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Old 12-03-08, 08:04 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 15th, '08

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"This is a declaration of war on an entire generation of young voters." – Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge


"She had to use the bathroom on the floor. She said she was so thirsty she had to drink her own urine." – Adriana Torres-Diaz


"It's affecting virtually every circus in America. We're still on hold. We've applied and haven’t gotten anything. We're trying desperately to recruit, but the artists will probably have to help out." – Jim Royal


"It's true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character and I feel it's a limit. I'm always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp. Then again, an actor who gives a big performance, it's always a little embarrassing, because he's there saying, 'Look at my performance.' And that bothers me a lot." – Louis Garrel


"You have the world open to you now. You can get almost any song in the world as an mp3. Then you can try and find a version of it that you can actually listen to if you like good sound. The technology is taking us backwards. It's making it easier to make things worse." – Lou Reed


"We can record something at night, put it on the site for breakfast and have the money in the PayPal account by 5. With all due respect for my very great friends who have come up in the record-company environment, it’s nice to see that technology has opened the doors to everybody." – Daniel Lanois


"We hope this shows that using P2P in an intelligent way can benefit everyone. It allows us to use fewer resources on our network and get better performance for our customers." – Douglas Pasko, Verizon senior technologist and co-chair of the P4P Working Group


"The BBC accidentally opened the floodgates and gave the world DRM-free downloads. If only it were down to something other than poor design, decisions and ineptitude." – Hacker


"Last year YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000." – Steve Lohr


"Ex-girlfriend, Rachel Marsden, leaked instant messaging transcripts that purported to show [Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy] Wales using his influence to improperly make changes to Marsden's Wikipedia entry so he could continue 'f---ing [her] brains out'." – Asher Moses


"Good beat. Love the scandal behind it." – Poster on Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s MySpace page



































March 15th, 2008




House Subcommittee Passes IP Bill
Susan Butler

A House Judiciary Subcommittee late last week passed a bill intended to strengthen the government's intellectual property (IP) enforcement efforts.

Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., Howard Berman, D-Calif., Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and others had introduced the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007 (PRO IP Act, HR 4279). The Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property on March 6 passed the bill.

The bill has the support of more than 500 diverse companies, trade associations and unions, including the Copyright Alliance, the National Music Publishers' Assn., the RIAA, 3M, Cargill, Honeywell, Nike, Verizon, the Teamsters and the American Federation of Musicians.

"Having spent time at the Justice Department tackling IP enforcement and coordination issues, I understand the challenge of managing resources effectively and applaud the Subcommittee's efforts to provide leadership in this area," says NMPA president/CEO David Israelite. "This bill will go a long way towards making sure law enforcement agencies have what they need to get the job done on both domestic and international fronts."

The bill creates stiffer penalties for piracy and counterfeiting activities, such as making criminal copyright violations interchangeable in order to apply enhanced penalties for repeat offenders and increasing maximum fines from $1 million to $2 million for willful use of a counterfeit mark. It harmonizes forfeiture procedures for IP offenses, making it illegal to export counterfeit goods, and eliminates loopholes that might prevent enforcement of otherwise validly registered copyrights.

The bill also strengthens the administration's ability to address IP violations. It reorganizes and provides additional resources to the Justice Department to help prioritize IP related prosecutions. Additionally, it creates IP enforcement coordinators to facilitate greater enforcement efforts in foreign countries. It also provides $25 million in grant money to help state and local law enforcement combat IP crimes.

The bill establishes an Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (IPER) responsible for coordinating all federal government IP enforcement efforts, which include the work of at least eight government agencies and additional offices tasked with different roles in IP enforcement.

To address the shortcomings in current IP enforcement efforts, the IPER will be established in the executive office of the president and, with the cooperation of all the relevant government agencies, will be responsible for developing a joint strategic plan for national IP enforcement.

"With this vote, Congress has taken the first legislative step toward enacting a common sense bill that closes needless loopholes in the copyright laws and provides more resources to the federal government and law enforcement to fully address intellectual property theft," says Mitch Glazier, RIAA executive VP, government and industry relations. "This is great news for the music community and all businesses that rely upon intellectual property laws."
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...cca1831b12481e





'A Declaration of War on Sweden's Youth'

Plans for a new Swedish government proposal to counteract illegal file sharing met with mixed reactions on Friday. The proposal will enable courts to force internet service providers (ISPs) to give out IP addresses used in illegal file sharing to whoever owns the rights to the material.

Internet service providers were quick to welcome the move, while the Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay were scathing in their criticism.

"This is a declaration of war on an entire generation of young voters," said Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge in a statement.

Falkvinge characterized as "shameful" the government's decision to renege on its promise not to start hunting young people "on behalf of the American movie and music industries."

Rather than "dismantling the rule of law", the government should recognize file sharing as "a techno-historical fact", he said.

Writing in the opinion pages of newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask and Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth said the government was now united in how to approach the issue.

Those who own the rights to illegally shared content must be able to prove that an internet service subscription has been used for infringement, the ministers pointed out.

The Centre Party, one of four parties in the centre-right coalition government, reluctantly agreed to compromise on the issue despite having certain reservations.

"It's not possible to get things 100 percent your own way in negotiations. It was with a degree of regret that we agreed to go along with this," spokeswoman Annie Johansson told Svenska Dagbladet.

The party had previously said it would not support any policy that entailed releasing IP addresses to the courts.

Speaking to Svenska Dagbladet, The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde described the move as "completely the wrong way to go and an affront to personal integrity".

With the new proposal, the government is effectively rejecting an alternative proposal put forward in a report by appeals court judge Cecilia Renfors. which called for ISPs to shut down subscribers who repeatedly downloaded films and music without permission.

"It is good that the government has reached a decision on this issue and it is good that they have clearly distanced themselves from the Renfors inquiry, which would have put us providers in a position of having to police our own customers," said Bredbandsbolaget's CEO Marcus Nylén in a statement.

These sentiments were echoed by Martin Tivéus, head of internet service provider Glocalnet.

"It is important that the new copyright laws will take into account users' rightful interest in their own personal integrity," he said. "

Neither we as a provider nor the Anti-Piracy Agency can or should make a decision as to when copyright is more important than personal integrity. For this reason it feels good that the government will hand this task to the courts."
http://www.thelocal.se/10492/20080314/





Japan to Strip Internet for Illegal Downloaders: Report
AFP

Japanese companies plan to cut off the Internet connection of anyone who illegally downloads files in one of the world's toughest measures against online piracy, a report said Saturday.

Faced with mounting complaints from the music, movie and video-game industries, four associations representing Japan's Internet service providers have agreed to take drastic action, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.

The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, said service providers would send e-mails to people who repeatedly made illegal copies and terminate their connections if they did not stop.

The Internet companies will set up a panel next month involving groups representing copyright holders to draft the new guidelines, the report said.

Company and government officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the report Saturday.

The actions would be among the strictest in fighting online piracy.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy late last year outlined similar measures to disconnect Internet users who flagrantly violated copyright laws.

But for the most part, illegal downloading is being addressed through litigation against individuals.

The music industry won a first-of-a-kind victory in a US court in October when a single mother in Minnesota was ordered to pay more than 220,000 dollars for sharing 24 songs online.

The Yomiuri Shimbun estimated that 1.75 million people in Japan use file-sharing software, mostly to swap illegal copies.

One Internet service provider considered two years ago a plan to disconnect people who swap illegal files but dropped the plan after the government said it may violate the right to privacy, the Yomiuri said.

The best-known Japanese file-sharing software is called Winny, which allows users to swap games, movies and music online. It was developed by Isamu Kaneko, a young research assistant at the prestigious University of Tokyo who has become an Internet icon.

But in 2006 he was fined 1.5 million yen (15,000 dollars), although he was spared jail.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080315...copyrightmusic





Authorities Seize Gadgets During Patent Raid at German Tech Fair
AP

Police and customs officials investigating suspected patent violations seized mobile phones, navigation devices and other gadgets in raids at a technology fair in Germany, with many Chinese exhibitors among those searched, authorities said Thursday.

Police in Hanover said that more than 180 officials were involved in the searches Wednesday at the annual CeBIT trade and technology fair in the central German city.

They said they filled 68 boxes with gadgets, documents and advertising material. The material included cell phones, navigation devices, electronic picture frames and flat-screen devices, a police statement said.

Police said they took the identities of nine people. They added that nearly all the exhibitors searched were cooperative — except for one who resisted and was briefly taken to a police station.

They said that of the 51 exhibitors affected, 24 were from mainland China, three from Hong Kong and 12 from Taiwan. Another nine were German, with one each from Poland, the Netherlands and Korea.

Police did not identify the people or companies concerned.

They said that "the background is the number that has been rising for years of criminal complaints by the holders of patent rights in the run-up to CeBIT."

The alleged patent violations largely concerned devices with MP3, MP4 or digital video broadcast functions, as well as DVD players and blank CDs and DVDs, police said.

They said the patent holders "had pointed out to the affected exhibiting firms in good time the lack of licensing contracts" and asked them to get in contact.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...-Fair-Raid.php





Dungeon for a pirate

Illegal Immigrant Left in Cell 4 Days
Jon Gambrell

A bailiff is under an internal investigation after a woman spent four days forgotten in a holding cell without food, water or a toilet.

Bailiff Jarrod Hankins put Adriana Torres-Flores in the cell to await transport to jail Thursday and didn't let her out until Monday morning. No one on the fourth floor of the courthouse had heard her cries or her banging on the 2-inch-thick steel door of the 9 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot cell.

"There's nothing at all that indicates this was done intentionally," said Washington County Chief Deputy Jay Cantrell. "This was a very, very horrible accident."

Torres-Flores, 38, arrested on charges of selling pirated CDs, had been ordered held by a judge because the Mexican immigrant is in the country illegally. On Monday she was taken to a hospital, where she was treated and released and allowed to go home, though she still faces deportation.

Torres-Flores told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette through an interpreter -- her 14-year-old daughter -- that she used a shoe as a pillow to sleep in the holding cell, which had two benches, a metal table and a light she could not turn off.

"She was feeling like she was going to die," said the daughter, Adriana Torres-Diaz.

"She had to use the bathroom on the floor," Torres-Diaz said. "She said she was so thirsty she had to drink her own urine."

The bailiff meant to call the county jail for deputies to pick her up, but got pulled away back into court and forgot Torres-Flores was waiting inside the cell, Cantrell said.

The next day, snow blanketed Arkansas and the courthouse saw few employees come in for work, though both Hankins and the judge he works for, Circuit Judge William Storey, were there. No one checked the cell, as Storey did not hear cases all day, Cantrell said.

"They were just a few feet away from the cell, but they never heard anything. Nothing got their attention," Cantrell said.

As of Tuesday, Hankins, of Elkins, remained on administrative leave pending an internal investigation, Cantrell said. He described the bailiff as horrified over what happened.

"He's extremely distraught over it," Cantrell said. "He's not distraught over his job or anything like that, he's distraught about this woman that he caused her to be left in there for four days."

A bailiff for about two months, Hankins started part-time work for the sheriff's department in 2005 and in 2006 began working as an adult detention officer.

Mexican consul Andres Chao said he visited Torres-Flores as she rested at home Tuesday. Chao said she still suffered from periodic headaches and stomach aches.

"At this moment, Adriana is alive," Chao said. "But after four days without water, without food, in a small room -- it's unbelievable."

Chao met Tuesday with Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder and county Judge Jerry Hunton to offer "the highest protest of the Mexican government."

Torres-Flores will receive legal assistance from the consulate as her case moves on, Chao said. She pleaded not guilty in the criminal case against her and her trial is set for April 1.

Sheriff's office deputies guarding the courthouse now check the small room at the end of their shifts to make sure no one still sits inside, Cantrell said. Deputies also plan to install a video system for the cell, as well as a light alerting passers-by that the cell is occupied.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,4294926.story





Everybody is Jumping on the Levy Bandwagon
Michael Geist

From levies on blank CDs to tariffs on background music played in dental offices, Canada has long held the reputation of being a haven for policies that support cultural and creator groups through levies, tariffs and other fees. In recent months, this love of levies has grown dramatically as a number of new proposals have emerged that could significantly increase the costs to consumers for Internet, television and new media services.

While cultural and creator groups are the main proponents of these new funding schemes, they are by no means alone, as broadcasters, cable companies and Internet service providers have jumped into the levy and tariff game.

The cultural group proposals have focused primarily on Internet services. The best known is the Songwriters Association of Canada plan to fully legalize peer-to-peer file sharing of music by adding a $5 monthly charge to the cost of Internet access. That proposal has generated considerable debate, with many consumers expressing concern about a plan that would hit all Internet users, without regard for whether they engage in peer-to-peer file sharing.

Joining the SAC plan is a recent proposal that has garnered support from a handful of creator groups that includes the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), the Directors Guild of Canada and Writers Guild of Canada. The proposal envisions the CRTC establishing a new mandatory ISP contribution of 2.5 per cent of broadband revenue to help fund Canadian new media content.

Late last month, the groups released the results of a public opinion survey which they said found that "69 per cent of Canadians believe that ISPs should be required to help fund the production of Canadian digital media content in the same way that cable and satellite TV providers are required to contribute a small percentage of their revenues to the production of Canadian television programs."

The proposals do not end there. Last week, ACTRA also called on the CRTC to require broadcasters to spend 7 per cent of their revenues on Canadian English-language drama programs. Moreover, the Creators Copyright Coalition, comprised of 16 associations and collectives, recently recommended that government extend the private copying levy to all technologies that permit private copying.

Yet cultural groups are not the only ones clamouring for new levies and tariffs. Canada's broadcasters have been busy lobbying the CRTC to require cable and satellite companies to add a fee to their subscribers' bills for carriage of over-the-air broadcast signals. That would mean that advertiser supported networks such as CTV and Global would receive additional revenues from millions of Canadian television subscribers.

The cable companies unsurprisingly oppose the broadcaster proposal; however, they are also looking at new tariffs of their own. In late 2006, Videotron proposed a new Internet transmission tariff that would allow ISPs to charge content creators for transmitting their work over the Internet. This proposal is viewed as part of the larger ISP push for a two-tiered Internet in which creators and websites would pay for the privilege of having their content transmitted on the "fast track," while consigning everyone else to a slow lane.

Although it is unlikely that all of these proposals will be implemented in the short term, it would be a mistake to dismiss them out-of-hand. Indeed, the CRTC has already received submissions on the fee-for-carriage proposal and it is expected to conduct hearings that could address the 2.5 per cent broadband fee and the Internet transmission tariff later this year.

As these plans make their way through the legislative and regulatory process, one thing seems certain. While cultural groups, broadcasters and ISPs battle it out, Canadian consumers will ultimately be left footing the bill.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/326749





Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books
Brad Stone

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

The trend will allow consumers who download audio books to freely transfer these digital files between devices like their computers, iPods and cellphones — and conceivably share them with others. Dropping copying restrictions could also allow a variety of online retailers to start to sell audio book downloads.

The publishers hope this openness could spark renewed growth in the audio book business, which generated $923 million in sales last year, according to the Audio Publishers Association.

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

Penguin was initially going to join the eMusic service last fall, when it introduced its audio books download store. But it backed off when executives at Pearson, the London-based media company that owns Penguin, became concerned that such a move could fuel piracy.

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

Other major book publishers seem to agree. Chris Lynch, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio, said the company would make 150 titles available for download in an unprotected digital format in “the next couple of months.”

An executive at HarperCollins said the publisher was watching these developments closely but was not yet ready to end D.R.M.

If the major book publishers follow music labels in abandoning copyright protections, it could alter the balance of power in the rapidly growing world of digital media downloads. Currently there is only one significant provider of digital audio books: Audible, a company in Seattle that was bought by Amazon for $300 million in January. Audible provides Apple with the audio books on the iTunes store.

Apple’s popular iPod plays only audio books that are in Audible’s format or unprotected formats like MP3. Book publishers do not want to make the same error originally made by the music labels and limit consumers to a single online store to buy digital files that will play on the iPod. Doing so would give that single store owner — Apple — too much influence.

Turning to the unprotected MP3 format, says Madeline McIntosh, a senior vice president at the Random House Audio Group, will enable a number of online retailers to begin selling audio books that will work on all digital devices.

Some bookstores are already showing interest. The Borders Group, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., introduced an online audio book store in November using D.R.M. provided by Microsoft. Its books cannot be played on the iPod, a distinction that turns off many customers. But Pam Promer, audio book buyer for Borders, said the company welcomed moves by the publishers and planned to begin selling MP3 downloads by early spring.

A spokesman for Barnes & Noble said the retailer had “no plans to enter the digital audio book market at this time.”

Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to D.R.M. out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the D.R.M.-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or D.R.M.-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.

“Our feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy,” said Ms. McIntosh of Random House Audio.

Amazon and Audible would not comment on whether they would preserve D.R.M. protections on their own audio books, citing Securities and Exchange Commission restrictions surrounding the recent acquisition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/bu...audiobook.html





Amazon: What Are You Hiding?
Mike Elgan

Amazon shipped its Kindle e-Book reader way back in November of last year -- since then, the company has tried to paint a picture of runaway success by suggesting that the incredible popularity of the device prevents the company from keeping up with orders. Is the Amazon the Kindle really a secret failure?

I wrote a blog entry back in December called "Kindle: gadget of mystery." In that piece, I listed unknowable details about the Kindle -- information that Amazon is concealing from everybody.

Now, it's March, 2008, and Amazon is still stubbornly hiding the most basic facts about the Kindle -- while trying at the same time to paint a picture of success based entirely on the very facts it conceals -- such as: How many Kindles has Amazon sold?

Since the day it shipped, people who wanted to buy a Kindle have been put on a waiting list -- often for more than a month and a half. In a recent earnings call, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said:

"Kindle is, in terms of demand, is outpacing our expectations, which is certainly something that we are very grateful for. It's also on the manufacturing side causing us to scramble. We're working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week, so that we can get back-our goal is to get into a situation as quickly as we can where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately."

Why should we believe him?

Why is Bezos so aggressively hiding the actual numbers. Have they shipped millions? Thousands? Dozens? Has Amazon sold ten times as many Kindles as Sony has the PRS-500 Reader? Or one-tenth as many? We have no idea. None!

Is Amazon really working hard to ramp up production? Or is the company artificially creating a perception of high demand by playing games with production? If not, why hasn't it been able to fix the problem in four months? And since Amazon can't keep up with demand, why does it devote the very top center of the Amazon.com home page -- the most valuable real estate on the entire site -- to the creation of MORE demand?

Normally, I would be willing to trust a company like Amazon when its CEO and others in the company say popularity is to blame for their inability to keep up with demand. But Amazon's conspicuous, needless secrecy about unit shipments -- an act of secrecy that has become the "elephant in the living room" for e-book reader watchers -- makes me wonder.

Amazon: What are you hiding?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/amazo...are_you_hiding





Pulp Fact: New Study Says Book Production is Greener
Hillel Italie

The latest report about the publishing industry doesn't compile sales figures, track the market for fiction or lament the future of reading. It does tell a great deal about books -- not what they say, but what they're made of.

"Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts" is an 86-page summary, printed on 50 percent post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.5 million metric tons of paper each year, is steadily, if not entirely, finding ways to make production greener.

"I was very pleasantly surprised," said Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program which has worked extensively with publishers on environmental issues. "We're seeing a groundswell of momentum and real measurable progress."

Commercially, publishers have certainly discovered the benefits of green, with best-sellers including Deirdre Imus' "Green This!" and Al Gore's companion guide to the Academy Award-winning movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Environmental themes can be found in novels, children's stories and business books.

But reading books is healthier than making them. The climate impact survey, released Monday and co-commissioned by Green Press and the nonprofit Book Industry Study Group, offers a mixed picture about industry practices.

There is great support in theory for going greener, but results are uneven. Just over half of publishers, for instance, have set specific goals for increasing use of recycled paper. About 60 percent have a formal environmental policy or are in the process of completing one.

Declining to name any specific companies, Miller said "the other 40 percent just aren't taking the issue seriously or they aren't willing to pay a penny more to move in the right direction.

"But," he added, "critical mass has no doubt been reached and my sense is that the majority of those publishers that aren't acting will step up and join their peers in this effort."

