. In the same period in 2005, the loss was $123.6 million, with revenue of $100.1 million.

Vonage's IPO was unusual in that the company set aside 4.2 million shares for its customers to buy directly. But Vonage revealed Tuesday that as the company's shares sank, customers who had registered for nearly 1.1 million shares went back on their pledges. The company was forced to spend $11.7 million buying the shares from the IPO's underwriters and expects to pay an additional $6.2 million in underwriting expenses.

Vonage said it plans to pursue efforts to force the customers to pay up. That could prove tricky for a company that already admits customer-relations difficulties. "Churn," a closely watched measure of the number of subscribers who leave each month, averaged 2.3 percent in the second quarter, up from 2.1 percent a year ago.

Snyder told analysts on a conference call that the figure was "unacceptably high." He said Vonage's intense growth had strained customer service, but he promised a turnaround.

"Improving our metrics in customer care is our single most important priority," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-06-40-30





Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma
Richard Morgan

When the dust settles after World War III, or World War IX, humanity will still want to grow pineapples, rice, coffee and other crops. That is why in June on the island of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, all five Scandinavian prime ministers met to break ground on a $4.8-million “doomsday vault” that will stockpile crop seeds in case of global catastrophe.

While it boasts the extra safety of Arctic temperatures, the seed bank is just the latest life-preservation plan to reach reality, joining genetic banks like the Frozen Ark, a British program that is storing DNA samples from endangered species like the scimitar-horned oryx, the Seychelles Frégate beetle and the British field cricket.

To a certain group preoccupied with doomsday, these projects are laudable but share a deep flaw: they are Earth-bound. A global catastrophe — like a collision with an asteroid or a nuclear winter — would have to be rather tame in order not to rattle the test tubes in the various ark-style labs around the world. What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?

Cue the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge — the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah.

Far from the lunatic fringe, the leaders of the alliance have serious careers: Robert Shapiro, the group’s founder, is a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in biochemistry at New York University; Ray Erikson runs an aerospace development firm in Boston and has been a NASA committee chair; Steven M. Wolfe, as a Congressional aide, drafted and helped pass the Space Settlement Act of 1988, which mandated that NASA plan a shift from space exploration to space colonization, and was executive director of the Congressional Space Caucus; William E. Burrows, an author of several books on space, is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at N.Y.U.

President Bush has already proposed a Moon base. “He just needs to be told what it’s good for,” Dr. Shapiro said. Dr. Shapiro has written a number of books on the origins of life on Earth, as well as “Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth,” where he unveiled the civilization rescue project.

In 1999, the same year the book came out, Dr. Shapiro wrote an essay with Mr. Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. There, they formally laid out their plan for the rescue alliance, beginning by warning that “the most enduring pictures to come back from the Apollo missions were not of astronauts cavorting on the Sea of Tranquillity, nor even of the lunar landscape itself.”

“They were the haunting views of Earth, seen for the first time not as a boundless and resilient colossus of land and water,” they continued, “but as a startlingly vulnerable lifeboat precariously plying a vast and dangerous sea: a ‘blue marble’ in a black void.” A conversation shortly after the essay was published, Dr. Shapiro recalled, resounded with the earnest imagination of science fiction drama:

Dr. Shapiro: “We’ve got to use space to protect humanity!”

Mr. Burrows: “By God! Yes!”

The concept is not new, but there is some fresh momentum. Mr. Burrows’s new book, “The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth,” is due out this month. And the physicist Stephen W. Hawking, who is not part of the group, began arguing this summer that human survival depends on leaving Earth.

The mission of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization has also attracted the support of Col. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, who now devotes much of his time to the idea of Martian colonization.

“It takes a big reason to go to the Moon, because, frankly, it’s a lousy place to be,” Colonel Aldrin said in a telephone interview. “But this is exactly the kind of planning as a human race we need to secure our future.

“But the A.R.C. idea isn’t ahead of its time because it’s needed right now. It’s a reasonable thing to do with our space technology, sending valuable stuff to a reliable off-site location. NASA is certainly not bending backwards to do it. It’s the private people like A.R.C.”

Born and raised within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo — and he walked that distance often — Dr. Shapiro developed an early interest in biodiversity. He frets over the frailty of civilization and the planet, but he is not a pessimist. He compares the Moon-base idea to a safe-deposit box.

“It makes sense to protect the things you value,” he said. “But we, as a civilization, we don’t have anything like that.” The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats.

In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.

“But I’m not here to predict doomsday; I’m here for sanity,” Dr. Shapiro said. “When we’ve gained what we’ve gained, we should fight to keep it.

“And, worst-case scenario, if it’s all for nothing, we’ll have a nice museum.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/science/01arc.html





‘Talladega Nights’: The Men Are Rowdy, the Cars Are Fast and the Product Placement Is Extreme
A. O. Scott

For those still clinging to the notion that the United States is divided into Red and Blue, Nascar and Hollywood would seem to dwell on opposite sides of the cultural divide. “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is hardly the first movie to challenge this simple-minded view of American popular culture — see also “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and of course “Cars” — but it does an admirably thorough job of debunking it.

After all, movies (and movie fans) have always had a soft spot for whining engines and screeching tires. But these days the deeper bond between auto racing and popular moviemaking lies in a shared passion for corporate sponsorship. The vehicles in “Talladega Nights” — which was made with the cooperation of Nascar — are covered with logos and brand names, and the movie itself may break new records for product placements per frame.

It’s all in fun of course. As a good-hearted spoof of the folkways of stock-car racing, the movie is happy to mock the sport’s eagerness to sell prime uniform and chassis space to sponsors like Perrier, Wonder Bread and Old Spice. It also is tickled at the eating habits of its fast-driving characters, who wash down Domino’s Pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken with Coca-Cola and Budweiser and, when they want a high-end night out, head for the nearest Applebee’s. You can be sure that all these companies paid handsomely for the privilege of such lampooning, which even extends to the movie’s single funniest joke, a suppertime blessing brought to you by PowerAde.

Really, though, the brand that powers this ragged, intermittently uproarious fusion of sketch-comedy goofing and driving around in circles is Will Ferrell, who wrote the screenplay (with Adam McKay, the director) and served as an executive producer, in addition to running around on a race track in his underpants. He does a lot more than that, needless to say, but Mr. Ferrell’s willingness to strip down to his skivvies is one of his trademarks.

It is also a rare movie-star display of solidarity with those American men who, whether out of laziness or principle, disdain sunlight, proper nutrition, body-hair maintenance and abdominal exercise. Part of Mr. Ferrell’s appeal is surely that he is one of them. O.K., one of us.

He also has a genius for sniffing out pop-cultural fixtures and embodying them in a way that goes beyond easy, obvious parody. Like Ron Burgundy, the hero of “Anchorman,” Ricky Bobby is at once a creature of pure, extravagant absurdity and a curiously vulnerable, sympathetic figure. The son of a “semi-professional stock car racer and amateur tattoo artist” played by Gary Cole, Ricky is born in the back seat of a speeding Chevelle and goes on to glory on the Nascar circuit. His sidekick and best buddy is Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), a sweet, dim fellow content to come in second behind his pal. (Their motto, “shake and bake,” may be an honest homage to a popular product rather than a paid endorsement, but who really knows?) Ricky, by turns childlike and ferociously competitive, has some unresolved Daddy issues, which unfortunately weigh down the last third of “Talladega Nights” with perfunctory sentimentality.

Ricky and Cal are from North Carolina, home of the stock car king Richard Petty, and it requires no sensitivity training to recognize that they are stereotypes of a certain kind of Southern manhood. Not that anyone is likely to be too offended; from the old “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show to the songs of Toby Keith, caricature and Rebel pride tend to keep close company.

In any case the two good ol’ boys are soon confronted with a designated bad guy who incarnates an entirely antithetical stereotype — or, rather, invents a new one: the gay French Formula One driver. Jean Girard, as this nemesis is called, is played by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Ali G” fame with a demented sang-froid that suggests a synthesis of Peter Sellers and Pee-wee Herman. Mr. Cohen proves himself to be Mr. Ferrell’s equal and opposite, a comic dialectic sealed with the summer’s best on-screen kiss.

Like most movies of this kind, “Talladega Nights” is as good as its craziest riffs, which aren’t quite strong or various enough to fill out a whole feature. The funniest scenes have some of the improvised, pseudo-vérité flavor of Christopher Guest’s “Best in Show,” but Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay are less rigorous than Mr. Guest and his collaborators, preferring easy laughs to carefully turned comic insights. Still, at the high points — when Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reilly start jawboning, when Leslie Bibb slyly steals a scene as Ricky’s frosty, gold-digging wife, when Mr. Reilly and Michael Clarke Duncan try to remove a fork from Mr. Ferrell’s thigh, or whenever Mr. Cohen opens his mouth — laughs are hard to suppress.

As a cultural artifact, “Talladega Nights” is both completely phony and, therefore, utterly authentic. Or, to put it differently: this movie is the real thing. It’s finger lickin’ good. It’s eatin’ good in the neighborhood. It’s the King of Beers. It’s Wonder Bread.

“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Like any respectable country ballad, it has cussin’, fightin’, cheatin’ and drinkin’.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/08/0...es/04tall.html





An Image Popular in Films Raises Some Eyebrows in Ads
Jeremy W. Peters

At 200 pounds plus — most of that pure attitude — she is hard to miss.

Her onscreen presence takes on many variations, but she is easily recognizable by a few defining traits. Other than her size, she is almost always black. She typically finds herself in an exchange that is either confrontational or embarrassing. And her best line is often little more than a sassy “Mmmm hmmm.”

This caricature, playing on stereotypes of heavy black women as boisterous and sometimes aggressive, has been showing up for some time in stand-up comedy routines and in movies like “Big Momma’s House’’ and “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.’’ Often, the pieces are produced by directors and writers who are black themselves.

With black creators giving more acceptability to the image, it is now starting to appear more often in television commercials as well. Most recently some variation of this character has appeared in commercials for Dairy Queen, Universal Studios and Captain Morgan rum.

But despite the popularity of such characters among blacks, the use of the image of big black women as the target of so many jokes is troublesome to some marketers and media scholars.

“It is perpetuating a stereotype that black females are strong, aggressive, controlling people,’’ said Tommy E. Whittler, a marketing professor at DePaul University. “I don’t think you want to do that.’’

To be sure, sassy overweight black women appear to represent only a small fraction of the African-American actresses who appear in commercials. Marketers have made strides in recent years toward making advertisements with a more diverse cast of characters.

Blacks regularly appear in commercials selling products as diverse as toothpaste, credit cards and erectile dysfunction medication. Indeed, according to several academic studies, over the last 15 years the number of blacks appearing in commercials has been roughly proportional to their share of the American population, about 14 percent.

“Over the years it’s evolved,’’ said Fay Ferguson, co-chief executive of Burrell Communications, an advertising agency that specializes in marketing toward black consumers. “We’ve come a long way in how we see black women in advertising.’’

