Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 1st, '07

[JackSpratts]

Editorial Director Fired Over Negative Game Review?
Kyle Orland

So before we get going, we should make it clear that this post is still just a rumor and many of the facts behind it are still up in the air. That being said, word around game journalism's virtual water cooler is that Gamespot Editorial Director Jeff Gerstmann has been fired because publisher Eidos was unhappy about his negative review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

What seems in little dispute, going by forum chatter as well as multiple published sources (referencing conversations with multiple CNet employees), is that Gerstmann has indeed been fired after over ten years working at the site. We were not immediately able to confirm the firing with Gamespot or Gerstmann directly, but an e-mail sent to his Gamespot address did get returned with a "permanent failure" error. Seems pretty serious to us ... (see 7:12 AM update below)

What is in some dispute is the reason behind the firing. The current leading theory is that Eidos, a major Gamespot advertiser (just look at the current Kane&Lynch-ified front page shown above) was unhappy with Gerstmann's review of their game and brought pressure to bear on the site to remove the longstanding editor (Eidos representatives were not immediately available for comment). Gamespot's text review of the game is definitely very negative, and the 6/10 score rather low, but it's the video review of the game that really eviscerates it for "impossible to like" characters, a "lazy" script and excessive profanity, among other things. It does seem plausible that Eidos might not be too happy with either review, and that Gamespot might be willing to do anything to prevent losing such a large advertiser (notwithstanding the site's posted review guidelines, which state they have never "altered our verdict about any game due to advertiser pressure").

But there are some parts of the story that don't quite fit. For one, the review was posted on Nov. 13, yet the evidence points to Gerstmann being fired only recently. For another, it stands to reason that if Eidos was so unhappy with the review, that they would also demand it be taken down from the site, a step that has not yet been taken (though the video version doesn't seem to be actively linked on the site's Kane & Lynch videos page)? And while GameSpot's 6/10 score was low, it certainly wasn't out of the ordinary. Why would Gamespot be singled out, and why would such a senior and generally respected editor be demanded (and accepted by Gamespot) as sacrifice?

The ramifications of the story, if true, are huge. Readers should fairly expect there to be an inviolable firewall between advertising and editorial in journalism, and game journalism (yes, that includes "just reviews") is no different. While our industry has had its fair share of accusations of impropriety, nothing so far has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Giving a publisher the power to fire a senior editor is a line no outlet should be willing to cross.

We hope that everything is not as it seems here, and that there has simply been some sort of misunderstanding brought on by a game of telephone. The circumstantial evidence, however, is hard to ignore, and significant enough to make us seriously question what exactly is going on here. We'll of course be following this story as it inevitably develops over the next few days.

Update - 11:00 AM EST: The anonymous source/speculation train rolls on. Rock Paper Shotgun has posted a story citing an unnamed "very reliable source" as saying that "while Gerstmann wasn't the most popular man with the CNET owners, it was his Kane & Lynch review alone that saw him lose his job." Meanwhile, a poster at Forumopolis who claims to be directly involved with the Kane & Lynch ad campaign says that the whole thing is just a matter of bad timing. "I sincerely doubt that Eidos made Gamespot fire him," the poster writes. "CNET doesn't kowtow to its advertisers, and I've more than once seen the higher-ups turn away big advertising dollars for the sake of the company's integrity." Make of this what you will.

Update - 10:44 AM EST: Gamespot PR representative Leslie Van Every has responded to Joystiq's request for comment with ... a predictable 'no comment.' "It is CNET Networks' policy to never comment on individual employees--current or former--regarding their job status," Van Every told Joystiq. "This policy is in place out of respect for the individuals' privacy."

Update - 7:12 AM EST: Jeff has confirmed his firing to us via e-mail, but says he's "not really able to comment on the specifics of my termination." He added that he's "looking forward to getting back out there and figuring out what's next." We're still digging.

Update - 1:35 AM EST: The Kane and Lynch ads that blanketed Gamespot's front page are no longer being shown. Check out the picture above to see what the site looked at just an hour ago.
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/30/ru...and-lynch-rev/





Jack Thompson, Video Game Lawyer, Could be Disbarred
Kevin Spiess

Courts of Florida to pass judgment on Jack Thompson

Jack Thompson made a legal niche for himself by crusading against violence in video games, over the last decade. But now, the tables have turned on Mr. Thompson. He is currently involved in a court case that could possibly see his license to practive law being revoked by the Florida Bar.

The case was brought to the attentions of the Florida judiciary over "several complaints" of Mr. Thompson's "professional conduct in court cases", according to the blog gamepolitics.com. Jack Thompson tried to block the trial from continuing, and also tried counter-litigation by attempting a federal suit against the Florida Bar, but with no luck. Mr. Thompson also tried to invole the blog-writer of gamepolitics.com in that suit, but it was dismissed U.S District Court Judge Jordan.

Specifically, Mr. Thompson is to be held accountable for apparently making "making false and disparaging comments about a judge and several lawyers" (source).

Mr. Thompson contends that the Florida Bar is out to get him because of his "Christian activisim" and his "outspokenness." Mr. Thompson was quoted as sayng that "this [case] is frankly once again just the Bar going off the deep end trying to use Bar rules to limit my First Amendment activism."

Mr. Thompson has a history of trying to sue the makers of games, most famously Rockstar, for somehow causing real-world violence. Many people say that the link between game violence and real-world violence is tenous, and has not been supported by many studies.

Besides video games, Mr. Thompson also has issues with shock-jock Howard Stern, and claims to have gotten him booted of the air. And back in the early 90s, Mr. Thompson worked hard to block the success of rap group 2 Live Crew, and rapper-later-turned-actor, Ice T.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7370/





TV, Film and Game Violence Seen as a Threat

Violence depicted on television, in films and video games raises the risk of aggressive behavior in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to public health, according to a new study.

After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media, L. Rowell Huesmann, of the University of Michigan, and his colleague Brad Bushman concluded that only smoking posed a greater danger.

"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer," he said in a statement.

Smoking, a leading cause of preventable death, is linked to lung cancer and other illnesses.

Huesmann said children spend an average of three hours watching television each day and more than 60 percent of TV programs contain some violence, including 40 percent showing extreme violence.

"Children are also spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83 percent of homes with children," he added.

The findings, which are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, support earlier research which showed that children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and believe they are real are more likely to be aggressive as adults.

The results were true for both men and women.

"The research clearly shows that exposure to virtual violence increases the risk that both children and adults will behave aggressively," said Huesmann, adding it could have a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being of youngsters.

Although not every child exposed to violence in the media will become aggressive, he said it does not diminish the need for greater control on the part of parents and society of what children are exposed to in films, video games and television programs.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney,Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...61655220071128





'State Secrets' Doctrine Draws Scrutiny
Pamela Hess

Congress, courts examine Bush strategy to protect surveillance program

In federal courts and on Capitol Hill, challenges are brewing to a key legal strategy President Bush is using to protect a secret surveillance program that monitors phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.

Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine - a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.

The principle was established a half-century ago when, ruling in a wrongful-death case brought by the widows of civilians killed in a military plane crash, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's refusal to provide an accident report to the plaintiffs. The government contended releasing the document would compromise information about a secret mission and intelligence equipment.

Judicial review proposed
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits.

"We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says. "I don't think that the simple assertion of state secrets ought to be the end of the matter."

Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.

Practices among judges vary. Some accept state secrets claims outright, dismissing cases on the government's word. Others read the privileged information and decide for themselves, but almost invariably side with the government, according to legal scholars.

The draft legislation is modeled on procedures used in criminal cases that involve classified information. The Classified Information Protection Act lets judges review classified information a criminal defendant wants to use in his defense, but which could compromise national security if it were released publicly. The law allows the court to delete classified passages, substitute summaries of the information, or substitute a statement of facts that the classified information would prove.

The measure could become part of the Senate's new eavesdropping law, expected to be voted on in early December, the aides said.

State decisions
In another challenge to Bush's position on classified material, a federal judge in Virginia last week ordered the government to give trial prosecutors, defense lawyers and her clerk security clearances to review classified material in a terrorism case. Defense lawyers say the material will show the government failed to turn over evidence obtained by illegally monitoring their client's communications, and they want a new trial. The government says the information is protected by the state secrets privilege.
And in a case in Oregon, a U.S. district court judge is set to decide whether the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act trumps presidential claims of secrecy.

Adopted after the Watergate scandal, FISA dictates when the government must get permission from a secret court to monitor electronic communications inside the United States. It also allows people who believe they were spied on illegally to sue the government for damages and to request materials that would prove the surveillance. If the attorney general says disclosure would harm national security, a district court may review the classified materials privately to determine if the surveillance was illegal.

Politics of terror
That civil liability provision of FISA, however, comes up hard against the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush secretly authorized the spy agency to intercept international communications coming in and out of the United States that were believed to involve foreign terrorist organizations. It did so without going through the FISA court, claiming the Constitution and Congress' authorization for the use of military force after the terrorist attacks were all the authority the president needed to undertake the program.

Privacy and civil liberties groups say the warrantless surveillance violates FISA's prohibition on domestic surveillance without court orders. But for someone to sue the government for FISA violations, they must prove they were directly injured by the government's action. That is nearly impossible because the government will not disclose its targets or methods.

Terrorist Surveillance Program
One organization, however, believes it can demonstrate it has standing to sue because of an accidental document release in 2004. That February, the Bush administration froze the assets of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Muslim charity the United Nations Security Council alleges is associated with al-Qaida. In preparation for a legal proceeding on the terrorist designation in August, the Treasury Department inadvertently gave the foundation's lawyers and directors a top secret document dated May 24, 2004.

The document appeared to be a government summary of phone conversations it monitored between foundation lawyers and directors, according to a Washington Post reporter who received a copy from the foundation.

The FBI took the document from the Washington Post and Al Haramain in October 2004.

Fourteen months later, The New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. That is when the foundation's lawyers realized what the top secret document was: proof the organization had been targeted for warrantless electronic surveillance under TSP. They believe that proves standing, unique among plaintiffs in dozens of surveillance cases filed across the country.

The government asserts the states secrets privilege and refuses to release the document or confirm its contents. In its first crack at the case in 2006, the federal court in Oregon partially agreed. It said the document was rightfully protected by state secrets, but the foundation's lawyers could describe what they remembered about it to establish standing in their lawsuit.

The government appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which last week upheld its state secrets claim. But it did not dismiss the case. Instead, it directed the Oregon court to tackle one question it had sidestepped: whether FISA overrides the common law state secrets privilege.

Whatever the lower court decides, its decision will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court, legal experts and attorneys on the case say. The high court is unlikely to be friendly to a challenge to the state secrets doctrine. In October it unanimously declined to hear a CIA torture allegation case that the Bush administration wanted dismissed on secrecy grounds. And in 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state secrets doctrine in an espionage contract case.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21971705/





YouTube Suspends Egyptian Blog Activist's Account
Kevin Anderson

Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas has been using YouTube to expose torture in his country, but now his account has been suspended. Bloggers accuse YouTube of double standards.

YouTube has suspended the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who has been posting videos of cases of torture in his country. One of the videos he posted, of a Cairo man being beating and sexually assaulting, was credited with helping bring pressure on Egyptian authorities. That pressure led to three-year jail sentences for two of the policeman involved in the assault. Abbas has called the suspension of his YouTube account "by far the biggest blow to the anti-torture movement in Egypt", according to Amira Al Hussaini on Global Voices.

Amira has collected a good sample of reaction by Egyptian bloggers. Blogger Hossam El Hamalawy called the move by YouTube "un-bloody-believable" and said:
Wael's videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture

He predicted that activists would move the videos to other sites. The move has already started. A video showing scenes of torture in Egypt on the Global Voices post is hosted on the popular French video sharing site, DailyMotion.

But in a comment on Hamalawy's post, Mostafa Hussein said that YouTube's terms of service prevent the posting of such videos:
Well, the message from youtube is that waelabbas violated their terms of use.

This is actually true if you take a look at it. It states that content should follow the community guidelines[1]. In these community guidelines, there is this statement saying "Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it."

He suggested that activists use other sites, not just commercial sites like DailyMotion but "activist friendly" sites like IndyMedia.

Well-known Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh has called on readers of his blog to protest YouTube's decision.
These videos are the only mean to expose what happens in our police stations, without them the cry of people who were subjected to torture will go unheard.

Outside of Egypt, Stan Schroeder writing on Mashable, a site which covers social networking, questioned why Abbas' account was suspended when other videos of violence are on the site:
OK, why then can I find dozens of videos of people getting tasered by the police? If you ask me, a video of someone getting shocked with a high voltage weapon can definitely be described as graphic violence. And many will argue that the violence in such videos cannot be qualified as gratuitous. ... This is an ongoing problem with practically all sites which aggregate user-submitted content: double (or simply unclear) standards.

The question for Schroeder was whether showing police brutality qualified as 'gratuitous' violence. One of the commenters pointed out the Witness' Hub was created specifically to host videos of human rights abuses. But another commenter said that the audience at the Hub is much less than YouTube, and many of the videos on the Hub are in fact hosted elsewhere on sites like YouTube.

On the blog Mideast Youth, Esra'a from Bahrain says that this is pattern of YouTube and parent company Google giving into state pressure, saying that it recently gave into pressure from Turkish authorities.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/200...tian_blog.html





Blogger Fights for Free Speech in New Jersey

EFF defends critic from local government's heavy-handed tactics
Press release

Manalapan, NJ - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a Superior Court judge in New Jersey today to preserve the free speech rights of an anonymous blogger facing legal threats from local government officials.

The blogger, writing as "daTruthSquad" on a site hosted on Google's Blogspot service, has criticized a controversial lawsuit filed by the township of Manalapan, as well as the officials who decided to pursue the case. The township subpoenaed Google for "daTruthSquad's" identity -- as well as for any emails, blog drafts, and other information Google has about the blogger -- claiming that the defendant in the case is actually writing the posts. The defendant, however, has already sworn under penalty of perjury that he is not "daTruthSquad."

"Bloggers, as well as everyone else, have a First Amendment right to speak anonymously," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Litigants don't get a blank check to pry into the private lives of critics when they say things the litigants don't like. The fact that it is the government trying to abuse the discovery process makes this attempted invasion of privacy all the more repugnant."

In a motion to quash the subpoena filed today, EFF asked the court to block the township's attempt to uncover the identity of "daTruthSquad" and allow the blogger to continue to write about this or any other issue without being forced to identity him or herself.

"Attempts to intimidate critics into silence need to be confronted whenever and wherever they occur," said Zimmerman. "Governmental entities simply cannot be permitted to investigate critics because they dare to voice disapproval of public officials. It remains our sincere hope that the Township will abandon this intolerable legal strategy."
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2007/11/28-1





Arizona Affirms Strong Protections For Anonymous Speech Online
Corynne McSherry

An Arizona appellate court today joined a growing judicial consensus recognizing the need to protect the anonymity of online speakers from overreaching discovery requests.

Mobilisa, a Washington-based communications company, went to court last year to seek the identity of an individual who had obtained an email initially sent by company's CEO to his mistress. The individual forwarded the email to company employees. A lower court agreed to issue a subpoena requiring Doe's ISP to reveal Doe's personal information. Doe and the ISP, represented by longtime EFF cooperating attorney Charles Lee Mudd, Jr., immediately appealed. EFF and Public Citizen (with help from Arizona attorney John Flynn) filed an amicus brief in support of Doe, pointing out that strong protection for the right to engage in anonymous communication--to speak, read, listen, and associate without revealing your full identity--is fundamental to a free society. In fact, the tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius."

Concerns about political or economic retribution, harassment, or even threats to their lives lead many people today to choose to speak anonymously. For these individuals and the organizations that support them, secure anonymity is critical, often to their very safety, and courts should not permit the use of trumped up legal claims as an excuse to silence people who need anonymity. At the same time, people who have legitimate grievances against anonymous speakers should be able to pursue them in court. Recognizing these competing concerns, courts around the country have set up a flexible test for those seeking to unmask anonymous speakers: they require litigants who seek an anonymous speaker's identity to show that they have given notice of the attempt to the Doe (so she can protect herself), present evidence to show their case is legitimate, and shown that their need for the information outweighs Doe's right to anonymity.