Seventy-six publishers, representing just under half of the market, participated in the study, along with 13 printers (about 25 percent) and six paper mills (about 17 percent).

One publisher that hasn't set targets is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A spokesman says Houghton "has been actively working to increase usage of recycled papers in its print products and has in fact substantially increased its use of recycled papers in recent years.

"While we haven't formally adopted corporate-wide percentage goals for use of recycled papers, we are currently reviewing procurement policies from the standpoint of environmental impact," spokesman Rick Blake told The Associated Press.

Regnery Publishing, a conservative press based in Washington, D.C., also has not set any targets and has no plans to do so. Jim Zerr, Regnery's director of production and distribution, said the reason isn't ideology, but economics; recycled paper is more expensive than regular paper.

"We basically follow what our competitors and the leaders of the industry are doing," he said, adding that he didn't expect any changes until "the Random Houses of the world, and the HarperCollins and Simon & Schusters start ordering enough tonnage of that product" to make using it more practical.

Compared to late 2001, when Miller began working with publishers, cooperation is easy. "University presses and a few smaller presses were making progress," he says, but no major company had announced any public environmental goals. Now, around 150 publishers, along with 10 printers and four paper manufacturers, have backed a treatise supporting recycled paper and fiber from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international environmental organization.

A turning point came in 2006 when Random House, Inc., said that it would dramatically increase its use of recycled paper, saving more than 500,000 trees a year.

"We were already working on our own environmental initiatives, but to have Random House step up like that encourages everyone in the industry to come forward," said publisher Liz Perl of Rodale, which published Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and has another environmental book by the former vice president scheduled for 2009.

Virtually all of the major publishers have taken some steps, from Hyperion switching to soy-based ink, to Penguin Group (USA) using wind power, to Scholastic, Inc. printing the deluxe edition of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on 100 percent post-consumer waste fiber. Simon & Schuster and the Hachette Book Group USA are among those using e-book readers instead of paper manuscripts. The Random House Publishing Group is experimenting with sending books online to media outlets.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_8529962





Nine Inch Nails Slams Radiohead's 'Bait and Switch'

Industrial Quality
Andrew Orlowski

Trent Reznor has taken a swipe at English whingers Radiohead for using the internet as a cynical marketing stunt. Like Radiohead, Reznor has released a digital version of his new album first, following it up with a physical release. Like Radiohead too, you can legally download the music for free. And it's brought Reznor immediate payback - the limited edition "deluxe" CD of Nine Inch Nails' Ghost sold out almost instantly, grossing $750,000 - although he hasn't revealed digital sales yet.

So what's his beef?

Reznor's proposition offers the paying fan considerably better value for money: lossless versions in FLAC, and artwork, for $5. And he contrasts this with the In Rainbows digital release.

"What they did was a cool thing; I think the way they parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," he told ABC's Michael Atkin. "But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."

"There's nothing wrong with that - I but don't see that as a big revolution [that] they're kinda getting credit for."

"What they did right: they surprised the world with a new record, and it was available digitally first. What they did wrong: by making it such a low quality thing, not even including artwork ... to me that feels insincere."

Reznor agreed with the view that the model only really favors established artists, calling it a "fair critique". He also blasted the "stunning" ineptitude of major labels and said they're current licensing strategy is "five years too late".

As we reported, technical problems last week drove fans to the P2P Torrent sites. Reznor took responsibility for the snafu - which he said was caused by his insistence on providing high quality streams - and apologized.

"We were caught with our pants down," he said.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03...ne_inch_nails/





Corned beef and a lot of cabbage

Reznor's One-Week Take for 'Ghosts': $1.6 Million

A week after releasing his four-volume instrumental work “Ghosts I-IV” through his Web site, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is reporting that he amassed more than $1.6 million in orders and downloads.

Reznor made the albums available at five different prices, including a free download, without any advance publicity. His marketing campaign, such as it is, consisted of a terse announcement on his nin.com Web site. On Wednesday, he reported 781,917 transactions, including free and paid downloads and orders of physical product. A $300 box set sold out of 2,500 copies within a day. Nine of the 36 songs were made available as a free download. The complete set also was available as a $5 download, a $10 double-CD and a $75 set with bonus visual content.

A few months ago, Radiohead adopted a similar strategy in releasing its latest album, “In Rainbows.” Fans were allowed to name their price for the album, but the U.K. band did not release sales statistics.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.c...s-one-wee.html





'Guitar Hero' Subject of Patent Dispute
Alex Veiga

Video game publisher Activision Inc. has asked a federal court to declare that its popular "Guitar Hero" game does not violate a patent held by real-guitar maker Gibson Guitar Corp.

Gibson's 1999 patent covers a virtual-reality device that included a headset with speakers and that simulated participating in a concert, according to a complaint filed on Tuesday by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Activision in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Gibson is trying to get Activision to stop selling "Guitar Hero" until it gets a license under the patent, according to the complaint. But Activision says it doesn't want or need a license under the patent.

"We disagree with the applicability of their patent and would like a legal determination on this," George Rose, Activision's general counsel, said in a statement Wednesday.

No one answered an after-hours call to Nashville, Tenn.-based Gibson.

The dispute arose in January, when Gibson attorneys sent Activision a letter accusing it of violating a patent titled "System and Method for Generating and Controlling a Simulated Musical Concert Experience," according to the complaint.

A copy of the patent included in the lawsuit and dated Nov. 23, 1999, describes a device that lets a user "simulate participation in a concert by playing musical instrument and wearing a head-mounted 3-D display that includes stereo speakers."

The device described in the patent also includes playback of audio and video of a prerecorded concert and a separate track of audio from the user's instrument, according to the patent form.

"Guitar Hero" users play songs using a stringless, plastic guitar by following graphics displayed on a TV connected to a game console. The TV also displays animated musicians playing along.

All the versions of "Guitar Hero" have been a boon to Activision. The company reported last month a 90 percent increase in profit for the third quarter ended Dec. 31, in part due to strong sales of "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock."

Shares of Activision fell 31 cents, or about 1 percent, to $26.82.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...NlASQD8VC7K801





Games That Launched the Band
GameCareerGuide.com staff

Steve Schnur is worldwide executive of music and marketing for Electronic Arts. It's a high-level job that puts him in charge of the company's overall musical standing -- he is responsible for the pursuit, creation, and continuous development of the global vision for music in EA games.

He believes that musical artists in the past few years have begun to see video games not as a product in which to license their music, but as an integral role in their careers. GameCareerGuide.com spoke to him about his work in the game industry and his views on music in games.

GameCareerGuide.com: Tell us about your first job in either music or video games.

Steve Schnur: I became part of the original programming team at MTV as a college intern, and the experience taught me more than I ever learned at NYU. In fact, much of what I absorbed at MTV remains with me to this day.

I distinctly remember attending a focus group there in which a 15-year old was asked about videos compared to songs on the radio. His comment back was, "A song only becomes real to me when I see it."

I still think about the implications of that kid's statement. You should, too. Since MTV first appeared in 1981, an entire generation has been raised with an expectation of visuals attached to audio. We are continuing a trend already in motion for more than 25 years, a trend already indelibly ingrained in future generations, generations raised on video games as a major entertainment source in their lives, generations raised on discovering music through these games.

For this generation, the song now becomes real when they "play it."

After MTV, I went on to more than two decades in radio promotion, A&R, marketing, and as a music supervisor for movies. ... But over the years, I began to sense a growing cultural shift that would lead me away from the traditional record business to where I am today.

The most important lesson I've learned in 20 years is that the record business and the music industry are two distinctly different entities. And the most essential fact I know is that these last seven years at EA have been the most creatively rewarding of my entire career.

GCG: What is the difference between the record business and the music industry?

SS: Beginning in the mid to late 1990s, the record business fatefully chose short-term payoffs instead of long-term vision. They chased and milked trends rather than investing in creating them. They continued to believe that retail album sales were the only income that mattered. They allowed cookie-cutter radio play lists to fragment and sanitize the market. They ignored -- and often fought -- new media and digital technologies.

When P2P file sharing appeared, total control suddenly belonged not to the record industry, but to the true music fans. And by using this digital technology, true music fans -- otherwise known as the consumers -- took it upon themselves to transform the industry like never before. Mergers and ownership by non-entertainment multinationals took care of the rest. When the smoke cleared, the traditional record business as we had known it was officially dead.

Smart artists and their management have now finally begun to take their business to the next level. Within the past six months alone, three of the biggest acts in the world -- The Eagles, Madonna, and Radiohead -- have very publicly and profitably eschewed traditional record labels and retail distribution. Many more will follow. Deals like this are an essential part of the new music industry, growing hand-in-hand with widespread broadband access, the next generation of home entertainment systems, multi-function PDAs, and beyond. And while the traditional record business is all but buried, the music industry is about to enter one of the most extraordinary and exciting growth periods in our history.

GCG: What kinds of trends do you see happening right now in video game audio?

SS: I'm proud of the unprecedented relationships we've created between games and the music industry. What used to be a purely buy-sell licensing arrangement is now an ongoing series of groundbreaking co-marketing partnerships.

Today, labels around the world are launching artists' entire careers around their inclusion in a top-selling title like Madden, FIFA, or Need for Speed. Radio is adding songs based on a band's inclusion in these games. Video channels are creating playlists based not on radio airplay, but on video game soundtracks. Even sports leagues are using our music selections to guide their future marketing. In less than seven years, video games have become the most effective -- and essential -- way of breaking new music in our world today.

GCG: Who, for example?

SS: Epic Records credits Madden 2003 as being instrumental in the breaking of Good Charlotte. Avril Lavigne was first introduced to European audiences through FIFA 2003. Fabolous was first introduced in America via NBA Live, and went on to sell over 2 million albums here. JET got their American iPod commercial based on exposure in Madden 2004. Avenged Sevenfold were an unsigned act when we featured them in Madden 2004. In the weeks following the game's release, their independent album sold tens of thousands of copies without radio airplay, and they were signed to a major label soon after. Our FIFA 2005 soundtrack featured the earliest appearances of Franz Ferdinand, Marcelo D2, and Scissor Sisters. Sony Records credits Madden 2005 as being instrumental in the breaking of Franz Ferdinand in North America. Ozomatli, a band that has existed for years with minimal sales and exposure, got an iPod commercial, a career-changing sales jump, and a Grammy nomination based on their exposure in Madden 2005. Def Jam Vendetta single-handedly created a new global market for hip-hop.

Within the past two years, we've seen major international breakthroughs from acts that include Robyn, Mando Diao, Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Bloc Party, LCD Soundsystem, Dúné, Tribalista, Go Team, Bullet for My Valentine, The Caesars, Kasabian, Lupe Fiasco, MIA, Wolfmother, Hawthorne Heights, and others. That's just a small sampling of what we've helped make happen. It's all real and exciting proof that video games are a critical component of the new industry paradigm.

I'm also excited about the monster success of Rock Band, which has instantly created an extraordinary new relationship between fans and music. Everything about it -- the remarkable software, the widespread demographic appeal, the unrivaled song library, the tremendous online capabilities, the downloadable content -- represents an entertainment breakthrough that cannot be underestimated.

But most of all, I'm thrilled about Artwerk, our new joint venture with our friends at Nettwerk. For the past seven years, EA has been instrumental around the world in breaking new artists for other labels. With Artwerk we can now directly sign, launch and grow our own unique roster via our own full-service music company. Our roster, which includes Junkie XL, Airbourne, Jupiter One, and Datarock, already represents everything a label should be: diversified, unafraid, insanely talented and growing. We think of Artwerk as "music 2.0," where music, games, and digital entertainment come together like never before.

GCG: Licensing music for video games has become a huge business. But there seem to be different viewpoints on whether it's any good for the art of video games. Some players enjoy the licensed music or games that allow the player to import his or her own music, or customize play lists. Other players would rather hear original scores and theme songs, arguing that games are a unique medium that requires unique music. What do you make of the debate? As an executive, what are the challenges and benefits of using licensed music or original music?

SS: When we formalized in-game music under the name EA Trax, we established the new industry standards for fair licensing, label cross-promotion and artist involvement. This paradigm encompasses both original scores and licensed tracks, both of which are equally essential to the business -- and the art -- of the video game experience.

The key aspect of every soundtrack must always be for the music to fit with a game's theme, lifestyle, and emotional heart. A soundtrack of licensed songs is carefully designed to maximize the emotional lift needed to enhance even greater gameplay. Each song must make you want to drive faster, score higher, hit harder.

At the same time, the soundtrack has to give each artist, whether established acts or new bands, unprecedented exposure within the game itself so that a gamer can discover their favorite new song ...

For titles like Medal of Honor or Command and Conquer, as well as our The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, James Bond, and Sims titles, we approach them as if they were major Hollywood films by contracting major Hollywood film composers. The challenge of creating any soundtrack will always be to discover, design, and define a game's ultimate audio personality. It is a creative challenge -- and opportunity -- that must be met with every title we release.

Clearly, some gamers want to explore the control of full customization. We are currently developing a new technology capable of fully integrating music into existing audio -- sound effects, commentary -- while offering a continuous flow of customized tracks for every gaming platform. ...

GCG: Can you explain how musical artists are contracted to work on games? And how is the process different when you're working with a contract audio engineer or audio designer rather than a musical artist?

SS: My staff and I all come from similar A&R or music marketing backgrounds. We listen to a lot of music. We study all the international charts. We track college radio, mix tapes, underground clubs, and local scenes all over the world. We consult with our EA offices in every corner of the globe. We work with artists, composers, publishers and labels, both major and independent, often more than a year in advance to ensure that, in an EA game, the music will matter.

EA also has a talented team of both in-house and outside engineers who handle the majority of audio design. And while the vast range of sounds you hear within our games are easily taken for granted, it is truly one of the most intricately creative elements of the software development process. ...

GCG: What's the most rewarding part of your job?

SS: The most rewarding part of this job has been, and always will be, the music. ... I got into the music business because I love music. Twenty-seven years later, it's what still motivates and rewards me every day.

GCG: What advice do you have for people who are interested in working on the audio side of the video game business?

SS: Learn everything you can and build on everything you learn. Explore all the digital capabilities of the new game systems and PDAs, but proactively prepare for the iPodTouch 2, Wii 3, PlayStation4, and the Xbox 5000.

Game like no one's watching. Understand that we are on the cusp of one true global culture. Challenge your equipment, your teachers, your eyes and ears, and most of all, yourselves. Challenge everything!

GCG: What games have you played recently?

SS: You mean besides introducing my kids to Deep Purple, Molly Hatchet, and The Ramones on Rockband? Mostly I've been playing beta versions of upcoming EA titles. Not only do I want to ensure that each soundtrack and song choice works within the context of the gameplay itself, but I genuinely believe that EA creates and distributes the very best games in the industry.
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/featu...nched_the_.php





Search Mission
Russ Mitchell

Google's business model of internet-search-driven advertising has become so dominant that competitors Microsoft and Yahoo can hardly compete. But will C.E.O. Eric Schmidt be able to keep Google true to its roots?

When Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted a C.E.O. for their rapidly growing company in 2001, they turned to a technology executive, Eric Schmidt, who had previously worked at Sun Microsystems and Novell. Coincidentally, Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were also looking for a C.E.O. that year, and they picked a Hollywood insider: Terry Semel, who had run Warner Bros.

Hollywood failed; technology prevailed.

Since signing on with Google, Schmidt, 52, has channeled the founders' strategic vision and the company's technological assets to create a Web-search and online-advertising Goliath, with $5.7 billion in profits in 2007. Yahoo, meanwhile, has fallen behind Google technologically and is now fighting a hostile takeover by Microsoft. For his part, Semel quit last year.

Along the way, Schmidt has become a billionaire several times over, rich enough to buy a Gulfstream G-550 and to fund philanthropic projects like the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank that recently named him chairman of its board. In 2006, he was appointed to Apple's board of directors. But at Google, he faces challenges that didn't exist when he started. Already, growth in search-driven advertising is slowing, and Google's recently announced plan to run ads on mobile phones might not be a hit with consumers. The company's buyout of online-ad firm DoubleClick was approved in March. And a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would pose a more formidable threat than either company alone—which is why Google has offered to help Yahoo fend off the takeover bid.

Schmidt sat down with Condé Nast Portfolio senior writer Russ Mitchell to talk about his plans for Google.

Why does a merged Microsoft-Yahoo pose such a threat to Google?
It's an unstable situation. But the theoretical issue is the concentration of Microsoft's resources and its history, combined with the very large share that it would have in certain applications—like instant messaging and email—that could be used essentially to break the internet and diminish choice.

Break the internet?
All internet-based systems today are highly interoperable, open systems. The whole antitrust trial that Microsoft went through was really about it breaking that.

In favor of establishing its own proprietary standards. But what are you going to do about the deal?
We've indicated that we don't think it's a good idea. All options are open. I don't want to rule out or rule in anything.

Google's become so big and so successful that many would see your concerns about Microsoft's size as ironic.
We had a debate about this a while ago, and it had nothing to do with Yahoo. The question was how to prevent what happened at Microsoft from happening at Google. Consumers have had more choice on the internet. And we have a set of policies that we follow—entrenched inside the culture—the most important of which is that we won't trap user data in proprietary systems. So we have a rule: You have to make it possible for people who don't like your service to get out. If I don't like Google, I can switch to Yahoo, Microsoft, or whatever. This has another impact that's not as obvious. It serves as a check and balance on poor-quality teams. They can't prevent users from fleeing bad products. It also helps us with this question of becoming too big and powerful.

But you already dominate the market for Web search and online advertising, and now you're trying to buy DoubleClick, which is huge in display advertising.
I don't think that DoubleClick has much to do with that argument. We decided that we wanted to work in this new space called display advertising, where we are not the leader—the leader is Yahoo. That's not the same thing as text ads, which is our primary business.

The other issue that the DoubleClick deal has raised is privacy. And what we've done there—in response to U.S. and European governmental concerns—is make a series of commitments about privacy, which is very reasonable and which we should have done anyway.
So you're saying that the concern about the DoubleClick deal was a good thing.
To some degree. When you're inside a company, you have your own belief system. It's always good to get a look at how your company is perceived versus what your self-perception is.

Google recently registered slower earnings growth. If the economy continues to worsen, how might that affect your business?
Well, we don't know. There's evidence that more-measurable advertising does better than unmeasurable advertising during a slowdown. People only want to spend money on stuff that they can prove is effective. Ours is the most measurable of all the advertising systems in the world. We did well in 2001, 2002, in that recession, because people wanted measurability.

You've gone through tremendous expansion, and the company is still growing. Does a slowing economy put any of your employees at risk?
I think that's unlikely. The company had been hiring on the order of 100 people a week. That's a ballpark number. We hire people right out of college, so there’s a bubble in the spring, which is amortized over the year. We expanded so fast internationally that we have a lot of countries in which the oldest person by tenure has been there a year.

The New York Times is under pressure to sell. Blogs are abuzz with the idea that Google ought to buy it, because it’s in your interest to keep the quality of journalism high.
I'm not aware of a proposal for us to buy the New York Times, but I'd never rule anything out. So far, we've stayed away from buying content. One of the general rules we've had is "Don't own the content; partner with your content company." First, it's not our area of expertise. But the more strategic answer is that we'd be picking winners. We'd be disenfranchising a potential new entrant. Our principle is providing all the world's information.

Is there anything about Sergey and Larry that drives you nuts, together or as individuals?
They're clever in a way that's disruptive. Here I am, I've got it all figured out, and all of a sudden they have some idea. It disrupts this brilliant notion I just had, but they come in with a better idea. It's maddening, but that's an important part of innovation.

You were brought onboard in 2001 almost as a grownup to guide the kids.
Larry and Sergey are now perfectly capable of doing the things I brought to the company then. I don't come to the party today with unique knowledge that they don't have. I had a lot of management experience, but they've developed it.

So what do they need you for now?
We each have our own specialties. They spend time on products strategy and technology. They're heavily involved in new wireless technologies, climate-change stuff, making things faster, the expansion of search, how to make the advertising system even better from a technology perspective. My job is to run the management team on a daily basis. There are many problems that all three of us are dealing with, like the scaling of the company. I'm extremely interested in the international nature of the company because I think the future is outside the U.S., so obviously that requires a lot of travel.

It was recently reported that the three of you signed a long-term agreement to stick together. Is that true?
We made an informal agreement to work together for 20 years after Google went public, so I hope to be here for a long time.