Stereotypical portrayals of blacks in commercials have drawn criticism from civil rights groups for decades. Some of the earliest and most iconic examples of blacks in advertising — Rastus the Cream of Wheat chef, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben — showed blacks in subservient roles that recalled the days of slavery.

Those images have been toned down over the years (Aunt Jemima’s red bandanna, for example, was replaced with pearl earrings and a lace collar in 1989) and are no longer as overtly stereotypical as they once were. And now there are many examples of blacks presented in middle-class settings and engaged in mainstream activities.

To some, the freer use of overweight black women in comic situations suggests a welcome change that reflects a broader acceptability of blacks in the media. But others find the recurring use of the image a return to a disturbing past.

And some say these images may serve to exacerbate misunderstanding between whites and blacks.

“Not only are we being given images of who we are supposed to be, but others are also formulating their images of us based on that,” said Marilyn Kern Foxworth, an author and marketing expert who studies how blacks are portrayed in advertising. “People have already determined who we are and how we’re going to react in certain situations.”

The heavy black female makes one of her latest appearances in a commercial for the Dairy Queen Blizzard. In the spot, a man boarding an airplane sets his ice cream shake down so he can load his bag into an overhead compartment. As he reaches up, another passenger on the plane starts eating the Blizzard. Seeing this, the first man lets go of his bag so he can reclaim his Blizzard and inadvertently drops his luggage on another passenger’s head.

That unlucky passenger happens to be an overweight black woman who lets out an irritated gasp that reminds all the passengers around her who not to mess with.

Rick Cusato, executive vice president for Grey Worldwide, the firm that wrote the campaign for Dairy Queen, said the script was not written with a black actress in mind.

“We basically cast the funniest person,” he said. “We didn’t specifically cast for a black woman. We said, ‘Wow, she’s really funny.’ And she happened to be black.”

Another new Dairy Queen commercial features a similar character — played by the same actress — working as an airport security screener. When a man tries to walk through a metal detector eating a Dairy Queen burger, her eyes dart disapprovingly downward at him. Then she barks, “Uh, uh. Get on!” directing him to walk through again.

Michael Keller, Dairy Queen’s chief brand officer, said the company considered actors of all sizes and races before making a decision. “We looked at male body builders, really big tall women. We looked at just about everybody we could,” he said. “She projected an image that was everything we wanted it to be. This is just a strong woman being herself.” He added that the company had not received any complaints about the ads being racially insensitive. But to some these images are troubling.

“It’s not an accident that she’s African-American and heavy,” said Howard Buford, founder and chief executive of Prime Access, an advertising agency that creates commercials marketed toward minority audiences. “There’s certainly a long heritage of large African-American women who are kind of sassy and feisty and humorously angry. There’s a sense that this whole value system is O.K. again.”

Large black actresses have had recurring roles in commercials over the years, and often are cast in roles where their aggressiveness is a defining trait. The heavy black spokeswoman for Pine Sol was one of the first to embrace the role. Her aggression was aimed at household dirt, however, not people. In a recent commercial for Captain Morgan rum, a large black woman berates her man for playing dominoes and making her late.

In one recent Twix commercial, a full-figured black woman asks her boyfriend if her pants make her rear end look big. As the camera focuses on her plump backside (exaggerated by the camera for effect), the man stuffs his face with a Twix bar and mumbles an indecipherable answer.

Pleased with his response, the woman walks away. She is not shown being aggressive or loud, but the commercial leaves the impression that if the man had given the wrong answer, she might have erupted.

A series of Universal Studios commercials star a heavy black woman who is accompanying her children on a Jurassic Park ride. Frightened by the ride, she roars and buries the heads of her two young children in her bosom.

Black advertising executives have noticed the stereotype.

“There’s an image out there of black women being boisterous, overbearing, controlling and extremely aggressive in their behavior,” said Carol H. Williams, who runs her own advertising firm in Oakland, Calif., that specializes in marketing toward blacks. “I really don’t know why that stereotype is laughed at.”

Some have trouble with the new commercial images in part because they are being created by white writers.

“There are images of African-Americans created for white people by white people and there are images of African-Americans created for African-Americans,’’ Mr. Buford said. “And there’s a big difference.”

The lack of diversity on Madison Avenue has been a long-standing issue. In fact, the New York City Commission on Human Rights is investigating the hiring practices of advertising agencies in the city and is looking at how they have approached employing blacks.

Jannette L. Dates, dean of the communications school at Howard University, said that while whites and blacks could watch the same portrayal of a large black woman on television and laugh, they are laughing for different reasons.

Some whites, Ms. Dates said, may laugh thinking, “Wow, she’s so ridiculous. My people aren’t like that.” She added: “They wouldn’t consciously feel that way. But there is something going on subconsciously because that’s what advertising is all about. They’re trying to tap into some feeling, some emotion, some psychological hang-up.”

Blacks, meanwhile, might laugh because they can identify with the character, Ms. Dates said. “It’s for both the people who want to snicker and say, ‘See, that’s how they are.’ And for people to say, ‘There’s one of us.’ ”

Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard, amplified that point. “To the black audience, this may be, ‘You do your thing, sister,’ ” Professor Patterson said. “The white audience is laughing with her. Then they go back to reality, and they laugh at her.”

But Liz Gumbinner, a creative director at David and Goliath, the agency that developed the Universal campaign, said the broad appeal of the commercials was proof they were not insensitively playing on racial stereotypes.

Noting that a black woman in a recent David and Goliath focus group spoke up about how much she liked the Universal ads, Ms. Gumbinner said: “I wonder if sometimes when you have somebody that is less conventional, they become the most memorable. We use a lot of bald men, and it’s not like we have it out for bald men.”

Ms. Gumbinner and Mr. Cusato of Grey Advertising, however, said no black writers were involved in either of their campaigns.

As is typically the case with racial stereotypes, who is laughing and why is complex and potentially inflammatory. Black actors and comedians have profited handsomely from creating bumptious female characters on TV and in movies, raising the issue of whether they, too, are perpetuating the stereotypes that many find offensive.

Tyler Perry, the filmmaker and actor, created a series of plays and movies, including the huge hit “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” in which the main character Mable (Madea) Simmons is a no-nonsense overweight matriarch. Mo’Nique, a full-figured comedian, has built a routine on being outlandish, brash and, at times, downright crude.

Mr. Buford, of Prime Access, said part of what makes the comedy of Mr. Perry and Mo’Nique acceptable is that it is written from a personal experience common to many blacks.

“Authenticity makes a lot of difference,” he said. “It’s authenticity born of having lived that life versus having been cast in that role.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/bu...ia/01adco.html





Kohlberg and Private Partner Seen as Close to Deal for Chip Maker
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Alex Berenson

In the latest bidding war between private equity firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company and Silver Lake Partners appeared close to a deal last night to acquire the semiconductor unit of Philips Electronics.

People involved in the deal said the two firms would pay about eight billion euros, or more than $10.2 billion, for the unit, surpassing bidders that included the Texas Pacific Group and the Blackstone Group, and a group that included Bain Capital, the people involved said.

It was unclear last night when the deal could be finalized and announced, according to these people, who did not want to be identified because the talks were continuing. They also cautioned that the deal could fall apart or another group could come in with a higher offer.

Representatives of Kohlberg Kravis and Silver Lake had no comment last night. A spokesman for Philips could not be reached for comment.

The sale would come as Philips has started to focus on relatively stable and fast-growing businesses like medical imaging.

The company ranks eighth among all semiconductor makers, with 2.5 percent of the global market, according to Gartner, the research firm.. But the division’s sales grew only 4.7 percent in 2005, lagging the overall industry, which grew 5.7 percent, Gartner said.

In June, Philips announced a spinoff of the division, but the unit lacked the size to compete on its own, so a buyer was sought from the outset.

The unit makes specialized semiconductors used in cellphones, music players, small appliances and automotive parts. It has some valuable intellectual property, analysts say, especially in cellphone applications.

In Europe, several companies and carriers are experimenting with the use of cellphones as more secure substitutes for credit cards, and Philips makes the custom chips that enable cellphones to securely handle electronic transactions. A user whisks his or her cellphone past a point-of-sale scanner in a store, and punches in a personal identification number or a fingerprint reader on the phone to authorize a purchase.

Credit card companies in the United States and wireless carriers are also interested in this emerging business.

“This is an intellectual property play before that market has really taken off, but it’s very promising,” said Rob Enderle, an independent technology analyst.

The $10.2 billion price would be above the $7 billion to $9 billion that analysts had forecast for the unit, which had about $6 billion in revenue in 2005, Gartner said.

In a research report on July 24, a Citigroup analyst, Simon Smith, wrote that he did not think Philips could find a buyer willing to pay $10 billion, a price valuing the unit at a 20 percent premium to ST Microelectronics, a publicly traded semiconductor company. But Mr. Smith wrote that the deal would be “bullish if true.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/te...gy/02chip.html





Books

Where Do Babies Come From? In the 17th Century, Scientists Laid Myths to Rest
William Grimes

In the 17th century, scientists didn’t believe that the stork delivered babies, but they might as well have. Reproduction remained a deep mystery, its processes the subject of wild speculation and absurd flights of fancy. Otherwise sophisticated intellects believed that carp grew from reeds and that it was possible to create mice by putting a dirty shirt and a few grains of wheat into a sealed jar and letting it sit for 21 days.

These and other follies, the received wisdom of centuries, were debunked in a brief but startling burst of scientific creativity lasting from about 1665 to 1680. A loosely bound network of scientists, empowered by the experimental method and new technologies like the microscope, overturned the old theories of Aristotle and Galen, parted company with the alchemists and laid down the basic framework for our modern understanding of reproduction. This is the story that Matthew Cobb tells in “Generation,” his competent if less than enthralling reconstruction of the bold experiments, intellectual alliances and bitter battles that led to a new scientific frontier.

Mr. Cobb, an animal behaviorist at the University of Manchester, tries to place his scientific material in historical context, pulling the camera back for some panoramic shots of the Dutch and English Wars, or the London of Samuel Pepys. To enliven his narrative, he plays up the personal drama involving Jan Swammerdam, Niels Stensen and Reinier de Graaf, fellow students at the Leiden University who made key discoveries about animal and human reproduction and who function as Mr. Cobb’s protagonists.

Much of this is wasted effort. Mr. Cobb’s strong suit is science. His pages come alive when he delves into experiments, published scientific works and the cross-fertilization of ideas made possible by new scientific journals and societies. Here, fortunately, he has a wealth of material, starting with the speculations of William Harvey, who first argued that all animals emerge from an egg, and ending with Leeuwenhoek’s groundbreaking microscope studies of spermatozoa.

This is a tale worth telling. In a mad rush of inspired inquiry, researchers throughout Europe, trading ideas and sharing observations, established that all species bred like to like, that insects do not generate spontaneously, that all life forms develop according to observable laws, that ovaries contain eggs, and that human life begins when an egg is fertilized by the male sperm.