We're very pleased that the Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed this test and thereby struck the right balance between the competing interests of subpoenaing parties and the anonymous speakers they seek to unmask, recognizing that once an online user's anonymity and privacy have been eviscerated, they cannot be repaired.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11...-speech-online





NBC in Pact to Use TiVo's Viewership Data: Report

General Electric Co unit NBC Universal has reached an agreement with TiVo Inc to become the first major broadcaster with the right to use the digital recorder company's research and interactive advertising products, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

The agreement will give the TV concern's networks such as NBC, Telemundo and Bravo -- as well as its NBC owned-and-operated TV stations -- access to TiVo's ratings data, the Journal said.

The deal will be announced as early as Tuesday, the Journal added.

NBC Universal is also planning to use the deal to sell advertisers TiVo products such as interactive tags, which enable a company's name to be seen even if a viewer is zapping through an ad, the Journal said.

The deal will enable NBC to offer advertisers data on the results of campaigns that use interactive tags, according to the Journal.

NBC Universal told the Journal it plans to begin using the TiVo services January 1.

Representatives of TiVo could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Justin Grant; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
http://www.reuters.com/article/busin...44476820071127





Japanese Robot Gets More Life-Like



A pearly white robot that looks a little like E.T. boosted a man out of bed, chatted and helped prepare his breakfast with its deft hands in Tokyo on Tuesday, in a further sign robots are becoming more like their human inventors.

Twendy-One, named as a 21st century edition of a previous robot, Wendy, has soft hands and fingers that gently grip, enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand, and supple movements that respond to human touch.

It can pick up a loaf of bread without crushing it, serve toast and help lift people out of bed.

"It's the first robot in the world with this much system integration," said Shigeki Sugano, professor of mechanical engineering at Waseda University, who led the Twendy-One project (http://twendyone.com) and demonstrated the result on Tuesday.

"It's difficult to balance strength with flexibility."

The robot is a little shorter than an average Japanese woman at 1.5 m (5 ft), but heavy-set at 111 kg (245 lb). Its long arms and a face shaped like a giant squashed bean mean it resembles the alien movie character E.T.

Twendy-One has taken nearly seven years and a budget of several million dollars to pull together all the high-tech features, including the ability to speak and 241 pressure-sensors in each silicon-wrapped hand, into the soft and flexible robot.

The robot put toast on a plate and fetched ketchup from a fridge when asked, after greeting its patient for the demonstration with a robotic "good morning" and "bon appetit".

Sugano said he hoped to develop a commercially viable robot that could help the elderly and maybe work in offices by 2015 with a price tag of around $200,000.

But for now, it is still a work in progress. Twendy-One has just 15 minutes of battery life and its computer-laden back has a tendency to overheat after each use.

"The robot is so complicated that even for us, it's difficult to get it to move," Sugano said.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Jerry Norton)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scien...28581120071127





Hollywood Eyes Super-Series With "Golden Compass"
Mike Collett-White

For one Hollywood studio there is a lot riding on "The Golden Compass", the $180 million adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel "Northern Lights".

The film, based on the first part of Pullman's acclaimed "His Dark Materials" trilogy, premieres in London on Tuesday and stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and young newcomer Dakota Blue Richards in the central role of Lyra.

Laden with computerized special effects including talking polar bears, warring witches and animal "daemons" that represent each human's soul, the film aims to go where the "Lord of the Rings", "Narnia" and "Harry Potter" series have gone before.

Director and screenplay writer Chris Weitz said the fate of films two and three in the Pullman series depends on how "The Golden Compass" performs, with more money riding on the movie for New Line than even on "Lord of the Rings".

Industry estimates show that each "Rings" film cost around half the amount of money to make as "The Golden Compass".

"It's bigger than 'Lord of the Rings' in terms of its outlay," Weitz said in an interview. "And so 'The Golden Compass' becomes central to the future of the company."

Compared with "Lord of the Rings", "Harry Potter" and "Narnia", Pullman is relatively unknown, particularly in North America, making it a commercially more risky project.

"With the 'Lord of the Rings' they were so well known around the world that you could depend upon just the fandom to be this huge core demographic," Weitz told Reuters.

"So we knew that we needed to have a film that would appeal to families and children as well as to grown-ups and that meant handling some of the dark material carefully."

Religious Boycott

Even before the film's release on December 7, some conservative Christians in the United States have urged movie goers not to see it, basing their objections on Pullman's unflattering portrayal of the church, and specifically the Catholic faith.

In a storyline seen by many as an attack on religion, the church is linked with cruel experiments on children aimed at discovering the nature of sin and with attempts to suppress truths that would undermine its legitimacy and power.

Weitz rejects such criticism, although he did consciously tone down religious elements of the original story.

"Yes, it (the trilogy) deals with theology and it deals with religion, but I think it deals with it in a much more subtle way than the people who want to boycott the film are regarding it."

Kidman, who is Catholic, said she did not want to be involved in a movie that was anti-religious or anti-Catholic.

"I come from a Catholic family so that's not something that my grandmother would be very happy about, and I really don't think that that's what I'm involved in," she told a news conference.

Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy is a tough act for Weitz to follow, earning around $2.9 billion at the box office, according to movie tracking site www.boxofficemojo.com.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...62237120071127





Tape vs Disc - the New Battle
Guy Matthews

The debate about whether tape storage can compete with a disk-only back-up solution is as hot as ever. We talk to two senior pros to find where they stand on the debate as they battle with information overload in two very different sectors.

As organisations of all sorts, in the public and private sectors, struggle with growing amounts of data, much of which must be backed-up safely by law, the issue of what constitutes a secure but also economic back up strategy remains at the forefront of many IT professionals' minds.

Here we talk to two senior IT professionals in two different sectors about the role of tape and disk in the enterprise.

Richard Bates, network manager for Warwick District Council

Warwick District Council employs 20 people in its IT department, serving over 600 users, 400 of them on its main site and the rest in small, local offices.

"We've always used HP for both servers and storage," says Bates. "We made a move to networked storage five years ago with the StorageWorks MSA1000. We decided to centralise our back up onto tape at the same time. We realised that that was the way to go and moved onto an EVA 3000 array with Fibre Channel connectivity."

At the time, the authority's data storage needs were expanding hugely, says Bates, making this move not simply desirable but essential.

"We were no longer allowing users to save stuff onto their desktop, so all data was going onto our central server - for security reasons mainly," he says. "The number of photos and large documents we were storing was just growing and growing - especially once we got a document management project started which meant we were storing an image of all the post we received. The databases in use with the various departments just seemed to keep growing too."

Bates realised it was time to review his back-up strategy again when the back up window stretched all night: "It was often still going in the morning when everyone turned up for work, slowing the network down no end," he says.

Another hardware upgrade followed: "We got an EVA 5000, and kept the EVA 3000 to replicate everything on to and give us a degree of disaster recovery capability," says Bates. "We then moved the MSA1000 to a staging job in the back up process, shifting data from disk to tape."

He says the core of his back-up process is now replication between the two SAN arrays, but still backed by tape: "It's just so reliable, it's cheap, and it means I can easily take back-up data and store it off site," he says. "I keep hearing about people who've moved the back up function entirely onto disk, but I can't see any reason to. Getting rid of tape is just not an option for me at the moment. In the future? I really can't say. I'm sure we'll be using tape for a few years yet. You just feel more secure with tape. Disks do crash, don't they?"

He says future plans include moving one of the SANs to a remote office and connecting it over a wide area link: "It's obviously something that would be technically feasible right now, but it would be expensive," he says. "Although I can't justify this move at present, technology might well move on and make it possible in the future."

With no remote site in operation at present, Bates says he always has to look at what might go wrong with data and plan accordingly: "At the moment, we could lose a floor to, say, a flood, and be OK, but losing the whole building would be a true disaster."

Another possible move for the future is to virtualise all servers, he says, perhaps adopting blade technology: "Blades look good to me, or at least the HP ones I've seen. We're looking into it at the moment."

Greg Gawthorpe, technical operations team leader at CMC Markets

CMC Markets was established in 1989 as a foreign exchange market maker, and is now a global leader in online trading. It provides tailored online trading solutions for banks, brokers and financial intermediaries worldwide.

Offering access to over 3,000 instruments across 18 global markets, CMC Markets handles equities, indices, forex, commodities and treasuries, and provides a spread betting service to UK residents.

"I sat down last week with our senior infrastructure guy, and he asked me 'Is it time to move back up totally on to disk?'," says Gawthorpe. "It's a key question. We store eight or nine terabytes of data every time we do a back up, using BakBone software to manage the process, and I wouldn't call us a big organisation. We've got to keep that data safe for seven years."

Although there is now a good cost argument for disk over tape, Gawthorpe says the debate has to extend well beyond simply cost and take in practicality as well. "There's no way one disk is going to hold all that data," he says. "And if you're going to have two locations for disaster recovery purposes, that means you've got to have two lots of machines. It's just not as simple as saying I'll use this disk and replace that tape. They just aren't the same thing."

Each location must be an environment suited to housing a disk array, he says, unlike with tape where the back up location need be no more than a good, clean environment with some dust-free shelving. "Tape just sits there until I need it," he says. "It's not a machine that needs to be looked after, while giving off heat and noise. I've restored data from tape that's been there for over seven years - no problem. It's time consuming, but possible. And you can reuse the media."

Although increasingly perceived as yesterday's technology, tape technology is still developing, he says. "It certainly hasn't stood still, as tape vendors realise they need to keep up. They're not just waiting for the axe. With the huge capacities that today's tape media can hold, that's a lot of disk capacity to buy instead. It's not just about capacities though. With today's tape you can get throughput of 250Mb/sec, which is phenomenal. At the very least, it's similar to what you achieve with disk."

He says he does not anticipate a major rush to replace tape within the next few years. "I've heard rumours that there's a few organisations doing this, but I don't know of any specific examples. I've been in this game a long time, and just don't see this move happening anytime soon."

He sees tape and disk coexisting for a long while yet, with neither able to eclipse the other's key strengths. A more important debate, he says, is arguably the choice of software used to manage the process: "BakBone is the best I've used - easy and intuitive. When I come in it reports a successful back-up process, and that's all I care about."
http://www.itpro.co.uk/features/1314...ew-battle.html





Google's Gdrive (and Its Ad Potential) Raise Privacy Concerns
Wayne Ma

It’s still shrouded in secrecy, but Google’s free storage service is headed for the Web next year. Still, if the so-called Gdrive becomes as rapidly popular as the company’s e-mail service has in the past three years, what happens to your secrets? The prospect of a massive, speedy and tricked-out online hard drive already has privacy experts and illegal downloaders alike worried—especially if all that data is in the hands of a third-party giant and its cash cow to compete with Apple and Microsoft.

With the rumor mill buzzing over the virtual drive’s advertising model and storage capacity, Google isn’t commenting just yet on any plans. But the company already lets users buy extra space for its e-mail and photo services. “Each of the services has its own free bucket,” Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells PM. To start, users get more than 5 GB for Gmail and 1 GB for Picasa. Once they reach the limit, they can purchase a yearly plan, similar to Apple’s Mac accounts, to store the overflow. Google Docs, the company’s foray into online word processing and spreadsheet applications, doesn’t place strict limits on space. But “it makes sense” to eventually put it all under one roof, Freidenfelds says.

Online storage services already exist, but most are touted as remote backup solutions—and sometimes serve as virtual warehouses for hackers and copyrighted media files. Services like Omnidrive, MediaMax and Box.Net already offer some advanced features such as encryption and on-the-fly editing. But the Gdrive’s functionality is likely to launch on a much larger scale: Google could try to edge out big competitors—such as Microsoft’s Web-based photo and video offerings and its new Windows Live Skydrive—by making a one-stop shop for everything from document and photo editing to video and e-mail viewing.

But portability is the key, and the Gdrive might well be part of a larger plan to push computer use into a data cloud, untethered from individual devices. Coupled with Google’s open-source Android operating system for mobile phones, the Gdrive fits nicely with power users looking to access their files anytime, anywhere.

Keeping your data on the Web protects you from losing your files after a computer crash or physical theft, and Google takes the security and privacy of its users’ information seriously. “We have a very strong track record when it comes to protecting users’ data,” Freidenfelds says, adding that users’ trust in Web apps is “about where we were when people started realizing that their money was safer in a bank than under their mattress.” But that’s not stopping online rights advocates from raising eyebrows worldwide.

Trusting information with a third-party client can still expose you to thorny legal challenges such as a subpoena. Unlike a search warrant for your off-line hard drive, which is far more restrictive and difficult to obtain, Google could perhaps be persuaded by law enforcement to deliver up your files—without even telling you.

“Google would be wise to offer users an option to encrypt your information,” says Nimrod Kozlovski, a professor of Internet law at Tel Aviv University. “It really needs to have really detailed explanations of what the legal expectations are for storing your info.”

Physical hard drives and e-mail services already offer encryption for users via software like BitLocker for Windows Vista and PGP for e-mail. Having your own encryption key for data would make it harder for others to access—and almost useless to hackers, Kozlovski says.

Then there’s the trickier part: How does giving away storage translate into profits for Google? The company could potentially serve up contextualized ads to Gdrive users similar to its Gmail service and the Ad Words search model that made Google a giant in the first place. In this case, a computer might scan through all your files for relevant keywords, in a move that’s certain to spook privacy advocates, who tend to give Google a free pass compared with some of its competitors.

Still, Kozlovski insists, the lack of human eyes will prevent Google from being held responsible for illegal or infringing material on your hard drive. “Google will not be liable unless they have knowledge of the material on your hard drive,” he says, adding that the company isn’t obligated to actively search for illegal or copyrighted files unless users share them publicly. And even then, the potential for abuse is low, because Google can easily trace back accounts to those who sign up for them. “I don’t think it’s an attractive scenario for users to use online storage as a sharing facility,” Kozlovski says. “They would rather put it on the Web and give other people access or links to it.”

Leaving files exclusively on a virtual drive or data cloud could, eventually, usher in a new era of computing where mobile devices replace large, clunky desktops sitting in offices and homes. A virtual drive means that your cellphone, MP3 player and laptop all draw from the same data and sync with one another seamlessly. Take a photo on your camera, and it’s ready to be retrieved by your laptop to edit. Create a spreadsheet on your laptop, then add to it on your cellphone during your next train ride. The Gdrive looks like it will take a quantum leap in that direction—whether you like it or not.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...y/4234444.html





Q&A: Pamela Jones of Groklaw
Richard Hillesley

Groklaw is the blog that has made a difference. Created as a personal project by Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, in 2003, its stated purpose was to increase understanding of the law as it is applied to Linux and free software.

The Groklaw website emerged just as SCO began its legal action against IBM and the Linux community, and quickly became a focus for Linux users, programmers and legal professionals in their mission to expose, understand and demystify the issues surrounding SCO's legal action.

IT PRO spoke to the site's founder, Pamela Jones about the impact of the site, the SCO case and the role Groklaw has played in the ongoing legal case.

The SCO Group's current fate can be neatly summarised by the title of PJ's very first article on the case, back in May 2003 - "SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step." In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO's case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case, which had been hidden from public view and played a significant role in undermining SCO's claims to the ownership of Unix. Earlier this year PJ memorably compared SCO's persistence in the face of the facts to the black knight in the Monty Python film who claimed "It's only a flesh wound".

Is SCO is dead yet?

I think it's more accurate to say it's going down slow, as the old blues song puts it.

When Caldera Systems was a Linux company, (before it became the SCO Group), it's IPO was valued at a billion dollars. How did they get themselves into this mess, given it seems they knew from the beginning that their claim to the ownership of the Unix copyrights was, at the very least, dubious?

The one thing I think we don't know yet, and I try not to speculate, is why they did this. It makes no sense on its face, so I assume personally that there is some missing piece. I suspect that the missing piece is that someone wanted the case blown up in the media for as long as possible, to create a fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) cloud over Linux in the market. I don't think they thought it'd ever go to trial, and if you look at current events, they don't seem to have planned for the end game very well. I gather some have made rather a lot of money as well, in salary, bonuses, stocks, etc.