You're introducing Android, a mobile operating system for cell phones, later this year. Why does the world need another one?
Most of the older mobile operating systems were not really designed for modern Web use. They don't run the internet applications right. Many companies are looking for an inexpensive, Web-based operating system for their upcoming mobile devices that's based on open systems—Linux, in this case.

What might it do differently from what you can do on current wireless phones?
Well, it has a full browser, it has Java support, and it's being marketed to the software developers to build new applications. We don't know what a lot of those are going to be, but the most interesting ones will probably combine social activity and location. I saw a freaky demo of an application in which you and I have phones with maps, and our phones find each other and tell us where to meet.

When you bid on the new cell-phone spectrum back in January, you insisted that the winner open its network to new products—hardware and software—from competitors. Verizon, another bidder, said that it would open up not just the new spectrum but its existing network as well. Are you skeptical?
I was initially, but actions speak louder than words. And I think Verizon has shown a commitment to open access. It concluded that it was good for Verizon's customers. The senior leadership of Verizon actually visited Google to talk to us about this and make sure they got it right. And I think it's great. I wish everybody else would open up their networks.

You own a Gulfstream G-550 for your personal use. Is that what you take when you travel overseas?
Well, it's very important to say that I fly with a professional crew, with a professional pilot, and I'm licensed as a crew member.

Sounds like fun. How often do you take the controls?
A lot. It's my hobby.
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/...midt-Interview





Microsoft Challenges 'Vista Capable' Class Action
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft Corp. on Friday asked that a lawsuit claiming it duped consumers in a Windows Vista marketing program be suspended while the company appeals a judge's decision to grant the case class-action status.

If granted, the motion would also postpone any new disclosures of potentially embarrassing company e-mails. Last month, the release of similar documents showed that top-level company executives struggled with the new operating system on machines labeled "Vista Capable," and that partners such as Dell Inc. warned Microsoft that the campaign would confuse consumers.

Friday, Microsoft petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to hear its challenge of the case's class-action status, which was granted two weeks ago by U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman. The company also filed a separate motion with Pechman on Thursday, asking her to stay the lawsuit's proceedings pending the appeal.

"Continued proceedings here would cost Microsoft a substantial sum of money for discovery and divert key personnel from full-time tasks," said Charles Wright, an attorney for Microsoft, in the motion to suspend the case. "[It] would intrude on sensitive pricing decisions and strategies by OEMs, wholesalers, and retailers; and would jeopardize Microsoft's goodwill with class members -- all with respect to claims that might not proceed on a class basis at all."

The papers filed with Pechman claimed that Microsoft had already produced nearly 50,000 pages of internal documents as part of the lawsuit's discovery process. Continuing the case pending appeal would likely mean disclosing even more documents. If the class-action status is denied on appeal, Microsoft argued, the money spent digging up messages and memos would have been wasted, and any negative publicity generated needlessly.

Microsoft painted a picture of business secrets made public and damage done to its reputation. "Plaintiffs' discovery almost surely will involve intrusion into the most sensitive pricing decisions of the OEMs, wholesalers, and retailers who sell the PCs at issue and set their prices," said the motion. "Continued discovery thus will disrupt Microsoft's relationships with its business partners, a disruption that will be unnecessary if the Ninth Circuit reverses."

Wright also contended that because the plaintiffs will have to do a national search for consumers who can join the class action, Microsoft might get a black eye for no reason. "The result will be nationwide publicity that impugns the [Windows Vista Capable] program," read the filing. "Although Microsoft fully expects to vindicate the program in the course of this litigation, allowing notice to proceed in the face of the pending appeal will jeopardize Microsoft's goodwill based on an Order that, Microsoft respectfully contends, might be held erroneous from its inception."

The company's petition to the Ninth Circuit spelled out two questions it thinks the appellate court should consider. The first was Pechman's decision to base the call for class-action status on Washington state law because Microsoft is headquartered there. The second questions Pechman's approval of a "price inflation" theory, which argues that PC buyers paid more than they would have without the Vista Capable program, since Microsoft's marketing boosted demand and increased the prices of systems that could run the lowest-priced and lowest-powered version of Vista, Home Basic.

Microsoft said it hoped to have a ruling on its appeal within 90 days, which would push back several tentative deadlines in the lawsuit, including a trial start in October, if the stay request is granted.

All of this new legal maneuvering revolves around a lawsuit filed nearly a year ago that claims Microsoft misled PC buyers during the months leading up to Vista's release. Many of the machines that boasted the Vista Capable sticker, the lawsuit charged, were able to run only Home Basic, a version the plaintiffs said was not the "real" Vista because it omitted some of the most heavily promoted elements of the new OS, including the Aero interface.

Microsoft has consistently disputed the charges, saying that Vista Home Basic was a "major advancement" over Windows XP, and part of its efforts to offer multiple versions of the new operating system.

While it didn't repeat those claims in its filings last week with Pechman and the Ninth Circuit Court, it did argue that the "balance of hardship" was on it, not the plaintiffs, and so the stay should be granted.

"Microsoft's interest in avoiding unnecessary litigation costs, preserving the time of its employees, insulating OEMs, wholesalers, and retailers from discovery into confidential pricing policies, and maintaining its goodwill far outweighs the interest of class members in relief they never expected before filing this action," Microsoft said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9067400





The BitTorrent Legend Returns: I Am aXXo
Ernesto

During November last year we reported that the popular DVD ripper aXXo had decided to take a break and stop releasing new material for a while. It now seems that he is back in business. A few hours ago aXXo uploaded his first movie in months. He chose “I Am Legend”.

Since November 11 2007, when the last official aXXo torrent was uploaded, it has been awfully quiet. Some people assumed that aXXo had got himself caught while others claimed he had an accident. After a while it became clear that he simply decided to take some time off.

An administrator on Darkside RG, the official home of aXXo explained at the time: “aXXo told us that he has decided to take a break, so you will not see new aXXo torrents anywhere for a while. Please show your support by keeping his torrents alive until he comes back, as always, he will post here first when he does.”

Now, after nearly four months of absence aXXo has returned, and uploaded his first .torrent on Darkside RG and other torrent sites. It’s the news that many BitTorrent users have been waiting for.

Marking his comeback with the movie “I Am Legend” could be seen as symbolic. Before aXXo decided to take a break, an estimated one million people downloaded his DVDrips every month. The search term aXXo was undoubtedly the most popular at many torrent sites. Although there are conflicting opinions in respect of the quality of his work, there can be no dispute that he was, and still is, very popular indeed.

While some see him in an almost religious light, others have been quick to take advantage of his popularity for nefarious purposes, or have used the aXXo brand to draw attention to their own releases, like KLAXXON did.

Even though some see him as a legend, aXXo certainly isn’t without his critics but whatever the position, his popularity is indisputable…..along with his modesty
http://torrentfreak.com/axxo-returns-legend-080309/





Anonymize BitTorrent Transfers with BTGuard
Ernesto

BTGuard is an easy to use proxy service that adds an extra layer of privacy to your BitTorrent transfers. The service is designed for BitTorrent users who don’t want their ISPs or any third party to log or throttle their IPs or traffic.

BTGuard reroutes all your BitTorrent traffic through their servers in Canada. This means that anyone who connects to you via BitTorrent, even the MPAA or RIAA, will see BTGuard’s IP, and not yours.

BTGuard does not have any bandwidth or volume restrictions, and while we briefly tested the service (from Europe), the speeds were almost equal to an unsecured connection. Setting it up is fairly easy, the only thing you need to do is enter the username and password provided by BTGuard, and you’re ready to go. Please note that this is only a proxy service, so the traffic between the user and the server is not encrypted, which means that ISPs can (potentially) still monitor it.

TorrentFreak asked one of the founders of the project why they launched the service, he told us: “More and more, people find their privacy being invaded on the Internet and we find it to be a very disturbing, unethical trend. There are some countries that still actively protect privacy, one of which is Canada.”

The BTGuard team decided to setup in Canada not only for privacy protection, but also its close network proximity to the US. “The US is experiencing a privacy invasion epidemic more so than most. ISPs are issuing disconnection notices with little regard for privacy or the accuracy of those who notified them.”

“Companies like MediaSentry collect IP addresses on P2P protocols like BitTorrent; right holders then send the IPs to your ISP. However, MediaSentry systems and techniques have no governments’ authority and are certified by no one and many institutions have received false claims. Companies like this should not be allowed to go around and make or break your Internet connection. These days, some people’s lives depend on it. This is where BTGuard comes in. The only IP companies such as MediaSentry will see is ours.”

BTGuard works differently then some other similar services like VPNOut or Smarthide. Most notably it does not VPN your entire Internet connection. You simply configure your BitTorrent client to route through their servers, so it will only effect your BitTorrent downloads. BTGuard says it has received reports that it effectively bypasses throttling but at this point they cannot confirm that it works in all cases (please let us know in the comments if it does).

BtGuard offers a free trial, and they welcome people to try it, so you can see if it’s works for you. After the trial it costs 4.75 Euro per month which is cheaper than most other services, and a small price to pay for privacy.
http://torrentfreak.com/btguard-anon...orrent-080309/





Pirate Bay to Hollywood: Open your Own Torrent Site
Ernesto

Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij from The Pirate Bay recently did a video interview which resulted in some great quotes. One such quote comes from Fredrik, he suggests that the movie and music industry should set up their own torrent site, and monetize it through advertisements. “We would be out of business.” he added.

More





MTV Uses P2P Data for Playlist Selection
Ernesto

TMF, a popular Dutch music channel which is part of MTV said it will use data from BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks as a resource for their playlist selection. The data from these sources gives a more accurate picture of what people actually listen to, rather than counting single sales alone.

TMF recently subscribed to a service from the P2P tracking company GfK. Based on a list of music titles, GfK will gather data from BitTorrent and other filesharing networks and report this back to the music channel.

TMF said it will use the information to signal trends and target their audience.

Initially, TMF announced that it would count downloads from file-sharing networks for their new Superchart, as more people download music than buy it. However, they canceled this plan last week after protests from the music industry, who said it would send out the wrong message.

TMF, however, now say that they will use data from filesharing services as one of the sources for their playlist selection.

Wouter Rutten, the spokesman for the Dutch IFPI said he doesn’t see the use of P2P data as problematic as long as they don’t explicitly use it for their music charts or advertise it in any other way.

The negative reaction from the music industry on the pirate chart was to be expected, but also a little hypocrital. Last year we reported that Interscope Records, and probably other record companies, use P2P data as a marketing tool. They determine which tracks they will release as their next single, based on what people are downloading.
http://torrentfreak.com/mtv-uses-p2p-data-080314/





China Seen Overtaking U.S. as Top Web Market

China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest Internet market by number of users, a research firm said on Thursday. The estimate by Beijing-based BDA was based on data from China Internet Network Information Centre which indicated that the country's Internet users totalled 210 million at end-2007.

Nielsen/NetRatings put the United States Web population at 216 million for the same period, BDA said.

"Based on these sources and the assumption that these markets have continued to grow in 2008 to date at the same rates that they grew in 2007, we can conclude that China has by now comfortably surpassed the United States as the world's largest Internet population," analyst Bin Liu said in a statement.

BDA added that it expected e-commerce to become the next boom sector in China, as businesses take advantage of the mass market of consumers already online.

(Reporting by Sophie Taylor; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
http://www.reuters.com/article/media...29750720080313





Harvard Server Hacked, Database of Student Data on BitTorrent
Tim Conneally

Harvard, the Ivy-league bastion of higher learning released a statement on Monday that its database of applicants to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from last year was compromised.

As many as 10,000 applicants could have had their information exposed, with at least 6,600 comprehensive profiles that include names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, test scores, and school records.

A small number of student records even included details as specific as personal health issues and food allergies.

The statement said the extent of the hack was not fully revealed in the initial examination. However, the hackers made the degree of their compromise visible, by availing all the information on BitTorrent as a 125MB file containing a backup of the GSAS site, including the full directory structure and its three databases.

According to the host of the file, the hack was executed to show that the server's admin does not know how to secure a Web site.

That seems to be an echo of the 2004 case of two first-year students hacking into Oxford's computer system and publishing a front page story about it in the Oxford Student. While those students claimed to only have the security of the school in mind, the result was more a mockery of the school's inferior IT department.

The GSAS' administrative dean said the school is "truly sorry" for the incident and is notifying and apologizing to everyone in the database. The school will be paying for identity theft recovery services for all parties involved.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Harv...ent/1205436999





Easy to Crack

Access to protected data areas without the right fingerprint
Daniel Bachfeld

Manufacturers of USB sticks and cards with fingerprint readers promise us that their data safes can only be opened with the right fingerprint. It turns out that an easy-to-find tool allows nosy parties to get around the protection in some products.

Many secure USB sticks consist of three components: flash memory for data, a fingerprint sensor and a microcontroller that processes USB traffic, communicates with the flash memory, and controls the sensor. The flash memory itself is divided up into several logical partitions. The controller provides access to a public partition when connected to a PC. The pre-installed software on this partition then runs to perform fingerprint detection and authentication. If the fingerprint is valid, the microcontroller then provides access to the protected partition as a mapped drive on the PC.

That's the theory. In practice, USB sticks with the USBest UT176 and UT169 controllers from Taiwan's Afa Technology provide access to the protected partition without any authentication. All you need to do is use the PLscsi tool to send a single USB command – Command Descriptor Block – to the stick for access to the public partition to be replaced by access to the protected one. At first, this flaw seemed to be an undocumented back door, but some sniffing with a USB monitor tool revealed it to be a major design flaw: the controller on the stick does not decide whether to provide access to the partition; the software running on Windows does. The software on the PC uses another command to decide whether read-only write access is possible. Based on the manufacturer's descriptions, you'd expect the biometrics and access control to take place entirely within the stick's microcontroller, an 8032 derivative.

Various sticks affected

In our tests, we found the vulnerability in the MyFlash FP1 from A-Data (USB-ID 1307:1169) and the 1GB Secure Card (USB-ID 7009:1765) sold by 9pay. The JetFlash 210 and 220 fingerprint sticks from Transcend use the chips in question and also provide access to the protected partition after transmission of a single USB command. The UT176 made by CySecure could also suffer from the same flaw, though we have not tested it yet. 9pay confirmed that it was aware of the problem, but said that only "very professional users" would be able to access the protected partition without authentication. The manufacturer says that it will be pointing out this vulnerability in the manual to prevent people from thinking that the fingerprint sensor provides a greater level of security. As a workaround, the firm recommends that users encrypt sensitive data before they save it on the card, which costs around €90 euros. The manufacturer is also thinking about switching to a different chip that would be safer.

We also asked Transcend Afa, the manufacturer of the chip, to comment. Transcend said it would not be able to respond in detail because of the Chinese New Year's festival but did say that if the manufacturer of the controller confirms the bug, Transcend plans to provide a patch for partition security as a firmware update. Afa Technologies did not wish to comment at all, saying instead that we should contact the manufacturer of the sensor chip, LighTuning, which is allegedly responsible for the controller's communication with application programs. We have yet to receive a response.

DIY test

You can find out whether your USB stick can also be "opened" without authentication by using the open source tool PLscsi[1]. A precompiled command line version for in Windows is available; Linux users will have to compile the tool themselves. The command plscsi -w specifies USB drive as a variable. Keep in mind that the fingerprint sticks register two drives on the system when connected to the PC: a virtual CD-ROM and the normal drive. Select the latter and send the command for access (see image below).

The procedure is similar for Linux, but before the command is sent you need to unmount both drives just in case the automounter automatically connected to them when the stick was plugged in. You can find the right drive by using the dmesg command and setting export PLSCSI=/dev/sdb as the variable. You will need administrator rights to perform all of these actions both on Windows and Linux.

In addition to the protected partition, there is another small hidden partition where private PGP keys, passwords, and, apparently, fingerprint data are stored. We did not manage to get access to it, and in our analysis of USB traffic we could not establish whether the fingerprint stored on the hidden partition ever leaves the stick or the card. It would seem that the fingerprint stored is compared within the stick to the fingerprint read from the sensor. It;s all the more unfortunate, then, that the access command comes from outside.

Conclusion

The fingerprint sensors in the products mentioned above apparently only serve one purpose: they mislead interested buyers. They do not provide any significant level of protection. We can only recommend that these products not be purchased. If you want to protect your data effectively on a USB stick with a fingerprint, you would be better off with products such as MXI Security's Stealth MXP, which has integrated hardware encryption. The 1GB version also costs twice as much as 9pay's solution and more than 10 times as much as the A-Data stick. A quite affordable solution that is nonetheless secure is also available: a normal stick, the free TrueCrypt encryption software, and a good password. (dab[2])

This article was originally published in German in c't magazine 05/08, page 70
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/features/110280





Security Guide to Customs-Proofing Your Laptop
Declan McCullagh

If you travel across national borders, it's time to customs-proof your laptop.

Customs officials have been stepping up electronic searches of laptops at the border, where travelers enjoy little privacy and have no legal grounds to object. Laptops and other electronic devices can be seized without reason, their contents copied, and the hardware returned hours or even weeks later.

Executives have been told that they must hand over their laptop to be analyzed by border police--or be barred from boarding their flight. A report from a U.S.-based marijuana activist says U.S. border guards browsed through her laptop's contents; British customs agents scan laptops for sexual material; so do their U.S. counterparts.

These procedures are entirely legal, according to court precedents so far. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine." One lawsuit is seeking to force the government to disclose what policies it follows.

The information security implications are worrisome. Sensitive business documents can be stored in computers; lawyers may have notes protected by the attorney-client privilege; and journalists may save notes about confidential sources. Regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley may apply. A 2006 survey of business travelers showed that almost 90 percent of them didn't know that customs officials can peruse the contents of laptops and confiscate them without giving a reason.

Fortunately, you have some technological defenses against overly snoopy border agents. Keep reading for our easy-to-understand, Homeland-Security-inspired, color-coded News.com Guide to Customs-Proofing Your Laptop. (And no, we're not responsible if you end up cooling your heels in some Burmese prison for using PGP; check local laws and use good judgment.)

Let's assume you've already backed up your files before traveling in case your laptop gets seized for an indefinite period of time. The next thing to know is that merely setting an account password is insufficient.

Unless you use encryption, a customs agent can simply remove your laptop's hard drive, plug it into another computer, and peruse its contents. There are plenty of programs, including Guidance Software's EnCase Forensic, that let police extract every bit of data possible from that hard drive.

To guard against that, you can set aside a section of your computer's hard drive to be encrypted. This is the simplest approach because not all the files will be encrypted; the operating system itself and, in most cases, applications you use will remain unencrypted.

For Apple OS X users, FileVault does this by seamlessly scrambling the contents of your home directory (to enable, select the Security panel in Preferences and click the "Use secure virtual memory" option). PGP sells volume encryption software for OS X and Windows. There's also the free TrueCrypt application, which runs on Windows Vista, Windows XP, OS X, and Linux.

Most people use encrypted volumes to do things like save sensitive files--think tax returns, bank and credit card statements, medical records, and so on.

But encryption isn't enough. Research published last month ("Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys") demonstrates how encryption keys can be extracted from a laptop that's placed in sleep mode when the contents are retained in RAM. They haven't released the software to extract the contents yet, but it's not terribly difficult to write and you may not want to bet your privacy on government agencies being ignorant of this attack.

The solution is to let the contents of RAM decay by turning off your computer and letting it sit for a few minutes. A test they did showed that, after five minutes, the memory contents had completely disappeared and could not be retrieved.

Turning off your computer is especially important for OS X users, at least until Apple patches a security glitch that keeps account passwords in RAM. In the default configuration, the account password is the keychain password and yields passwords to wireless networks, Web sites, accounts accessed via SSH, network-mounted volumes, etc.

There's more. You'll want to delete cookies and browser-stored passwords for Web sites. Erase the cache and Web browsing history. Securely delete files not protected by the encrypted volume so they can't be undeleted at the border. Here are still more tips.

Another problem is that if customs agents have physical possession of your laptop and you can't see what they're doing, they can install spyware. (They have the technical ability to do so; let's put aside for the moment in which circumstances they would have the legal authority to do so. Besides, in some non-democratic regimes, questions about due process are irrelevant.)