Such knowledge did not come easily. “Confusion about the processes involved in sex and growth was so great that conception, reproduction and embryonic development were all collapsed into one unknown and mysterious phenomenon: ‘generation,’ ” Mr. Cobb writes. The great William Harvey referred to conception as a “dark business,” and even leading researchers tended to advance only so far before lapsing into old habits of airy speculation and reliance on classical authorities. Nevertheless, step by step, through repetition and correction, progress was made.

Mr. Cobb can be breathtakingly obtuse on larger historical questions. He seems to think that readers will be startled to find out that the Netherlands was once a great political, cultural and economic power. (Similarly, he explains that the host is “the piece of bread which Catholics claim has been transmuted into the body of Christ.”) But he is in his element describing the critical role played by informal salons and formal scientific societies in pushing research on generation, and the role of copper-plate engraving and new instruments like the microscope in propelling discoveries.

It was in Paris, at the private academy presided over by Melchisedec Thévenot, that Stensen, better known as Steno, used his skill at dissection to refute Descartes’s theories of the brain, and where, with Thévenot’s encouragement, he and Swammerdam first turned their attention to the problems of generation.

Steno moved on to Florence, where he became the star of Grand Duke Ferdinando de Medici’s scientific academy. After dissecting dogfish and rays, he proposed that the ovaries of the human female likewise contained eggs that passed into the uterus.

Swammerdam, meanwhile, focused on insect development, demonstrating to an astonished audience at Thévenot’s academy that the wings, head and proboscis of a future butterfly could be seen inside a silkworm caterpillar, which he slit open with a scalpel. The butterfly, in other words, developed rather than emerging fully formed from the decaying carcass of the caterpillar. “In the whole nature of things,” he would write, “there is no generation by accident, but by propagation and the growth of parts, in which chance has no part.” De Graaf, the youngest of the three, concentrated on female and male genitalia, dissecting the testicles of the dormouse to reveal the structure of the testes for the first time, and locating the human egg precisely in ovarian follicles, pioneering work that was brilliantly supplemented by Leeuwenhoek’s observations of sperm through the microscope.

After Leeuwenhoek, momentum stalled. New puzzles replaced old ones. “Despite 150 years of research, no one had any real idea what egg and spermatozoa were, what they represented, or what they contained,” Mr. Cobb writes. “From this point of view, generation remained as great a mystery at the end of the 1830’s as it had been in the 1670’s.” Rearguard actions were being fought as late as the mid-19th century, when Louis Pasteur faced off against Félix Pouchet to prove conclusively that spontaneous generation was a myth. As poets have long known, a persuasive metaphor can often be more powerful than a fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/books/02grim.html





Rowling Stays Silent on Harry’s Future
Steven McElroy

The authors John Irving and Stephen King both appealed for Harry Potter’s life yesterday in a joint news conference with the woman who holds the teenage wizard’s fate in her hands, Reuters reported. The two writers appeared with J. K. Rowling at Radio City Music Hall before “An Evening With Harry, Carrie & Garp,” a charity reading scheduled last night to support two nonprofit organizations: the Haven Foundation, devoted to helping performing artists who have had accidents or illnesses that leave them unable to work, and Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian group that delivers emergency aid in more than 70 countries. “My fingers are crossed for Harry,” said Mr. Irving, far left with Ms. Rowling and Mr. King. Ms. Rowling did not say whether their appeals were too late; she is already at work on the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series and has already said that two characters would die. “A couple of characters I expected to survive have died, and one character got a reprieve,” she said, but she did not elaborate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/books/02potter.html





Helena Bonham Carter Joins 'Potter' Cast
AP

Helena Bonham Carter has signed on to play fanatically evil Lord Voldemort devotee Bellatrix Lestrange in the next ''Harry Potter'' film.

The Oscar nominee joins incoming composer Nicholas Hooper, who will create the score for ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' the fifth film adaptation of author J.K. Rowling's epic series, according to a statement released Wednesday by Warner Bros.

Directed by Hooper's longtime collaborator David Yates, the movie also includes newcomers Imelda Staunton as frumpy Dolores Umbridge and Evanna Lynch as Luna ''Loony'' Lovegood.

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson return as teen wizards Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

''It's going to be a really cool cast,'' said Carter's publicist Jay Waterman.

Carter's film credits include 2005's ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' and 1997's ''The Wings of the Dove,'' for which she received a best actress Oscar nomination.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...le-Carter.html





A Skeptic on 9/11 Prompts Questions on Academic Freedom
Gretchen Ruethling

Sipping on a bottle of water and holding a book about the history and future of Islam, Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an “inside job.”

As children zoomed by on tricycles and shot basketballs at a community center near his home, Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. “The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon,” said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher’s assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. “The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours.”

Mr. Barrett’s views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism.

“They apparently have no limits to what can be taught in the classroom,” Representative Steve Nass said of the university’s decision to allow Mr. Barrett to teach a class this fall titled “Islam: Religion and Culture.”

“Barrett has got to go,’’ Mr. Nass, a Whitewater Republican, said. “It is an embarrassment for the state of Wisconsin. It is an embarrassment for the university.”

The week of July 24, Mr. Nass, who is up for re-election this year, sent a resolution signed by 61 state legislators — all but one of them Republican — to Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, and university officials condemning Mr. Barrett’s “academically dishonest views” and demanding that his one-semester contract to teach the class for a salary of $8,247 be terminated.

Mr. Barrett, a co-founder of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, argued that he had never presented his personal opinions in class and that he was free to offer those opinions on his own time outside the classroom.

“Why is liberal Wisconsin going bananas over an $8,000-a-year lecturer who’s not even teaching his own views in the course?” Mr. Barrett asked. “I go out of my way to bring in diverse interpretations for students to look at.”

The university’s chancellor, John D. Wiley, said that he was baffled by Mr. Barrett’s beliefs but that they were irrelevant in the classroom, where he must stick to a syllabus that has been approved by the department. That syllabus includes a week devoted to the war on terror.

A 10-day university review had determined that Mr. Barrett presented a variety of viewpoints and that he had not discussed his personal opinions in the classroom, Mr. Wiley said.

“I think it would be a serious mistake for legislators to try to get in and micromanage curriculum,” said Mr. Wiley, who added that university officials would keep an eye on Mr. Barrett by meeting with him throughout the semester. “We don’t go around and question all our instructors to find out what all their views are.”

At the University of Colorado, a committee voted in June to fire Ward L. Churchill, an ethnic studies professor who had compared some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a Nazi official. Professor Churchill appealed this month to keep his job.

And early this year at Northwestern University, Arthur R. Butz, a tenured professor of engineering, drew strong criticism after saying he agreed with the belief of the president of Iran that the Holocaust was a myth.

Patrick V. Farrell, the provost of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the university was not focusing on Mr. Barrett’s political views but on the teaching and learning experience in the classroom.

“I want to avoid as much as we can creating some kind of a political test for instructors or faculty, to say that only those whose thinking fits within some predetermined mold are well equipped to teach our students,” Mr. Farrell said. “I think that creates a dangerous precedent.”

Some Wisconsin students said they thought it was a crucial part of a college education to learn about a variety of theories, including radical ones, before forming opinions on a topic.

“It’s a student’s decision in a class whether they believe what a professor is saying,” said Jillian Alpire, 22, who graduated this year. “Just because he said his opinions on a radio station does not mean that’s what the course is going to be about.”

Ben Kopish, 20, a junior, said that such a controversial discourse should be welcomed at a public university that is known for fostering outspoken academic debate.

“If it doesn’t happen somewhere like the Madison campus,” Mr. Kopish said, “then I don’t know where else it would happen.”

But Katherine Brown, 20, who had finished a summer course on Islam, questioned the role of such a political discussion in a religion class.

“I just feel like it isn’t relevant because Islam is a religion,” said Ms. Brown, who added that she agreed with her own professor’s decision not to discuss the war on terror. “It’s not about what’s going on currently in politics so much.”

Mr. Barrett’s ideas place him squarely within a loose confederation of skeptics who think the American government had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks and whose theories are spread through the Internet and other means.

Mr. Barrett and Chancellor Wiley both said the controversy might actually be helping provide Mr. Barrett with a larger platform to voice his ideas. It has sparked curiosity in students like Ms. Brown, who said she was interested in finding out more about why Mr. Barrett believes what he does.

Although Ms. Brown said she did not believe that the government could have been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, she added, “So many very important things that we know now were considered radical when they were first presented as ideas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/ed...352&ei=5087%0A





Las Vegas Hosts Computer Security Events
Dan Goodin

The middle-aged G-men who wear crisp suits and consort with teenage hackers sporting purple hair can make the two conferences that will converge in Las Vegas this week look like a scene from a science-fiction movie.

In fact, the gatherings are the most important in the world of computer security, drawing a "who's who" list of leaders from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., government agencies including the FBI and underground groups that act as a neighborhood watch for the Internet.

The motley band of researchers, federal agents and cyberhobbyists come to learn how to fortify networks against the latest attacks, share research on new vulnerabilities and recruit people in a field where competition for talent is growing increasingly fierce.

Laced with an abundance of raucous parties and high-tech pranks, the five-day event is equal parts boot camp, hard-core technical forum and carnival of bacchanal proportions.

"This is a circus with many rings," said Richard Thieme, whose book "Islands in the Clickstream" explores the effect computers and other machines have on society and individuals. "There's a constant exchanging of energy and information, morning, noon and night, and that's what is so powerfully attractive to hackers and anyone who wants to learn."

Black Hat, which runs Wednesday and Thursday, is more the university: In its 10th year, it is a corporate-driven event, with an admission fee as high as $2,500.

By contrast, Defcon is the fraternity party. Held every year since 1993, the Friday-Sunday show thrives on chaos, loud parties and a crowd that's decidedly more anti-establishment.

True to the insatiable curiosity at the heart at the hacker ethos, the events keep participants on their toes, lest they fall victim to high-tech pranks of fellow attendees.

In past years, pay phones have been said to disappear off hotel walls and hotel TV billing systems and wireless computer networks have been penetrated, allowing those with the technical know-how to one up their fellow attendees.

Bo Holland, the founder of several startups that work with large financial services companies, said he was cruising the floor of last year's Defcon when he came upon an automated teller machine that had a skull and crossbones and the conference logo displayed on its monitor. Upon closer inspection, he noticed someone had attached alligator clips to the cable on the ATM's backside and run a wire into the ceiling.

"I lost a real sense of security," said Holland, who had long assumed ATM networks were invulnerable. "I came away with a real appreciation for the powers these hackers had developed."

Other pranks have included dye that, in different years, has turned hotel pools purple, orange and blue. A large "wall of sheep" displays names and partial passwords sniffed from unsecured computers that connected to wireless networks.

A few years ago someone disguised a wireless network to look like the one officially sanctioned by Defcon. When unwitting attendees connected to the rogue network, their Web pages were appended with vulgar images.