What drew you towards the free software movement?

I don't view myself as part of any movement. I just like to use Mandriva and Ubuntu and Red Hat and Knoppix. When SCO attacked Linux, I noticed things were being said that I thought were outrageous, so it made me mad enough that I thought I could contribute my skills to try to contribute back by defending where I could. It really bothered me that SCO was attacking Linus. I was sure that if there was any code in Linux that shouldn't be there, he'd never do so deliberately. His character stands in the face of any such accusation. And the code is out there for the public to view 24/7, so it makes no sense to "steal" anyone's copyrighted code and put it there. Anyway, I always wanted to contribute back something for all the enjoyment I get from the operating system these guys gave the world, but it was my first chance to actually do so, not being a programmer.

Have you learnt as much from the Groklaw process as your readers, friends and volunteers, have?

I think more, in that I get to see all of it. I certainly know more about the business side of things than I did before, in that I knew nothing at all about Linux in the enterprise. And I've surely learned a lot about Unix. And the history of Linux and the development method. I've learned a lot about journalism too.

I don't imagine you had any idea what Groklaw would become when it started. Can you remember what you hoped from it at that time. D‎id it work out as you planned?

I didn't really plan at all. At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software. I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote. The first articles were not about SCO at all. I started covering the McDonald's "I'm fat and it's your fault" litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked.

Later, when I started to write about SCO, I did so a lot because I thought it was funny. At the time, I was experimenting with graphics and text juxtapositions, and it made me laugh. I thought it was the stupidest lawsuit in the history of the world, and I was just writing to the air.

Then, when readers showed up, and I saw the media in general was taking SCO seriously, I began to realise what could happen. That was the creative moment, when I put all the pieces together and realised that my readers knew the tech, I knew how to explain what was happening in the litigation, and they knew where to find evidence that what SCO was saying wasn't likely to prove true.

I was worried that the lawyers might not know the tech as well as we did, and my largest hope was that maybe somebody would notice what we were finding, and it might help. I had seen some court rulings that indicated to me that the judges didn't understand the tech, so they were getting things wrong. And I knew from working with lawyers that many of them are the last to grasp anything technical, so I realised that I could be a kind of bridge. I understood the tech enough to translate from the geek input for the lawyers; and I could translate the legal stuff to the tech guys, so everyone would understand what was happening. You can only get better case law if everyone understands the facts well, including the lawyers, who explain it all to the judge. My concept was that this could actually make the system work as intended, by speeding up the learning curve.

Does democracy work? Has Groklaw actually influenced the legal process, or has its role been to inform the audience? If it has, what have been your greatest triumphs?

Frank Hayes wrote once that cynicism just shows you've been paying attention. I confess I don't view humans as having many answers to big problems. People are the problem, usually. But I think we as individuals can impact our immediate surroundings by how we act and what we choose to do. In that smaller sense, Groklaw worked. It's not a democracy though. I run it very much like the Linux kernel, a meritocracy, and I get final say, because I'm the maintainer of the project. It is too soon to say what Groklaw's role has been, I think. I believe, however, that it's had an impact.

Finding the BSDi settlement agreement and getting legal permission to publish it was, without any doubt, our biggest contribution. It showed that it was never court-validated. It was just a private agreement between the parties, with no real threat to anyone else from it. I believe, based on SCO's comments, that they had intended to threaten folks based on that then-hidden agreement, and in fact they had made threatening remarks about it, IIRC, and yet after we published, nothing further ever happened on that. Anyway, SCO never presented any actual copyright infringement to shake a stick at. But at the beginning, who knew that would be the case?

We've seen Groklaw described as a "hack on the law", or more accurately, as "open source" applied to the law. Is that a fair reflection of the community that has grown up around Groklaw and the way it works? What have your helpers, friends, and contributors (the community) given to the cause?

It's accurate that it's open source applied to legal research. Actually, it's a hack on open source. You can't work on open legal research in quite the same way you can develop software, so I had to adapt. Not everything can be open, because you have to consider factors that are not in the mix in software development. I don't publish people's home addresses, for example, just out of human kindness, the Golden Rule, if you will. And there are certain types of cases I would never cover.

There has been some outrageous press coverage of Groklaw over the last few years, including personal attacks, and some more recent less than fulsome apologies for getting the facts so wrong. In the light of this, do you have any reflections on the nature of the press, 'think tanks', and consultancies in the technology industries and how they influence the technological climate?

How much corruption there is in the media/analyst world. It's part of why, though, many people now view blogs as more reliable sources of information than the mainstream press. Sad, really, because you need both, and analysts can be very helpful when they are honest and competent, and many are. There is, in the US anyway, a trend to attack people, not ideas, to try to defeat an idea by smearing someone who holds an idea you don't like. I don't see the logic there, but that's probably my geek side. Because I never responded in kind, people were able in the long view to sort out what was going on.

Technology seems to be beset with legal entanglements. Interoperability seems permanently hampered by issues of intellectual property, and as the use of free software in the developing world grows, the contradictions between the interests of the incumbent and emergent powers in this field seems to grow. If you could change a part of the law as it effects free software, what would it be?

I think software and patents need to get a divorce. They hold back innovation and hence they damage the public and do the exact opposite of what patents are supposed to be for. If you absolutely must have patents on software, then at least enforce the law that says that if you get a patent, you have to disclose fully. At the moment, there really is absolutely no way for a developer to know if what he is developing is or isn't violating someone's patent, no matter how hard he tries. So it's a trap. Any time someone wants to create trouble for you or kill you off as competition, they can. That isn't what patents are supposed to be for. Proprietary vendors may assert that they can't disclose, because then their software will be revealed. OK. But then you should rely on trade secret protection instead, not patents, because the whole point of patents was to induce inventors to reveal their inventions, so others could build on them.

What do you think the big issues of the next few years will be, affecting free software and its growth?

I see big money interests short-sightedly making moves that in my view will destroy the GPL and the FOSS development method if they succeed. They want to do to Linux what they did to Unix, only worse. I doubt they fully realise it, since their focus is on making money. But they are, in my view, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It isn't just Microsoft. There are those who proclaim they are FOSS community folks who are involved too.

What next for Groklaw?

As usual, I'm not doing a lot of planning. When I see an issue, we leap in, like the new litigation against Red Hat and Novell. We're doing prior article searching, and so far, it's looking very good. We did prior article searching on the NetApp v Sun litigation too. We'll probably do more of that. And any lawyer who wants to pick the technically skilled Groklaw members' brains is free to contact me.

We've had lawyers ask technical questions in preparation for depositions, for example. It's a resource that is available.

Is there a place for Groklaw to widen its coverage to International Standards and, more specifically, issues as they are discussed through WTO and WIPO?

Groklaw can cover whatever it needs to. We certainly do cover standards to some degree already, as in the ODF/MS OOXML matter. But to expand much more

while still doing what we already do would probably require funding, to hire people to cover the new areas. Because I don't scale, and I'm doing as much as I humanly can already.

For example, I can imagine covering more cases and more types of cases all over the world, with reporters on staff to cover legal news of interest to the FOSS community. I can't do it now, because of the scaling problem, so there are many cases I can't currently cover that I'd love to be able to do.

I'm happy with it as it is, though, but if you really thought about it, I'm sure you can see that it could be much bigger and covering a lot more stories.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/features/1415...f-groklaw.html





Novell's Motion to Lift Stay Granted!

Here is the docket entry:
232 - Filed & Entered: 11/27/2007
Opinion
Docket Text: Opinion Granting Novell's Motion for Relief from the Automatic Stay to Proceed with the Lawsuit (related document(s)[89] ) (LJS, )

233 - Filed & Entered: 11/27/2007
Order on Motion For Relief From Stay
Docket Text: Order Granting Novell's Motion For Relief From Stay to Proceed with the Lawsuit (Related Doc # [89]) Order Signed on 11/27/2007. (LJS, )

Utah, here we come!

Judge Kevin Gross writes in the first filing, the Opinion, that there is no prejudice to SCO by continuing the litigation and finishing it since the case is ready for trial and SCO has separate counsel for it, the balance of hardships favors Novell, Novell has a probability of prevailing on the merits, and the SCO v. Novell litigation is highly technical, and Utah District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball has already spent years mastering that part of the dispute, and so it makes sense to let him finish, as footnote 4 highlights:

The learned District Court issued a thorough 105-page opinion carefully analyzing the facts and law. The District Court's mastery of the facts and law pertaining to the Lawsuit is a powerfully important consideration in the Court's decision to lift the stay.

Amen. Utah was, after all, SCO's chosen forum. We have the order now too, and here is the list of what is and isn't going to be decided in Utah:
ORDERED, that pursuant to 11 U .S.C. § 362(d)(1), relief from the automatic stay is granted for cause to allow Novell to proceed with the Lawsuit at the convenience of the District Court (as defined in the Memorandum Opinion ) on the following issues: (1) the amount of the royalties to which Novell is entitled from certain SCOSource licenses that the District Court determined to be SVRX Licenses and any additional licenses that are determined to be SVRX Licenses; and (2) whether SCO had the authority to enter into licensing agreements with Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems.

ORDERED, that the automatic stay is not lifted for a determination of the imposition of a constructive trust, an issue which this Court will adjudicate if and when necessary, following the District Court’s decision in the Lawsuit.

So back SCO goes to Utah.

As is always true with bankruptcies, whatever Judge Kimball decides, then it goes back to Judge Gross to implement, but this order goes one step further, with the opinion (in this case that means the Findings of Fact, sort of the reasons why the judge orders what he orders) saying that it must come back to Judge Gross to "determine whether a constructive trust is appropriate." Money is the bankruptcy court's area, so he will get to review whatever happens in Utah, to determine what is and is not property of the estate. But he goes on to quote from a case regarding not holding an equitable interest, which is the case with SCO. He points out that "the Debtors simply cannot file a confirmable plan of reorganization until they know what liability they have to Novell." However, the stay on the constructive trust matter is not lifted. That has to be decided by the bankruptcy court, after Utah does what it does. So it's back to Utah to find out what liability SCO has to Novell. And footnote 7 shows what may have finally determined this decision, the difficulty is figuring out what SCO has to sell:

An example of Novell's dilemma, and the Court's, arose recently in the bankruptcy cases. Debtors moved to sell substantially all of their assets. Without a ruling on the Liability Issues it was unclear if the sale would adversely affect Novell's rights. Debtors subsequently withdrew the sale motion, but the problem remains.

I think that means there will be no assets sale as proposed by York until Utah is finished. And footnote 8 says that SCO already said it will appeal the Utah decision, so there may be a longer wait. I personally think there will likely be some issues going forward as to whether Judge Gross is correct in saying that no constructive trust was already established in Utah. We'll see. And he may mean not so much whether there should be one if there were no bankruptcy, but whether there should be one *now* under these circumstances, whether there should be the imposition of one, whether ordered or not. But that is what he wrote, that there was no constructive trust established and so he's not lifting the stay on that, and he'll decide that later. I expect some lawyering on that point, unless Novell decides it isn't worth bothering with. I think Judge Kimball already decided whether or not there should be a constructive trust. Here's what he wrote in his decision on August 10:
Although the court finds that Novell meets the requirements for the imposition of a constructive trust, the question of fact as to the SVRX portion of the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements precludes the court from imposing a trust for the appropriate amount.

I believe that is clearly saying that there should be a trust, but that the amount in it needed to be determined. One would have to also read the cases Judge Gross cites to form a complete picture, which I haven't yet done, but that is one issue I see. But the bankruptcy court has discretion to decided about money, and that is its area of special competence. If any bankruptcy lawyers can explain this part to us, I'd be delighted.

Here's the Fernstrom case the judge refers to. And here's the Sonnax decision [PDF]. I couldn't find a free version, but Groklaw's Steve Martin took the initiative and went to a local law library and sent me the scanned decision, so we can all read it in full. Is he not amazing? I've been trying to get the text done, but things are happening so fast in this bankruptcy, I haven't been able to finish. But at least you have the PDF. Thank you, Steve. By the way, you'll see one reference "reh'g denied" and that means there was a request in that case referenced for a rehearing, and the request was denied. Just a small detail.

So it's back to Utah they go. I'm sure SCO's lawyers can't wait to see Judge Kimball again, after all the horrible things SCO's CEO Darl McBride said about Judge Kimball to the press. It occurs to me that Judge Kimball may have missed that. So as a service to the court, here an example of what Darl said about the Honorable Judge Dale Kimball, from Todd Weiss's October 1st article in ComputerWorld, "SCO's McBride: Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated":

Behind the scenes, though, McBride said SCO's legal team has unearthed some details about Kimball's rulings that may provide a glimmer of hope for his company's ongoing fight.

"There's one little tidbit that we came across just a few days ago," he said. "Whereas the popular press has said, 'OK, this thing is now over,' there is an appeal process and the other fact is that if you look inside that appeals process and you take a microscope and look at the record of Kimball's summary judgment rulings that have gone to appeals, he gets overturned the vast majority of the time. It's nearly two-thirds of the time. That was something I was a little curious about myself.

"This apparently is a [judge] who very regularly, the majority of the time, gets [overturned] when it goes to the replay booth. That's the one sort of a news fact that's not out there today that [could] maybe temper some of this enthusiasm out there" about SCO's troubles. "He certainly has a dismal record on appeals."

So, SCO is not dead yet. Reminds me of a Dylan song lyric... "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." A number of us looked into those figures, by the way, and I couldn't duplicate the SCO findings, quite the reverse.

It's looking like this bankruptcy thing was a big mistake, a SCO strategy that could only work if they could quickly get a sale shoved through before anyone could figure out what was happening, a Hail Mary pass, and it didn't work.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?s...71127151556531





Press release

Lagos Analysis Corp. (LANCOR) Files Lawsuit Against Nicholas Negroponte and OLPC Association for Patent Infringement. Negroponte's OLPC Accused of Unauthorized Use of LANCOR's Multilingual Keyboard Technology Invention in XO LaptopsHighlighted Links

Lagos Analysis Corporation, a United States-based Nigerian-owned company with a subsidiary called LANCOR Management Limited, in Nigeria (LANCOR) announces today that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division holding at Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria against Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC) and its enablers in Nigeria.

The patent infringement lawsuit was filed on November 22nd, 2007 as a result of OLPC's willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops.

LANCOR is seeking substantial damages as well as a permanent injunction to prevent OLPC from continuing to unlawfully manufacture, sell, distribute or offer for sale the XO Laptop, and any other products infringing on the RD8489 and using the illegally acquired keyboard driver source codes.

LANCOR is a pioneer in the development of advanced physical multilingual keyboard technology using four shift keys and characters with combining properties to allow for direct access typing of accents, symbols and diacritical marks during regular typing. LANCOR's technology named Shift2 keyboard technology has been used to create a new class of region specific based keyboards called KONYIN Multilingual Keyboards, which are currently on sale globally. (http://www.konyin.com)

LANCOR has retained the law firm of Adedeji & Owotomo a Lagos, Nigeria-based law firm that specializes in intellectual property litigation. Both LANCOR and its legal counsel are extremely confident that LANCOR's case will be successful.

LANCOR's lawsuit alleges that OLPC purchased two KONYIN Multilingual Keyboard models (KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard and KONYIN United States Multilingual Keyboard) with the express purpose of illegally reverse engineering the source codes for use in OLPC's XO Laptops. "The willful infringement of our client's intellectual property is so blatant and self-evident in the OLPC's XO Laptops," said Solicitor Ade Adedeji, "we will have no problem establishing the facts of our client's case against OLPC in any court of law."

"LANCOR treats its intellectual property as one of the Company's most important resources," said Adé G. Oyegbola, chief executive officer of LANCOR. "This patent infringement lawsuit is another step in LANCOR's continued protection of its intellectual property. LANCOR will continue to take aggressive steps to protect its intellectual property around the world. LANCOR is also in the process of filing a similar lawsuit against OLPC in a United States Federal Court," Oyegbola, added.

About Lagos Analysis Corporation

LANCOR is a dynamic technology solutions provider using process reengineering for designs and development of both hardware and software products for end-users. LANCOR, incorporated in Massachusetts in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts and can be found on the internet at www.lancorltd.com
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=796745





Police: Teen Pulled Heists, Kept Curfew
AP

A teenager says he held up a dozen businesses in part to get "gas money" but made sure the heists wouldn't make him miss curfew or church on Sundays with his mom.