There are at least three cases in which the Feds have, with a court order, installed spyware on a suspect's computer. As encryption becomes more popular, so will the use of fedware. There may be no easy way to detect it--security software vendors generally say they will--short of booting off of a DVD or another trusted device and checking the operating system for tampering. Linux users can use a Knoppix CD or DVD for this.

All these extra steps are irksome, and stem from the fact that Threat Level Yellow with an encrypted volume doesn't completely protect you.

Why not? Unix-derived systems including Apple's OS X store details about VPN usage and user login times in unencrypted form. Some applications including Thunderbird save working copies of documents in an unencrypted area (/tmp or /private/tmp) outside the home directory. And the contents of the computer's virtual memory file may be readable as well.

That brings us to Threat Level Orange, at which point you should encrypt everything. That means you won't have to worry about whether applications leak data outside the virtual safe of an encrypted volume.

Microsoft has included the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature in the Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows Vista. A perpetual license for PGP Whole Disk Encryption 9.8--often viewed as the gold standard of encryption products--for Windows costs $149. Macintosh users are out of luck for now, though PGP did tell us last month that whole disk encryption for OS X is "in active development." Linux users have loop-aes and dm-crypt to choose from.

The same advice as Threat Level Yellow holds for laptopping-across-the-border: shut down your computer for a few minutes to make sure the memory decays.

While you're at Threat Level Orange, you might as well take some additional steps to harden your machine against other attacks. One of those is guard against having the entire contents of your computer's memory siphoned off through FireWire.

This isn't new. In 2004, Maximillian Dornseif showed how to extract the contents of a computer's memory merely by plugging in an iPod to the FireWire port. A subsequent presentation by Adam Boileau in 2006 expanded the FireWire attack to Windows-based systems; he released exploit code this month.

Under OS X, according to a security guide by Paul Day, setting an Open Firmware password disables physical memory access for FireWire devices. Here's how to set an Open Firmware password.

If they're out to get you, or if you're sufficiently paranoid to think they are, you're at Threat Level Red.

One downside with encrypted drives is that they can be a huge blinking neon side to customs officers saying: "Contraband! Likely! Here!" Even if you're law-abiding, an encrypted drive could mean unwanted hassles and delays, and the unpleasant prospect of customs officials preventing you from entering the country unless you type in your password. In the U.S., whether you can be compelled to divulge it by court order remains an unanswered question--and other nations may not observe such legal niceties.

One answer is steganography, which means concealing data in a way that nobody even knows it's there. It's an electronic form of invisible ink. Data can be stored in MP3s, in videos, and even in apparently-empty space on the hard drive.

Unfortunately, steganographic file systems are about as well developed as cryptographic ones were a decade ago--they're still more of a laboratory curiosity than something that's been thoroughly tested and built into commercial products. One exception is TrueCrypt, which offers two levels of plausible deniability, including a standard TrueCrypt volume that appears when you're forced to give your "password," and a hidden one that remains concealed.

Some technologists remain skeptical. Jon Callas, PGP's chief technology officer, says:

Quote:
I have a rather negative opinion about steganographic file systems. I just flat don't believe they work. I don't believe you can hide the data so that nobody can find it...

If this customs official says, "Aha! I see you have a steganographic file system, tell me the other password,' what do you do?" It is unsafe to use a product that has a steganographic file system since you can never prove you have no steganographic data...

For stegonography to work it must be custom-built for you. Or you're relying on the fact that the person searching for the data is stupid.
So what's left? Concealing the data in other ways. Bring your laptop with tourist snapshots and no steganography. Put your sensitive files on your camera's memory card or your phone's SD card; Sandisk's 32 GB SD card is supposed to ship soon.

Finally, there's always the option of bringing your data across the border electronically--by securely downloading it once you and your laptop have made it safely past customs. It may not work for everyone, and extremely large files may make it unwieldy as an option, but it may be the safest and easiest way to travel internationally nowadays.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-989...?tag=nefd.lede





2 for 1

Some Viruses Come Pre-Installed
Jordan Robertson

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory - pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.

Computer users have been warned for years about virus threats from downloading Internet porn and opening suspicious e-mail attachments. Now they run the risk of picking up a digital infection just by plugging a new gizmo into their PCs.

Recent cases reviewed by The Associated Press include some of the most widely used tech devices: Apple iPods, digital picture frames sold by Target and Best Buy stores and TomTom navigation gear.

In most cases, Chinese factories - where many companies have turned to keep prices low - are the source.

So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control - perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing - rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.

It's the digital equivalent of the recent series of tainted products traced to China, including toxic toothpaste, poisonous pet food and toy trains coated in lead paint.

But sloppiness is the simplest explanation, not the only one.

If a virus is introduced at an earlier stage of production, by a corrupt employee or a hacker when software is uploaded to the gadget, then the problems could be far more serious and widespread.

Knowing how many devices have been sold, or tracking the viruses with any precision, is impossible because of the secrecy kept by electronics makers and the companies they hire to build their products.

But given the nature of mass manufacturing, the numbers could be huge.

"It's like the old cockroach thing - you flip the lights on in the kitchen and they run away," said Marcus Sachs, a former White House cybersecurity official who now runs the security research group SANS Internet Storm Center. "You think you've got just one cockroach? There's probably thousands more of those little boogers that you can't see."

Jerry Askew, a Los Angeles computer consultant, bought a new Uniek digital picture frame to surprise his 81-year-old mother for her birthday. But when he added family photos, it tried to unload a few surprises of its own.

When he plugged the frame into his Windows PC, his antivirus program alerted him to a threat. The $50 frame, built in China and bought at Target, was infested with four viruses, including one that steals passwords.

"You expect quality control coming out of the manufacturers," said Askew, 42. "You don't expect that sort of thing to be on there."

Security experts say the malicious software is apparently being loaded at the final stage of production, when gadgets are pulled from the assembly line and plugged in to a computer to make sure everything works.

If the testing computer is infected - say, by a worker who used it to charge his own infected iPod - the digital germ can spread to anything else that gets plugged in.

The recent infections may be accidental, but security experts say they point out an avenue of attack that could be exploited by hackers.

"We'll probably see a steady increase over time," said Zulfikar Ramzan, a computer security researcher at Symantec Corp. (SYMC) "The hackers are still in a bit of a testing period - they're trying to figure out if it's really worth it."

Thousands of people whose antivirus software isn't up to date may have been infected by new products without even knowing it, experts warn. And even protective software may not be enough.

In one case, digital frames sold at Sam's Club contained a previously unknown bug that not only steals online gaming passwords but disables antivirus software, according to security researchers at Computer Associates.

"It's like if you pick up a gun you've never seen before - before you pull the trigger you'd probably check the chamber," said Joe Telafici, vice president of operations of McAfee Avert Labs, the security software maker's threat-research arm.

"It's an extreme analogy, but it's the right idea. It's best to spend the extra 30 seconds to be sure than be wrong," he added.

Consumers can protect themselves from most factory-loaded infections by running an antivirus program and keeping it up to date. The software checks for known viruses and suspicious behaviors that indicate an attack by malicious code - whether from a download or a gadget attached to the PC via USB cable.

One information-technology worker wrote to the SANS security group that his new digital picture frame delivered "the nastiest virus that I've ever encountered in my 20-plus-year IT career." Another complained his new external hard drive had malfunctioned because it came loaded with a password-stealing virus.

Monitoring suppliers in China and elsewhere is expensive, and cuts into the savings of outsourcing. But it's what U.S. companies must do to prevent poisoning on the assembly line, said Yossi Sheffi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in supply chain management.

"It's exactly the same thing, whether it happened in cyberspace or software or lead paint or toothpaste or dog food - they're all quality control issues," Sheffi said.

While manufacturing breakdowns don't happen often, they have become frequent enough - especially amid intense competition among Chinese suppliers - to warrant more scrutiny by companies that rely on them, Sheffi said.

"Most of the time it works," he said. "The Chinese suppliers have every reason to be good suppliers because they're in it for the long run. But it's a higher risk, and we've now seen the results of that higher risk."

The AP contacted some of the world's largest electronics manufacturers for details on how they guard against infections - among them Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which is based in Taiwan and has an iPod factory in China; Singapore-based Flextronics International Ltd. (FLEX); and Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc. All declined comment or did not respond.

The companies whose products were infected in cases reviewed by AP refused to reveal details about the incidents. Of those that confirmed factory infections, all said they had corrected the problems and taken steps to prevent recurrences.

Apple disclosed the most information, saying the virus that infected a small number of video iPods in 2006 came from a PC used to test compatibility with the gadget's software.

Best Buy, the biggest consumer electronics outlet in the U.S., said it pulled its affected China-made frames from the shelves and took "corrective action" against its vendor. But the company declined repeated requests to provide details.

Sam's Club and Target say they are investigating complaints but have not been able to verify their frames were contaminated.

Legal experts say manufacturing infections could become a big headache for retailers that sell infected devices and the companies that make them, if customers can demonstrate they were harmed by the viruses.

"The photo situation is really a cautionary tale - they were just lucky that the virus that got installed happened to be one that didn't do a lot of damage," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But there's nothing about that situation that means next time the virus won't be a more serious one."
http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D8VCSJKO0.html





To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on What You Click
Louise Story

A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

That may no longer be true.

A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.

These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisements people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates.

The analysis, conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides what advertising executives say is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies.

Privacy advocates have previously sounded alarms about the practices of Internet companies and provided vague estimates about the volume of data they collect, but they did not give comprehensive figures.

The Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.

Consumers have not complained to any great extent about data collection online. But privacy experts say that is because the collection is invisible to them. Unlike Facebook’s Beacon program, which stirred controversy last year when it broadcast its members’ purchases to their online friends, most companies do not flash a notice on the screen when they collect data about visitors to their sites.

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”

But executives from the largest Web companies say that privacy fears are misplaced, and that they have policies in place to protect consumers’ names and other personal information from advertisers. Moreover, they say, the data is a boon to consumers, because it makes the ads they see more relevant.

These companies often connect consumer data to unique codes identifying their computers, rather than their names.

“What is targeting in the long term?” said Michael Galgon, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist. “You’re getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are.”

The rich troves of data at the fingertips of the biggest Internet companies are also creating a new kind of digital divide within the industry. Traditional media companies, which collect far less data about visitors to their sites, are increasingly at a disadvantage when they compete for ad dollars.

The major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies “aren’t even in the same league,” said Linda Abraham, an executive vice president at comScore. “They can’t really play in this sandbox.”

During the Internet’s short life, most people have used a yardstick from traditional media to measure success: audience size. Like magazines and newspapers, Web sites are most often ranked based on how many people visit them and how long they are there.

But on the Internet, advertisers are increasingly choosing where to place their ads based on how much sites know about Web surfers. ComScore’s analysis is a novel attempt to estimate how many times major Web companies can collect data about their users in a given month.

Web companies once could monitor the actions of consumers only on their own sites. But over the last couple of years, the Internet giants have spread their reach by acting as intermediaries that place ads on thousands of Web sites, and now can follow people’s activities on far more sites.

Large Web companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have also acquired a number of companies in the last year that have rich consumer data.

“So many of the deals are really about data,” said David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, an ad agency in the Aegis Group that decides where to place ads for clients.

“Everyone feels that if we can get more data, we could put ads in front of people who are interested in them,” he said. “That’s the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs.”

Web companies also can collect more data as people spend more time online. The number of searches that American Web users enter each month has nearly doubled since summer of 2006, to 14.6 billion searches in January, according to comScore.

ComScore analyzed 15 major media companies’ potential to collect online data in December. The analysis captured how many searches, display ads, videos and page views occurred on those sites and estimated the number of ads shown in their ad networks.

These actions represented “data transmission events” — times when consumer data was zapped back to the Web companies’ servers. Five large Web operations — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace — record at least 336 billion transmission events in a month, not counting their ad networks.

The methodology was worked out with comScore and based on the advice of senior online advertising executives at two of the largest Internet companies.

“I think it’s a reasonable way to look at how many touch-points companies have with their consumers,” Jules Polonetsky, the chief privacy officer for AOL, said of the comScore findings on Friday.

But Mr. Polonetsky cautions that not all of the data at every company is used together. Much of it is stored separately.

The information transmitted might include the person’s ZIP code, a search for anything from vacation information to celebrity gossip, or a purchase of prescription drugs or other intimate items. Some types of data, like search queries, tends to be more valuable than others.

Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.

MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, were not far behind.

ComScore said it recorded the ad networks using different methods and that the exact ordering of these top companies might vary with a different methodology, but the overall picture would be similar.

Google also has scores of data collection events, but the company says it is unique in that it mostly uses only current information rather than past actions to select ads.

The depth of Yahoo’s database goes far in explaining why AOL is talking with Yahoo about a merger and Microsoft is willing to pay more than $41.2 billion to acquire the company.

Traditional media companies come in far behind.

Condé Nast magazine sites, for example, have only 34 data collection events for the average site visitor each month. The numbers for other traditional media companies, as generated by comScore, were 45 for The New York Times Company; 49 for another newspaper company, the McClatchy Corporation; and 64 for the Walt Disney Company.

Some companies are trying to close the gap. Walt Disney, for example, is studying how to combine data from its divisions like ESPN, Disney and ABC. The News Corporation is exploring ways to use information that MySpace members post on that site to select ads for those members when they visit other News Corporation sites.

IAC is using data from its LendingTree site to deliver ads on its other sites to people it knows are looking for mortgages.

Some advertising executives say media companies will have little choice but to outsource their ad sales to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to benefit from their data. The Web companies may prove they can use their algorithms and consumer information to better select which ads for visitors better than media companies can.

“I think a lot of publishers are going to find they don’t have enough data,” said David W. Kenny, chief executive of Digitas, a digital advertising agency in the Publicis Groupe. “There’s only going to be a handful of big players who can manage the data.”
People who spend more time on the Internet, of course, will have more information transmitted about them. The comScore per-person figures are averages; occasional Web users have far less transmitted about them.

The comScore figures do not include the data that consumers offer voluntarily when registering for sites or e-mail services. When consumers do so, they often give sites permission to link some of their interests or searches to their user name.

The figures also do not account for information people enter on social network pages. MySpace, for example, collects billions of user actions each day in the form of blogs, comments and profile updates, said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace.

Even with all the data Web companies have, they are finding ways to obtain more. The giant Internet portals have been buying ad-delivery companies like DoubleClick and Atlas, which have stockpiles of information. Atlas, for example, delivers 6 billion ads every day. The comScore figures do not capture such data.

Executives from Web companies said they had been working to inform consumers on their data practices.

These companies noted their consumer-protection policies. AOL, for example, lets users opt out of some ad targeting, Google lets users edit the search histories that are linked to their user names, Yahoo is working on a policy to obscure people’s computer identification addresses that are connected to search results, and Microsoft says it does not link any of its visitors’ behavior to their user names, even if those people are registered.

A study of California adults last year found that 85 percent thought sites should not be allowed to track their behavior around the Web to show them ads, according to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley, which conducted the study.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/te...10privacy.html





How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways
Louise Story

In my article in Monday’s Times, “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on What You Click,” I worked with comScore to develop a new measure for Web companies: how much data they can collect from users.

On the Internet, companies are typically ranked by how many different people visit their sites in a given month. And when Microsoft announced its $41 billion bid for Yahoo, comScore and Nielsen Online promptly put out estimates counting how many people would be in the merged company’s total audience.

But audience size is not everything in the online world. Advertisers increasingly want media companies to find their most likely customers and show their ads only to those people, rather than to the site’s entire audience.

Such targeted advertising requires data, so there’s a good argument to be made that we can spot the companies that will lead the pack in online advertising by looking at the depth of data that large media companies can collect about each of their Web visitor. Here is some more detail about the methodology comScore and I came up with:

The comScore study tallied five types of “data collection events” on the Internet for 15 large media companies. Four of these events are actions that occur on the sites the media companies run: Pages displayed, search queries entered, videos played, and advertising displayed. Each time one of those four things occurs, there is a conversation between the user’s computer and the server of the company that owns the site or serves the ad.

The fifth area that comScore looked at was ads served on pages anywhere on the Web by advertising networks owned by the media companies. These include text ads provided by Google’s AdSense network, for example, and display ads from AOL’s Advertising.com unit. Ad networks add the ability for these companies to note where you are on other Web sites when they serve you an ad. Google, for example, can note that your Internet Protocol address is on Kelly Blue Book, if it serves you an AdSense ad there.

So each time one of these five things occur, it is an “data collection event.” The data that is transferred varies for each. Typically, Web company receives information about the type of page the user is looking at, the user’s I.P. address (which sometimes has clues to the user’s location), and for advertising, the content of the ad. Most Web sites and advertising networks place cookies on users’ browsers, allowing them to recognize each time they interact with that user in the future. Cookies themselves don’t identify the name of users, but if users register with a Web site, their identities can be linked to their cookies.

When all these data collection events are combined for users in the United States in December 2007, Yahoo had the potential to gather data, through 400 billion events in the month. Time Warner, which includes AOL, was second, with about 100 billion events. Google was not too far behind with 91 billion.

Interestingly, Microsoft, with 51 billion events in December is far behind not only the other big Internet companies, but also the News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace.

Below is a view of this data. Here is an image that shows the data behind the graphic, as well as a version of the data that shows the average number of data collection events for each of the company’s users.
See the Complete Data

What is important here is not the precise numbers, but the overall picture that the biggest Internet companies are accumulating many different ways to collect data about users. Many caveats are needed: Not all of this data is useful; not all of it is retained by the companies with access to it; much of it cannot be traced back to individuals.

Moreover, this method often identifies several data collection events on a single Web page. That is because one page can contain search results, video players, and ads from several sources, each of which can send different data in a different direction.

Another caveat: ComScore’s method of measuring advertising networks has limitations that make it difficult to compare one network to another. For the networks run by Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, comScore doesn’t count how many ads they actually display, but how many pages their ads could appear on. This substantially overcounts the networks’ data collection because some Web sites have several networks that compete to place ads on their pages. ComScore counts the page views on those pages - without knowing if that network did in fact serve an ad on that page view. So the ad network tallies for these companies represent potential data collection events, rather than definite ones.

For Google, comScore can actually identify when ads from its AdSense network are loaded on a Web
page. but this measure could overstate Google’s potential to collect data. That’s because Google may display several short text ads on one page, and comScore counts each of those text ads separately. To compensate in this study, comScore tried to figure out how many pages Google ads are loaded on pages. It took its count of ads displayed and divided that by 4.17, its estimate of the average number of AdSense ads that appear together on a page.

ComScore’s December 2007 figures for AOL, moreover, do not include the reach of Tacoda, the behavioral targeting firm AOL just bought.

I do not suggest using the ad network figures to make comparisons between the Internet giants. Instead, you should look at them as potential expansions of these companies’ reach. They do collect significant data from their ad networks - but possibly not as much as suggested by these figures.

These comScore figures - though eye-popping - provide only a minimum level of data collection events. There are other ways these companies obtain data that comScore was unable to capture. The two largest ways left out here are ad-serving data (from the likes of Microsoft’s Atlas and Google’s desired partner DoubleClick) and user-volunteered data. By the latter, I mean the information that users enter when they register for sites or e-mail accounts as well as all the juicy details they post on social networking pages.

Arnie Gullov-Singh, vice president of advertising technology at Fox Interactive Media, the owner of MySpace, likes to call this sort of information “hand-raiser data,” since people choose to type it in.

I hope what I’ve done here will start a conversation. It would be fascinating to see someone try to quantify the aspects of data collection left out of this analysis. Atlas serves 6 billion ads per day, for example, which could be added in.

It is also well worth watching whether most of the data proves lucrative. Perhaps there will be diminishing returns at some point, though Mike Galgon, chief advertising strategist at Microsoft (and co-founder of aQuantive), told me he didn’t think there would be.

Consumers get all kinds of free services and content on the Web because they are shown ads, and media companies are increasingly showing them ads based on data they have collected about them. So, in a sense, consumers “pay” for free content and features like e-mail by letting companies collect this data about them.

When regulators evaluate mergers from a consumer protection standpoint, they consider whether mergers would end up raising the prices that consumers pay for those companies’ products. Since people “pay” with information about themselves on the Internet, rather than with dollars, regulators should consider consumer data when they consider mergers.