"An awful lot of what you will see is people gleefully poking holes in things," said Jon Callas, a longtime attendee and chief technology officer of encryption software maker PGP Corp. "It's a cross between a computer security conference and a punk rock concert."

Although some of the events clearly cross the line into illegality and good taste - past pranks have included pouring cement into toilets, setting off smoke bombs and stealing hotel satellite dishes - the conferences have been known to expose weaknesses in products made by some of the world's most powerful companies.

At last year's Black Hat, Cisco Systems Inc. tried to stop researcher Michael Lynn from speaking about a vulnerability that he said could let hackers virtually shut down the Internet.

Cisco managed to get pages documenting the flaw torn out of all 2,000 conference binders, but ultimately the biggest maker of Internet routing and switching equipment was unable to squelch Lynn's talk.

The tension between hacker activism and corporate interests may generate more friction this year as two researchers demonstrate ways to hijack some of the most popular brands of laptop computers by exploiting a flaw in their wireless connections.

A third researcher plans to demonstrate software that can drop undetectable programs for snooping into computers running Windows Vista, the next generation of Microsoft's operating system.

But there are signs that technology companies may be getting more comfortable discussing the security of their flagship products. Microsoft scheduled a day of talks for Thursday on new approaches to hardening its products; it also wants feedback from participants.

And a Cisco executive is scheduled to sit in on a panel that includes people who have criticized the company in the past.

Adam Laurie, chief security officer of Thebunker.com, a U.K.-based site for storing sensitive information, said past conferences are partly to thank for the growing willingness of Microsoft and Cisco in disclosing potential weaknesses in their key products.

"We are having this stuff forced upon us, and you can't choose not to have it," said Laurie, who goes by "Major Malfunction." "If they don't do it properly, that puts me at risk."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-20-11-30





AOL Makes More Services Free
Anick Jesdanun

Stepping up the chase for online advertising dollars, AOL will give away e-mail accounts and software now available only to its paying customers in a strategy shift likely to accelerate the decline in its core Internet access business.

The decision, announced Wednesday by AOL parent Time Warner Inc., removes the few remaining reasons for AOL subscribers to keep paying when they already have high-speed Internet access through a cable or phone company.

"We've listened to our customers, and many of them want to keep using these AOL products when they migrate to broadband - but not pay extra for them," said Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's president and chief operating officer.

The move marks the end of an era for a company that grew rapidly in the 1990s by making it easy to connect online, giving millions of Americans their first taste of e-mail, the Web and instant messaging through discs that continually arrived unsolicited in mailboxes.

"This is the final goodbye to the days when AOL was the king of the Internet," said Jeff Lanctot, general manager of aQuantive Inc.'s Avenue A/Razorfish, an agency that places some ads on AOL sites. "They now know they are the underdog."

AOL hopes that by making services free, it can draw Internet users to its ad-supported Web sites and keep them from defecting to Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which have offered free e-mail for years.

Lanctot said AOL could pull off the strategy shift given its "tremendous potential" to tap video and other resources from other Time Warner units as well as a sizable subscriber base - which, while dwindling, still makes AOL the leading Internet access provider.

AOL will still offer dial-up accounts at $26 a month for unlimited use, but the company no longer will aggressively market the service. That's likely to mean the end of promotional CDs and an unspecified number of job cuts in marketing and customer service.

Free e-mail accounts are available immediately, while some other features, primarily parental controls, won't become free until early September.

Subscribers who dropped AOL within the past two years will be able to reclaim their old AOL.com e-mail addresses.

The changes were announced as Time Warner reported a profit Wednesday of $1 billion for the second quarter. Its cable TV business grew thanks to more high-speed Internet and digital phone customers, offsetting weakness at AOL, which saw a 2 percent drop in revenue.

AOL accounts for one-fifth of Time Warner's revenue, and most of that contribution comes from subscription sales. So the bet here is that advertising can rise fast enough to supplant the declines in subscription revenue - a trend possibly already in action. In the second quarter, AOL's ad sales rose 40 percent, while subscription revenue dropped 11 percent.

"A small percentage of a big something is better than a whole lot of not much," said Jonathan Gaw, a research manager at IDC.

AOL has about 6.2 million U.S. subscribers who have broadband but pay extra - generally $15 a month - for AOL services, meaning AOL could lose more than $1 billion in annual revenue, on top of what it would have lost anyway from customers dropping dial-up plans.

Advertising, meanwhile, grew last quarter by $129 million from the same period in 2005, or $516 million over a full year if it can sustain the growth rate.

That's still a gap of about $500 million, although AOL will save an unspecified amount from payroll, network and other costs. Implementing these changes is expected to cost $250 million to $350 million through 2007, about half for employee severance.

Although millions of subscribers are now likely to drop their paid accounts, AOL has little choice. AOL lost 976,000 U.S. subscribers in the past quarter alone even with the premium offerings. As of June 30, AOL had 17.7 million subscribers, a 34 percent drop from its peak in September 2002.

AOL's European units also lost 218,000 subscribers, dropping to 5.6 million. Time Warner said Wednesday it was considering a sale of those units and anticipates a deal this year.

The number of unique U.S. visitors to AOL sites has remained steady, while its three chief rivals all saw gains in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. And comScore Media Metrix found that in June, pages viewed at the main AOL sites - by subscribers and free users - dropped 44 percent, while Yahoo increased 23 percent.

Nonetheless, AOL officials see good opportunities with emerging features like online video. On Friday, AOL is revamping its video portal to give visitors one-stop access to free and for-pay clips from around the Internet, including those at rival sites like YouTube. The company hopes that by creating a user-friendly experience, the market would grow for everyone, including AOL.

Besides e-mail, AOL will give away its proprietary software for accessing the once-premium offerings, as well as safety and security features such as parental controls.

"This is the next logical step for AOL to capitalize further on the explosive rise in broadband usage and online advertising," Bewkes said. "With its robust and rapidly expanding advertising operation, we expect to put AOL back on a growth path."

Investors have been cautious about Time Warner's prospects. Even as word of the new strategy circulated in news reports, Time Warner stock prices have been hovering near a 52-week low of $15.70 in recent weeks. The shares rose 40 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $16.65 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

AOL actually began moving away from its roots as a walled-garden service emphasizing exclusive content in 2004, making most of its news, music videos and other features available for free on its ad-supported sites.

The move was driven by the fact that as more Americans turned elsewhere for high-speed service, they no longer needed AOL for dial-up access and didn't find the exclusive content enough to justify the price.

Although the company tried to keep some customers paying by giving free e-mail accounts only with less-desirable AIM.com addresses, many subscribers defected to free offerings elsewhere.

AOL also tried to keep its proprietary software a premium offering, but that only made the transition difficult for those who dropped subscriptions but still wanted AOL's free content. They had to learn new tools, and in doing so, could more easily discover rival offerings.

Jonathan Miller, AOL's chairman and chief executive, said the strategy shift would help the unit "maintain and deepen our relationship with many more members who are likely to migrate to broadband. Providing them with their familiar AOL software and e-mail for free, over any broadband connection, will be critical to our future success."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-10-33-59





Cable/broadband up, but AOL, TV/film studios down

Time Warner Reports $1 Billion Profit for Quarter
AP

Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, reported a $1 billion profit for its second quarter Wednesday and said it would revamp its AOL business to offer many services such as e-mail for free.

The profit contrasted to a loss of $409 million in the same period a year ago, when the company recorded a charge for settling securities litigation. Strength in cable TV and filmed entertainment offset weakness at AOL, which lost nearly 1 million subscribers in the quarter.

The company, whose properties also include HBO, Warner Bros. and the Time Inc. magazine publisher, earned 24 cents per share in the April-June period versus a loss of 9 cents per share a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, the earnings were equivalent to 20 cents per share in the most recent period, a penny better than analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting. On a similar basis, the year-ago earnings were 16 cents per share.

Time Warner also said the AOL revamp, which had been expected, wouldn't hurt its earnings this year. Time Warner's shares rebounded 37ents, or 2.3 percent, to $16.62 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, having slumped over the past month as reports emerged about the overhaul plans.

Revenues edged up 1 percent to $10.7 billion from $10.6 billion.

On an operating basis, income before depreciation and amortization rose 7 percent to $2.7 billion as gains in cable TV, cable networks and filmed entertainment offset weaker results at AOL and magazine publishing.

In the year-ago period, the company took a $3 billion charge for legal reserves related to settling securities litigation in the wake of the sharp tumble in the company's share price following AOL's deal in 2000 to buy Time Warner.

Separately, the company also announced changes in its AOL division, saying it would make its software, e-mail and other parts of the service free to high-speed Internet users, but no longer aggressively market its dial-up subscription service.

The move is part of AOL's strategy to refocus on the booming area of online advertising and shift away from dial-up Internet access subscriptions, which are declining. By allowing AOL members to continue to use the service for free after switching to broadband, ''we will finally position AOL to take advantage of very compelling online trends,'' Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons told analysts on a conference call.

In its quarterly regulatory filing, which was also made Wednesday, the company said it expected to reach a deal to sell the Internet access services of its AOL Europe unit in the second half of this year.

Time Warner said it had completed more than half of its $20 billion share buyback program announced last year, paying about $11.7 billion since the program started to buy 14 percent of its outstanding shares.

The AOL division posted a 2 percent decline in revenues and a 4 percent fall in profits as it continued to lose dialup subscribers, offset partly by more gains in advertising. The quarter also included $15 million in charges to close one customer service center and scale back another. As of the end of the quarter, AOL's subscriber rolls fell 976,000 to 17.7 million. Time Warner said in its regulatory filing that it expects a faster rate of decline in its subscribers, as well as a corresponding decline in both subscription revenues and network costs.

Time Warner's cable TV business, the second largest in the country after Comcast Corp., recorded a 15 percent gain in revenues and a 16 percent rise in profits on more growth in premium services like highspeed Internet, digital phone and digital video. This week Time Warner Cable closed a deal to acquire, together with Comcast, the cable systems of Adelphia Communications Corp.

Time Warner said the additional cable systems would add several percentage points to its full-year growth rate in operating profits, which is now expected to be in the low double-digit percentage range, off a base of $10 billion last year -- a figure that was adjusted to reflect the sale of its book publishing division. That rate also accounts for the consolidation of Court TV and the shutdown of the struggling WB network.

The company's movie and TV studios -- Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema -- posted a 10 percent decline in revenues on lower home video sales and other factors. Profits rose 10 percent on lower costs as well as contributions from syndication sales of ''Seinfeld'' and ''Without a Trace.''

Time Inc., a major magazine publisher that puts out Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Money and many other titles, turned in a 2 percent decline in revenues and an 11 percent fall in profits.

Revenues and profits from cable TV networks both rose 9 percent, partly as a result of the consolidation of Court TV, a network it had half-owned with Liberty Media Corp.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi... tner=homepage





Postal Service Finds a Friend in the Internet
Katie Hafner

At a recent conference that attracted 15,000 eBay fanatics to Las Vegas, the main sponsor was a big advocate of online shopping: none other than the United States Postal Service.