Justin T. Veal, 18, was jailed on a felony robbery charge after being arrested last week in a liquor store holdup.

He told detectives he robbed about a dozen businesses of an estimated $10,000 this year for "money to fix his car, to buy jewelry, to keep up with everyone else," Indianapolis police Sgt. Kerry Buckner said.

Veal said in an interview at the Marion County Jail that he watched the clock, making sure he finished the robberies in time to make it home before the 1:30 a.m. curfew set by his mother.

"Curfew is 1:30. Her rules, her house. Make it in by 1:30," Veal told television station WTHR Wednesday.

Police say Veal stayed close to home for several of the robberies and that while he had a weapon in each of the holdups, no one was injured.

"He didn't do a robbery on Thanksgiving and he never did a robbery on Sunday because his mother made him go to church every Sunday," Buckner said.

Veal says he was desperate for extra money.

"I had just got hired to two new jobs and really, I just needed some gas money," he said. "It was the easy way. Sometimes you never think you're going to get caught."
http://www.miamiherald.com/577/story/326126.html





A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges
Christopher Maag

Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

That an adult would plot such a cruel hoax against a 13-year-old girl has drawn outraged phone calls, e-mail messages and blog posts from around the world. Many people expressed anger because St. Charles County officials did not charge Ms. Drew with a crime.

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what Ms. Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

“Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

St. Charles County’s prosecuting attorney, Jack Banas, said he was reviewing the case to determine whether anyone could be charged with a crime. State Representative Doug Funderburk, whose district includes Dardenne Prairie, said he was looking into the feasibility of introducing legislation to tighten restrictions against online harassment and fraud.

In seventh grade, Megan Meier had tried desperately to join the popular crowd at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, only to be teased about her weight, her mother said. At the beginning of eighth grade last year, she transferred to Immaculate Conception, a nearby Catholic school. Within three months, Ms. Meier said, her daughter had a new group of friends, lost 20 pounds and joined the volleyball team.

At one time, Lori Drew’s daughter and Megan had been “joined at the hip,” said Megan’s great-aunt Vicki Dunn. But the two drifted apart, and when Megan changed schools she told the other girl that she no longer wanted to be friends, Ms. Meier said.

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter. Reached at home, Lori’s husband, Curt Drew, said only that the family had no comment.

Because Ms. Drew had taken Megan on family vacations, she knew the girl had been prescribed antidepression medication, Ms. Meier said. She also knew that Megan had a MySpace page.

Ms. Drew had told a girl across the street about the hoax, said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter, a minor.

“Lori laughed about it,” the mother said, adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

As paramedics worked to revive Megan, the neighbor who insisted on anonymity said, Lori Drew called the neighbor’s daughter and told her to “keep her mouth shut” about the MySpace page.

Six weeks later, at a meeting with the Meiers, mediated by grief counselors, the neighbor told them that “Josh” was a hoax. The Drews were not present.

“I just sat there in shock,” Mr. Meier said.

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

“I felt like such a fool,” Mr. Meier said. “I’m supposed to protect my family, and here I allowed these people to inject themselves into our lives.”

The police learned about the hoax when Ms. Drew filed a complaint about the damage to the foosball table. In the report, she stated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Megan had mentioned suicide several times, her mother said, but had never attempted it, and no one who knew her, including her doctors, felt she was suicidal.

On the advice of F.B.I. agents who did not want the Drews to learn of their investigation of the hoax, Ms. Meier said, her family said nothing publicly about the case for a year. Today, the Meier and the Drew families continue to live four houses from one another on a winding suburban street.

“There are no words to explain my rage,” Ms. Meier said. “These people were supposed to be our friends.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/us/28hoax.html





Firefighters Asked to Report People Who Express Discontent with the Government
David Edwards and Muriel Kane

It was revealed last week that firefighters are being trained to not only keep an eye out for illegal materials in the course of their duties, but even to report back any expression of discontent with the government.

A year ago, Homeland Security gave security clearances to nine New York City fire chiefs and began sharing intelligence with them. Even before that, fire department personnel were being taught "to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities" and were also "told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."

Unlike law enforcement officials, firemen can go onto private property without a warrant, not only while fighting fires but also for inspections. "It's the evolution of the fire service," said a Phoenix, AZ fire chief of his information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement.

Keith Olbermann raised the alarm about the program on his show Wednesday, noting that "if the information-sharing program works in New York, the department says it will extend it to other major metropolitan areas, unless we stop them." He then asked Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the ACLU, "This program seems to be turning [firefighters], essentially, into legally protected domestic spies, does it not?"

"That's the entire intent," German replied, noting the serious legal issues involved. "There is actually still a fourth amendment," he pointed out, "and what makes a firefighter's search reasonable is that it's done to prevent a fire. If now firefighters are going in with this secondary purpose, that end run around the fourth amendment won't work, and it's likely that they will find themselves in legal trouble."

Olbermann, however, was most strongly concerned about the implications for civil liberties. "Is what disturbs you and the ACLU the same thing that just jumped off the page for me?" he asked. "That one phrase, 'look for people who are expressing hatred of or discontent with the United States?' Discontent?"

German agreed that there are serious first amendment issues raised by the focus of the program on constitutionally-protected literature, such as books that might be considered "terrorist propaganda."

Olbermann asked in conclusion whether firefighters could be used under this program to plant evidence. German agreed that the way it is defined "really plays to people's prejudices and gives them the opportunity to do damage to someone."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Homela...stic_1129.html





Feds Cancel Amazon Customer ID Request
Ryan J. Foley

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

"The (subpoena's) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

"Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases," the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

Seattle-based Amazon said in court documents it hopes Crocker's decision will make it more difficult for prosecutors to obtain records involving book purchases.

Crocker — who unsealed documents detailing the showdown against prosecutors' wishes — said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena's law enforcement purpose.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Federal prosecutors issued the subpoena last year as part of a grand jury investigation into a former Madison official who was a prolific seller of used books on Amazon.com. They were looking for buyers who could be witnesses in the case.

The official, Robert D'Angelo, was indicted last month on fraud, money laundering and tax evasion charges. Prosecutors said he ran a used book business out of his city office and did not report the income. He has pleaded not guilty.

D'Angelo sold books through the Amazon Marketplace feature, and buyers paid Amazon, which took a commission.

The initial subpoena sought records of 24,000 transactions dating back to 1999. The company turned over many records but refused to identify the book buyers, citing their First Amendment right to keep their reading choices private.

Prosecutors later narrowed the subpoena, asking the company to identify a sample of 120 customers.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Graber dismissed First Amendment concerns in an April letter to the company. He said D'Angelo — not Amazon — was the seller and prosecutors needed proof he sold books online.

Crocker brokered a compromise in which the company would send a letter to the 24,000 customers describing the investigation and asking them to voluntarily contact prosecutors if they were interested in testifying.

Prosecutors said they obtained the customer information they needed from one of D'Angelo's computers they seized earlier in the investigation.

Crocker scolded prosecutors in July for not looking for alternatives earlier.

"If the government had been more diligent in looking for workarounds instead of baring its teeth when Amazon balked, it's probable that this entire First Amendment showdown could have been avoided," he wrote.

The company asked Crocker to unseal the records after D'Angelo was indicted last month. Crocker granted the request over the objections of federal prosecutors, who wanted them kept secret.

"Shining some sunlight on the instant dispute reassures the public that someone is watching the watchers, and that this district's federal prosecutors are part of the solution, not part of the problem," he wrote.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...R55oAD8T66FAG0





In Global Precedent, Google to Hand Over Blogger's IP Address

An anonymous blogger using Google Blogger slandered Shaarei Tikva councilmen.
Noam Sharvit

In an unprecedented move, Google Inc. has agreed to supply the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used "Google Blogger" for a blog in which he slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection. The election is being held today. So far as is known, this is the first time that Google forewent legal action in such a case.

The slandered Shaarei Tikva council members asked Google for the blogger's name. They reached a settlement with the company on the basis of an Israeli ruling on the subject. The settlement stipulates that 72 hours before a hearing on the case at the Rishon LeZion Magistrates Court, the council members would leave the blogger a message on his blog summoning him to the hearing, or else his IP address would be handed over. The notice would invite the blogger to disclose his identity, participate in the hearing, or oppose the disclosure of his identity by filing a motion as "anonymous".

For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva councilmen: local council chairman Gideon Idan, Shaarei Tikva director general Haim Blumenfeld and council member Avi Yokobovich. The blogger accused the men of criminal acts, such as pretending to be handicapped in order to receive discounts on local property taxes, receiving bribes from a contractor, and having ties to criminal gangs.

The three councilmen filed a NIS 300,000 lawsuit against the blogger, who was named "anonymous" in the statement of claim. They also asked for a court order ordering Google to disclose the blogger's IP address, which would enable the court to contact the blogger's Internet services provider and order it to disclose the blogger's identity.

Google initially said that disclosing the blogger's identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person's right to his reputation.

However, in a pre-ruling, Judge Oren Schwartz said that the blog's content raised suspicions of criminal conduct, and Google took the hint. Judge Schwartz applied the strict position of Tel Aviv District Court Judge Michal Agmon that the details of a surfer may be disclosed only if the slander was tantamount to criminal defamation.

Following Judge Schwartz's ruling, Google and the councilmen reached a settlement in their dispute. Google was represented by Adv. Keren Beer and Adv. Hagit Blaiberg of Goldfarb, Levy, Eran, Meiri & Co. /a> and the councilmen were represented by Adv. Ben Zion Adoram and Tomer Altus of Adoram & Co.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/glob...79585&fid=1725





Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy
Brad Stone

Google, the Internet company with a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced Tuesday that it intended to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.

Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal,” said Larry Page, a Google founder and president of products, “and we don’t see people talking about that as much as we would like.”

The initiative, which Google is calling RE

The company also said that Google.org, the philanthropic for-profit subsidiary that Google seeded in 2004 with three million shares of its stock, would invest in energy start-ups.

Google says its goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy — enough to power the city of San Francisco — more cheaply than coal-generated electricity. The company predicted that this can be accomplished in “years, not decades.”

For some Wall Street analysts, the most relevant question is not whether Google can save the world, but whether the company’s idealism may ultimately distract it from its core businesses of organizing the world’s information and selling online ads.

“My first reaction when I read about this was, ‘Is this a joke?’” said Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets. “I’ve written off Google’s competition as a threat to Google’s long-term market share gains. But I haven’t written off Google’s own ability to stretch too far and try to do too much. Ultimately, that is the biggest risk in the Google story.”

Robert Peck of Bear Stearns agreed that “the headlines were a little scary at first” and said investors were initially worried that this was another example of Google “trying to bite off more than they can chew.”

But Google’s stock closed up more than 1 percent Tuesday in a higher market, Mr. Peck said, when investors ”realized this is more of a Google.org initiative and backed off.”

Mr. Page, in an interview, said that failing to investigate new businesses could hurt Google more than any potential distraction. “If you look at companies that don’t do anything new,” he said, “they are guaranteed never to get bigger. They miss a lot of opportunities and they miss the next big things.”

As part of the initiative, executives at Google.org said they are working with two companies that have “promising, scalable energy technologies.” One of these, eSolar, based in Pasadena, Calif., uses thousands of small mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate steam that powers electric generators. The other, Makani Power of Alameda, Calif., is developing wind turbines that will run on powerful and generally more predictable winds at high altitudes.

In a conference call Tuesday with reporters, Sergey Brin, Google’s other founder and president of technology, said the effort was motivated in part by the company’s frustrating search for clean, cheap energy alternatives.

“It’s very hard to find options that aren’t coal-based or other dirty technologies,” he said. “We don’t feel good about being in that situation as a company. We feel hypocritical. We want to make investments happen so there will be alternatives for us to use down the road.” Both founders declined to specify what the company now spends on energy.

Idealism is hardly new at Google. In their Letter From the Founders before the company’s 2004 initial public stock offering, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin wrote: “Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”

Mr. Rohan of RBC Capital Markets said that the returns were not obvious. “The only positive byproduct of this project that would be anything other than environmental,” he said, “is that it might make Google managers and executives even prouder of the fact that they work there, and it may help retain key employees who think their goal is to do good in the world. But I’m really stretching.”

Google is only the latest Fortune 500 company to embrace green technologies. Also Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard said it would install a one-megawatt solar electric power system at its manufacturing plant in San Diego, and buy 80 gigawatt-hours of wind energy in Ireland next year. H.P. said that together, the agreements would save it around $800,000 in energy costs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/te...google.html?hp





University of Michigan Librarian Defends Google Scanning Deal
Nate Anderson

The University of Michigan's head librarian, Paul Courant, started a blog this November to talk about large-scale digitization projects. Sounds noncontroversial, right? It was, for all of one post, and then Courant defended his library's relationship with Google, saying that "the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better." Not everyone agrees.
Google Book Search adds libraries, books from University of Lausanne

Courant's basic argument is that Google will scan seven million Michigan books in less than six years, and it won't cost the university a dime. In addition, Michigan retains the books and also gets a complete copy of Google's scans, including the text that's spit out by optical character recognition software.

Left to its own devices, the university would have no chance of duplicating this feat on its own. It could also partner with other projects like the Open Content Alliance, which won't display any snippets from copyrighted works unless the publisher opts in to the program. But Courant argues that time is crucial, and Google is the company who can get the most done in the least amount of time.

"We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically," wrote Courant. "At the rate that OCA is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically."

Courant has previously served as an economics professor at the university (and was later Provost), and he says that his economic work on public goods has convinced him just how bad it would be for society if one company ended up with sole control over large swathes of cultural knowledge. But he doesn't believe that Michigan's partnership with Google Book Search will create such problems.

"Google has no such control," he writes. "After Google scans a book, they return the book to the library (like any other user), and they give us a copy of the digital file. Google is not the only entity controlling access to the collection—the University of Michigan and other partner libraries control access as well. Except we don't think of it as controlling access so much as providing it."

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia, is working on a critical book about Google, and he argues that the current book-scanning program is riddled with problems. Public institutions, he argued in a response to Courant, should not be making these sorts of deals with private companies, especially when those companies are as dominant in their fields as Google is.

He also wonders how the "library copy" retained by the library is not an "audacious infringement of copyright? It violates both the copyright holder's right to copy and right to distribute. Doesn't a university library have an obligation to explain this?"

Courant then tries to do so in a response of his own. He takes special aim at this last criticism about copyright, one that has been repeatedly leveled at Google as well. The response is worth quoting at length.

"I must say that I am troubled that the author of a very sensible book about copyright is so enthusiastic about trashing Google that he is willing to give up on the uses, notably scholarly uses, that are permitted in the higher-numbered sections of the Copyright Act," writes Courant. "As my institution's copyright lawyer says: 'FAIR USE, it's the law.' And my institution believes that when we have Google digitize our holdings we do so under the law and in order to make uses that are not only lawful, but that are completely consistent with the undergirding purpose of copyright law."

Michigan uses the scanned files in its own system, allowing patrons to search through books for keywords and to view complete pages of works no longer covered by copyright. But Michigan, like Google, does claim to respect copyright by not showing more than tiny snippets from copyrighted texts.

Vaidhyanathan remains unconvinced, and in a later post referred to Michigan's arrangement with Google as "massive corporate welfare." (Those who want to read the actual conditions of the deal can see the Michigan/Google contract online.)

This particular debate, which has been raging in various forms for the last two years, is driven in part by the tremendous sense of what's at stake. Book search projects like the one undertaken by Google have huge potential to transform public access to books and archival material, especially now that Google has broadened its program to include French-language texts and texts from India.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has also been covering the debate, notes that digitization practices and the existence (or lack thereof) of quality controls could become even more important if readers take to digital books. Products like the new Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader make that a plausible future scenario, though neither device looks likely to displace paper quite yet.