If Yahoo is to merge with Microsoft or any company, the merged company will be an entity that has significantly more data about consumers. Will consumers get more - or better - free services in exchange?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ount-the-ways/





Why We're Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data
Lee Gomes

While there is a certain grand mystery to some aspects of human behavior, others can be easily explained. Just find yourself a garden-variety house cat, along with a $10 laser pointer.

Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it's beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.

Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.

Cats and lasers are useful in explaining some of the more addictive aspects of Web use, including a recent occurrence on the site for Andrew Sullivan, a popular political blogger. Mr. Sullivan's blog doesn't follow the standard practice of making room for readers to add their own comments after each blog item. Curious if he should change his policy, he put the question to a vote.

Readers responded 60-40 against allowing comments. Even more striking than the fact that these readers were denying themselves a voice was the reason some of them gave for declining the offer: Like cats chasing a laser, they wouldn't be able to stop themselves.

"In truth we would rarely opt not to read them," said one reader. "Blog comments have the power to hammerlock one's attention. ... We'd be impotent to resist looking over the rantings and counter-rantings. ... Not only would comments be an incredible drain on one's time (especially if we check your blog several times a day from work), but it also exposes readers to the nasty underbelly of blogging."

What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don't yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain's pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.' "

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can't dial back when something is abundant.

The same happens with food: Because at one time we never knew when the next saber-toothed tiger might come along for food, it made sense to pack on the calories whenever we chanced upon them. That's not much help in today's world of snack aisles and super sizes.

Using computers traditionally has been associated with Mr. Spock-style cerebration, the ultimate kind of left-brain activity. But Dr. Biederman is just one of many researchers now linking it with some of the oldest parts of the human brain.

A group of Stanford University researchers, for example, recently found gender differences in the brains of computer gamers. Males showed more neural firings, suggesting that they were physically experiencing the game in a manner different from women.

Watching a cat play with a laser, you realize the cat never learns there is no real "prey" there. You can show the cat the pointer, clicking it off and on, and it will remain transfixed.

Indeed, while cats find a causal link between the pointer and the shimmering light, they come to a wrong conclusion. They believe the pointer is the container that holds the prey, and that the critter is released once the cat's owner gets the pen down from the shelf and starts to wave it around.

People presumably are smarter than cats, and as we become more familiar with the Web and its torrent of information, maybe we'll do a better job learning what is useful and what isn't.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...=rss_free?=4ED





Lawsuit Could Force RIAA to Reveal Secrets
Eliot Van Buskirk

Things will get very ugly over the next few months for the RIAA, if one disgruntled file sharing lawsuit victim gets her way.

Tanya Andersen, the single mother who filed a countersuit against the RIAA after the organization mistakenly sued her for sharing music online, attempted to hold it responsible for all sorts of heavy infractions ("RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of 'outrage,' and deceptive business practices").

According to Mike Ratoza, a copyright lawyer with Bullivant, Houser and Bailey who teaches at the University of Oregon, Andersen is close to forcing the RIAA into the discovery phase of her countersuit, after having her original complaint dismissed on Feb. 19. Andersen's amended complaint, due March 14, will not be a layup, and there are no guarantees in litigation. But assuming her lawyer is able to craft the pleading to the judge's specifications, Andersen will have another chance to tilt at the RIAA windmill, with the case proceeding into the discovery phase. If that happens, the RIAA could be forced to release potentially incriminating details about its techniques for investigating alleged file sharers.

This information would likely be held under a confidential seal, but if lawsuits over mold, tobacco, and asbestos are any indication, the RIAA's secrets will likely leak out into the legal community at large, potentially culminating in a class-action lawsuit.

Once Tanya Andersen files her amended Complaint, which the RIAA is barred from contesting this time around, the organization could have to explain the following details by producing documents and allowing major-label anti-piracy executives to be deposed:

- How much the RIAA's lawyers make
- Why the average file sharing settlement fee is $4-5K
- How it decides which file sharers to sue, and which ones not to sue
- Where the settlement money goes (i.e. whether any of it makes it to the artists)

If it turns out that the RIAA is paying its investigators (such as MediaSentry) a percentage of the settlements that result from their investigations, it is in even more trouble. That's illegal in many states, according to Ratoza, including New York.

Things could get even worse for the RIAA. Andersen isn't likely to be granted class action certification for her suit, because federal courts (where copyright-related proceedings take place) are not friendly to class-action suits. But another RIAA lawsuit victim could use the information divulged in Andersen's case to countersue the RIAA for specific allegations (fraud and RICO violations) in a state court, where class action certification is more likely.

Even without a class action lawsuit, the RIAA nutshell is likely to split wide open after Andersen's case hits the discovery phase, causing problems in subsequent cases. Ratoza expects the discovery phase in Andersen's case to start in about 90 days, and said it will last 4-6 months. The judge isn't likely to rule until early next year, but the RIAA's secrets could leak out a lot sooner.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/andersen-might.html





Going to the Company Elders for Help
Matt Richtel

On a recent Saturday afternoon, John Toppel, a retired Hewlett-Packard sales manager, did not spend his leisure time golfing or mowing the lawn. He spent it at a local electronics store extolling the virtues of H.P. laptop computers to customers.

He was not paid by the store or by Hewlett-Packard, for that matter. Mr. Toppel, 62, left the technology company four years ago, but he remains a volunteer cheerleader for H.P., one of thousands of its retirees whom the company is trying to galvanize into an auxiliary army of senior marketers, good-will ambassadors and volunteer sales people. None of them get paid; they do it, they say, because of their affection for the company.

“I feel like I have two marriages: a wonderful marriage at home for 36 years and a wonderful marriage at H.P.,” Mr. Toppel said. “I guess that’s now a former marriage, but I still have strong feelings for it.”

Across the country, companies are making use of retirees as part-time or temporary workers. They are taking advantage of not only their expertise, but also their desire to stay involved and engaged with the world through work.

Hewlett-Packard’s twist is particularly unusual in Silicon Valley, where long-term company loyalty is as rare as a pinstripe suit. Here, people switch jobs and companies on Internet time, chasing the latest technology developments and the chance to cash in stock options or catch an initial public offering.

But Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939 before there even was a Silicon Valley, has tens of thousands of alumni, many who spent decades at the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif. Old-timers express a familial loyalty, telling stories of eating meals and drinking coffee with the founders, David Packard and William Hewlett, or receiving a baby blanket from Mr. Packard’s wife, Lucile, on the birth of a child.

In a move it says reflects a renewed emphasis on grass-roots marketing in the Internet era, Hewlett-Packard is seeking to turn its retirees into a valuable asset that other, younger tech companies lack.

“We’re moving forward with an effort to capitalize on the fact we have these great brand stewards,” said Michael Mendenhall, chief marketing office of Hewlett-Packard. “When you look at the importance of great word of mouth and great third-party endorsement — who better to do that than your own employees?”

Mr. Mendenhall appeared last Monday at the retirees’ annual gathering with Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, Mark Hurd. They urged more than 500 retirees who had gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. — hundreds more watched over the Internet — to do volunteer sales, join local alumni clubs, get involved in legislative issues the company cares about and represent Hewlett-Packard in philanthropic and community events. The company’s goal is to inspire involvement from as many as 40,000 retirees.

Mr. Toppel, who did a recent stint as a volunteer salesman at Circuit City, said he gladly is participating because he feels great loyalty to the company. He and others also say they still own shares in the company, giving them a financial incentive to contribute. And, Mr. Toppel said, the company is giving a renewed sense of purpose to retirees.

“It makes them feel good, makes them part of it, makes them feel wanted,” said Mr. Toppel, who spent 31 years at Hewlett-Packard and now is a professor of management at the business school at Santa Clara University.

The idea of encouraging retirees to work for free has inspired some criticism. Susan Ayers Walker, founder of SmartSilvers Alliance, which offers consulting services to business looking to connect with older consumers, says she is offended that Hewlett-Packard can’t find some way to compensate volunteer workers, particularly salespeople.

The company said participation is the reward. “It’s about being part of the H.P. community and its rich heritage,” said Mr. Mendenhall. “That’s what they get.”

Their involvement can be bittersweet, say some of Hewlett-Packard retirees. The oldest among them — now into their 90s — are the last of the generation that helped build Silicon Valley, watching it evolve from endless fields of almond, plum and cherry orchards into laboratories, semiconductor companies and software makers.

They also are workers from a bygone era of paternalistic employers that promised lifelong employment. That era is largely gone across the country, including at H.P., which broke a tradition of avoiding layoffs and has terminated more than 30,000 workers over the last five years.

The contrast between the Hewlett-Packard of yesterday and the typical Silicon Valley company of today is especially pronounced, said Joe Schoendorf, 62, who spent 18 years at H.P. and is now a venture capitalist. “If I look at a résumé today, it says two years at Netscape, two years at Google, two years at Amazon, and then Facebook. That used to be a bad résumé that meant the person couldn’t keep a job,” said Mr. Schoendorf. “There is no institutional loyalty.”

Leslie Berlin, a project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, said the ethos has probably changed today at Hewlett-Packard, which now has 172,000 employees. But in Silicon Valley’s history, the loyalty engendered by Hewlett-Packard stands alone, she said.

“This is quite a unique phenomenon,” she said. “They represent the collective past of this place,” she said of the older retirees.

To be sure, companies like I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin have loyal retiree groups. So do relatively newer entrants into the Valley’s economy and culture, like Intel. A tight-knit network of retirees in the area, alumni from places like SRI International and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center who helped build the Valley, have an enormous sense of tradition. But they often are tied not to a company but to their work on specific projects or technical standards.

In the case of Hewlett-Packard, retirees talk about how the company treated them with respect. The company was, historians say, the first to adopt flexible work hours, and it put an early emphasis on ideas rather than titles.

Last Monday, Chuck Ernst, 91, a former customer service manager, attended the retiree meeting with Frank Musso, 75, who spent 25 years at H.P. They said they might not have too much time or energy to get involved in volunteer projects, but they liked the way the company was reaching out. They said the company’s embrace of its retirees started in earnest several years ago and has been intensifying.

“H.P. wants us to feel connected, and they’re doing all this work to keep us connected,” said Mr. Ernst. He said he thought the company probably ought to pay retirees to get involved in sales, but it’s not something he feels strongly about. “We’re proud of the company, and we don’t hesitate to let people know it.”

Some former employees also do not hesitate to let the company know how it might do better. One of them is Art Fong, 88, who joined Hewlett-Packard in 1946 after being recruited by Mr. Hewlett over a spaghetti dinner. Every few years, Mr. Fong sends the company a technical suggestion, as he did on the day of the retiree meeting.

“I suggested some improvements to their new TVs,” said Mr. Fong, who spent 50 years at the company, 40 of them full time, and, thanks to stock ownership, retired a wealthy man.

He said he has another suggestion for the new Hewlett-Packard: “Be nice to your employees. Treat them like family.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/te...gy/10hp-1.html





Tech’s Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True
Miguel Helft

Every time he fired up his Netscape Web browser since mid-February, John Uribe was greeted with a message urging him to switch to one of Netscape’s two successors, Firefox or Flock.

The missives came from AOL, Netscape’s parent company, and warned him that Netscape, which introduced millions of people to the Internet, was about to become a digital orphan. On March 1, he was told, AOL would stop providing support for Netscape, leaving a band of users loyal to the pioneering Web browser to fend for themselves if they ran into technical problems.

Mr. Uribe, a 56-year-old real estate agent in Waldorf, Md., ignored every message.

“It’s kind of irrational,” Mr. Uribe said as that deadline approached. “It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some reason to totally abandon it, I won’t.”

The technology industry thrives on its ability to sell new products to consumers at an ever-increasing pace, and it has turned many upgrades into painless, one-click operations. But millions of users of nearly every type of Internet service and technology, from Netscape and AOL dial-up to old e-mail systems, still prefer to ignore the pitches and sit still — or at least move ahead at their own pace.

Mr. Uribe, a professed late adopter, is one of them. He still has dial-up Internet access at home and he does not lust after the latest tech gadgets. He is content with his aging Dell computer, which he said has an absurdly small amount of memory.

He is hardly alone. Netscape users accounted for 0.14 percent of the Internet population in February, according to OneStat.com, which offers Web monitoring services. That is a tiny fraction of the market, but still represents more than a million users, many who use aging versions of Netscape.

Meanwhile, more than nine million people still pay $10 to $25 for AOL’s dial-up service when faster broadband service is available in most parts of the country, often at comparable prices. Dial-up is a rapidly declining business, but it is not an insignificant one. After all, it accounted for most of AOL’s $5.2 billion in revenue last year.

Yahoo updated its popular Web e-mail service last year, but tens of millions of its customers stuck with the company’s “classic” e-mail. And on the Well, a pioneering online community founded in 1985, hundreds of people communicate using an archaic text-only system, even though a Web-based graphical interface has been available for years.

“Every other online conversational space has a toolbar where you can plug in your favorite winking face,” said David Gans, a musician and radio host, who has been a member of the Well for 22 years. Mr. Gans says he uses the Well’s text interface, in part, because it helps to keep the quality of conversations high.

“Just because you can have a nuclear-powered thing that can dry your clothes in five minutes doesn’t mean there isn’t value to hanging your clothes in the backyard and talking to your neighbor while doing it,” Mr. Gans said.

New, of course, is not always better, and people hang on to existing technologies for a variety of reasons, including loyalty, satisfaction with what they have, fear of time-consuming upgrades and even inertia.

In the age of Facebook, blogs and micro-blogging services like Twitter, these are forces that technology companies need to understand and address as they bet their fortunes on their ability to market a nearly continuous stream of new products and upgrades.

Experts say that late adopters, or technology laggards, are not necessarily Luddites and can play a pivotal role in keeping the beat of innovation.

“Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. “Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world in which only early adopters got to choose, we’d all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo.”

Mr. Saffo said that aspects of the laggard and early adopter co-exist in most people. They may buy the latest digital camera, but end up using only a fraction of its features, or they may proudly tote an iPhone but still pay their bills by check, rather than online.

At 81, Jerry Gropp, an architect in the Seattle area, is a bit of both. He has a high-speed Internet connection through Comcast and Web e-mail accounts with Yahoo and Hotmail. But he still pays AOL for its dial-up service, largely because the desktop e-mail software packaged with it makes it easier to include maps, photographs and notes in the body of messages, rather than as attachments.

“I’ve been on this for about 20 years,” he said about AOL’s service. “In some ways, the old may be the best, combined with the new.”

Technology laggards are neither new nor unique to the Internet. Consider, for instance, that an estimated 13 million households are ill-prepared for the switch in February 2009 to all-digital TV broadcasts. And individuals and businesses alike have long complained about the upgrade “treadmills” that benefit software sellers, but not necessarily buyers.

But the Web has changed things. In the past, many late adopters upgraded their software only when they bought new hardware or when they were forced to because they could no longer read the files they received from others. Now, Internet companies can, and do, deliver upgrades with a flip of a virtual switch — not always to the delight of their customers.

In mid-2006, AOL turned its Netscape.com site, a once-popular portal that had faded into near obscurity, into a “social news” site where users’ votes would determine which items received top billing.

The experience proved disastrous, as many of the mostly late adopters who still relied on Netscape.com, the default home page for the browser, disliked the change. AOL reversed course a little more than a year later, but not before losing about half of Netscape.com’s users in the United States.

AOL declined to comment on the experience, but a spokeswoman pointed to a message in a company blog explaining the September 2007 course reversal: “We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled.”

Dan Clifford, managing partner and founder of AnswerLab, a research company that conducts usability tests for clients like Yahoo, Intuit and eBay, offers a rule of thumb for Internet companies that want to succeed with upgrades. “People need to think about order of magnitude improvements in terms of benefits, efficiencies or costs,” Mr. Clifford said.

Yahoo thought it was delivering such a vast technological improvement when it began unveiling a new e-mail system in September 2006. Eighteen months later, tens of millions of the company’s estimated 250 million e-mail users are still using the old service. Yahoo is now supporting both, saying it is happy to give customers a choice.

“We have effectively segmented the market between people who have embraced the new interface and functionality that is in it, and others who are very content and have built their lives around the classic Yahoo mail interface,” said John Kremer, vice president for Yahoo Mail.

There are times when people hold on to older technologies simply out of nostalgia.

“I am not rational about these things,” said Stephen Lee, a doctor in Hanover, N.H., who still has dial-up access and e-mail from CompuServe, an online service founded in 1969 that AOL bought in 1998. “I have a soft spot for it,” he said, adding that he did not like to see early Internet icons fade into oblivion.

It’s a similar sentiment that made Mr. Uribe hold on to the Netscape browser, even though in recent years the software had become nearly indistinguishable from Firefox, the much more popular open-source browser.

But last week, Mr. Uribe reluctantly decided to upgrade, after reading an article warning that Netscape, without support, could become a target of hackers and virus writers.

“I won’t continue using Netscape for old times’ sake,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I’ve imported my bookmarks into Firefox and will remove Netscape from my computers. To avoid temptation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/te...12inertia.html





Centenarian Director’s Very Long View
Dennis Lim

WHEN referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase “world’s oldest active filmmaker.” The operative word is “active.” Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies preconceptions of what an artist’s twilight period should be. Mr. Oliveira’s undaunted productivity is remarkable, as is the undimmed creative vigor of his films.

The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”

Mr. Oliveira, force of nature that he is, represents both kinds of lateness, often in a single film. In this, as in so many other respects, he is his own special case. What are we to make of an artist who hit his stride in his 70s, and for whom “late style” is in effect the primary style?

Many of Mr. Oliveira’s films have the pensive, melancholic quality of memento mori. But whether grappling with mortality (in “Voyage to the Beginning of the World” and “I’m Going Home,” both of which feature elderly protagonists) or with the birth pangs and death throes of empires and civilizations (“ ‘Non,’ or The Vain Glory of Command,” “A Talking Picture”), he poses many more questions than he answers.

His movies, full of backward glances, are too eccentric or perverse to be considered nostalgic. While it’s tempting to liken his inquiring spirit to that of a man a quarter of his age, his longevity is hardly incidental to the work. In his richest films Mr. Oliveira creates the impression of a one-man century of cinema, a living link between old and new: the ideals of the Enlightenment, modernism and European high culture on the one hand, the uncertainty and multiplicity of the present age on the other.

Regarded as a modern master in Europe, on a par with Buñuel, Dreyer and Bresson (filmmakers to whom he is sometimes compared), Mr. Oliveira is a more marginal figure in the United States. Despite regular appearances at the New York Film Festival, only a few of his films have received domestic distribution. BAMcinématek’s centennial retrospective, which opens on Friday and continues through March 30, is an opportunity to take stock of a singular career and to catch some rarely screened films: 18 of his 28 features will be shown, along with four shorts, including his first, “Working on the River Douro,” from 1931. (Mr. Oliviera is scheduled to make an appearance on Friday after a screening of his most recent film, “Christopher Columbus — The Enigma,” completed last year and shot partly in New York. The series will tour the United States in the coming months, stopping off at the Harvard Film Archive, the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other locations.)

The peculiar shape of Mr. Oliveira’s filmography — he made only three features and a smattering of shorts in the first 40 years of his career — is partly a function of Portuguese history. Born in Oporto to a well-off family, he competed in the pole vault, raced cars professionally and even performed as a trapeze artist in his youth. He had just turned to filmmaking when the dictator Antonio Salazar came to power in 1932. It took Mr. Oliveira years to make his first feature, the neo-realist street-kid parable “Aniki-Bóbó” (1942). The decades that followed were no more hospitable, especially since he did not conceal his opposition to the authoritarian regime.

“I was never a political man,” Mr. Oliveira said in a recent e-mail message from Portugal. “But my obsession is with humanism, and I reject all action which is damaging to man.”

During the period of enforced inactivity, Mr. Oliveira tended a farm and vineyard that his wife had inherited. “It was an enormous lesson, in terms of agriculture and human dealings with the farmers, even in regards to the laws of the land ruled by the immutable laws of nature,” he wrote. For years he acquired almost no experience as a filmmaker but was accumulating insight: “I had time for a long and profound reflection about the artistic nature of cinema, which transformed my previous certainties into new concepts between hesitations and doubt.” The ruminations led him to a guiding principle of sorts: “the simplicity of old Greek tragedies and the realism of Renaissance.”