“I have one message today for the entire eBay community,” said Postmaster General John E. Potter in a speech to the crowd. “We, the Postal Service, we love you. We love every buyer, every seller, every power seller. Thank you for shipping with the United States Postal Service.”

Thank you indeed.

As people send e-mail and e-cards instead of handwritten letters and greetings, as they pay more bills online and file tax returns electronically, the Postal Service has started to seem like a drab and tired reminder of the old way of doing things.

Yet the Internet is actually injecting new life — and a sorely needed source of revenue — into the Postal Service. And it is happening with packages — millions of them shipped every day, in a journey that starts with a few mouse clicks and ends a day or two or five later at a customer’s door.

In 2005, revenue from first-class mail like cards and letters, which still made up more than half the Postal Service’s total sales of $66.6 billion, dropped nearly 1 percent from 2004. But revenue from packages helped make up for much of that drop, rising 2.8 percent, to $8.6 billion, last year, as it handled nearly three billion packages.

It is impossible to say how many of these were online orders, but Postal Service officials give e-commerce a lot of credit.

“Six years ago, people were pointing at the Internet as the doom and gloom of the Postal Service, and in essence what we’ve found is the Internet has ended up being the channel that drives business for us,” said James Cochrane, manager of package services at the Postal Service.

There are other beneficiaries of online shopping: FedEx, D.H.L. and the United Parcel Service have all gotten a boost. “E-commerce has clearly benefited all the companies in the package delivery business,” said Robert Dahl, the project director of the Air Cargo Management Group, an aviation consulting firm in Seattle.

But nobody needed the new business more than the Postal Service, which now works closely with some Web giants. As early as 1998, when Amazon.com was first grappling with the challenge of volume shipping, William J. Henderson, then postmaster general, talked business with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, Mr. Henderson recalled recently.

Patty Smith, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, said: “We love the U.S. Postal Service. They’re critical in helping us get packages out. They hit the customer every day, whether it’s with an Amazon package or not.”

Netflix, which rents DVD’s through its Web site, is so dependent on the post office that when the company needed to fill the job of chief operations officer, it turned not to a general logistics expert but to someone with an intimate knowledge of how mail gets delivered: Mr. Henderson.

Netflix ships 1.4 million movies every day, and it expects to spend some $300 million on postage this year. Mr. Henderson is “the only guy on the planet who looks at our volume of mail and thinks of it as quite small,” said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif. “It’s a trickle of mail to him, where to anyone else it’s a torrent.”

Since arriving at Netflix, Mr. Henderson has helped the company take advantage of discounts available to companies that presort their mail, and improved efficiency at its 40 shipping plants sprinkled around the country, all of them near a mail-sorting center. Netflix plans to offer electronic delivery of movies, but Mr. Hastings said the company expected to keep mailing DVD’s for some time.

One of the biggest boosts for the Postal Service has come from eBay, the online marketplace, whose sellers ship millions of packages every year.

“Shipping is an incredibly important part of trading on eBay,” said Meg Whitman as she introduced Mr. Potter at the Las Vegas conference. “The men and women of the United States Postal Service are really the unsung heroes of the eBay community.”

According to a study conducted by Forrester Research for Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, online sales of items that are shipped are expected to rise 20 percent this year from last year, to nearly $132 billion.

EBay shippers, said Mr. Potter in a recent interview, have accounted for more than $1 billion worth of postage since the Postal Service started working with the company in 2004.

“They’re very helpful,” he said, by way of understatement.

Mr. Potter added: “We’re finding a lot of synergy between what we have to offer and what some of the companies on the Internet are trying to do.”

That synergy has given rise to some innovations for both the Postal Service and eBay. Consider the routine annoyance of going to the local post office and waiting in line to have a package weighed. Enter the $8.10 flat-rate box, introduced in late 2004 and big enough to hold five hardcover books, as well as an assortment of services for shippers on the Postal Service’s Web site.

“Shipping was obviously of some concern to our sellers who don’t have big warehouses and shipping departments,” said Chris Tsakalakis, vice president of advanced solutions at eBay. “Obviously the Postal Service knows their business inside and out, and we know our sellers fairly well.”

Roy Schott, an eBay seller in Phoenix with enough sales and endorsements from buyers to have reached the rank of “power seller,” grows positively romantic when talking about his newly streamlined interactions with the Postal Service.

“I think the post office is an absolutely fabulous partner to eBay,” Mr. Schott said. “Without the post office, satisfying customers would be much harder. I have delighted customers.”

Mr. Schott, who sells Zippo lighters and other pieces of vintage Americana, much of it to collectors overseas, does most of his shipping preparation from home.

The Postal Service and eBay provide him with boxes in a variety of sizes that bear their logos, delivered free by his mail carrier. He is an enthusiastic user of the flat-rate box, and everything else he weighs on his own postage scale.

Using a feature on the Postal Service Web site called “Click to Ship,” Mr. Schott fills out his labels online, as well as international customs forms, has the postage deducted from his account with PayPal (an eBay service), and prints everything out.

“I have tried to embrace each innovation,” said Mr. Schott, who has been an eBay seller since 1997, when shipping was far more cumbersome.

Mr. Schott said he used FedEx or U.P.S. only for unusually large items, and for those that exceed the Postal Service’s 70-pound limit.

Shoes, it turns out, are an oft-shipped commodity. So at the eBay conference in June, Mr. Potter unveiled a new shoe-size shipping box. The Postal Service has already distributed 250,000 of them.

Even FedEx depends on the Postal Service to handle some e-commerce deliveries. FedEx now has a service called FedEx SmartPost for high-volume shipping from online retailers like L. L. Bean. FedEx uses its planes and trucks to get packages to a nearby postal facility, and they are then delivered by the Postal Service, taking advantage of its expertise in handling the “last mile” of mail delivery.

“They’re most efficient walking down the sidewalk,” said Bram B. Johnson, executive vice president for FedEx Ground, referring to the Postal Service. “They go to every single address every single day. No one else does that.”

Mr. Dahl of Air Cargo Management warned that the package delivery business alone would not help the Postal Service offset shortfalls in other areas.

“If you look at the bread and butter for the Postal Service, those segments have been declining,” he said. “So obviously it’s to their benefit to look for other kinds of opportunities.”

Mr. Potter is sanguine about the other opportunities coming his way.

“If you look back at the history of Postal Service, there’s always been a threat,” Mr. Potter said. “The telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine. Any new form of communication has been viewed as, oh wow, it’s the beginning of the end. But I take great reassurance that the American public always seem to find new ways to use the mail.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/bu...rtner=homepage





Congress' Broadband Battles

Politicians are busy overhauling federal telecommunications laws for the first time since 1996, and there's zero consensus so far on controversial topics like Net neutrality, copy protection and Web censorship.

To help clear things up, CNET News.com has prepared a reader's guide to various provisions of the Communications, Consumer's Choice and Broadband Deployment Act (that's what it's called in the Senate) and the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (its name in the House).

The full House of Representatives voted on its version June 8, and on June 28, a Senate committee cleared its version for a floor vote, which could happen at any time. But because the bills are different, they'll have to go before a conference committee before a final version is negotiated.

Net neutrality
Senate: A Senate committee rejected proposed Net neutrality regulations by a tie vote, 11 to 11, on June 28. Democrats are backing extensive Internet regulations, which Republicans largely oppose. One Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, has pledged to block the bill from coming to a vote unless Net neutrality regulations are inserted. House: The House voted by 269-152 on June 8 to reject extensive Net neutrality regulations backed by Democrats and technology companies. Republicans voted against the regulations by a 20-to-1 margin. Final: Nothing yet.

Broadcast flag
Senate: A Senate committee approved on June 27 a proposal requiring audio and video broadcast flags. House: The telecommunications bill the House approved on June 8 does not include a broadcast flag provision. Final: Nothing yet.

Municipal broadband
Senate: A Senate committee approved the telecommunications bill's existing language on municipal broadband without amendments on June 27. That language says no state may prohibit its own municipalities from offering broadband services. Before a municipality may offer its own broadband service, it must publish a 30-day notice and solicit bids from the private sector. But it's not required to accept any of the bids. House: A measure approved by the full House on June 8 is not as regulatory. It merely says municipalities must not grant special regulatory treatment to broadband providers that it owns or controls. Final: Nothing yet.

Web labeling
Senate: A Senate committee approved an amendment on June 27 that requires Webmasters of sexually explicit sites to post labels or face 5-year prison terms. House: The telecommunications bill that the House approved on June 8 does not include mandatory Web labeling. Final: Nothing yet.

Net taxes
Senate: A Senate committee approved an amendment on June 28 that would prohibit state and local governments from levying Internet access taxes. House: The telecommunications bill that the House approved on June 8 does not include a prohibition on Internet access taxes. Final: Nothing yet.
http://news.com.com/Congress+broadba...32.html?tag=nl





Paris Homes Test Very High-Speed Broadband

France Télécom lays fiber to 100 homes in trial of connection with a maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps
Peter Sayer

France Télécom has laid new optical fiber connections direct to 100 homes in and around Paris to test a very high speed broadband access service, the company said Tuesday.

For €70 ($88) a month, customers participating in the fiber trial get Internet access, digital television broadcasts, and unlimited telephone calls over an optical connection with a theoretical maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps downstream, and 1.2Gbps upstream. The price includes installation and activation of equipment at the customers' homes, and the first two months' access are free.

During the trial, France Télécom also plans to offer interactive television services and videoconferencing, and will test new content-sharing and gaming services, it said.

Former monopoly operators in other countries are eyeing similar strategies. German operator Deutsche Telekom, for example, is laying fiber to the curb in front of German homes, and plans to use VDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line) technology over the last few meters to deliver broadband services to the homes at up to 50Mbps. It wants the service to be exempt from regulation, on the basis that it is a new market. German parliamentarians will debate a new telecommunications law that could decide such an exemption after the summer recess.

France Télécom, meanwhile, has laid 100 kilometers of new fiber, connecting its network direct to houses and apartments in six of the 20 arrondissements (administrative districts) in Paris, and in the nearby towns of Asnières-sur-Seine, Boulogne-Billancourt, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Rueil-Malmaison and Villeneuve-la-Garenne. The service is delivered over a Giga Passive Optical Network (GPON), the company said. The GPON standards were developed by the International Telecommunication Union, beginning in 2003.

Delivering new broadband services using fiber to the home would be attractive for France Télécom, as in the market for existing consumer broadband services it is hemmed in by competitors and regulations. Using unregulated fiber would allow it, and other former monopoly operators in markets where copper infrastructure is heavily regulated, to offer something their younger competitors can't.

France Télécom owns the decades-old copper infrastructure that links most homes to the French telephone system, but is obliged to rent it at a closely regulated price to competitors wishing to offer DSL services. They, in turn, typically undercut France Télécom's retail prices to offer a better, cheaper service over its own infrastructure.