The New Yorker tried to put the whole debate in perspective a couple weeks back in a lengthy piece that looks at the history of textual production. "Google's projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it," notes Anthony Grafton. Those prophecies can be either apocalyptic or utopian, and the debate between Courant and Vaidhyanathan illustrates perfectly how two academics can look at the same data and see either the Four Horsemen or the Garden of Eden.

In the meantime, Google scans on.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ning-deal.html





Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader
Julian "rabbit" Murdoch

On Tuesday last week, to much fanfare and extreme skepticism, Amazon launched their Kindle book reader. If you went solely by invective and blog traffic, a casual observer might surmise that Amazon had been handed a monopoly on reading and thus any failure of the device was somehow a personal attack on the intelligentsia, rather than the release of a small niche-market consumer electronics device. Within hours there were hundreds of reviews on Amazon for the device, most extremely critical, yet by definition there were no devices in consumer's hands. Even a week later, the love-hate relationship seems far more fired up with invective than could possibly be justified based on what the device is, and more importantly isn't. Noted tech-wonk Robert Scoble went so far as to switch from baseline praise to mind-wrenching red-faced diatribe calling for unemployment lines at Amazon. Notable author Neil Gaiman managed to get into a well-mannered disagreement about it with large-funny-person Penn Jillette.

All this over a gizmo?

The Kindle is really a dull and simple device designed to do exactly two things: Get stuff you can read, and then make it easy to read it. And yet, all of the discussion seems to be about its digital rights management, and its industrial design.

This DRM debate is endless and in my mind somewhat pointless. The exchange between Penn Jillette and Neil Gaiman on Neil's blog is typical: Penn argues for the pointlessness of DRM and the irrelevance of the product in the face of the joys of a physical paper, Neil points out that the whole DRM thing is a red herring and that the device has substantial benefits over paper. (At the end of the day, Amazon's DRM applies only to books you actually buy - everything else works natively or with minimal hassle.)

So which is it? Sliced bread or failed better mousetrap. Rather than engage in the kind of feature dissection we technophiles live on, I thought I'd just record how this thing has actually fit into the life of my family in the last 7 days.

Day 1: Ooooh, Shiny! And small!


Jess and I take turns poking around on it, trying to figure out what it does in the corners. We get used to holding it. Our first impressions are favorable. It's incredibly light and geek-lust thin. The navigation, through a little scroll-wheel and click, is completely intuitive. The screen essentially is paper, which even in the age of Rock Band seems somehow magical. We download a handful of books and subscribe to a bunch of magazines. We take turns fondling it.

Day 2: I haven't seen it in a day, because Jess downloaded a new release in a hardcover series to which she is addicted. It's 800 pages in print form, about twice that in digital clicks.

"So how do you like it?" I ask.

"It's good. Not as good as the last one, but it made me cry about half way through. They killed off one of the main characters, so I just had to finish it and see how they ..."

"No I mean the Kindle."

She looks puzzled.

"Oh. It's fine I guess," she says, shrugging. "I didn't really think about it. It's nice you can read it with one hand instead of lifting weights with a hardcover."


Day 3 (Thanksgiving): Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It's surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it shows up as a hard drive. I drop .txt and .mobi files into the "Book" folder and they show up. I convert a handful of PDFs to .mobi files using Mobi Creator and they work perfect, Tables of Contents and all. Sweet.

Like a set of prayer beads, I take it with me to Thanksgiving dinner, and spend some time reading "The Secret Garden" to my daughter. I quickly see what Jess was talking about. After a few pages I forget I'm just reading a book. Yes, the page "flashes" briefly on page turns (a function of e-ink, not the Kindle per se). But after a few minutes, it ceases to be distracting. The only ongoing perception I have of the device itself is how nice it is not to have to hold it. Sitting curled up on the couch with my daughter, the kindle just rests on my lap, and I tap the "next page" button now and then. When I shift positions, I can just hold it lightly with my left hand by the spine of the cover, and nudge the page button with my thumb.


Day 4: I grab the kindle from my wife's nightstand. Yes, she's still dominating it. I'd bought a few books I'd been meaning to get and she's now decided they're at the top of her reading pile too. Curse Amazon and the "buy it now, get it now" book thing. I can tell it's going to be a constant battle who has Kindle rights.

I head downstairs for morning coffee. The previous night I had subscribed to a bunch of blogs, newspapers and magazines. I try browsing some blogs, and give up. While the idea of reading blogs on the Kindle is a good one, the problem is that most of the blogs I read are as much about linking to web content as they are content in their own right.

The Kindle will load the web pages most of my blogs link to. There's a rudimentary web browser. But it's less than ideal, and absolutely no substitute for a laptop, or even an iPhone. The web functionality is more an emergency backup than a true feature. This doesn't disturb me in the least - it's not supposed to be a portable browser, it's supposed to be a book.

My subscription to "Slate" and "Salon," more traditional internet magazines, is much more rewarding, and I spend an hour reading over coffee and a bagel. Again, the fact that I don't have to hold it is wonderful. It just lies flat in front of me, out of range of Bagel crumbs. Since I have it at some distance, I increase the typeface a notch, and it's comfortable to read at a distance of about 3 feet - way further away than I can read a paper, and while it shows poorly in photographs (like everythign about the Kindle) the text is, in short, gorgeous.


Day 5 AM: The Gym Test. My mom picks me up. Yes, my mom is my gym partner. Instead of my usual random magazine, I put the Kindle on the treadmill rack. Again, I'm delighted to be able to read a book without holding it. It's pretty much impossible for me to hold open a book on the treadmill normally. I'm just not coordinated enough. But lying flat in front of me, I can sweat like crazy and just tap the page once in a while.

Inspired, I crank the typeface all the way up and try actually running. Oh Joy oh Rapture Unforeseen! Yes, I can actually read a book at a full out run. I lose 20 minutes to Larry Niven's new tale of known space with my heart rate over 150. Simply impossible with a paperback, and it fills me with delight.

Day 5 PM: I spend some more time poking at the deeper features. I confirm that you can indeed listen to audio books on it just fine, and it's a miserable, but I suppose functional MP3 player. It's not going to replace your iPod, but for a little Brian Eno background music, it fits the bill. I play around with the Dictionary and the Wikipedia lookup features and they work - nothing fancy, just functional. I spend half an hour poking around the store and, like a jaded lover, discover the first big wart.

Book selection. Just as many early-adopter music services suffered from critical holes in the back catalog, so too the Amazon Kindle. I've been dying to read Into the Wild. It's not available. Thinking this might be a gaffe purely on Amazon's part, I poke around the web and discover it's not available in any eBook format, for the Sony Reader or the Kindle. Another hour shows me holes all over the library, again, not limited to Amazon, but rather limited to the whole idea of eBooks. And while Amazon accurately shows that 100 of the 112 current best-sellers are available, if you're after book 101, you're still heading to the bookstore.

That evening I just read. The Kindle disappears, and I realize how important the design of the book is, and how strongly I disagree with so many web comments about it's supposedly horrendous un-holdability. The instructions for the thing say that it's designed to be used with the cover on (even though all of the marketing shows it with the cover off). Being a weak pawn, I tend to follow directions, and I can confirm that wiith the cover on, it's extremely difficult to accidentally hit any buttons while reading, and the left hand spine becomes a natural handle. The super-matte surfaces of both the screen and the frame make it readable and un-distracting at any angle, in any light. The next page buttons on both sides make it usable in more positions than a normal book, and in no case does it ever require two hands to use.

It is, in short, the most invisible piece of technology I can recall owning. This makes it supremely unsexy, and exactly right.

Day 6: Once again, I wake up early and grab the Kindle from my Jessica's nightstand. The Kindle falls out of the cover and bounces off the floor of the bathroom. Thankfully no damage, and looking at the drop-test video on the Amazon website, I have some hope that my good fortune isn't accidental, but it highlights another wart. The kindle isn't a book, it's a device. It can break. It can out of batteries. It can drown. While a drop into the tub hurts any book, I imagine it ruins an expensive kindle exceptionally well.

No harm done, I descend to the temple of my morning ritual. It's Sunday. So I buy the Sunday New York Times for 75 cents (a bargain for a non-subscriber). While I miss the crossword puzzle and the smell of newsprint, I still get sucked into the Magazine's discussion of Rock Band and a dozen other articles of note. It's completely satisfying.

That's my week with the Kindle.

It's been at least what I expected. Yes, it's expensive, but with Jessica chewing through dozens of hardcover books a year, my payback on $400 will be less than a year. While this cost-justification was part of my purchase-justification, I find it's the subtleties that make me really pleased with it. Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book. The simple ability to lie flat or be held comfortably with one hand means I can read for longer, more frequently and with more comfort. And grabbing a book or a newspaper on demand is enough to make any word-geek giddy.

But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day.

And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of "get it out fast." The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurb's from authors) we're great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.

But in the final analysis, the point of the thing is to be a better book. It does this very well. Everything else is just icing on the cake, which is, in this case, not a lie.
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/36063





Online Library Gives Readers Access to 1.5 Million Books

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

The project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “The Analects of Confucius,” are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books. More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world’s books.

Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have been digitized — their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text. That allows these books to be searched and, eventually, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices.

An outgrowth of Reddy’s Universal Library, the Million Book Project received $3.5 million in seed funding from the National Science Foundation and substantial in-kind contributions from hardware and software manufacturers. These funds were primarily used to purchase scanning equipment and for developing the scanning, digitization and cataloguing methods necessary for creating a large digital library.

The vast majority of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing has been performed at centers in China and India, where more than 1.1 million and 360,000 books have been scanned, respectively. The U.S., China and India provided $10 million each in cash and in-kind contributions to the project. More recently, the Library at Alexandria, Egypt, has joined the effort. Now, about 7,000 books are scanned daily by more than 1,000 workers worldwide.

“We greatly value the participation of Bibliotheca Alexandrina,” said Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and copyright lawyer. “Scholars everywhere regret the destruction of the Alexandria Library at various points in history, and we’re willing to go to great lengths to see that no such destruction is ever possible in the future. Once books are on the Internet, they become immortal.”

Protecting and preserving texts is a major goal, said Pan Yunhe, the leader of the Million Book Project in China. “Paper gets old and brittle, so books soon become so delicate that no one can read them without damaging them,” said Yunhe, the former president of Zhejiang University who is now vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. “Artwork fades. But once we have digitized texts and illustrations, we can keep them in circulation indefinitely. And by storing them at multiple sites, we can minimize the risk that they be destroyed, as occurred in Alexandria.”

“This collection of books in multiple languages opens up unparalleled opportunities to bring Indian cultural material to everyone, and offers a huge range of possibilities in natural language research,” said N. Balakrishnan, associate director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, one of the partners in the project.

“Digital libraries constitute an essential part of the future of the developing world,” said Ismail Serageldin, director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina. ”This requires that we approach conditions governing copyright, digital archiving and scientific databases with a view to creating two-tier systems of access to information that would allow access to such data from developing countries for a nominal fee or for free.”

Though the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available online for free, about half of the current collection remains under copyright. Until the permission of the copyright holders can be documented, or copyright laws are amended, only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed at no cost.

The project has surpassed one million books, but the participants are looking to expand to all countries and eventually every language. At the Third Annual International Conference on Universal Digital Library, held at Carnegie Mellon Nov. 2-4, 2007, the partners in the Million Book Project agreed to continue scanning, to enlist more centers for the scanning of rare and unique materials, and to work on governmental solutions to the problem of books which are out of print but still in copyright.
http://www.physorg.com/news115383203.html





The Pirate Bay Sued Over O.J. Simpson’s ‘Murder Confession’
enigmax

Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman who was murdered alongside Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, has joined the long line of people threatening legal action against The Pirate Bay. Goldman demands that they take down O. J Simpson’s ‘murder confession’ book, a publication to which he owns the rights.

In 2006, O.J Simpson announced he was publishing a book in which he claimed he would reveal what would’ve happened, had he really murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a frenzied 1994 knife attack. After publication and public disgust, the book was canceled, with 400,000 remaining copies being destroyed.

Although Simpson was acquitted of the double murder in a criminal trial, he was found liable for the unlawful killings in a civil action and was subsequently ordered to pay $33.5 million. However, Simpson has become an expert on finding ways not to pay this huge amount.

As a result, Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman, has been taking action to get his hands on Simpson’s assets and has recently won the rights (90% of the royalties) to Simpson’s book, entitled ‘If I Did It’. The book was renamed “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” and became a best seller.

We reported back in June that a digital version of the book had already been made available for download via The Pirate Bay. Now, according to an Associated Press report, Fred Goldman - who claims to have lost $150,000 due to this leak - filed a lawsuit Thursday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, against The Pirate Bay.

Goldman’s attorneys wasted more of their client’s money by sending letters to The Pirate Bay demanding that the “the Web site’s operators stop posting the book”. It seems they received the standard Pirate Bay response of reminding everyone that “they are not subject to the laws of the United States”, which is of course, 100% true, residing in Sweden as they do.

The Pirate Bay’s brokep told TorrentFreak: “It’s the same thing over again. People need to learn how the internet works before they try something like this. I welcome his lawsuit, since he has no case whatsoever. Maybe we should sue over taking our time and lying in the media about what we do?”

The lawsuit claims that The Pirate Bay is making an “illegal publication” of the book, with its advertisers - heavyweights such as Jamster, Target, The Wall Street Journal and Wal-Mart - collectively, according to attorney David Cook at least, providing “the wealth through advertising”.

Cook said: “Ron Goldman LLC will never be able to stop these pirates from posting that book online but they can do that in the poorhouse.”

Finishing on a threat may be customary Mr Cook, but it won’t work. Guaranteed.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-s...ession-071130/





Microsoft Challenges the iPod (Again)
David Pogue

Don’t look now, but Microsoft might finally be getting the hang of hardware.

The company’s overall track record for designing gadgets is pretty awful. Remember the Smart Display? The Spot Watch? The Ultra-Mobile PC? The original Zune?

Me neither.

But Microsoft’s new second-generation Zune music/photo/video player is a pleasure to use. It fixes a long list of things that made the original Zune such a pathetic wannabe. Best of all, the new Zune is starting to develop its own identity. The echoes of Microsoft executives saying, “It’ll be just like the iPod, only ours” aren’t quite as loud on this one.

The family includes three new models. First, there’s an 80-gigabyte hard-drive Zune ($250) whose size, design, shape and price are intended to compete with the 80-gig iPod Classic. Then there are the flash-memory-based models, which resemble last year’s iPod Nano: thin, tall slabs that hold 4 or 8 gigabytes of music, photos and videos (for $150 and $200, like the Nano). The original, 30-gig Zune is still available, too, at $200. (There are no Zune equivalents to the tiny iPod Shuffle, the wireless-Internet iPod Touch or the capacious 160-gig iPod Classic.)

Confident design steps are evident in all the new models. The back is metal like the iPod’s, but textured and therefore far less likely to show scratches and dings.

Then there’s the new control pad. You can navigate the Zune’s bright, clear, animated software by clicking the dial at any of its four compass points; select something by clicking the center; and — here’s the twist — scroll through lists by rubbing the pad’s face. Music-player companies have struggled for years to come up with a controller as good as the iPod’s click wheel; Microsoft, in Zune 2.0, has finally done it.

The sound quality is very good, especially if you use the 80-gig Zune’s included earbuds. They’re not hard disks like the iPod’s and those of the smaller Zunes; they’re soft rubber bulbs that snuggle securely into your ear canals, sealing out the outside world.

On the 80-gig model, the screen is bigger than the iPod Classic’s — but it’s the same number of pixels. As a result, the pixel grid is far more visible, giving you a screen-door effect during videos with bright scenes.

Some of the biggest Zune-iPod differences involve the Zune’s wireless feature. As on the previous Zune, you can beam songs to your friends’ Zunes, to demonstrate your superior musical taste. But beamed songs no longer self-destruct after “three days or three plays”; the time limit is gone. You have all the time you like to listen to them three times.

Unfortunately, that beaming feature will remain irrelevant as long as there’s nobody to beam songs to. You could go a year without spotting another Zune (and, in fact, you probably just have). But at least the antipiracy limitations on beamed songs is now infinitely more sensible.

Microsoft. meanwhile, has finally begun to exploit its wireless transmitter in more useful ways. The Zune can’t surf the Internet, as the iPod Touch can. But it can now synchronize its music and photos (although not videos) with those on your Windows PC over your wireless home network.