In 1931, when Mr. Oliveira made “Working on the River Douro,” a poetically edited documentary of riverside activity, the Soviet theories of montage were a big influence. Over the years, as his cinema became more cerebral, his style grew starker and more subdued, moving away from what he called “a distracting expression wherein shots succeed each other ceaselessly.”

His second feature, “Rite of Spring” (1963), was pivotal. Ostensibly a piece of filmed theater, showing an enactment of the Passion of Christ in a peasant village, it is also a self-conscious making-of documentary with elements of political allegory. The tension between fiction and documentary — between different levels of reality and forms of representation — would prove central as Mr. Oliveira jump-started his career, quickly making up for lost time after the Salazar regime was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution of 1974.

Many of his films are based on theatrical or literary texts and often deal with the disjunctions between film and theater, or between film and literature, even as they attempt to merge the respective mediums. Randal Johnson, the author of a new monograph on Mr. Oliveira (the first book in English about him), refers to this process as “palimpsestic writing,” resulting in films that are “consistently in dialogue” with existing texts.

Some are relatively freewheeling riffs. “Abraham’s Valley” (1993) is a contemporary update of “Madame Bovary.” “Belle Toujours” (2006) is a speculative sequel to Buñuel’s “Belle du Jour.” Others, like 1978’s four-and-a-half-hour “Doomed Love” (based on a classic of Portuguese literature by Camilo Castelo Branco, and a title that sums up one of Mr. Oliveira’s favorite themes) or 1985’s seven-hour “Satin Slipper” (based on an epic Paul Claudel play, and one of the few major films not in the BAMcinématek series), are adapted with a fidelity that seems almost ascetic.

“I think of film as a synthesis of all art forms,” Mr. Oliveira wrote. “And I try to balance the four fundamental pillars of film: image, word, sound and music.” He may have started in silent movies, but he is obsessed with language, as is apparent from some of his titles (“Word and Utopia,” “The Letter,” “A Talking Picture”). He layers his movies with intertitles and voice-overs, asserting that the text is as important as the image.

Mr. Oliveira’s movies are often described as painterly or theatrical. His camera frame functions as a proscenium, and his actors tend to deliver their lines with a declamatory stiffness, sometimes facing the camera. This mode of direct address is in keeping with Mr. Oliveira’s notion of interactive cinema. “Each film must be finished by the spectators,” he said. (He also recognizes the comic potential of breaking the fourth wall. In “Abraham’s Valley” someone interrupts a monologue on the fall of Western civilization by tossing a cat at the camera.)

His international profile went up in the ’90s when he started supplementing his stable of Portuguese actors (notably Luis Miguel Cintra and Leonor Silveira) with art-house stars like Marcello Mastrioanni, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and John Malkovich. But his movies, steeped in history, philosophy and theology, have never made obvious concessions to the tastes of the art-film marketplace. It can seem that Mr. Oliveira, an artist liberated by age, is, as Cahiers du Cinéma once put it, beyond “the rules of cinematic decorum and commerce.”

But the reality is trickier, even for an almost-100-year-old maverick. “Today the economic situation in our country and around the world has gotten much harder for resistance,” Mr. Oliveira wrote.

“I don’t know if a career like his will ever be possible again,” said Mr. Malkovich, who has appeared in three of Mr. Oliveira’s films. “There’s a sense with Manoel that he feels profoundly he has a lot more to say. I think that still comes across in his movies, and that’s pretty amazing.”

Already Mr. Oliviera is planning his next film, “The Strange Case of Angelica,” which, he said, “will deal with today’s situation in its terrible complexity,” much like the post-9/11 meditation on clashing civilizations, “A Talking Picture” (2003).

As befits a man of his age Mr. Oliveira’s specialty is the long view, and the expanse of Portuguese history has given him plenty to work with. The new “Christopher Columbus” uses the quest of its hero — a researcher trying to prove Columbus was born in Portugal — to contemplate the once mighty empire’s central role in the age of discovery. “It expresses a certain melancholy before the greatness of a past faced with the mediocrity we have come down to today,” Mr. Oliveira wrote.

Most artists are fortunate if they get to make a work with the culminating grace and authority of a final testament; Mr. Oliveira practically has half a career’s worth. (There is also one final film before the fact, made in 1982 and called “Visit, or Memories and Confessions,” about a house where he used to live, which he will only allow to be shown after his death — “for prudish reasons,” he said.)

But he would be the first to caution against making too much of his longevity. “Nature is very capricious and gives to some what it takes from others,” he said. “I see myself being more admired for my age than for my films, which, being good or bad, will always be my responsibility. But I am not responsible for my age.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/movies/09lim.html





Study: Profanity Affects PG Box Office
Ryan Nakashima

A new study by The Nielsen Co. found that the PG-rated movies with the least profanity made the most money at the U.S. box office.

Sexuality or violence in those films had less to do with success than the language, the Nielsen PreView group said in a study being released Thursday.

"The reality is that profanity, within PG, is the big demarcation between box office winner and box office loser," research and marketing director Dan O'Toole said at ShoWest, a conference where studios unveil upcoming movie lineups.

"Parents are choosing PG films for their kids that have very, very low levels of profanity. We're talking one-third the level of the average PG film," he said.

The research firm cross-referenced box office data on 400 films in wide release from the fall of 2005 to the fall of 2007 with their ratings for sex, violence and profanity given by Critics Inc.'s Kids-In-Mind.com Web site.

Controlling for marketing and production budgets of films, as well as depictions of violence and sex, movies that scored an average 0.8 on a 10-point profanity scale collected an average of $69 million. Those that averaged 2.8 for profanity averaged $38 million.

All PG movies averaged 2.3 on the profanity scale.

The Nielsen unit, which launched a fee-based research Web site for studios Tuesday, also listed other early predictors of success.

The company found that movies that received approval from more than 70 percent of critics, regardless of their stature, earned far more at the box office.

In addition, Internet buzz about a horror film had little relation to its eventual box office draw. Other films, however, saw paydays increase in relation to Web chatter.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...GXUKgD8VCE7PG0





Studios Announce a Deal to Help Cinemas Go 3-D
David M. Halbfinger

Eager to get American cinema complexes ready for a surge in 3-D movies next year, four major Hollywood studios announced on Tuesday a deal to subsidize the conversion of 10,000 theaters to digital projection systems.

The announcement, at ShoWest, the annual trade show that gathers theater owners and movie distributors here, overlooked one point: the theaters that could be converted under the deal have yet to agree to it.

The motion picture industry is racing to roll out digital projectors, not just because they avoid the costly printing and shipping of reels of film, but also because they’re needed to show the current generation of 3-D films, which have often been bonanzas at the box office. One, “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert,” generated $31 million its opening weekend on only 683 screens, about one-fifth as many as the typical wide release.

Under the deal announced on Tuesday, the Walt Disney Company, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Universal all agreed to pay “virtual print fees” for each movie they distribute digitally to the participating theaters. Theater owners will use the fees to buy the projectors, servers and other equipment needed — about $75,000 for each auditorium.

Also on Tuesday, Paramount executives confirmed that “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” would be released digitally, though its director, Steven Spielberg, has long insisted that his movies be released exclusively on film. Every movie that earned more than $100 million last year was released both digitally and on film.

Access Integrated Technologies concluded a first round of 3,740 theater conversions last year. It now must go out and sell its systems to other cinema owners. It has three years to accomplish those installations; the studios will pay the virtual print fees for up to 10 years.

The size of these virtual print fees was not disclosed, but one person involved said it would be around $800 per movie, per theater — down from about $1,000 in the first phase.

Chuck Viane, president of distribution at Disney, said the studios were insistent that theater owners cover more of the cost of converting, including maintenance. “We’ve always felt that exhibition had to have some skin in the game,” he said.

The announcement came as, in a separate deal, the nation’s three largest theater chains — Regal, Cinemark and AMC — were negotiating for what Variety reported would be a $1.1 billion line of credit to finance the conversion of their theaters to digital cinema. The three, bargaining as Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, own about 14,000 of the nation’s 37,000 screens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/movies/12scre.html





Another DVD Format, but This One Says It’s Cheaper
Eric A. Taub

No sooner has the battle for the next-generation high definition DVD format ended, with Blu-ray triumphing over HD DVD, than a new contender has emerged.

A new system that is incompatible with Blu-ray, called HD VMD, for versatile multilayer disc, is trying to find a niche. New Medium Enterprises, the London company behind HD VMD, says its system’s quality is equal to Blu-ray’s but it costs less. By undercutting the competition in production, replication and hardware costs, it thinks it can find a market among consumers with less disposable income, particularly outside the United States.

An HD VMD player costs less than a Blu-ray because it uses the red-laser technologies found in today’s standard-definition DVD players. The Blu-ray and HD DVD machines use a more-expensive blue laser system. “We do not intend to take on Blu-ray,” said Shirly Levich, New Medium’s vice president and product development manager, in an e-mail message. “We see VMD as a natural extension of mass market DVD product enhanced to HD capabilities. We shall not rekindle the format war.”

The industry and consumers may not see it that way, given that the company is promoting its price advantages. While Blu-ray players typically cost more than $300, an HD VMD unit is priced at $199. Sales through Amazon are scheduled to begin in five weeks, the company said. No talks have been held with the big-box retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores, to carry the product.

New Medium thinks its secret weapon is Michael Jay Solomon, one of Hollywood’s best-known film distributors, who has been named its chairman.

Although he has yet to approach the studios, Mr. Solomon, a former president of Warner Brothers International Television, said his long tenure in the industry would help him succeed in licensing movies for HD VMD. “It’s a combination of my good experiences and continual relationships,” Mr. Solomon said in a telephone interview from Shanghai, where he was visiting with company engineers.

No matter how cheap a player is, it is useless unless major movies are released using its format. To date, New Medium has come up short. Just 17 movies are available to customers in the United States at the company’s online store, including little-known ones like “The Enigma With a Stigma” and “Kandukondain Kandukondain,” a Bollywood production. Its major suppliers to the American market are Anthem Pictures, Eros Entertainment and SFM Entertainment, all independent distributors. Some bigger movies, like “Apocalypto,” are available in other territories.

Neither Walt Disney, Universal Studios nor Warner Brothers would comment on their interest in releasing movies on HD VMD.

But even without major studio movies, Mr. Solomon thinks the company will be successful. The low cost of producing HD VMD master discs, from which the consumer products are made, and the inexpensive consumer players have attracted the owners of movie rights in China, India and Spain, Mr. Solomon said. He said Australia, China, India, Central Europe, Russia and Scandinavia would be major markets.

“We can sell players for $90 and make a profit,” he said.

In the United States, Mr. Solomon believes that producers of lesser-known movies, like religious organizations and independent filmmakers, will see HD VMD as a cost-effective way to create high-definition versions of their programming.

The Blu-ray camp is unimpressed. New Medium’s price strategy will fail, said Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, a trade group, because it relies on a false assumption: Blu-ray technology will always be more expensive.

“When you mass produce blue lasers in large quantities, hardware costs will absolutely come down,” Mr. Parsons said. “I’m sure we’ll eventually be able to charge $90 for a Blu-ray player.”

The HD VMD camp “is pitching a solution at a market niche that does not exist,” said Carmi Levy, senior vice president for strategic consulting at AR Communications, a Toronto research firm. “And even if it is a niche, you will never sell enough to make it a business.”

Mr. Solomon dissents. “Our idea is to create a player that people can afford. There is room for the two of us.”

Unfortunately, those consumers who bought HD DVD players that are now orphaned may not agree.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10dvd.html





Serving Up Television Without the TV Set
Brian Stelter

The “stupid computer” is a repeated target of the dimwitted office manager Michael Scott on “The Office.” But the show itself may be motivating viewers to put down their remote controls and pick up their laptops.

When the fourth season of “The Office,” an NBC comedy, had its premiere in September, one in five viewings was on a computer screen instead of a television. The episode attracted a broadcast audience of 9.7 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research. It was also streamed from the Web 2.7 million times in one week, the executive producer, Greg Daniels, said.

“The Office” is on the leading edge of a sharp shift in entertainment viewing that was thought to be years away: watching television episodes on a computer screen is now a common activity for millions of consumers.

“It has become a mainstream behavior in an extraordinarily quick time,” said Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC, which is owned by General Electric and Vivendi. “It isn’t just the province of college students or generation Y-ers. It spans all ages.”

A study in October by Nielsen Media Research found that one in four Internet users had streamed full-length television episodes online in the last three months, including 39 percent of people ages 18 to 34 and, more surprisingly, 23 percent of those 35 to 54.

“I think what we’re seeing right now is a great cultural shift of how this country watches television,” said Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy,” a Fox animated comedy that ranks among the most popular online shows. “Forty years ago, new technology changed what people watched on TV as it migrated to color. Now new technology is changing where people watch TV, literally omitting the actual television set.”

Although people are watching their shows, the networks are loath to release data about how many people are watching TV shows online and how often. The reason? Possibly because Internet viewers are worth only a fraction of the advertising dollars of television viewers.

“The four and a half billion we make on broadcast is never going to equate to four and a half billion online,” said Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive.

The most popular television shows tend to be the most-viewed online as well. While the doctors and nurses of the hit ABC drama “Grey’s Anatomy” look a little pixelated on a computer monitor, episodes of the show have been streamed more than 26 million times on ABC.com in the last six months, adding the equivalent of two full ratings points to each telecast.

“Heroes,” “Ugly Betty,” “CSI,” “House” and “Gossip Girl” are among the other online hits, analysts say. Just how many shows are being streamed is unclear because there is no widely recognized version of the Nielsen TV ratings for the Internet yet.

Regardless of the content, the shift is forcing the networks to rethink the long-held axioms of network schedulers and advertisers.

In an address in January to television executives in Las Vegas, Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, noted that NBC.com had measured more than half a billion video streams in just over a year.

"Our challenge with all these ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies,” Mr. Zucker said, calling it the No. 1 challenge for the industry.

Some people pay for episodes via Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon’s Unbox service, but many more appear to be watching streams of free, advertising-supported episodes on Web sites. In a closely watched effort, NBC Universal and the News Corporation are about to introduce their joint streaming site, called Hulu.

One piece of good news for the networks and advertisers is that viewers are more likely to remember ads on the Internet versions of TV shows, partly because the commercials are less numerous and more demographically aimed online, according to many studies.

For the moment, at least, conventional wisdom holds that the television and the Internet will essentially merge in the foreseeable future. Already, the hardiest of online viewers are letting PC screens replace their TVs altogether. Others are merely letting broadband connections supplement their digital video recorder.

About six months ago, Peer Gopfrich, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, bought a high-resolution liquid-crystal display TV screen for his living room. Around the same time, he discovered that the television networks were offering some shows online in a high-definition format, so he hooked an old computer up to his TV monitor and started streaming. Mr. Gopfrich’s computer became a free and seemingly endless source of on-demand television.

“All of a sudden, we could watch pretty much every popular show we wanted, when we wanted, in high definition in our living room,” he said.

Mr. Wurtzel has found that most consumers — at least 75 percent in his studies — prefer to watch higher-quality versions of episodes via their trusty TV sets. They make distinctions between dialogue-driven comedies like “The Office,” which are better suited to laptops and iPods, and special-effects-laden dramas like “Heroes,” which look better on a big screen, he said.

For a variety of shows, the Web proves valuable as a time machine, permitting users to catch up on missed episodes. The Web site for “Jericho,” a show that was canceled by CBS but revived last year because of Internet-savvy fans, had roughly 1.3 million video views in the first week after the show’s second-season debut on Feb. 12. Less than half of those views were of the premiere episode; the rest were from viewers catching up on the first season or sharing clips.

In addition to tracking the episode views, CBS measures the amount of online conversation happening about shows.

“We’re still midstream,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment. “We’re still learning about people’s behaviors and we’re still learning about what shows really resonate with an online audience.”

Other consumers use the Internet to discover new shows. Jason Kilar, the chief executive of Hulu, heard rave reviews of the NBC comedy “30 Rock” last year but never took the time to watch the show until he could stream it online. After one episode, he was hooked.

“After I put my kids to sleep and I have a few minutes to spare, I’m able to catch up on the show,” he said. “It provides an opportunity to both sample and consume content without having to schedule the DVR, without having to think about the on-air schedule.”

For the time being, broadcasters are harnessing the audience interest in different ways. Hulu content is widely distributed on MySpace, Yahoo, AOL and a variety of other sites. Similarly, CBS has chosen to syndicate its shows across a range of sites called the CBS Audience Network.

ABC, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, has been more guarded with its content, making episodes available for streaming on only its Web site. Mike Shaw, the president for sales and marketing for ABC, said ABC.com has served up more than 220 million ad impressions, or views, in the last six months, up 188 percent from the same time period a year earlier.

And in the last month, all the broadcast networks have added classic series to their Web sites, making shows like “Star Trek,” “MacGyver,” “The A-Team” and “I Dream of Jeannie” available online. For companies that have sold all their available advertising space, tapping into their show libraries creates new opportunities.

“We would love to have more inventory,” Patrick Keane, the chief marketing officer at CBS Interactive, told reporters last week. “The advertisers are raring to go.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/te.../10online.html





The Battle for Wikipedia's Soul

The internet: The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?

IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.

Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.

Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)

Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.

Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.

The rules of the game

In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?

To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d'affaires ad interim are not).

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant's notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.

As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). Imagine you have just created a new entry, consisting of a few words. If a member of the Wikipedia elite believes that your submission fails to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, it may be nominated for “speedy” deletion—in other words, removed right away—or “regular” deletion, which means the entry is removed after five days if nobody objects. (To avoid deletion or vandalism, many highly controversial articles, such as the entries on the Holocaust, Islam, terrorism or Mr Bush, can be “locked” to prevent editing or removal.)

If your article is selected for deletion, you may choose to contest the decision, in which case you may be asked to provide further information. There is also a higher authority with the ultimate power to rule in controversial cases: the Arbitration Committee, which settles disputes that the administrators cannot resolve.

Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT (“Avoid Peacock Terms”—terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for “Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece”). Covert alliances and intrigues are common. Sometimes editors resort to a practice called “sock puppetry”, in which one person creates lots of accounts and pretends to be several different people in a debate so as to create the illusion of support for a particular position.

The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. According to one estimate from 2006, entries about governance and editorial policies are one of the fastest-growing areas of the site and represent around one-quarter of its content. In some ways this is a sign of Wikipedia's maturity and importance: a project of this scale needs rules to govern how it works. But the proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger, says Andrew Lih, a former deletionist who is now an inclusionist, and who is writing a book about Wikipedia. The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that this deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia's early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia's article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users' activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia's health.

It may be that Wikipedians have already taken care of the “low-hanging fruit”, having compiled articles on the most obvious topics (though this could, again, be taken as evidence of Wikipedia's maturity). But there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit. Producing articles about specialist subjects such as Solidarity activists, as opposed to Pokémon characters, requires expert knowledge from contributors and editors. If the information is not available elsewhere on the web, its notability cannot be assessed using Google.

To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project.

Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice, with a voting system that means the best rise to the top. Tellingly, this approach is based on individualism rather than collaboration (Google will share ad revenues with the authors). No doubt it will produce its own arguments and unexpected consequences. But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance.
http://www.economist.com/printeditio...ry_id=10789354





Wikipedia's Tin-Cup Approach Wears Thin

The nonprofit website needs to raise funds, but it resists selling ads.
Alana Semuels

The new headquarters of one of the world's most popular websites is 3,000 square feet of rented space furnished with desks and chairs bought on the cheap from EBay and Craigslist.

A sheet of printer paper taped to the door says the office belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the online almanac of anything and everything that users want to chronicle, from Thomas Aquinas to Zorba the Greek.

With about 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn't. Wikipedia's business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often.

When it comes to money, "we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be," Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office, the foundation's home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. "It's time for us to grow up a little bit."

Growing up can be hard to do.

Wikipedia, the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," is stuck in a weird Internet time warp, part grass-roots labor of love, part runaway success.

A global democracy beloved by high school term paper writers and run largely by volunteers, the site is controlled for now by people who seem to view revenue with suspicion and worry that too much money -- maybe even just a little money -- would defile and possibly ruin the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the written word.