For example, France Télécom bundles Internet access at up to 18Mbps and digital television service for around €40 a month, with unlimited telephone calls costing €10 a month more. Meanwhile competitor Iliad, through its subsidiary Free, bundles Internet access, digital TV and unlimited calls to European and North American destinations for around €30 a month. On Wednesday, Free announced it will increase the maximum speed of connections to 28Mbps for users of its newest modem, with no change in price.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/...ghspeed_1.html





Colleges Warn About Networking Sites
Justin Pope

Incoming college students are hearing the usual warnings this summer about the dangers of everything from alcohol to credit card debt. But many are also getting lectured on a new topic - the risks of Internet postings, particularly on popular social networking sites such as Facebook.

From large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, colleges around the country have revamped their orientation talks to students and parents to include online behavior. Others, Susquehanna University and Washington University in St. Louis among them, have new role-playing skits on the topic that students will watch and then break into smaller groups to discuss.

Facebook, geared toward college students and boasting 7.5 million registered users, is a particular focus. But students are also hearing stories about those who came to regret postings to other online venues, from party photos on sites such as Webshots.com to comments about professors in blogs.

"The particular focus is the public nature of this," said Tracy Tyree, Susquehanna's dean of student life. "That seems to be what surprises students most. They think of it as part of their own little world, not a bigger electronic world."

The attention colleges are devoting to the topic is testimony both to the exploding popularity of online networking on campus, and to the time and energy administrators have spent dealing with the fallout when students post things that become more public than they intended.

Northwestern temporarily suspended its women's soccer program last spring after hazing photos surfaced online, while athletes at Elon University, Catholic University, Wake Forest and the University of Iowa were also disciplined or investigated. At least one school, Kent State in Ohio, temporarily banned athletes from posting profiles on Facebook, and now allows them to do so only with restricted access.

Non-athletes at numerous schools from North Carolina State to Northern Kentucky have been busted for alcohol violations based on digital photographs. Students at Penn State were punished for rushing the field at a football game. A University of Oklahoma freshman's joke in Facebook about assassinating President Bush prompted a visit from the Secret Service.

"I think they don't realize that others have" so much access, said Aaron Laushway, associate dean of students at the University of Virginia, which first incorporated the topic into orientation a year ago.

Many colleges tell students they won't actively patrol online profiles to look for evidence of wrongdoing - but they are obliged to respond to complaints (at Susquehanna, Tyree says, rival fraternities like to rat each other out by pointing out photos involving alcohol to administrators).

The real concern, they are trying to persuade students, is the unintended off-campus audience.

Unlike MySpace - a social site that many incoming freshman are already familiar with - Facebook users generally need a ".edu" e-mail address and can view complete profiles only of users at their colleges unless identified as a "friend" by the profile's owner. So most students feel confident they are addressing an audience of peers. Maybe they shouldn't be so sure.

Police are increasingly monitoring the sites. And it's not hard for prospective employers to get a ".edu" e-mail address from an alumnus or an intern, and recruiters are increasingly trolling the Internet to scope out prospective hires.

"They may be looking at these sites wondering if there's a personality fit with their company culture," said Tim Luzader, director of Purdue's center for career opportunities. A recent survey there found that a third of employers recruiting there ran job applicants' names through search engines, and 12 percent said they looked at social networking sites.

News reports of online stalkers warn there are potential personal safety issues, too. Tara Redmon, who oversees the orientation program and transition program at Western Kentucky, said one inspiration for adding the topic this year was talking to a student who had put her dorm address and room number on a posted profile, never considering the risk.

College administrators say they can't - and wouldn't want to - keep students off sites such as Facebook. Many welcome the kind of community-building the sites facilitate, and they recognize they have become an important, and usually harmless, venue for the kind of identity formation and presentation that's an important part of the college experience.

The sites actually help with one of the major goals of orientation: bonding. At Birmingham-Southern, dozens of members of the incoming class of about 350 had already formed a Class of 2010 Facebook group long before the start of school.

"That's great," said Renie Moss, the school's dean of students. "That's what should be happening, forming that camaraderie. But we're hoping to just maybe give the students a moment to pause and make sure they put out something they can be proud of."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-17-18-26





Tony Bennett at 80, Keeping the Flame
Stephen Holden

A quintessential Tony Bennett moment comes at the end of “It’s a Wonderful World,” the tender duet he recorded with K. D. Lang for their 2002 Louis Armstrong tribute album, “A Wonderful World.” After they swap greeting-card doggerel celebrating “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white,” Mr. Bennett remarks with a boyish enthusiasm, “Don’t you think Satchmo was right?”

Ms. Lang responds by crooning a final, dreamy “what a wonderful world,” whereupon her partner, speaking in the quiet, choked-up voice of a man visiting the grave of a beloved father figure, declares, “You were right, Pops.”

This gentle burst of affirmation melts your heart and reminds you that sincerity, a mode of expression that has been twisted, trampled, co-opted and corrupted in countless ways by the false intimacy of television, still exists in American popular culture. It can even salvage “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white” from the junk heap of pop inanity.

Mr. Bennett, who turns 80 tomorrow, has steadfastly remained the embodiment of heart in popular music. He pours it into every note he sings and every phrase he swings with a sophistication that deepens his unguarded emotional directness. In the polluted sea of irony, bad faith and grotesque attitudinizing that pop music has become, he is a rock of integrity.

That integrity has carried him through the ups, downs and ups of a musical career that now spans more than half a century. After the death of Frank Sinatra in 1998, Mr. Bennett immediately became the leading caretaker of the literate American song tradition that runs from Kern to Ellington to Rodgers. You couldn’t ask for a more reverent keeper of the flame.

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.

Mr. Bennett is something else altogether. A native New Yorker and man of the people, he never strayed far from his working-class roots in Astoria, Queens, where he was born Anthony Benedetto. Although he came out of the same tradition of Mediterranean balladry as Sinatra, he retained the innocence and joie de vivre of his youth. Disappointment is not in his vocabulary. We don’t go to him for psychological complexity, but for refreshment and reassurance that life is good.

Believing in the power of art to ennoble ordinary lives, he sings what he feels with a rare mixture of humility and pride: humility in the face of the daunting popular-song tradition he treasures and pride that he is recognized as its custodian. Gratitude and joy, gruffness and beauty balance each other perfectly in singing that has grown more rhythmically acute with each passing year.

To attend a Tony Bennett concert is to find yourself in the presence of a performer who exudes a rough-hewn natural elegance, devoid of airs. Singing a song like “Mood Indigo,” he transmutes its sadness into the exuberance of a man who acknowledges having the blues but embraces resilience. He can still end a song like “Fly Me to the Moon” or “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” with an old-fashioned, quasi-operatic crescendo, but he makes these corny triumphal endings stick in your heart.

Late next month, Columbia Records will release “Tony Bennett: Duets/An American Classic,” which includes 18 of his old hits and favorite album cuts rerecorded with everybody from Bono (“I Wanna Be Around”) to Tim McGraw (“Cold, Cold Heart”). The album belongs to the dubious Grammy-seeking category of event records that includes “Frank Sinatra Duets” and Ray Charles’s “Genius Loves Company,” albums that aren’t about interpreting songs but are about pop royalty putting on a show of chumminess while strutting arm in arm down the red carpet.

Everyone involved in these orgies of mutual admiration pretends for the moment that there are no ethnic, generational or stylistic boundaries in music. Mr. Bennett handles his chores on “Duets” with a casual, offhand grace that goes a long way toward undercutting the ceremonial pretensions.

It is an official marker in a career that can be divided into three phases. The first is defined by four early-50’s hits: “Because of You,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Blue Velvet” and “Stranger in Paradise,” which stand as the gorgeous final flowering of the high-romantic style invented in the 40’s by Sinatra and his arranger, Axel Stordahl. Pure and throbbing, Mr. Bennett’s voice adds a semioperatic heft to Sinatra’s more intimate crooning style. Male pop singing since then has never been this unabashedly sweet.

Phase two began in 1962 with the hit “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which rejuvenated Mr. Bennett’s flagging career. Singing songs like “I Wanna Be Around,” “The Good Life” and “The Shadow of Your Smile,” the 30-something singer infused these more adult, bittersweet ballads with a current of worldly nostalgia.

At the end of the 1960’s, Mr. Bennett, like many of his peers, became an instant relic rudely shoved to the perimeter of the pop marketplace in the vindictive generational coup that thrust rock to the forefront of American pop. Leaving Columbia Records in 1972, he spent the next decade and a half in semi-exile, recording excellent but obscure albums (including two mid-70’s masterpieces with Bill Evans) for smaller labels before returning to Columbia Records in 1986.

Mr. Bennett’s resurgence under the management of his son Danny has been a double-barreled triumph of marketing and artistry: of marketing in the case of his “MTV Unplugged” record, which shrewdly cast him as an avuncular elder statesman of rock and won him the Grammy for album of the year in 1995, and of artistry in the deluge of lovingly conceived and executed tribute albums he has put out over the last decade and a half.

Those records include “Perfectly Frank” (a Sinatra tribute), “Steppin’ Out” (Fred Astaire), “On Holiday” (Billie Holiday), “Hot and Cool: Bennett Sings Ellington,” “Playin’ With My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues” (easy-listening pop-blues duets performed with stars like B. B. King, Ray Charles and Bonnie Raitt) and “Here’s to the Ladies” (his versions of the signature songs of 17 women, from Mabel Mercer and Blossom Dearie to Sarah Vaughan and Barbra Streisand).

This legacy equals Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook albums of the 50’s and 60’s, which were instrumental in codifying the American songbook. These albums honor the performers as well as the music they recorded. Listen to any or all of them, and you may find yourself nodding your head and agreeing with Mr. Bennett: “You were right, Pops.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/arts/02benn.html





For Tom Hanks, Just Another Day at the Office
Lorne Manly

SEEMINGLY every Hollywood studio and production company coveted “Mamma Mia!,” the international musical that had been planting Abba’s infectious songs inside theatergoers’ craniums since 1999. But Judy Craymer, the musical’s global producer, had rebuffed all advances — even Tom Hanks’s.

On the eve of the show’s Los Angeles premiere five years ago, Gary Goetzman, Mr. Hanks’s partner in the production company Playtone, met with Ms. Craymer at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. Mr. Hanks’s star power wasn’t enough, though: Playtone received the same polite no as all the rest.

So the people at Playtone applied the full extent of their trademark charm. Mr. Hanks called Ms. Craymer to convey his personal interest in the project. Rita Wilson, his wife, sent her a note gushing about the production the couple had seen in London. Mr. Goetzman, the sort of Hollywood dude who’s partial to calling everyone he meets dude, kept in touch too, even paying a visit to her home in London last fall. All along, the message was low-key but clear: In Playtone’s hands the movie would be faithful to the campy, winking stage show, and the members of the main creative team behind the original would be full partners.