Now the value of wireless synching may not be immediately apparent. Hooking up a U.S.B. cable, the usual way to sync a music player, has never been a particularly harrowing task.

But what’s great is that you can make it automatic. You come home, you set the player in its charging dock ($50) or a speaker dock, and presto: the thing syncs as it recharges. The next time you grab your Zune, it’s charged, synched and filled with your latest tunes or your favorite podcasts.

Microsoft has also written a new Windows-only loading-dock program for the Zune. You no longer use Windows Media Player for that purpose.

That’s good, because it allowed Microsoft’s programmers to start fresh and create a streamlined, simple, spartan program dedicated to its task. Really spartan. There aren’t even any menus. (How unlike Microsoft.)

But it’s also bad, because the new program pointlessly duplicates Media Player’s functions. Now you have to learn two different programs and maintain two different libraries. (How Microsoft.)

The online Zune store is better now, too. It now lets you swap song suggestions and 30-second clips with your friends, and it finally offers podcast subscriptions. (Microsoft must absolutely hate saying the word “pod” every time it touts this feature.) And unlike Apple’s store, the Zune store offers an optional $15-a-month all-you-can download plan, although you lose your entire music library when you stop paying.

If you’re tempted to align yourself with Planet Zune rather than Planet iPod, you should ask two important questions.

First: How do I know Microsoft won’t dump me the way it dumped people the last time around?

After all, the Zune is not Microsoft’s first effort at an iPod-like universe of player, software and music store; that honor goes to the PlaysForSure format. And everybody who bought into it must be feeling just a tad rejected at this point. When it introduced the Zune, Microsoft shut down its PlaysForSure store and further development efforts. Whatever songs you bought in the PlaysForSure format won’t play on the Zune.

The second question is, How much will I miss the richness of the iPod economy?

Microsoft hasn’t had nearly as much time as Apple has had to cultivate a culture of add-ons and flourishes. So its player, its software or its store can’t rival the abilities of Apple’s.

Here are some of the iPod features that the Zune lacks: Games, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, password-protected volume limiter, graphic equalizer, notepad, auto-synched copy of your computer’s calendar and address book, and Disk Mode, which lets an iPod serve as an external drive for carrying around computer files.

If you use the Zune’s wireless features, you’ll also get much worse battery life: 19 hours of music playback on the 80-gig Zune versus 30 on the equivalent iPod. The 80-gig Zune is still thicker and chunkier than its iPod rival, too.

Above all, you may miss that thriving virtual bazaar of iPod accessories: more than 3,000 stereo docks, cases, car adapters, and so on, compared with only a handful for the Zune.

Here are some of the iTunes software features missing in the Zune’s software: Smart Playlists, which assemble groups of songs based on criteria that you specify (“80’s up-tempo songs I haven’t heard in three months”), choice of visualizers (screen-saver effects that dance to the music), closed captioning for videos and TV, Cover Flow view, and a graphic equalizer.

The Zune store is missing a lot of iPod features, too: TV shows, movies, audio books, monthly allowances and comprehensible pricing.

At the iTunes store, you pay $1 a song. But on the Zune store, you pay using Microsoft Points, which are sold in blocks of 400 ($5). Songs cost 79 to 129 points, which means 99 cents to $1.61. Suddenly, you’re a currency trader.

This absurd system serves nobody except Microsoft. First, it’s a ham-handed effort to make you lose track of how many dollars you’re actually spending. Second, you can’t just buy one song; the least you can spend is $5. And finally, you’ll inevitably waste money, since it’s unlikely that Microsoft’s various song prices will divide evenly into 400.

The bottom line: the iPod is still a more versatile, compact and beautiful machine. But the Zune has come a long way in very little time. Already, its potential audience is no longer limited to a sect of irrational Apple haters. It’s now a candidate for anyone who values its unique powers — excellent built-in FM radio, scratchproof case and wireless auto-synching — more than they value the richness and choice of the iPod universe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...h/29pogue.html





Zune a Hot Item This Holiday Season?

Something tells me the Zune will be a popular Christmas gift this holiday season. The player is currently Amazon's top-selling music player, beating out the new iPod Nano and the 80GB iPod on the "Bestsellers in Electronics" list. Could it be that we've been underestimating the Zune for far too long, or are people snapping up the first-generation Zune players due to their heavily discounted prices?

I can't blame anyone passing on the $135 4GB iPod Nano when presented with the option to buy the brown 30GB Zune for $134. I mean, you would be crazy to pass up that deal. To prove that color does matter when it comes to electronics, the sleek black 30GB Zune is currently selling for $140, while the red and pink 30GB Zunes are even more expensive at $150. What's even more perplexing is that the white Zune player is the most expensive of all first-generation players, selling for a whopping $160. But wait, there's even a new 80GB Zune player at No. 17, so it can't be all about the deep discounts, right?

A report by the Associated Press says there's a shortage of new Zune media players on the web and in retail stores. Apparently, the new 80GB Zune player has sold out everywhere, but more should be on virtual and physical shelves in the next 10 to 14 days. This buzz obviously makes Microsoft very happy, but its discounts on first-generation Zunes are making consumers extremely happy, or at least happy enough to ditch their iPod for a Wi-Fi loving Zune.

Regarding the "Bestsellers in Electronics" list, I should mention that iPods are still dominating most of the list, but it's nice to see the iPod up against some real competition. I really thought the iPod Touch was going to be a hot music player this holiday season, but so far both the 16GB and 8GB models are coming in at Nos. 6 and 7.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/21050





Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away.
Seth Mnookin

It's Monday afternoon, and Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group, is eating lunch in his private dining room at the company's Manhattan headquarters. Morris hasn't been here much in recent months, though it's hard to imagine he misses the place. For one thing, workers have been renovating the building: To reach his corner suite, you need to take an elevator to the floor above, walk down a hallway covered with plastic sheeting, and then descend a flight of stairs. For another, these are tough times for the music business. In 2006, the number of CDs sold worldwide fell 10 percent, the largest one-year drop ever — steeper than in any of the so-called Napster-era years from 2001 to 2004. Early indications suggest that 2007 will be at least as bad. The shades in the adjoining office are drawn, making the room feel a little like a crypt — albeit one outfitted with leather couches and tasteful art.

For the past several minutes, Morris has been listening to Rio Caraeff, executive VP in charge of the company's digital strategy, tell me how the sagging fortunes of the music industry highlight the need to diversify revenue streams. Caraeff explains that the company will eventually need to transition from running a product-based business to running a service-based one. He talks about ringtones, subscription services, and deals with mobile providers, stressing the need to raise the industry's "digital IQ."
Morris seems distracted. At 68, he looks every bit the prototypical New York big shot. What remains of his hair is slicked back along the sides of his head, and if his face is fleshier than it once was, the ever-probing, slightly combative intensity of his eyes hasn't dulled a bit. Morris has spent his entire life working with musicians and producers, finding and nurturing the talents that make his company a $7 billion-a-year business. It's safe to say that increasing his digital IQ and pondering a service-based business model aren't the topics that get him out of bed in the morning.

But digital strategies are important these days, and Morris has become entangled in them whether he wants to be or not. Over the past several years, he has been one of the most staunch and vocal proponents of aggressive copyright enforcement, at one point publicly blasting MP3 players as merely "repositories for stolen music." When he realized, after watching his grandson stream online clips, that portals weren't paying Universal for playing its music videos, Morris pulled the company's content off of Yahoo. Once the two sides came to terms, Morris went after YouTube and MySpace — "copyright infringers" both, as he put it. YouTube eventually agreed to a deal; a lawsuit against MySpace is ongoing. (Licensing of videos to Web sites now nets Universal more than $20million annually.) And in November 2006, Morris parlayed Microsoft's desperation to establish a true alternative to the iPod into a $1 ransom to Universal for every Zune music player sold — and that's on top of the licensing fees Microsoft pays to have Universal's songs in its Zune Marketplace online store. It's a sign of Morris' power that he is able to pressure so many players in the technology world to bend to his will.

Last summer, though, Morris seemed to change direction. After years of tightening controls on his company's content, he agreed to let Amazon.com and other online retailers sell unprotected MP3s of Universal songs. These contain none of the digital rights management software that media companies usually embed in digital files to prevent piracy. Universal wasn't the first big label to offer unprotected tracks; the EMI Group had begun selling DRM-free songs in May. But with its small market share, EMI's decision seemed unlikely to have much effect on the market. Universal, on the other hand, was setting out to change things. In particular, it hoped to end Apple's near monopoly on legal digital downloads.

Discussing Universal's various initiatives, Caraeff, an even-keeled 32-year-old in a crisply tailored suit, is explaining that it's important to be "invigorated and challenged by the opportunities of digital music." At this, Morris puts down his tuna fish on white, wipes some crumbs off his khakis, and clears his throat. I expect him to deliver an explanation of how he learned to stop worrying and love the MP3. Instead, he launches into a rant about a creature that resembles a misshapen bowling ball.

"There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo," he says in a raspy tenor. "It was in Li'l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That's what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo.

"It was only a couple of years ago that we said, What's going on here?' Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?" Morris sighs. "People never really understand what's happening to the artists. All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven't paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go," he says. "That's what happened to the record business."

Morris goes on to rail against criminal-minded college students and low-life punks who steal the music that his artists work so hard to create. He admits to being fairly ignorant about technology and insists that his job is to nurture the creative side of the business — work that's being threatened by all of this other nonsense.

So how is it that an old-school music mogul who can barely hide his indifference to technology or his contempt for the download-loving public is out front on so many digital initiatives? Clearly, it's not because he wants to improve the music experience for consumers. It's also not because he finally understands that MP3s are fundamentally changing his business, whether he likes it or not. And if he's "invigorated and challenged by the opportunities of digital music," as Caraeff puts it, that's only because he relishes a fight. In truth, his motive is simple: He wants to wring every dollar he can out of anyone who goes anywhere near his catalog. Morris has never accepted the digital world's ruling ethos that it's better to follow the smartest long-term strategy, even if it means near-term losses. As far as he's concerned, do that and someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you. Morris wants to be paid now, not in some nebulous future. And if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's use the size of his company to get his way.

The problem is that a strategy based on quick returns is unlikely to pull the music industry out of its morass. After all, it was a reluctance to look farther down the road that got the labels in trouble in the first place. But Morris is much less interested in figuring out how to make digital music work for everyone than he is in not being the Shmoo.

Today, the Big Four record companies — Universal, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI — are all enormous corporations. Together they account for nearly 90 percent of recorded music sales in the US. Not surprisingly, their CEOs tend to be career executives. Edgar Bronfman Jr., CEO of Warner Music, previously headed the Seagram Company. Rolf Schmidt-Holz, CEO of Sony BMG since 2006, used to run the German public television station WDR. Until recently, EMI was run by Eric Nicoli, who spent 19 years at United Biscuits.

Morris, on the other hand, is a bona fide music man. He started out as a songwriter, penning "Sweet Talkin' Guy," a modest hit for the Chiffons in 1966. In 1970, he launched his own label, Big Tree Records, and later produced "Smokin' in the Boy's Room," Brownsville Station's 1973 teen anthem. Morris joined Atlantic Records in 1980, where he went on to oversee the production and distribution of artists like Snoop Dogg, Tori Amos, and Hootie and the Blowfish. He became chair and CEO of Atlantic's parent company, Warner Music US, in 1994.

When Morris took over at Universal Music Group (then called MCA Music Entertainment Group) after leaving Warner in 1995, he recruited producers who shared his devotion to finding and signing great artists — guys like Jimmy Iovine, who today runs UMG's Interscope Geffen A&M Records division, and Antonio "L.A." Reid, who runs its Island Def Jam Music Group. Under Morris' leadership, Universal captured more than 30 percent of the US market; today it sells more music than Warner and EMI combined. The many labels operating under the UMG umbrella represent artists from Elton John to Eminem, Lil Wayne to Loretta Lynn, Wet Wet Wet to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Morris' ascent coincided with the rise of CDs — the biggest boon the music business has ever known. According to industry figures, from the early 1970s through the late 1980s the total number of albums (in all formats) shipped each year in the US hovered around 650 million. In 1992, CD sales reached 400 million; six years later they hit 800 million. By 2000, more than 900 million CDs were being shipped each year. Many of those were back-catalog purchases, as music fans converted to the format that seemed destined to make all others extinct.

The rise of compact discs (like the rise of cassette tapes before them) demonstrated the market appeal of flexibility and convenience. CDs weren't a hit because they had the best audio fidelity; that honor still belongs to vinyl records. Rather, they gave consumers more control over the listening experience. If you wanted to replay your favorite song (or skip a crappy one), you didn't have to bother with delicately moving a phonograph arm or engaging in a frustrating rewind-stop-play-stop-rewind tango with your tape player. Everyone came out a winner. "The record companies minted money," one major-label exec told me. "We made huge margins off CDs. We'll never have those margins again."

Easy profits ended up blinding the industry to the threat of MP3s. Throughout the '90s, a handful of insiders warned of the need to get out in front of digital music, but for the most part they were ignored. The big corporations that had snapped up record labels in the '80s and '90s continued to focus on short-term financial results, even as it become amply clear that the advantages of CDs — control, convenience, durability, flexibility — were even more pronounced with digital files. "There's this mentality of always needing to make the numbers for the next quarter," says Ted Cohen, a former exec at EMI and Warner Bros., now managing partner at the consulting firm TAG Strategic. "It kept me up at night. Some of us could see that something needed to be done, but no one wanted to do anything that wouldn't maximize profit for that quarter."

Morris was as myopic as anyone. Today, when he complains about how digital music created a completely new way of doing business, he actually sounds angry. "This business had been the same for 25 years," he says. "The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy — to make a product that anybody liked."

And that's what Morris, and everyone else, continued to focus on. "The record labels had an opportunity to create a digital ecosystem and infrastructure to sell music online, but they kept looking at the small picture instead of the big one," Cohen says. "They wouldn't let go of CDs." It was a serious blunder, considering that MP3s clearly had the potential to break the major labels' lock on distribution channels. Instead of figuring out a way to exploit the new medium, they alternated between ignoring it and launching lawsuits against the free file-sharing networks that cropped up to fill the void.

Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me." Morris' almost willful cluelessness is telling. "He wasn't prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology," says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. "He just doesn't have that kind of mind."

In spite of Morris' early resistance to digital music, in August Blender magazine ranked him fourth on its Powergeek 25, a list of what the publication calls "the rockingest nerds on the Net." Morris is the only record exec on the list, and he was placed above such digital pioneers as the founders of Last.fm, the head of technology at LimeWire, and the VP of music programming at Rhapsody.

Morris' ranking is recognition of the fact that Universal has been aggressively muscling new digital initiatives onto the market. In addition to the licensing deals with Yahoo and YouTube and the dollar-a-Zune deal with Microsoft, the company has had undeniable success in selling mastertones, high-quality ringtones made directly from the original song recordings. Akon, a Universal artist, holds the current all-time mastertone sales record at 11 million copies. 50 Cent, also with Universal, held the previous record with 10.5 million. Last year, while the largest portion of Universal's digital sales came from iTunes, the second-, third-, and fourth-biggest digital revenue generators were all cell phone companies.

Universal is also experimenting with the subscription-based plans that many — including the new cohead of Columbia Records, Rick Rubin — see as the wave of the future. The idea is to charge customers a fixed monthly fee (which could get tacked onto their cell phone, cable, or Internet bill) in return for access to unlimited music from a given label and, say, the opportunity to hear new recordings a week before their general release. Morris is currently championing a version called Total Music.

Finally, there's the company's move to sell select songs DRM-free. Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and several other online retailers are currently offering MP3 downloads of Universal recordings. Unlike those sold by the iTunes Store, the files can be duplicated at will. (They do contain a watermark, presumably so Universal can track how many end up on peer-to-peer networks.) Of all Universal's digital efforts, this is probably the most significant, as it finally delivers legitimate files in a format that works on any device or computer. "It's surprising to see Universal out in front of new initiatives," says Mike Paxton, an analyst at the market research firm In-Stat. "But I hesitate to really give them credit for being groundbreakers. They're not too forward-thinking."