"Imagine if the other top 10 websites in the world, like Yahoo or Google, tried to run their budgets by asking for donations from 14-year olds," said Chad Horohoe, a 19-year-old college student in Richmond, Va., who was until recently a Wikipedia site administrator, one of the 1,500 or so people authorized to delete pages or block users from making changes to articles. "It isn't sustainable."

Looking at it one way, it's cheap to run Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation's other endeavors, which include an online compendium of quotations and a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus. The annual budget is $4.6 million, more than half of it dedicated to 300 computer servers and other equipment. On the other hand, the foundation has a tough time raising a few million dollars. The last fundraising campaign featured a video of co-founder Jimmy Wales literally wringing his hands in desperation.

The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed.

For the rest, foundation directors have to hit up outside donors, such as Stephen J. Luczo of Seagate Technology and U2's Bono.

Recent money-making proposals include a Wikipedia television game show, a Wikipedia board game and Wikipedia T-shirts. Gardner said that a board game might by OK but that a game show would be problematic, because game shows are competitive and Wikipedia is collaborative.

How about selling advertising space like most big-time websites do? Don't go there unless you want to start a Wikipedian riot. Some members of the foundation's board of trustees and most of the site's editors and contributing writers zealously oppose advertising.

After a staff member in 2002 raised the possibility in the Wikipedia community, a facet of the Spanish-language branch quit and created the forever ad-free Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español. Its founders said that advertising "implied the existence of a commercialization of the selfless work of volunteers."

Ads would be "threatening to Wikipedia's neutrality," said Michael Bimmler, a 16-year-old high school student who has been a contributor for more than four years and is president of the foundation's Swiss chapter. Readers would be suspicious about articles if ads were near them, he said, and would wonder why certain articles were longer than others. Besides, he added, ads are ugly.

The debate over Wikipedia's future took a tabloid turn last week when gossip sites started buzzing over allegations by former Wikipedian Danny Wool, who recently launched Veripedia, which says it authenticates Wikipedia articles. Wool posted on his blog claims that co-founder Wales had, among other things, been imprudent with Wikipedia funds, asking the foundation to pay for visits to massage parlors and other non-Wikipedia-related activities.

As those allegedly scandalous tidbits zoomed around the Internet, the website Antisocialmedia.net (which says it is in the business of "exposing user-generated discontent") got the attention of the blogosphere when it posted a rant about Wales supposedly having fiddled with one Wikipedia article on behalf of a girlfriend before he broke up with her and doctoring another in exchange for a $5,000 donation. Tech industry gossip site Valleywag got involved by posting what appeared to be instant message exchanges between Wales and the ex-girlfriend, political commentator Rachel Mardsen, who put some of his clothes up for sale on EBay.

Wales and Wikimedia said he had never misused foundation funds, and Wales posted a statement online saying that he cared deeply about Wikipedia's integrity and would never abuse it. Gardner said in a statement that Wales "has consistently put the foundation's interests ahead of his own."

In San Francisco, Gardner said that she wasn't planning wholesale changes as executive director, and that her first task was to "fix the basics and get the house in order."

Gardner, a petite woman with black hair and a tattoo of a black widow spider on her wrist, joined Wikipedia nine months ago after leaving Canadian Broadcasting Co., where she oversaw the introduction of advertising on its website. She said she didn't foresee a time when Wikipedia would go that route, though she added that she should never say never.

So far, Gardner has hired a staff lawyer, an accountant and a head of business development. She has created a travel policy, reimbursement policy and code of conduct for employees and instituted criminal background checks for potential hires (Wikimedia got unwanted publicity after a technology site revealed in December that the foundation's chief operating officer until July had been convicted of theft, drunk driving and fleeing a car accident before being hired.)

Now comes the hard part: money.

The foundation makes some -- less than 2% of its budget -- from ways other than flat out asking for it, Gardner said. For instance, it licenses the Wikipedia logo to companies such as Nokia, which used it to advertise a new phone, and it charges websites such as Answers.com for real-time feeds with page updates.

"The most difficult issue for a nonprofit is always how to raise money in ways which are consistent with the mission," Gardner said, "and don't distract too much from the mission-related work."

In the early days, funding wasn't a problem. Wales helped launched Wikipedia in 2001 with money he made through Bomis Inc., a Web portal known for directing users to pictures of women and celebrities, clothed and unclothed. By February 2004, the English-language Wikipedia had nearly 250,000 alphabetized articles. Today the English version has more than 2 million articles.

Global interest in the volume of information -- and the fact that it's free -- helped the site grow from the 100th most visited in 2005 to the ninth most visited now, according to Web-traffic tracker Alexa.

Decisions, financial and otherwise, are made by the Wikimedia Foundation board, whose seven directors include Wales, a French plant geneticist, a classical bassoonist studying law in Virginia and an Italian computer programmer. Most board members are nominated and elected, via e-mail debate and balloting, by Wikipedia editors and contributors.

As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. "Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years," said Nathan Awrich, a 26-year-old Wikipedia editor from Vermont who supports advertising.

Outsiders find it hard to see how the site can avoid selling ad space.

"They either have to charge people or run ads, or both," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in consumer behavior online.

E-mail traffic among Wikipedia contributors shed light on the depth of financing anxiety and the details that cause angst. One worried about the tax implications of the site accepting more than $200 from any individual. Another complained about a proposal to give T-shirts to donors. Wrote one person: "All of this fundraising talk is very nice and dandy, but it sounds like plans for the local glee club, not an international foundation."

Foundation Director Erik Moeller said the foundation had to be "very, very careful with the kinds of deals we want to make" to sustain itself.

"We don't want to endanger the mission by entering into deals that would conflict with it," said Moeller, a German technology writer who was elected to the foundation board in 2006 and named director last year.

Some people have abandoned Wikipedia for Wikipedia-like companies and organizations, including Citizendium and Veripedia, and speak of joining Google's yet-to-be-launched "knol" project. Co-founder Wales started a for-profit that operates a Google-like search engine and allows users to write Wikipedia-like articles. Wales' site, called Wikia, runs ads.

Wales said that the free culture movement, as it's called, has to think creatively if it wants to keep spreading information to computers around the world.

"There are some real problems with a nonprofit structure," he said. "One of the basic problems is funding: We can get enough money to survive but don't really have the funding to push forward or innovate."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,7404443.story





More Woes for Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales
Asher Moses

The toughest two weeks of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales's career just became a whole lot worse, with a former chief scientist at one of the world's biggest technology companies claiming Wales traded Wiki edits for donations.

Jeff Merkey, a former computer scientist at Novell, claims Wales told him in 2006 that in exchange for a substantial donation from Merkey, he would edit his uncomplimentary Wikipedia entry to make it more favourable.

Merkey made a $US5000 ($5455) donation in 2006 and the edit history for his Wikipedia entry showed that, around the same time, Wales personally made changes to the entry after wiping it out completely and ordering editors to start over.

Merkey's claims were published in a statement on a Wikipedia mailing list. On the same mailing list, Wales called the allegation "nonsense".

The claim is the most damning yet against Wales, who was last week accused by a former Wikipedia executive of improperly using the non-profit organisation's funds for his own lavish recreation.

Earlier, an ex-girlfriend, Rachel Marsden, leaked instant messaging transcripts that purported to show Wales using his influence to improperly make changes to Marsden's Wikipedia entry so he could continue "f---ing [her] brains out".

On the Wikipedia mailing list, Wales said he would "never offer, nor accept any offer, whereby a donation would buy someone special editorial treatment in the encyclopedia".

When he erased Merkey's Wikipedia entry in May 2006, Wales told Wikipedia users he did so "because of the unpleasantness of it" and asked them to "be extra careful here to be courteous and assume good faith".

A Wikipedia user, "Aim Here", quickly questioned Wales's reasoning: "Have you been making secret dealings behind everyone's back? So much for Wikipedia's openness."

Following his decision to erase Merkey's entry and start over, Wales placed it under his "special protection". Protected entries can only be edited by Wikipedia administrators.

Wales's edits to the page related to various lawsuits Merkey had been embroiled in.

Merkey was sued by Novell after his departure from the company for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets.

In 2005, he filed a harassment lawsuit against various people and organisations including the geek news website Slashdot. Then in 2006 he filed suit against Natural Selection Foods and Delta Air Lines, claiming his son became ill from eating spinach contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/more-...125874243.html





Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban
I don't believe in imaginary property

The flagship physics journal Physical Review Letters doesn't allow authors to submit material to Wikipedia, or blogs, that is derived from their published work. Recently, the journal withdrew their acceptance of two articles by Jonathan Oppenheim and co-authors because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia and the Quantum Wikipedia. Currently, many scientists "routinely do things which violate the transfer of copyright agreement of the journal."

Thirty-eight physicists have written to the journal requesting changes in their copyright policies, saying "It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible." The protest may be having an effect. The editor-in-chief of the APS journals says the society plans to review its copyright policy at a meeting in May. "A group of excellent scientists has asked us to consider revising our copyright, and we take them seriously,” he says.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/.../1425247.shtml





Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog
Michael White

There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the 'oppressed underdog' narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it's usually wrong.

The narrative goes like this:

1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.

2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.

3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.

We love stories like this; in our culture we love the underdog, who sticks to his or her guns, in spite of heavy opposition. In this narrative, we have heroes, villains, and a famous, brilliant scientist proven wrong.

I'm sure you could pick out instances in science history where this story is true, but more often it is not. You wouldn't know this from the pages of our major news media though; in fact you'd probably get the impression that the underdog narrative is the way science works. And many journalists may think that too; after all, most of them read (or misread) Thomas Kuhn when they were in college, and Kuhn brought this kind of narrative to a new high. The impression this narrative leaves is that science only progresses by the efforts of brave individuals who are willing to wither the wrath of the scientific establishment.

Why is this narrative about science wrong? Let me illustrate with the nearest example I have at hand right now: a piece out of the 2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing:"The Effeminate Sheep", by Jonah Lehrer, a piece that was originally published in Seed magazine. The piece is about Joan Roughgarden, a writer here at Scientific Blogging, an accomplished Stanford Biologist, and the transgendered author of the book, Evolution's Rainbow, about the sexual diversity that we find in nature. As we learn in her book, gay sex is quite popular in the animal world - bonobos, fish, giraffes, whales, and big-horn sheep make humans look incredibly prude.

This raises a question: being gay has obvious evolutionary fitness consequences - without modern medicine, you have to have heterosexual sex to have offspring. So is homosexuality in nature just a freak occurrence, a case of bad genes; or is it something that is in some way adaptive and therefore under selective pressure? Does this mean that there are problems with our current understanding of sexual selection in evolutionary theory?

(Important aside: let's make it clear right now that my intention is not to knock Dr. Roughgarden or her research, or her book - I'm talking here about how science is presented to the public. In fact I feel a little school pride in Roughgarden's accomplishments - she and I both spent some of our educational careers at the University of Rochester, though obviously not at the same time.)

Getting back to our underdog narrative, take a look at how Lehrer sets up the story. After giving a very brief introduction to Darwin's ideas about sexual selection, using the classic example of peacock tails, he writes:

"Darwin's theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies."

There you have the classic start of the narrative: Darwin, our brilliant scientist, came up with a theory about evolutionary sexual selection, which has been dogma among biologists ever since.

But this story isn't true: Darwin's theories about selection took some time before they were widely accepted (in fact, Darwin's claim that all living species share a common ancestry was accepted before his ideas about selection). And even then, they weren't taken as dogma; researchers have been actively studying the subject for a long time. The theory of sexual selection has undergone heavy scrutiny and extensive modification, including an effort to put it within the mathematical framework of game theory - a development which didn't take place until 100 years after Darwin proposed sexual selection. Biological dogma ever since Darwin? Hardly! (Take a look at this book on the development and status of theories of sexual selection.)

But Lehrer doesn't bother to tell his readers any of this; it would spoil the underdog narrative. It's time to introduce the underdog scientist ready to overturn it all:

"Despite this new evidence [of gay sex among animals], sexual selection theory is still stuck in the nineteenth century. The Victorian peacock remains the standard-bearer. But as far as Roughgarden is concerned, that's bad science: 'The time has come to declare that sexual theory is indeed false and stop shoehorning one exception after another into a sexual selection framework ... To do otherwise suggests that sexual selection theory is unfalsifiable, not subject to refutation.'"

Roughgarden is the underdog against the scientific establishment - an establishment stuck in the nineteenth century, so willing to protect its pet theory that it will go so far as to make it unfalsifiable.

What is this revolutionary idea that the establishment is hostile towards? Roughgarden believes that homosexual behavior is an adaptive trait, one preserved by natural selection to play an important role in group cohesion, or as Lehrer puts it, "gayness is a necessary side effect of getting along." To support this, Roughgarden marshals examples of unorthodox sexual arrangements in many different species, and explains that these arrangements actually promote evolutionary fitness in complex animal societies. She has presented this evidence in a popular book, Evolution's Rainbow, and in a review article in the journal Science (subscription required).

Her ideas are unquestionably bold. She and her co-authors set themselves an ambitious task to replace the current theory of sexual selection:

"We think that the notion of females choosing the genetically best males is mistaken. Studies repeatedly show that females exert choice to increase number, not genetic quality, of offspring and not to express an arbitrary feminine aesthetic. Instead, we suggest that animals cooperate to rear the largest number of offspring possible, because offspring are investments held in common. We therefore propose replacing sexual selection theory with an approach to explaining reproductive social behavior that has its basis in cooperative game theory."

They go on to present their new mathematical formalism for their ideas. This is how science is supposed to work, incidentally. Roughgarden wrote a popular book, but didn't expect that to be a substitute for genuine scientific papers. She knows she has to convince her scientific peers, and to do that, she wrote a technical paper, spelling out the mathematical basis for her novel ideas. The next step is for the people who understand those mathematical details to check them out, work them over, and see how persuasive they are.

But that's not how the underdog narrative goes. According to Lehrer, by this point it should have been an open-and-shut case, if it weren't for the hostile scientific establishment:

"Despite Roughgarden's long list of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, most evolutionary biologists remain skeptical of her conclusions... In the absence of something conclusive, most scientists stick with Darwin and Dawkins."

In the underdog narrative, it is wrong for the establishment to remain skeptical, which in reality is exactly the opposite of how science is supposed to work. It is not like a courtroom where innocence is the presumption; in science, a novel idea is unfounded until proven otherwise. And Roughgarden's publication record, impressive as it is, is not evidence that her hypothesis is correct. Nor is the fact that her review article was published in Science evidence that her idea is true. It does mean though that she's put something together serious enough to deserve a hearing. (One more nitpicking point - "scientists are sticking with Dawkins"? Dawkins may be the authority on the subject to someone like Lehrer who has probably read only popular books on evolution. Dawkins has done some professional work in this field, but he's not the reigning authority.)

Our underdog narrative is almost complete: we have a reigning scientific authority, Darwin, whose ideas are entrenched dogma among an establishment that is skeptical of our underdog scientist, whose ideas are so obviously true that they would have been accepted if it weren't for the closed-mindedness of the defenders of orthodoxy.

And closed-minded they are: Lehrer, instead of summarizing the real critiques that Roughgarden's paper generated (those with access to Science can read them here and here), suggests that biologists are unwilling to abandon their dogma of sexual selection and view homosexuality as anything but "sexual deviants" and "statistical outliers."

That's not exactly what Roughgarden's critics are saying. The responses to her Science review included two major criticisms: that Roughgarden did not correctly characterize sexual selection as it is currently understood, and that some of her assumptions in her game theory model were wrong. Most writers did think that she had offered something interesting, although not something which completely negates the theory of sexual selection; several writers suggested that current theories could be modified to incorporate Roughgarden's ideas. Lehrer does quote one scientist who basically says just that. He quotes PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist:

"I think much of what Roughgarden says is very interesting. But I think she discounts many of the modifications that have been made to sexual selection since Darwin originally proposed it. So in that sense, her Darwin is a straw man. You don't have to dismiss the modern version of sexual selection in order to explain sexual selection of homosexuality."

Our narrative would not be complete without a final look at our persevering underdog:

"Roughgarden remains defiant," Lehrer writes. And we learn the real source of the establishment's skepticism. "I think many scientists discount me because of who I am," the transgendered Roughgarden says. "The theory is becoming Ptolemaic. It clearly has the trajectory of a hypothesis in trouble."

We are left with the impression of scientists hanging on to a sinking theoretical ship, unable to move forward in their understanding because they have something personally against the underdog of the narrative.

It's amazing science makes any advances at all, with such closed-minded people in control of the field! But that's not really how things work. The real story is an example of science operating the way it is supposed operate: a researcher comes up with new and very interesting observations that seem to challenge our current understanding of an important problem. She works to put those observations under some sort of theoretical framework, and presents the results in a paper to her scientific peers. Her fellow scientists think the work is interesting, but remain unconvinced because the evidence or theoretical development is not yet sufficient to support the hypothesis. What should happen next is that our researcher should go out and collect more evidence, correct any mistakes in the analysis or make a persuasive reply to her critics, and try again.

A major new idea, one which overturns an existing, well-supported theory, does not get established in one paper. There has to be follow up and debate, and if the idea holds up to scrutiny it will be accepted.

Beware the underdog narrative in science journalism. This narrative severely misrepresents how science really works. It's designed to elicit our sympathy for a not-yet-established theory, maybe one that is socially attractive, and to arouse our indignation against the staid community of eggheaded scientists. This underdog narrative plays on our emotions, it makes for a good read, and helps us feel good about ourselves when we stand up for our convictions.

What gets lost is the scientific method, the idea that novel proposals need to be thoroughly vetted and tested, no matter how intuitively attractive they are. That vetting process is done by a dynamic community of smart, educated, competitive people, who care passionately about science. It's a community where everyone wants to come up with the next big theory that overturns long-held beliefs. But that's hard to do, especially in fields where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked over by really talented people for decades or centuries. If a new theory is being presented in the media as the centerpiece of an underdog narrative, you can bet the farm that this theory is not yet sufficiently substantiated by the evidence. That doesn't mean it's wrong necessarily, but it does mean that the hypothesis has not yet met the rigorous standards of evidence that have served science well for centuries.

I said I wasn't writing this to knock Dr. Roughgarden, but I'm going to renege on that promise just a little: based on how she's quoted in the piece, she does seem to be feeding the narrative. She's not giving her colleagues enough credit for giving her ideas a hearing. What non-heterosexual behavior among vertebrates implies about evolution is a fascinating question, one many of biologists would be happy to know more about. I think the idea that homosexual behavior could be adaptive is intriguing, and its widespread occurrence in nature is a worthwhile scientific subject. But it's an issue that's only going to be settled by more evidence.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/ad...sed_underdo g





Dropping 22TB of Patches on 6,500 PCs in 4 Hours: BitTorrent
Iljitsch van Beijnum

Get out your list, because you can add another application to the tally of legitimate uses of BitTorrent.

Apparently, software updates are getting so big these days that simply downloading them from a server is becoming prohibitively time consuming, especially when the same updates need to be applied to many different machines. A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That's a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that's some modest lifting.

In fact, INHOLLAND University's IT department used to have almost two dozen servers distributed over the university's locations to serve up these downloads. The school was able to retire 20 of them after adopting a new way to distribute updates: BitTorrent.

The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.

Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!

Leo Blom of ITeleo, who came up with the idea of using BitTorrent, told Ars, "Let me put it this way: if INHOLLAND wants to migrate to Windows Vista, they only have to send out an image through BT. All 6,500 desktops can be migrated overnight in two hours' time—with one push of a button. It's a real migration killer. Migration used to mean a lengthy and trying process. At INHOLLAND, we took a different approach."

According to TorrentFreak, the university's management team was reluctant to adopt the peer-to-peer technology, but they quickly changed their minds after seeing a demonstration. Students and staff who think they can use the modified BitTorrent client for other purposes will be disappointed to learn that the system is completely locked down.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ittorrent.html





The Shareaza Conspiracy In a Nutshell
enigmax

The hijacking of Shareaza.com is a complex story with many twists and turns. Here is the story of Shareaza from its open source GPL roots, to the hostile takeover and where the project is today, directly from those at the heart of the news - the real Shareaza community. The fight for Shareaza has only just begun.