It wasn’t until last year that Ms. Craymer said she felt ready to go ahead with a movie, and by that time she had come to regard the folks at Playtone — who had since produced “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” — as friends. And uncommonly resourceful friends, at that: during his visit to her home, Mr. Goetzman arranged for Harrod’s to deliver her drink of choice (Champagne, Dom Perignon in this case) and his favored Belvedere vodka. When they failed to arrive, he rushed to the store — which had already closed for the night — and sweet-talked the security guards into letting him inside to find his parcel.

“I thought, I have to work with this man,” Ms. Craymer said. “No raised voice, no kicking in the door.” He and his colleagues simply got things done.

Over the last several years they have gotten a great deal done, quietly turning Playtone into one of Hollywood’s most prolific filmmaking entities. Mr. Hanks is characteristically self-deprecating about its growth. “It just happens. It’s not like I sat down and had a meeting on the Death Star with my crack advisers,” he said with a laugh, then lowered his voice into movie-villain mode: “Now, we make our move.”

On Friday the company’s animated feature “The Ant Bully” was released on 3,050 regular and Imax screens by Warner Brothers. Lined up behind it are nearly three dozen projects. The ambitious mix includes studio movies like “Mamma Mia!,” which is being developed with Ms. Craymer’s company and Universal Pictures; independent films like “Starter for Ten,” a British comedy about a working-class student; a sprawling HBO mini-series about President John Adams; and a big-screen production tentatively called “Baseball 3-D: The Imax Experience.”

Playtone has attracted top-tier talent to many of its projects. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about a Texas Congressman who helped arm the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, stars Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman alongside Mr. Hanks, and is directed by Mike Nichols. “The Great Buck Howard,” about a young man who becomes a magician’s assistant, stars John Malkovich. And Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” is being turned into a movie directed by Spike Jonze.

All this as studios are slashing the number of actor-run production companies, many of which were little more than vanity projects, places for stars to hang their Kangol hats and pretend they were movie moguls. According to Variety, in 1998 some 60 actors, including Sylvester Stallone, Ice Cube, Jason Patric, Julia Ormond and Demi Moore, had production deals with studios; by last year that number had dwindled by half, and none of those actors still had deals. Meanwhile two of the leading companies — George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s Section 8 and Brat Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s Plan B — are dealing with aftereffects of divorces of the professional and personal kind. (Mr. Clooney recently announced that he would form a new company, Smoke House.)

Mr. Hanks was initially reluctant to be interviewed for this article. “Why would I want to — so I could see my name in the paper tomorrow?” he joked. “I get my name in the paper when I go out and buy socks. I go to Gray’s Papaya in New York and I’m on Defamer.com.” Both he and his partner said they hate to talk about themselves or their strategy. “We’re more for having fun and doing things that are important,” Mr. Goetzman said. “We just want to tell good stories.”

But associates and competitors were less reticent, identifying Playtone’s devotion to projects that reach above the lowest common denominator, as well as a light touch with its own celebrity, as reasons the company has flourished.

I THINK actors are motivated to make better movies,” said Michael Shamberg, co-chairman of Double Feature Films, who with his partner, Stacey Sher, ran Jersey Films with Danny DeVito for 13 years. “They don’t always succeed of course, but the last thing an actor-producer does is just package cheesy movies.”

That hyphenated role first emerged in 1919, when three of the silent era’s biggest stars — Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin — started United Artists, along with the director D. W. Griffith. As the studio system began to crumble in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, individual performers like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster formed companies, largely to produce their own star vehicles.

By the 1980’s the Creative Artists Agency (which represents Mr. Hanks and Playtone) and other top talent representatives made the studio production deal a routine component in a star’s career apparatus. In flush times studio executives were happy to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on an office, a development executive and some assistants if it also bought the loyalty of the star.

But it often didn’t. Actors, it turns out, go where the best parts and biggest paychecks are. And their passion projects weren’t always easy for the studios to swallow. “You have the worst of both worlds,” said Peter Guber, who cut many such deals as chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and who is now the chairman of Mandalay Entertainment Group and one of the hosts of “Sunday Morning Shootout” on AMC. “You have the ego of the actor, and they have your money.” Under the new Hollywood calculus — slowed revenue growth and increased corporate oversight — that combination no longer made sense.

But Playtone was something different: a company that had interest and experience in the nuts-and-bolts process of making successful movies. “They’re focused and precise,” said Donna Langley, president for production at Universal Pictures. “They don’t throw a lot of things up against the wall and see what sticks.”

Playtone’s roots stretch back to “Philadelphia,” the 1993 AIDS drama in which Mr. Hanks starred. He was in the midst of a career transformation, having gone from cross-dressing (in the sitcom “Bosom Buddies”) to comic run-ins with a mermaid (“Splash”), a donkey (“Bachelor Party”) and a giant danceable keyboard (“Big”).

Mr. Goetzman, who as a child played Dick Van Dyke’s son in “Divorce American Style,” had since made a name for himself in the music business, co-writing songs for Smokey Robinson and composing and producing songs for the likes of Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan and the Staple Singers. He was also learning the movie business, and was working on “Philadelphia” as executive producer. When Mr. Hanks made his writing and directing debut with “That Thing You Do!,” about a 1960’s pop band, he turned to Mr. Goetzman, not just to write some of the fictional group’s songs but to produce the movie.

After winning an Oscar for “Philadelphia,” Mr. Hanks went on to “Forrest Gump” (and another Oscar), “Apollo 13,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Green Mile” and “Cast Away,” thus cementing his position as a new generation’s Jimmy Stewart. And to capitalize on that position, in 1998 he and Mr. Goetzman formed Playtone, using the name of the record label in “That Thing You Do!” Mr. Hanks had had development deals in the past, but this time he had a real producer on his side. “Without that, there’s no reason to have an office,” Mr. Hanks said, “except to make long-distance calls and use the postage machine.”

Playtone currently has 18 employees in a Santa Monica office, a soon-to-be-renewed deal with Universal for about $2 million a year, and a record label with Sony BMG.

The first movie under the Playtone logo — “Cast Away,” based on an original idea by Mr. Hanks — took in more than $233 million at the domestic box office after its release by Fox and DreamWorks in 2000. But it was a film he never appeared in that proved the company’s true vitality.

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” Nia Vardalos’s comedy about a young Greek-American woman and her wacky extended family, found a champion in Ms. Wilson, who had seen Ms. Vardalos’s one-woman show in Los Angeles. But it was hard to raise enough money for even a small-budget version. HBO’s theatrical movie division, for example, had already passed. Then Chris Albrecht, who was then a top HBO executive and is now the cable channel’s chairman and chief executive, got a call from Mr. Goetzman. “He said, ‘I really want to do this. If I can get half of the $5 million, will you put up the rest?’ ” Mr. Albrecht recalled.

Mr. Albrecht said yes, though he hadn’t yet read the script.

It helped that HBO had worked with Mr. Hanks on the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon” (for which Mr. Hanks did much of the writing). It had also joined with Playtone and Steven Spielberg to produce “Band of Brothers,” the $120 million mini-series about a rifle company in World War II. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” went on to make $241 million at the domestic box office.

Smooth working relationships — and substantial financial returns — have persuaded many of Playtone’s first-time partners to sign up for more. HBO turned to Playtone to handle the day-to-day production of “Big Love,” its dramatic series about a polygamist family in Utah. The two companies are also collaborating on a seven-hour mini-series about John Adams, and reuniting with Mr. Spielberg for a companion series to “Band of Brothers,” about the war in the Pacific. (Development of a sitcom based on “Lloyd: What Happened,” a satirical novel about the corporate world by Stanley Bing, dragged on for several years before the project died.)

Imax, another regular Playtone collaborator, created 3-D versions of “Polar Express” and the newly released “Ant Bully,” as well as the Imax original “Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D,” and is considering a more formal alliance with Playtone to produce shorter giant-screen films. “I want to hitch my wagon to them,” said Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment.

And Picturehouse, which is releasing “Starter for Ten,” is negotiating a distribution deal with Playtone for several films a year, each budgeted at less than $15 million, Mr. Goetzman said.

“Tell good stories for a good number,” he said, “and that is what’s really going to help the movie business more than anything.”

MORE than a few hard-boiled Hollywood veterans have been beguiled by what they describe, without embarrassment, as Playtone’s penchant for niceness.

A little less than four years ago, for instance, Diana Ossana found herself, along with her longtime collaborator Larry McMurtry, in Playtone’s Santa Monica offices. Mr. Hanks had read Mr. McMurtry’s post-Civil War novel, “Boone’s Lick,” on a camping trip in Idaho; when he got home he called the author to talk about turning it into a movie.

Five minutes into a subsequent meeting, Ms. Ossana said, Mr. McMurtry — a skeptic about business dealings — knew he wanted to work with the Playtone folks. It wasn’t the passion for manual typewriters that he and Mr. Hanks share. (The actor’s collection is on view at the company’s offices.) It was how serious and intelligent the Playtone executives seemed. And, Ms. Ossana said with a laugh, “they never interrupted when we spoke.”

The Playtone principals will, however, push back when necessary. One example: Mr. Goetzman argued that the polygamy stories in “Big Love” should not overwhelm the other aspects of the main character’s life. “He was kind of a lone voice in the room,” said Mr. Albrecht, who sided with Mr. Goetzman.

But they are loyal, said Mike Nichols, who starts production on “Charlie Wilson’s War” in September: “Whatever wall would come up at the studio, they would find a way around it. Tom will say, instead of getting into a long negotiation, ‘Take it out of mine.’ Or Gary will say, ‘We’ll give in on that.’ ”

Though Mr. Hanks and Mr. Goetzman profess discomfort with discussing their creative choices, certain interests and themes are clear. American history, from the Revolutionary War to modern days, for instance, has driven many acquisitions, including the recent purchase of the movie rights to David McCullough’s best seller “1776” and David Maraniss’s Vietnam War book, “They Marched Into Sunlight.”

“The thing about Tom is that he happens to be a movie star, but he could have been the greatest history professor you’ve ever had,” said Nora Ephron, who directed him in “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

A love for music shows up in movies like “Mamma Mia!” and Jonathan Demme’s documentary “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” And well-known children’s books to which they have aqcuired the movie rights, like “Amelia Bedelia” and “The Spider and the Fly” define another niche.

Playtone also has what some describe as a commitment to classic storytelling: “Main characters who go through some sort of awakening and become proactive in their lives,” said Cary Granat, president of the Anschutz Film Group, which through its Walden Media and Bristol Bay units is producing two movies with Playtone, “City of Ember” and “The Great Buck Howard.” In “The Ant Bully,” a young boy takes out his frustrations on an anthill. But when he’s shrunk down to the size of the ants, he must help save them from the annihilating spray of a bug-ridden exterminator.

While Playtone’s movies may strive to be about more than rollicking car chases, saw-wielding maniacs or flatulence jokes, that doesn’t mean the company sneers at commercial viability. “I don’t think they’d ever want to do a movie that didn’t do well,” said Mr. Foster of Imax.