Paxton's hesitation is justified. Over the years, the label has for the most part used its market power to squeeze money out of others' ideas. And its current moves — DRM-free songs and the Total Music subscription service — aren't about serving consumers, at least not principally. They're aimed at taking on Steve Jobs and, specifically, limiting the power of iTunes.

As Steven Levy writes in The Perfect Thing, his 2006 book about the iPod, when Apple was trying to start iTunes as an online music store it had trouble convincing the major labels to offer up their music. Apple managed it only after Jobs launched a charm offensive against Morris. According to Levy, a big factor in his success was Jobs' assurance that, since it was limited to Macs, iTunes could affect, at most, 5 percent of the market. (iTunes for Windows came out in 2003.)Whatever the promises, once the mighty Universal signed on, everyone else followed.

With the record companies on board, Jobs did something remarkable: He turned the labels' demand for bulletproof DRM into a way of locking up the retail end of the online market. Jobs argued that in order to make Apple's DRM software, called FairPlay, effective, it had to be proprietary — and since Jobs won't license FairPlay, tracks sold on iTunes can be played only on iPods. (Similarly, the iPod won't play DRM-encoded files purchased through other retailers.) This lack of interoperability, combined with the iPod's overwhelming dominance, gave Apple a stranglehold on the digital music marketplace. And Jobs got to be the good guy with consumers, blaming the mess on the music industry's pigheaded insistence on DRM.

When I suggest to Morris that the labels gave Jobs license to create what was in effect an Apple Walkman that played only Apple cassettes, it's Caraeff who answers. "Looking back, the best thing we could have done would have been to mandate one format," he says. So why didn't that happen? Morris is happy to field this one. "It never crossed anyone's mind!" he exclaims. "We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you're wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income."

Those cuffs get tighter every day. This year, 22 percent of all music sold in the US will move through iTunes. "If iTunes gets up to 40 or 50 percent, they'll have too much power for anyone else to enter the business," says James McQuivey, who analyzes the digital music industry for Forrester Research. If the labels want out, they have two choices: Find a way to unseat the iPod or allow iTunes' competitors to sell unprotected files that can play on Apple's ubiquitous device.

Morris is determined to do whatever it takes. In July, reports surfaced that Universal would not renew its sweeping contract with Apple. From now on, Morris said, UMG labels would selectively choose which songs (or albums or artists) were sold on iTunes, rather than granting blanket access to the entire catalog. Then, in August, he announced the plan to offer DRM-free tracks through non-Apple retailers. Finally, in October, details about Total Music started to trickle out.

Total Music is designed to unify Apple's competitors in what amounts to a coordinated attack on the iPod. The details are far from finalized, but in Morris' conception a Total Music subscription would come pre-installed on devices like the Zune, the Sony PlayStation, or a mobile phone. Universal is well aware of the difficulty of convincing consumers to pay for music subscriptions, so Morris wants the devicemakers to pony up the cash themselves, either by shelling out for a six-month introductory offer or by assuming the cost forever. This would be money well spent, Morris argues, because it would help the Microsofts of the world eat into the iPod's market share. He has already hammered out preliminary agreements with Warner and Sony BMG and has met with executives at Microsoft and several wireless carriers. If Morris is able to make Total Music a reality, he will once again have succeeded in bending the industry to his will — in this case, by using the combined catalogs of the major labels to help establish a true competitor to the iPod. After all, why buy an iPod if a Zune will give you songs for free?

Unfortunately, Total Music will almost certainly require some form of DRM, which in the end will perpetuate the interoperability problem. Morris likely doesn't care. He is more committed to Total Music — or any other plan that allows protection — than he is to a future where music can truly be played across any platform, at any time. "Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly," he says. "We need to protect the music. I know that."

The irony is that if he decides to base his plans around DRM, Morris will be missing the larger truth that has propelled his business for the past 30 years. Ultimately, it's convenience and ease of use that drive new media formats. That's why cassettes made inroads against records, why CDs killed them both, and why MP3s are well on their way to burying CDs. Morris is right when he says music is more popular than ever, but he's wrong to assume that will automatically lead to higher profits for the major labels. "Locking things up is actually good for piracy," says David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, an online retailer that sells DRM-free songs from independent labels. In other words, the more restrictions you put on your files, the more you encourage customers to turn to illegal services to get songs the way they want them.

Back in his dining room, Morris is incredulous. He's once again talking about how his job should simply be finding and breaking new acts. The problem, he says, is that "there's sympathy for the consumer, and the record industry is the Shmoo."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...5-12/mf_morris





Record Labels' Bigger Issue is Replacing CD Sales
Troy Wolverton

In the end, the long battle by the record labels against unrestricted digital music may have been little more than sound and fury signifying nothing.

At least, that's how it's starting to appear now that two of the major labels in recent months have embraced in some fashion the MP3 format, which has no copy protection. The early returns from those moves indicate they've had little impact on the industry's fortunes - for better or for worse.

Instead, the moves highlight a bigger problem. And that is how the labels are going to replace sales of CD albums, which constituted the core of their business and have plummeted in recent years.

"These are ailing businesses on their last legs," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a market research company focused on digital media. The question of copy protection on song downloads "matters a whole lot less to them than it once did."

For years, the major record labels fought a pitched battle against the MP3 format. The format doesn't allow for any copy restrictions, which made it a popular choice for songs swapped on illicit file-trading sites such as the original Napster and Morpheus.

To combat such piracy, the major labels insisted online stores that sold music had to wrap songs and albums in digital rights management (DRM) technology, which can restrict the number of copies users can make of a song or the number and types of devices it can be played on.

But online music and electronics vendors complained that such restrictions were limiting sales, in part because not all formats worked on every type of player.

In the past year, the music labels have become increasingly receptive to those arguments. In April, EMI announced it would make its entire catalog available for sale in DRM-free formats. In August, Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording company allowed the sale of a significant portion of its catalog in the MP3 format.

The labels' moves have opened up competition in the digital music space. In September, Amazon.com launched a digital music store, featuring only MP3 tracks. Meanwhile other, older digital music vendors, including iTunes and Wal-Mart's Web store, added DRM-free tracks.

Because those songs lack DRM, they can be played on just about any digital music device.

Although it's still early, DRM-free music seems to have had, at best, a slight positive benefit to the music industry.

Sales of DRM-free music to date have "outperformed" EMI's expectations, and Wal-Mart has seen its MP3 sales grow "considerably" since August, when its Web store made them available, representatives for the two companies said. However, neither they nor other labels or Web stores disclosed specific sales results.

Overall, the number of digital songs sold each week seems to have been unaffected by the launch of the major DRM-free stores since May, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital song sales - both of tracks with and without DRM - are in the same range after May as they were in the weeks before DRM-free sales started.

But that's small consolation for an industry whose wholesale revenue in the United States was down 11 percent in the first half of this year, according to IFPI, the industry's global trade group. That's on top of declines in retail sales in six out of the past seven years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Even if the effect has been questionable, some analysts think that eventually all the labels will sell DRM-free music.

"The writing on the wall, for the most part, is here for DRM," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director for Jupiter Research.

But not yet. Universal and Warner are still just experimenting with DRM-free music, and Sony BMG isn't even doing that much, analysts note.

"The marketplace will likely dictate how companies will move forward with respect to the protection of their product," said Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels.

Meanwhile, as Garland and other analysts note, the industry has a bigger problem. Consumers used to buy CDs for $10 or $15 a pop. Increasingly, they're buying songs at about $1 apiece instead. So, even if transactions continue to increase, the industry is seeing far less money each time consumers buy and it's having a difficult time making up the difference.

"They can't stick with this model with the weighted costs that they have," said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner, an industry research group.

By potentially encouraging more music sales, moving to MP3s may be one piece of the answer to the industry's problem, analysts say. But it's not the only one.

Instead, the industry's going to have to explore other ideas, including advertising-supported music, promotional relationships and subscriptions.

"There is no one silver bullet solution," Garland said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com//ci_7490437





Year-End 2007: Darknet Assumptions Still True
Fred von Lohmann

Princeton's Professor Ed Felten (full disclosure: he's an EFF board member) in a recent post on his blog reminds us that one of the core "Darknet premises" -- that DRM systems on mass media content will inevitably be broken -- continues to prove itself true. The victim this year, AACS:

We’ve been following, off and on, the steady meltdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the next-generation DVD systems. By this point, Hollywood has released four generations of AACS-encoded discs, each encrypted with different secret keys; and the popular circumvention tools can still decrypt them all. The industry is stuck on a treadmill: they change keys every ninety days, and attackers promptly reverse-engineer the new keys and carry on decrypting discs.

One thing that has changed is the nature of the attackers. In the early days, the most effective reverse engineers were individuals, communicating by email and pseudonymous form posts. Their efforts resulted in rough but workable circumvention tools. In recent months, though, circumvention has gone commercial, with Slysoft, an Antigua-based maker of DVD-reader software, taking the lead and offering more polished tools for reading and ripping AACS discs.

To many who follow DRM issues closely, this is hardly news; the regular breaking of DRM systems, followed by the steady leak of formerly-protected content into file-sharing channels, is now so common that it barely rates a mention in the tech press.

But copyright policy-makers still haven't gotten the message (hey, policy-maker: DRM does not slow piracy!!). Whether they get the message or not, this steadily mounting pile of empirical evidence continues to show that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (i.e., "thou shalt not circumvent DRM") are a failure if the goal was to impede digital infringement. At the same time, of course, the DMCA continues to be a valuable tool for rightsholders who want to use DRM to impede competition, innovation, and free speech.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11...ons-still-true





Hot Image Your PC's Hard Drive with DriveImage XML

You don't need a complicated boot CD or expensive software to create a restorable system disk image for your PC: free utility DriveImage XML can save a full, working snapshot of your Windows hard drive while you work on it. (That's hot.) When your PC crashes and burns or just slows down over time, the best insurance you can have is a mirror image of your operating system, complete with drivers, user settings, software applications, and documents in one place. A while back we covered how to partition and image your Windows hard drive using the Linux-based System Recovery Boot CD, a process that involves command line work, disk-burning, rebooting, and video driver wrangling. With DiskImage XML, imaging your PC's hard drive is a matter of a few clicks, no reboots required.

Let's check it out.

Create a New System Image

First, download DriveImage XML for free and install it as usual. You can store your system image anywhere you'd like, but I highly recommend saving it on a disk other than the one you're imaging. So if you plan to image your C: drive, purchase an external hard drive to store C:'s image, or right after you create the image, burn the files to CD or DVD. This way if your C: drive fails or breaks, you still have your image available on a separate physical disk.

When you launch DriveImage XML (DiX), click on the "Backup" button on the lower left of the screen. It will scan your PC and list all the hard drives connected to your system. To image your C: drive (most likely your system's primary, active disk), select it and click the Next button to launch DriveImage XML's backup wizard. Click Next again to set where DiX should save your image, and a few additional options, as shown.

The settings here will affect how large your image file is and how it can be restored. Here's a rundown of what each does.

• Raw mode. In "raw mode," DriveImage XML makes a sector by sector copy of your drive, including unused space. This means your image file will be the same exact size of the drive, and it can only be restored to a drive of that same exact size. For most home use situations, leave this box unchecked. (There's no sense in backing up blank disk space.)

• Split large files. If you plan to burn your disk image to CDs or DVDs, select "Split large files," which will break your image file down into smaller chunks. This way you can easily save them to smaller-sized disks later on. If "Split large files" is NOT checked, you'll get one giant image file, either as large as the disk itself or as large as the used space on the disk (depending on whether "Raw mode" is enabled.)

• Compressed. If space on your destination drive is at a premium, select the "Compressed" option to make your image file up to 40% smaller than in normal mode. Compression will slow down the imaging process, but it will help save on disk space.

• Hot Imaging Strategy. The hot part of DriveImage XML is that it can image your drive while you work but that means that files you're using while it does its thing have to be locked to be copied correctly. DiX will try two strategies: locking the drive entirely (if you're not using the computer and saving files), or using Windows' built-in Volume Shadow Services to get the last saved state of the drive. Leaving this at the default "Try Volume Locking first" is fine for home use.

Click the Next button to start creating the drive image file. Depending on the speed of your computer, and the size of your hard drive (and amount of used space), this process can take a significant amount of time. Consider starting it before you leave your computer for the evening, or during your lunch break. DriveImage XML will keep a running counter of how much time it's been copying the disk and how much time is left until it completes, as shown.

DiX isn't fast, especially if you've got a lot of data to image. On the spare PC where I ran DiX, about 12GB of used space took about 35 minutes to image. When the imaging process is complete, you'll have two types of files stored on the destination: a single .XML file (hence DriveImage XML's name), and either one or several .DAT files (depending on whether or not you selected "Split large files.") The .XML file is a list of all the files in the image. The .DAT file(s) contain the actual image data. Here's what the file listing on my external drive looks like, once my image was complete.

Once you've saved a system image, you can use it in three ways: to restore individual files from their saved state; to restore your PC back to the exact state it was when you saved the image, or to make an exact copy of the drive to another partition or hard drive.

Browse and Restore Individual Files

To view and copy files contained within an image to your PC, click on the Browse button on the lower left of the DriveImage XML window, and click "Load Image." Then select the .XML file for the image you saved. (Remember, every image has exactly one .XML file associated with it.) DiX will read the .XML listing and display all the files contained within the image, as shown.

Navigate the folder tree as usual, and right-click any file to view it, launch it using its associated application, or extract it (restore it to your current PC setup.) You can also right-click on an entire folder like "My Documents" and choose "Extract" (or press Ctrl+S) to copy it to your current PC setup.

Perform a Complete System Restore

If your computer's hard drive crashed entirely, you can restore it to its past state using the DiX image you created. Restoring an image to a target disk will delete everything on the disk and copy the contents of the image to it. That means you cannot restore an image to a drive you're already using (because you can't delete the contents of a disk already in use). So if you booted up your computer on your C: drive, you can't restore an image to your C: drive. You need access to the target drive as a secondary disk. There are a few ways to do this. You can install the target drive as a slave in another PC in addition to its primary boot drive, or you can buy a hard drive enclosure and connect the target as an external drive.

Either way, to restore a disk image to a drive you intend to boot from, you'll need:

1. A PC running DriveImage XML
2. The saved disk image files, whether they're on CD, DVD, on the host PC or on an external drive
3. A target drive with a partition at least the size of the drive image files. (You can use Windows built-in Disk Management console or your partition manager of choice to create a new partition to restore to.)

To start the restore process, in DriveImage XML, click on the Restore button, then click the Next button, which will launch the drive restore wizard. From there, select the .XML file associated with the image, and then select the target drive. (Remember, the target drive must be an existing partition that's the same size or larger than the image, and it must not be the active system drive.) All files will be deleted from the target drive on restore, so be double sure there's nothing there you need to save. Like the image creation process, Dix will display a progress bar and estimated time as it restores the image to the drive.

Once the image has been copied and restored onto the target drive, you'll have to make that drive the active, boot partition for your PC to start using it. Either install the disk back into your PC, or use the Disk Management Console to set the target partition as "Active" and reboot your PC. Alternately, you can create a bootable Windows CD with DriveImage XML on it. Here's more on DriveImage XML on a BartPE bootable CD.

More DiX Actions

You can also copy an entire existing partition to another blank partition without making an image at all, using DiX's Drive to Drive feature. (This could be useful to make a full copy of a data partition, for example.) Finally, you can schedule regular disk image operations using Windows Task Scheduler and Dix command line options. For more on that, in DiX's Help file, under the Feature folder, see "Task Scheduler."

Comparison to Commercial Alternatives, and Why DriveImage XML is Not Quite Time Machine for Windows

Commercial software that retails betweens $50 and $70, like Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage, do exactly what DiX does for free. However, DiX does NOT do incremental images like most commercial products and Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine does. Every time you create an image it's a full and complete backup of the disk, which means that regularly scheduled imaging can eat up hard drive space fast.