Beginnings Are a Good Place To Start

In mid 2002, a lone programmer by the name of Micheal Stokes released the first version of a Gnutella client he had written, dubbed “Shareaza”. Over the next two years Micheal added to his client and coded in support for the eDonkey 2000 network, BitTorrent and a rewritten Gnutella-based protocol which he named Gnutella2. Shareaza gradually became more and more popular and Mike started to receive several job offers based on the strength of his work on Shareaza. He eventually decided that continuing to work on a p2p application in an increasingly hostile legal climate was too risky, but he did the honorable thing and released the Shareaza source code under the GNU GPLv2 on June 1, 2004 (which coincided with the release of Shareaza V 2.0).

Mike stopped working on Shareaza and went on to develop a new p2p-based streaming radio project named Mercora. As part of distancing himself from Shareaza, he transfered the shareaza.com domain to one of his old alpha testers named Jon Nilson, who continued to administer the domain until late 2007.

The French (RIAA) Connection

In late 2007 the Shareaza website went down for several weeks, but eventually came back online. Not long after that, the Shareaza.com domain began pointing to a different website which several sharp-eyed community members recognized as identical to shareazaweb.com, a known scam site purporting to offer users “legal p2p downloads”. It emerged that Jon Nilson had been forced to relinquish control of the domain as part of a settlement with La Societe Des Producteurs De Phonogrammes En France (the French version of the RIAA). Jon’s name was the only one connected with Shareaza that the SPPF could find and due to Shareaza’s popularity in France he had been named in a lawsuit along with Azureus and Morpheus. See here for more.

A Dump for Ill-Gotten Gains

Members of the Shareaza community managed to track the new “owners” of the Shareaza.com domain to MusicLab LLC, based in New York. MusicLab now distribute the “new and legal” iMesh p2p client after the original Gnutella-based iMesh developers were sued by the RIAA, and forced to settle for $4.1 million with a promise to turn their app into a paid download service. A similar legal fate befell another popular Gnutella application called Bearshare which was then rolled into the RIAA-approved iMesh. Nobody has managed to ascertain whether the original iMesh developers are still involved, but the merging of Bearshare seems to indicate that MusicLab is a vehicle used by the recording industry to dump assets acquired through lawsuits into.

It would seem that since Shareaza is developed by anonymous group of individuals and organized via “ad-hocracy”, there was no company to sue, so stealth tactics were employed against the weakest link in the chain: Jon Nilson. iMesh, Bearshare and the fake Shareaza being distributed from Shareaza.com are all the same application with appropriate re-branding.

Threats of C&D

As you can imagine, the members of the Shareaza community were rather upset about all of this and set up a new website with user forums. After two users made some offhand remarks about a distributed denial of service attack against the servers in Israel where the hijacked Shareaza.com site is located, our forum administrator received an email from one Jeffrey A. Kimmel of Meister Seelig & Fein, in his capacity as a representative of Discordia Ltd, the new new “owners” of Shareaza.

Mr Kimmel stated that DDoS attacks are illegal and any further talk by “users [who] begin to promote the destruction of a legitimate business” would result in Discordia Ltd “tak[ing] all necessary action to vigorously and relentlessly protect its rights.” He went on to state that “if this action is not immediately taken and, as result, our client’s business is harmed, we will not only pursue, locate and hold fully responsible each and every one of those who have implemented this, or any similar DoS, but also those responsible for maintaining your site and the forums.”

The posts in question had actually been taken down by forum moderators already (as per forum rules on objectionable content), however this email was cause for great concern: not only were the domain hijackers starting to create a series of shell companies to avoid being identified, but they had engaged lawyers to monitor our forums and threaten anyone making disparaging statements about them.

A Tangled Web

More research by community members revealed that Discordia Ltd is registered in Cyprus, possibly owned by MusicLab but at arm’s length to avoid as much fallout as possible. Meister Seelig & Fein’s Kimmel also appears to have a long history of dealings with the recording industry, notably in the participation of the iMesh and Bearshare lawsuits and an interesting Amicus Curiae brief in the MGM vs Grokster which details how the new iMesh software has all the answers to stopping piracy and creating a wonderful legal download service.

Making The Takeover Official

In what is possibly the most audacious step so far, Discordia Ltd filed for a trademark on “Shareaza” with the USPTO on January 10, 2008.

If granted, our use of the Shareaza name will immediately infringe upon Discordia Ltd’s official trademark and we will doubtless be subject to legal action until we stop any infringing action i.e. we rename the project, remove all references to “Shareaza” and forget about the whole thing.

The Danger Posed To Open Source Software

Unless we are able to prevent the trademark being granted and regain control of the domain, our project will die. It really is as simple as that. Seven-odd years worth of brand recognition as “Open Source, Spyware, Malware and Advertising Free” will disappear and although we can (and have) dealt with “clones” who take our OS code base, add some spyware and release a “new” client as their own (breaking the GPLv2 in the process by not releasing the source) there is no possible way that we can survive having our identity stolen like this. Unlike a run-of-the-mill copyright violation, we are going to be permanently deprived of something. Our code is open to whoever wants to see it, we charge no money for the use of the program; the only thing of value that we have is the name and recognition that goes with it. The worst of it all is that this “software identity theft” could signal the beginning of hostile corporate takeovers of common property - the fact that we are in this predicament proves it to some extent.
What we need to know is if the people who stood up for an open culture by hacking copyright law will help protect that culture where it comes to trademarks and halting the advancement of encroaching corporate interests. If “common law” trademarks can’t be protected there is a very real danger that what happened to us will happen again and again and again. Many of us who work on the Shareaza project can foresee things becoming so that people will stop bothering to work on OS projects: open source software is, by it’s nature, more useful that closed source software and the more useful something is, the more popular it becomes…and then someone with expensive lawyers will come along and take it all away from the people who actually created it.

We recently asked for donations from our users for a legal defense fund and (very) quickly raised $2000. In our public thank you letter we wrote the following:

“There is one fundamental right that should never be in dispute: the right to be recognized as a creator. This moral right transcends arguments on whether copyright should last for 50 years or a hundred, whether software should be patentable or not, or even what a fair price price for an MP3 file is. Being able to say to the world “I made this” and be acknowledged for it is, for many people, the only reward they receive for their work. To deny that right is an insult to the creative forces flowing through every writer, performer, musician, actor and programmer who brings their work to the world.”

We have a section dedicated to this whole situation on our new forums which includes full details of all the events that have taken place so far.

Any help you are able to provide would be very, very gratefully accepted. Any advice, introductions or referrals to others who may be able to help us will be a great help.

Kind regards,

Shareaza Community
http://torrentfreak.com/the-shareaza...tshell-080313/





Lisa Marie Presley Sues Over 'Fat' Story
Tariq Panja

Lisa Marie Presley has sued a British newspaper for alleging that she was piling on the pounds because of her unhealthy appetite, her lawyer said Monday.

Presley, who is pregnant, alleges in a suit filed at London's High Court on Friday that the story in Britain's Daily Mail was slanderous and degrading. The newspaper has since reported on the 40-year-old singer's pregnancy.

"Once they got a glimpse of my expanding physique a few days ago, they have been like a pack of coyotes circling their prey whilst eerily howling with delight," she said on her blog.

The daughter of the late singer Elvis Presley claims the pictures taken at a Hollywood restaurant last week forced her to go public about the baby she is having with her fourth husband, music producer Michael Lockwood.

"It really upset her," Presley's attorney Jo Paton told The Associated Press. "She was about to announce her pregnancy and was shocked and hurt by the unkind article about her appearance."

Paton said Presley was seeking an apology and damages.

The Daily Mail said the first indication they had of Presley's complaint was when they were served with court documents.

"We are investigating the matter," the newspaper said in a statement.

The child will be Presley's third.

She has an 18-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son from her first marriage to musician Danny Keough, which ended in 1994. She was briefly married to Michael Jackson and to actor Nicholas Cage.

She married Lockwood in January 2006.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...RVZvAD8VAMSTG0





A Glossy Rehab for Tattered Careers
Ruth La Ferla



LINDSAY LOHAN wants you to know that she’s all right. Reminiscing about the series of scandals that have sullied her name and nearly deep-sixed her career, she is all contrition. “When I look back on this last year, it’s like what was I thinking?” she confided in the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “I’ve learned so much, though, like learning to live my life a different way.”

No need to take her word for it. Images speak persuasively, and in the case of Ms. Lohan, who appears this month inside Bazaar and on its cover, they do what they can to counter the perception that she is a train wreck, yesterday’s news.

The cover, shot by Peter Lindbergh soon after Ms. Lohan’s third round in rehab for alcohol abuse, makes her look as if she had spent the last 12 months thriving on yoga and a diet of sprouts.

It is the most sophisticated of a trifecta of March magazine covers to feature the troubled star — including a near-nude shot by Bert Stern for New York magazine’s spring fashion issue and a provocative pose for Paper, the alternative style monthly. Together the covers represent a full-court press by Ms. Lohan and her handlers to reposition her as fresh-faced and comeback-ready.

She is the latest Hollywood celebrity to seek to overcome scandal through the redemptive power of glossy fashion imagery. Last June, six months after her arrest for drunken driving, Nicole Richie modeled on the cover of Bazaar with Paris Hilton. In September, not long after Britney Spears’s first go at rehab and her divorce from Kevin Federline, she vamped for Allure, the beauty magazine. Drew Barrymore, Vogue’s current cover girl, first graced the magazine’s front in 2005 when many readers still recalled her years of drug abuse.

“A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab,” said Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. “Some people go to Utah,” she said, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox program, where Ms. Lohan was treated. “Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot.”

The audience for such makeovers is not just the ticket-buying public. The glamorous covers are also aimed at movie directors and executives — a very high-end head shot. “A person in a position to greenlight a movie project might say, ‘Oh, I guess she’s turning her life around,’ ” Ms. Rosenberg said.

That is Ms. Lohan’s hope, her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, acknowledged last week. “Her appearance on Bazaar is part of a strategic repositioning,” she said. It is an attempt to recast the actress as the pulled-together antithesis of the bad girl who was scolded in 2006 by a producer for failing to show up on the set of “Georgia Rule.”

“Right now I just want to find a great script, a great role,” Ms. Lohan said in the March issue of Paper. She is shooting “Dare to Love Me,” a movie about a tango star, but has not completed a movie since starring last summer in the horror film “I Know Who Killed Me,” which flopped. “Fashion can put a calm, fresh and vital face on a recovering soul,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features director for Vogue. “Some people can appear on a cover and suddenly seem relevant again.”

Ms. Lohan, 21, looks mature and confident on the cover of Bazaar. Such a laboriously constructed image, thanks to makeup artists and digital retouchers, is meant to serve as a corrective to the awkward, sometimes ugly celebrity candids in tabloid weeklies. “As a publicist, I would be high-fiving myself for getting Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar,” said Chris Miller, Ms. Barrymore’s manager and publicist. “It tends to smooth out that edge and negate when she’s on the cover of Life & Style.”

He added that it can eventually translate not just to film roles but to advertising contracts. Ms. Barrymore, who wrote directly to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, to campaign for a cover in 2005, according to Mr. Miller, is the current face of Gucci fine jewelry and the latest face of CoverGirl cosmetics. “That first cover was a power tool in putting her out there,” Mr. Miller said.

More than a talk show appearance or a stroll along the red carpet, a magazine photo shoot, with its army of enablers to select the right clothing and makeup, casts a performer in the best light. “It’s a safe atmosphere where the star has some control of her image, her words and the fashion that she is putting out there,” Ms. Sloane Zelnik said.

Winona Ryder must have thought so. Last August, five years after a humiliating trial and conviction for shoplifting, she was persuaded by Vogue’s editors to pose for the cover. It was Ms. Singer’s job to reassure her. “Before the shoot I told her, You can show your face to the world in the context of clothes in which you look beautiful,” she recalled. If an actress is hoping to dust herself off after a fall, she added, “this is a good way to do it.”

Of course it also pays returns for the magazines, as scandal-craving readers snap up the issues, which often promise a star’s first on-the-record account of her troubles. And if the interview is anodyne — or even nonexistent — there are always the pictures. Ms. Lohan’s Marilyn Monroe-inspired striptease for New York was the magazine’s biggest selling issue of the past four years, a company spokeswoman said.

The kid-glove treatment from fashion magazines has long made them popular with public figures who have suffered a reversal, especially when they are seen as women scorned. For them, “the best revenge is looking good,” Ms. Singer said. In 1990, Vogue put Ivana Trump on its cover weeks after her highly publicized split with Donald Trump, who had left her for a model. The magazine photographed Hillary Clinton in 1998, in the aftermath of her husband’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Jennifer Aniston scored her Vogue cover in April 2006, just after separating from Brad Pitt.

Alas, readers’ approval is not an assurance of a career comeback. Ms. Ryder has not been in a hit movie since her conviction, despite the Vogue cover. In Hollywood there is a feeling that a fallen star needs more than a magazine cover to redeem herself.

Fashion, and the reader, can be forgiving. Movie executives? Not necessarily. A star like Ms. Lohan, certainly, can hope to rehabilitate her image through fashion, said Robert Green, an executive producer of “Mad Money.” “But until she gets in a movie and it makes a lot of money, no one in the industry is going to care.”

Mr. Green had considered casting Ms. Lohan in “Mad Money.” But the idea, he recalled last week, “was made moot by the fact that at the time she was not insurable.” Her off-camera behavior was seen to be so irresponsible that the underwriters of film production budgets would not issue a policy.

“I told myself, O.K., let’s call Katie Holmes,” Mr. Green said. “She may have a weird personal life, but nobody thinks she’s not going to show up on time.”

Mr. Green is skeptical that a fashion makeover, however slick, holds much sway with industry power brokers. “I don’t think a Lindsay Lohan can overcome the things she’s done in her personal life by being on the cover of a fashion magazine,” he said.

Some of his peers are more generous, however. “An image on the cover of a fashion magazine could make you rethink somebody,” said Janet Hirshenson, a casting agent whose film credits include the coming “Angels and Demons.”

“People are not morons,” said Alison Owen, the producer of the current release “The Other Boleyn Girl.” “They know that with fashion, a lot of retouching goes on. Still, if you see someone in a magazine looking perkier, healthier and less skinny than they have for some time, consciously or subconsciously it makes you think, ‘Oh, this person is back in the ring; they want to be considered.’

“That undoubtedly is going to have an effect on you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/fa...magazines.html





Magazines to Spitzer Call Girl: Call Us
Clare Trapasso

The woman at the center of the Eliot Spitzer call girl scandal will have no problem cashing in on her notoriety: Penthouse and Hustler are already knocking on her door.

''We've been looking at that very closely. She's young. She's pretty. She's a model,'' said Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. ''We would love to do business with her, and we will approach her.''

Penthouse has been trying to reach out to 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupre, too, but had yet to make contact Thursday afternoon.

Penthouse Magazine Group president and publisher Diane Silberstein said she would ''love to have her in the magazine'' and would consider offering her a cover shot.

''She sounds like a very interesting and talented young woman, and I'm sure she has a great story to tell,'' Silberstein said. ''We promise to make it worth her while.''

The New Jersey-born Dupre was thrust into the limelight Wednesday when The New York Times identified her as the high-priced call girl whose arrangements for a rendezvous with New York's governor at a Washington, D.C., hotel were secretly monitored by the FBI.

So far, authorities haven't filed charges against Spitzer or Dupre, who was identified in court papers only by her escort agency pseudonym, Kristen. But she has a lawyer and hasn't been speaking about her encounter with the governor while the case is under investigation.

Flynt, who last June took out a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post offering $1 million for anyone who could prove he or she had illicit sexual relations with a prominent politician, suggested that by the time Dupre starts talking she may be too big a media phenomenon for a simple magazine spread.

''She is no doubt going to do a book. There will probably be a movie,'' he said. ''I think she is going to have so many offers coming in that it will probably be wishful thinking just to get in the door.''
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...QsqLQD8VCRQV80





Music Reps Seeing Green Over Spitzer Call Girl's Songs
David Segal

Hooking for the Emperors Club and emerging as the Earth's best-known call girl is surely not the career plan Ashley Alexandra Dupre had in mind when she moved to New York to make it as a singer. But now that she's achieved fame at the media stakeout level, as "Kristen," a bunch of music biz talent scouts and managers are giving her a listen.

Hello, silver lining!

No, a record deal isn't a sure thing. But look at it this way: She had no chance on Tuesday, before anyone knew her name, and she has a slender chance now that more than 2.3 million people have visited www.myspace.com/ninavenetta and heard her songs.

"People want to see if there's an opportunity there," says Ted Cohen, a former talent scout for Warner Bros. and now managing partner at TAG Strategic, which advises startup music companies on all aspects of digital media. "Is what she's posted a hit? No. But if someone like Jay-Z or Danger Mouse or Jimmy Iovine wanted to give her a shot, she'll have a shot."

As any aspiring singer will tell you, the hard part of breaking out is getting noticed, and let's just say Ms. Dupre has that covered. Thursday, a scrum of reporters hunkered down at the apartment building in the Flatiron District where she lives, waiting for just a glimpse of the woman who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer. And as news of her life's ambitions spread over the Internet ("I am all about my music," she proclaims on her page, "and my music is all about me") the songs she'd posted online were suddenly getting what they apparently never had before: an audition with some of the more powerful figures in the music biz.

"I read that she's a singer, and so I checked out her stuff on Wednesday evening," says Chad Jensen, an artist manager. Jensen has found platinum online before. He first heard his greatest find — Colbie Caillat, whose debut album, "Coco," has sold more than 1 million copies since July — on a Myspace page. What he heard from Dupre, however, didn't have nearly the same impact.

"It didn't blow me away," he says. "Part of it is that I could barely hear her voice. But here's the thing — if she has even an ounce of talent, someone is going to take a chance. I mean, they gave ("American Idol" reject) William Hung a shot. And I know for a fact that Tila Tequila" — the much page-viewed Myspace phenom turned reality TV star — "has been in the offices of every major label."

It was the same refrain, time and again, Thursday from the music industry pros. None swooned for Dupre's music, all of it club R&B in the dance-vixen vein of JLo and Beyonce. (Sample lyric, "I know what you want / You got what I want / I know what you need / Can you handle me?") A couple said the tunes are pretty uninspired, a tad derivative. But with the right song and the right producer, these people say, you never know.

"If Paris Hilton can make a hit song, anyone can," says Erik Parker, director of content at the hip-hop Web site SOHH.com. "Paris Hilton, she swung the doors wide open."

Actually the doors were open before Hilton.

"Look, Traci Lords had a music career after she'd acted in pornographic movies as a minor," says Cohen. "People are very forgiving, and she's going to emerge as the victim in all this."

Whether any producers or managers have made any offers, we don't know. So far, the only opportunity offered publicly to Dupre has come from Penthouse, whose publisher, Diane Silberstein, said she'd "love to have her in the magazine," perhaps even on the cover.

To which we say: Perhaps?

If the past is any guide, Dupre is about to hear about plenty of business ventures that she'll want no part of. That's the guess of another woman who was caught in the middle of another national sex scandal — one who had a modest singing career before achieving infamy.

"It's very scary," says Gennifer Flowers, who spoke from Las Vegas, where she'd recently ended a run in a musical comedy. Flowers recounted the fallout from revelations of her affair with then-governor Bill Clinton. She'd been a local-to-Arkansas nightclub singer until her name went household during the 1992 presidential campaign.

After that, the professional offers she got were "a lot of stuff like, have sex with a Bill Clinton lookalike. Or pose naked with a Bill Clinton lookalike." The publicity put a serious kibosh on Flowers' career prospects for years, she says, because no club owner wanted to hire a singer who'd be accompanied by a pack of reporters.

"What is fame without dignity?" she says.

We'll see! Music publicist Diana Baron suggested that Dupre's best shot is to end up in some glossy lad magazines, then segue from that platform to a music contract. Switching into "American Idol" voice critique mode, Baron adds that Dupre needs to convey more confidence when she sings. Some "clear intent and feeling of who she is" would be a good idea, too.

Eh, details. To judge from the feedback she's getting online, Dupre already has some ardent fans. "I wouldn't have known about this artist without her recent play in the political press," wrote one. "Oddly, I think she's going to take off in clubs!"

Another gave a very strong, perhaps totally sarcastic, thumbs up. "Best song of the century BAR NONE!"

"Good beat," quipped another poster, "love the scandal behind it."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5618119.html
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