Or as Mr. Guber said of Mr. Hanks: “He’s not going to do the movie about a proctologist from Mars. Unless it’s starring Adam Sandler.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/movies/30manl.html





‘Miami Vice’: Operatic Passions, Yet Cool in the Heat
A. O. Scott

IF there is a lesson to be extracted from the visual glories of “Miami Vice” — the painterly compositions of tropical sea and sky, the glowing, throbbing nightclub set pieces, the meticulously choreographed deployments of lethal force — it might be that love and work don’t mix. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the South Florida municipal employees whose labors preoccupy this movie (as they did its predecessor television series two decades ago), have pretty complicated jobs to begin with.

They impersonate highly skilled, business-minded drug couriers in the interests of bringing down far-reaching criminal enterprises, which means that they must be adept at handling fast boats, suitcases full of cash, small planes and large guns. Their private lives don’t take them far from the job. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.

But in the world of Michael Mann — a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version — no such line really exists. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.

These men might be television producers or paid assassins, boxers or cabdrivers, cops or robbers or frontiersmen, and they might relate to one another as partners, antagonists or uneasy allies, but they all seem to share this essential trait. It is impossible to separate who they are from what they do. Crockett and Tubbs are not in it for the pension plan or the dental coverage, not for the planes and the boats and the cool sunglasses, not even for the righteous thrill of fighting crime. Their devotion to their work is irrational, risky, extravagant: you might even say crazy. They insist on doing it their own way, tolerating no interference from, for instance, some pencil-pushing F.B.I. suit (Ciaran Hinds).

In other words, they’re a lot like the detectives played by William L. Petersen in “Manhunter” and Al Pacino in “Heat,” or like Tom Cruise’s hit man in “Collateral,” to name just a few. Which is also to say that, like most of Mr. Mann’s men, they betray a telling resemblance to the man himself. Never one for compromise or restraint, this filmmaker throws himself into every frame, turning genre movies into feverish spectacles of style and feeling.

With “Miami Vice” he clearly had money to burn, and the flames are beautiful to behold. Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.

I’m not exaggerating about the art. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.

Not that the narrative makes too many concessions to realism, apart from the occasional swatch of untranslated law-enforcement jargon (“Our op-sec has been compromised”) and the rumpled, workaday presence of the wonderful Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, the down-to-earth commanding officer played on television by Edward James Olmos.

There is a basic setup involving white-supremacist methamphetamine dealers that is a red herring and the foreshadowing of a later surprise, but before too long we’re in the familiar world of heartless Latin American drug lords (in this case a retiring fellow played by Luis Tosar) and their sadistic minions (John Ortiz, looking like an especially disgruntled graduate student). The case requires elaborate cover, buckets of money and the finest, fastest air and sea vessels the taxpayers of Miami can afford. Not really, of course. The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.”

The action jumps from Paraguay to Haiti, from Colombia to Cuba (impersonated, as usual, by the Dominican Republic), where Crockett and his lady friend drop in for cocktails one evening after work. The movie’s swirl of danger, glamour and professionalism expands the central conceit of the series, which was to imagine a pair of urban cops who looked, dressed and acted like movie stars.

After the show became a hit, real movie stars would occasionally swing by for a visit. Still, the old Crockett and Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, carried a lot of baggage onto the set: divorces, dead partners, Vietnam, the N.Y.P.D. Their new, improved selves, by contrast, travel light and sleek, with no back stories to burden the picture with exposition. Except for something about Crockett’s daddy and the Allman Brothers, which explains Mr. Farrell’s mustache, if not his peculiar accent.

When the show made its debut in 1984, Mr. Johnson was a has-been — or never-quite-was — movie star, which helped give his character a grizzled, disappointed element of soulfulness. In the movie version, though, only real movie stars, who command attention simply by allowing the camera to behold them, will do. Mr. Foxx, sly, taciturn and effortlessly charismatic, certainly fulfills the requirement, as does Ms. Gong, a goddess of global cinema whose every word you hang on even when you can’t understand a single one. If there is any justice in the world, Ms. Harris (who can also be seen this summer in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) will join their ranks before long.

Mr. Farrell, however, is a movie star only in the sense that Richard Gephardt is president of the United States. He’s always looked good on paper, and he’s picked up some endorsements along the way — from Oliver Stone, Joel Schumacher and Terrence Malick, among others — but somehow it has never quite happened. Here he squints and twitches to suggest emotion and slackens his lower lip to suggest lust, concern or deep contemplation, but despite his good looks he lacks that mysterious quality we call presence.

Mr. Mann’s script has its share of silly, overwrought lines, but they only really sound that way in Mr. Farrell’s mouth. (Did he really say, “I’m a fiend for mojitos”? ¡Dios mío!) When he’s not on screen, you don’t miss him, and when he is, you find yourself, before long, looking at someone or something else. Gong Li. A boat. A lightning bolt illuminating the humid summer sky.

Yet the flaws in “Miami Vice” are in the end part of its pulpy grandeur. It is in some ways an entirely gratuitous movie: the influence of the original series can be seen in any number of big car-chase-and-fireball crime thrillers, from “Bad Boys” to “Bad Boys II.” There isn’t much to add. But the irrelevance of this project makes Mr. Mann’s quixotic devotion to it seem perversely heroic. This was not a job that anyone needed to do, but then again no one could have done it better.

“Miami Vice” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has heavy swearing, heavy breathing and heavy gunplay.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/07/2...es/28vice.html





Entangling the Web
Timothy B. Lee

AFTER a decade of explosive growth, a revolutionary new technology transforms the American economy. It allows people to communicate and do business across great distances faster than ever before. Critics, however, contend that access is controlled by a few large corporations eager to abuse monopoly power in order to gouge consumers and crush competition. Congress responds by enacting anti-monopoly rules and authorizing regulators to enforce them.

That might sound like a happy ending for the current debate on “network neutrality,” in which Congress is being encouraged to restrain the appetites of the biggest Internet service providers. But it actually describes a similar drama from 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, the high-tech industry of the day.

Unfortunately, the story is a cautionary tale. After President Grover Cleveland appointed Thomas M. Cooley, a railroad ally, as its first chairman, the commission quickly fell under the control of the railroads, gradually transforming the American transportation industry into a cartel. By 1935, when it was given oversight of the trucking industry, the commission was restricting competition and enabling price increases throughout virtually the entire surface transportation industry. Decades later, in 1970, a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the commission as “a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

Economists have dubbed this process “regulatory capture,” and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970’s. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition.

Of course, incumbent broadband providers do have some limited monopoly powers, and there is cause for concern that they might abuse them. Last fall, the chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, argued that Internet giants like Google and Microsoft should begin paying for access to his “pipes”— never mind that consumers already pay AT&T for the bandwidth they use to gain access to these services. If broadband providers like AT&T were to begin blocking or degrading the content and services of companies that didn’t pay up, both consumers and the Internet would suffer.

But enforcing such a “pay to play” scheme might be more challenging than Mr. Whitacre suspects. As every music-downloading student knows, there are myriad ways to evade Internet filtering software. Moreover, an Internet service provider that denies customers access to content risks a serious consumer revolt. Unlike a one-railroad Western town, most broadband customers can choose between cable and D.S.L., and a growing number have access to wireless options as well.

With several promising new technologies on the drawing board, the market for broadband will grow only more competitive. Congress should let the marketplace develop rather than constrain it with regulation. Lawmakers should certainly be mindful of unintended consequences. The Interstate Commerce Commission’s regulations on transportation lingered for decades after their usefulness expired. Any neutrality regulations passed by Congress this year are likely to have a similarly dismal future. Choice and competition will do a better job of protecting Internet consumers than government bureaucrats ever have.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03lee.html





Black Hat: Researcher Creates Net Neutrality Test
Robert McMillan

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality.

Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, today at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell whether computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls or treating encrypted data as second-class, for example.

The U.S. Congress is presently debating whether to enact Net neutrality laws that would prevent this from happening. Net neutrality would force Internet service providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. to give all Internet traffic the same quality of service. Advocates of these laws say they are essential to preserving the openness that has made the Internet a success. Broadband providers say that such laws could prevent them from developing a new generation of services.

Kaminsky calls his technique "TCP-based active probing for faults." He says that the software he's developing will be similar to the Traceroute Internet utility that is used to track what path Internet traffic takes as it hops between two machines on different ends of the network.

But unlike Traceroute, Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier or is being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped and could ultimately be used to finger service providers that are treating some network traffic as second-class.

At this week's Black Hat conference, Kaminsky will show how to perform a basic version of TCP-based Active Probing using currently available tools. He said in an interview yesterday that he will release his own, more sophisticated software sometime within the next six months as part of a free suite of tools called Paketto Keiretsu Version 3.

The security researcher said he is curious to see what people do with his software. "People are going to start looking [at networks] and who knows what they are going to find," he said.

Already, a handful of carriers have tried blocking certain types of Internet services. In March 2005, the Federal Communications Commission fined Madison River Communications Corp. $15,000 for blocking Vonage Holdings Corp.'s VoIP service. Since then, the FCC has changed its broadband carrier requirements, and it's unclear whether it would again issue a similar fine.

Kaminsky said he believes that Net neutrality will eventually become law and that the type of software he is developing will help keep the carriers honest. "If you're going to enforce by law that networks be neutral, the question becomes, 'How do you test for this?'" he said. "I'm going to make sure that the tools are going to be in place."

Kaminsky plans to post information on TCP-based active probing for faults at www.doxpara.com.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&taxonomyId=13





Hotter than shoes

Technology Is a Girl's Best Friend: Study

Diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend, according to a new U.S. study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.

The survey, commissioned by cable television's Oxygen Network that is owned and operated by women, found the technology gender gap has virtually closed with the majority of women snapping up new technology and using it easily.

Women were found on average to own 6.6 technology devices while men own 6.9, and four out of every five women felt comfortable using technology with 46 percent doing their own computer trouble-shooting.

``People make the assumption that women are not as advanced as men when it comes to technology and I was surprised at the parity men and women now have in terms of technology,'' Geraldine Laybourne, chairman and chief executive of Oxygen Network, told Reuters.

The Girls Gone Wired survey of 1,400 women and 700 men aged 15 to 49, which was conducted by market researcher TRU, found that given the choice, women would opt for tech items rather than luxury items like jewelry or vacations.

The study found 77 percent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 percent would opt for a new plasma TV over a weekend vacation in Florida.

Even shoes lost out. The study found 86 percent would prefer a new digital video camera to a pair of designer shoes.

The study found over the next five years women see themselves increasing their activities in six tech areas: digital cameras, cell phones, e-mail, camera phones, text messaging and instant messaging.

Laybourne said this increasing use of technology among women was expected to continue -- with advertisers needing to ensure they addressed women's increased usage and knowledge.

``Women don't feel like they have been given credit for what they know and they are condescended to,'' Laybourne said.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...echnology.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

July 29th, July 22nd, July 15th, July 8th, July 1st

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Voicemail: 213-814-0165. Please include contact info. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 04:10 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)