Also, DiX's image files aren't browse-able using Windows Explorer, the way Mac users can explore Time Machine's backups using the Finder. However, the developers say that DiX is not necessarily required to restore files from the images it creates. The .XML file is not proprietary and readable by any program out to do so, and the image file itself is just all your files squashed into one big .DAT file. The .XML file acts as a map to the .DAT file, and if DiX wasn't around, in theory other programs would be able to grok it pretty easily. Which is nice, but still not as transparent as Time Machine's backup files.
Video Demonstration

Finally, if you haven't had enough of DriveImageXML, here's a video tutorial on using it, posted by its makers on YouTube.
http://lifehacker.com/software/featu...xml-326086.php





Roast beasts

FBI ‘Bot Roast II: 1 Million Infected PCs, $20 Million in Losses and 8 Indictments
Layer 8

The Federal Bureau of Investigation today revealed the second phase of its Operation ‘Bot Roast’ netted eight individuals that have been indicted, pled guilty, or been sentenced for crimes related to botnet activity.

Additionally, 13 search warrants were served in the U.S. and by overseas law enforcement partners in connection with the operation, the FBI said. This ongoing effort has thus far uncovered more than $20 million in economic loss and more than one million victim computers.

The botherders identified by the FBI as part of Bot Roast II are as follows:

• Ryan Brett Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pennsylvania, was indicted on 11/01/07 by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for botnet related activity which caused a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of this investigation the FBI was able to neutralize a vast portion of the criminal botnet by disrupting the botnet’s ability to communicate with other botnets. In doing so, it reduced the risk for infected computers to facilitate further criminal activity. This investigation continues as more individuals are being sought.

• Adam Sweaney, 27, of Tacoma, Washington, pled guilty on September 24, 2007 in U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, to a one count felony violation for conspiracy fraud and related activity in connection with computers. He conspired with others to send tens of thousands of email messages during a one-year period. In addition, Sweaney surreptitiously gained control of hundreds of thousands of bot controlled computers. Sweaney would then lease the capabilities of the compromised computers to others who launched spam and DDoS attacks.

• Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida, was indicted on 11/27/07 by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Florida for his involvement in botnet related activity involving coding and adware schemes. This investigation is being conducted by the U.S. Secret Service.

• Alexander Dmitriyevich Paskalov, 38, multiple U.S. addresses, was sentenced on 10/12/2007 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida, and received 42 months in prison for his participation in a significant and complex phishing scheme that targeted a major financial institution in the Midwest and resulted in multi-million dollar losses.

• Azizbek Takhirovich Mamadjanov, 21, residing in Florida, was sentenced in June 2007 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida, to 24 months in prison for his part in the same Midwest bank phishing scheme as Paskalov. Paskalov established a bogus company and then opened accounts in the names of the bogus company. The phishing scheme in which Paskolov and Mamadjanov participated targeted other businesses and electronically transferred substantial sums of money into their bogus business accounts. Immigrations Customs Enforcement, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the Panama City Beach Police Department were active partners in this investigation.

• John Schiefer, 26, of Los Angeles, California, agreed to plead guilty on 11/8/2007 in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, to a four felony count criminal information. A well-known member of the botnet underground, Schiefer used malicious software to intercept Internet communications, steal usernames and passwords, and defraud legitimate businesses. Schiefer transferred compromised communications and usernames and passwords and also used them to fraudulently purchase goods for himself. This case was the first time in the U.S. that someone has been charged under the federal wiretap statute for conduct related to botnets.

• Gregory King, 21, of Fairfield, California, was indicted on 9/27/2007 by a federal grand jury in the Central District of California on four counts of transmission of code to cause damage to a protected computer. King allegedly conducted DDoS attacks against various companies including a web based company designed to combat phishing and malware.

• Jason Michael Downey, 24, of Dry Ridge, Kentucky, was sentenced on 10/23/2007 in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, to 12 months in prison followed by probation, restitution, and community service for operating a large botnet that conducted numerous DDoS attacks that resulted in substantial damages. Downey operated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network Rizon. Downey stated that most of the attacks he committed were on other IRC networks or on the people that operated them. Downey’s targets of DDoS often resided on shared servers which contained other customer’s data. As a result of DDoS to his target, innocent customers residing on the same physical server also fell victim to his attacks. One victim confirmed financial damages of $19,500 as a result of the DDoS attacks.

“Today, botnets are the weapon of choice of cyber criminals. They seek to conceal their criminal activities by using third party computers as vehicles for their crimes. In Bot Roast II, we see the diverse and complex nature of crimes that are being committed through the use of botnets,” said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. “Despite this enormous challenge, we will continue to be aggressive in finding those responsible for attempting to exploit unknowing Internet users.”

A botherder can gain control of computers by unleashing malicious software such as viruses, worms, or trojan horses. By executing a simple task such as opening an attachment, clicking on an advertisement, or providing personal information to a phishing site (a fraudulent site that mimics a legitimate site), an individual computer user has unintentionally allowed unauthorized access. Bot operators will then typically use these compromised computers as vehicles to facilitate other actions such as commit identity theft, launch denial of service attacks, and install keystroke loggers.

In June the Department of Justice and FBI announced Operation Bot Roast and at that time said ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22413





Sent home to mum

NZealand Questions Top Cyber Suspect
Ray Lilley

Police questioned the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said.

Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police raided the home of the 18-year-old in the North Island city of Hamilton and took him into custody along with several computers, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center.

He was later released without charge after being questioned, though police said he was still part of the investigation.

The case is part of an international crackdown on hackers who allegedly assume control of thousands of computers and amass them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets. The hackers can then use the computers to steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry computers, authorities say.

Eight people have been indicted, pleaded guilty or have been convicted since the investigation started in June. Thirteen additional warrants have been served in the U.S. and overseas in the investigation.

The FBI estimates that more than one million computers have been infected and puts the combined economic losses at more than $20 million.

The New Zealander, known by his cyber identification as ''AKILL,'' was ''head of an international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers round the world with their malicious software,'' Kleintjes told National Radio.

Kleintjes told The Associated Press the teenager, whose name was not released because he was under 18 when the alleged offenses began, was cooperating with investigators in telling them how the crime system works.

''We have seized a number of computers and are talking with him,'' he said. ''We are going for evidence and the case will develop from there. We're still in the early stages of the investigation.''

Detective Inspector Peter Devoy, the senior investigator in the case, said the youth was later released after questioning and had not been charged. Further investigation of the youth's seized computers could lead to international inquiries, he said.

Kleintjes said possible charges against the teen could involve having unauthorized access to computers and possessing computer hacking tools -- charges that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Spybot and botnet are jargon for infiltrating a group of computers and infecting them with malicious software that allows them to be used to collect information -- mainly credit card and bank account details.

Kleintjes said the New Zealander had written software that evaded normal computer spyware systems, then sold his skills to hackers.

''He is very bright and very skilled in what he's doing,'' Kleintjes said. ''He hires his services out to others.''

Earlier this month, Ryan Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pa., was indicted in the case. Authorities allege that the New Zealand suspect and Goldstein were involved in crashing a University of Pennsylvania engineering school server Feb. 23, 2006.

Officials said that the server, which typically handles about 450 daily requests for Internet downloads, instead got 70,000 requests from the account of an unsuspecting Penn student over four days. Over time, the FBI followed an electronic trail from that student's account to Goldstein's screen name, ''Digerati,'' and the New Zealand hacker.

The crash briefly shut down computers at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, but did relatively little damage, university spokesman Ron Ozio said.

Goldstein has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail while awaiting a trial set for March 10.

He faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted of the single count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud.

''We feel the charges are inflated,'' defense lawyer Ronald Levine said Thursday. ''We think this is kind of an exaggerated case.''

Goldstein did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press on his cell phone and his parents' home in Ambler. He remains enrolled at Penn, according to Ozio, who said he could not comment on possible disciplinary action.

------

AP writer Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report
http://www.adn.com/24hour/nation/sto...13240928c.html





Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere
Christopher Drew

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

The House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts.

The House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, and the original sponsor of the bill, Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, said it would require hundreds of counties with paperless machines to install backup paper trails by the presidential election next year while giving most states until 2012 to upgrade their machines further.

Critics of the machines said that some of the measures would be just stopgaps and that the California reports showed that security problems needed to be addressed more urgently.

The California reports said the scientists, acting at the state’s request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.

Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.

The reports said the investigators had created situations for each system “in which these weaknesses could be exploited to affect the correct recording, reporting and tallying of votes.”

Voting experts said the review could prompt the California secretary of state, Debra Bowen, to ban the use of some of the machines in the 2008 elections unless extra security precautions were taken and the election results were closely audited.

Matthew A. Bishop, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who led the team that tried to compromise the machines, said his group was surprised by how easy it was not only to pick the physical locks on the machines, but also to break through the software defenses meant to block intruders.

Professor Bishop said that all the machines had problems and that one of the biggest was that the manufacturers appeared to have added the security measures after the basic systems had been designed.

By contrast, he said, the best way to create strong defenses is “to build security in from the design, in Phase 1.”

The reports also said the investigators had found possible problems not only with computerized touch-screen machines, but also with optical scanning systems and broader election-management software.

Professor Bishop and state officials cautioned that the tests had not taken into account the security precautions that are increasingly found in many election offices. Limits on access to the voting systems and other countermeasures could have prevented some intrusions, Professor Bishop and the officials said.

Industry executives said that the tests had not been conducted in a realistic environment and that no machine was known to have been hacked in an election. The executives said they would present more detailed responses on Monday at a public hearing.

Ms. Bowen said yesterday that it was vital for California to have secure machines for its presidential primary in February. She said she would announce by next Friday what actions she would take.

The findings could reverberate in Washington, where the full House still has to vote on the measure and the Senate plans to take up a similar bill this year.

Concerned about security, House and Senate Democratic leaders said they wanted to require a shift to paper ballots and other backup records to increase confidence that votes would be accurately counted.

State and local officials have argued that it is too late to make many of the changes without creating chaos next year. Advocates for the blind and other disabled voters say better equipment needs to be developed to enable them to vote without help from poll workers, as federal law requires.

In trying to balance all the concerns, Mr. Hoyer and Mr. Holt decided to delay the most sweeping change, a requirement that every ballot be cast on an individual durable piece of paper, from next year to 2012.

To ensure that all machines would have some paper backup, they agreed to require hundreds of counties in 20 states to add cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen machines for 2008 and 2010. New York, which has delayed replacing its lever machines, would have to buy a new system by November 2008.

Advocates for the disabled praised the compromise. For many disabled people to vote independently, the advocates said, the touch-screen machines need to be modified to include audio files that can read back the completed ballots, while the ballot-marking devices used with the optical scanning systems have to be changed to feed ballots automatically.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, a group that helped broker the deal, said the bill offered hope for an end to “unaccountable, unverifiable and inaccessible voting.”

Mr. Holt said the measure could “keep the country from going through another election where Americans doubt the results.”

Critics say the California findings suggest that Congress should press for a quicker shift from the touch screens to optical scanning, in which voters mark paper ballots. Advocates of those systems say that the paper ballots would be less vulnerable to manipulation than the paper trails generated by the touch-screen computers and that they would hold up better for manual recounts.
http://infowars.net/articles/july200...Scientists.htm





JPL Scientists Stand Up To Government For Right To Privacy
Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Next week 28 NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientists (including William Banerdt, a project scientist on the Mars rover program) will fight for their right to privacy in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. They are fighting against Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 (HSPD-12) that President Bush issued in August 2004. Policies resulting from the directive requires all federal employees and contractors to "voluntarily" (JPL employees would be terminated immediately for non-compliance) sign a form allowing the government the right to investigate them "without limit" for two years- even if they leave government work during that time. The directive is meant to confirm the identity of all government employees and give them new high-tech badges, the JPL scientists say they have gone too far.

The Union for Concerned Scientists have submitted briefs of amicus curiae in support of the plaintiffs:

UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] is concerned that the background investigations proposed by NASA are wide-ranging, highly personal, and unwarranted in light of the unclassified and non-sensitive nature of the Plaintiffs' work. While the investigations purportedly are intended to verify the Plaintiffs' identities...in fact the subjects covered by the investigations include a host of irrelevant and personal issues, including credit history, "personality conflict," physical and mental health and sexual orientation.

The process involves supplying the government names of people who can verify where an employee has lived for each address they have lived at in the last five years. The government asks these people to fill in a bubble form about the employees psychological stability, financial integrity, drug and alcohol consumption and character. All of this is done in the name of "protect[ing] personal privacy." But the 1984-esc "Newspeak" doesn't stop there.

UPDATE: NASA says that Shana Dale did not write the alleged memo (after the jump) and that the word "badge" is used throughout the official NASA website.

The JPL group has created a non-official website that offers people more information on the issue. It includes more of the double-speak. This example is allegedly from NASA Deputy Administer Shana Dale, a lawyer and government appointee.

Refer to the new badge only as a "new ID card"
Do not use these references: PIV, PIV-I, PIV-II, smart card, badge or credential;
Do not refer to any area of this program as "rigorous";
Refer to the program as "in response to HSPD-12"; and
The badging process may be referred as "badging process";.

The website goes to point out that, "Only a lawyer could devise a 'badging process' that results in no badges being issued."

The other example is the "mandatory" JPL Rideshare Survey which has no consequence of non-compliance, while the "voluntary" HSPD-12 carries a consequence of dismissal for non-compliance. The unofficial website states:

Doug Sanders of the JPL Ethics office states that it is voluntary because the definition of "voluntary" involves a choice, and here there is a choice between terminating employment and complying with HSPD-12. By this reasoning, handing over your wallet to a mugger also would be voluntary when he offers the choice of "your money or your life.

NASA is not the only agency to miss issuing the new cards to its employees by the original October 27th, 2007 deadline. According to a New York Times piece on the cards, no agency met the deadline- or even came close. JPL employees faced losing their job if they did not complete the re-badging process by October 27th, yet the Department of Energy has issued only five of the cards to their over 100,000 employees and contractors by that date. The other agencies had similarly missed the deadline by a large margin, with some, like the Department for Homeland Security itself, which got an extension from the Office of Management and Budget to 2010.

The Federal Computer Weekly's October 31, 2007 story adds:
Dan Stormer of Hadsell and Stormer, which represents the NASA scientists, said in a statement. “This is another egregious example of the Bush administration's assault on the constitution. Our clients are exemplary employees who have spent their work lives bettering this country. This shows the court will not stand by and let this attack on the right to privacy take place. This unlawful requirement allows unknown government officials to ask all manner of questions about people's personal lives, including their personal and mental state. It is exceptionally broad and completely unnecessary.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...cientists.html





Evolution Debate Led to Ouster, Official Says
AP

The state’s director of science curriculum said she resigned this month under pressure from officials who said she had given the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design.

The Texas Education Agency put the director, Chris Comer, on 30 days’ paid administrative leave in late October, resulting in what Ms. Comer called a forced resignation.

The move came shortly after she forwarded an e-mail message announcing a presentation by Barbara Forrest, an author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse.” The book argues that creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Ms. Comer sent the message to several people and a few online communities.

Ms. Comer, who held her position for nine years, said she believed evolution politics were behind her ousting. “None of the other reasons they gave are, in and of themselves, firing offenses,” she said.

Education agency officials declined to comment Wednesday on the matter. But they explained their recommendation to fire Ms. Comer in documents obtained by The Austin American-Statesman through the Texas Public Information Act.

“Ms. Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that T.E.A. endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” the officials said.

The agency documents say that officials recommended firing Ms. Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination.

The officials said forwarding the e-mail message conflicted with her job responsibilities and violated a directive that she not communicate with anyone outside the agency regarding a pending science curriculum review.

The documents criticize Ms. Comer for giving a presentation and attending an off-site meeting without approval. It also said she had complained that “there was no real leadership at the agency.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/us/30resign.html





Court Orders Bush Administration to Disclose Telecom Lobbying Ties. What About Senators?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won another significant legal battle, as a federal judge in California yesterday ordered the Bush administration to comply with EFF's FOIA demand and disclose documents revealing its "communications with telecommunications carriers and members of Congress" regarding efforts to amend FISA and provide amnesty to telecoms. Better still, the court imposed an extremely quick deadline for release of these documents -- December 10 -- so that "the public may participate in the debate over the pending legislation on an informed basis."

Needless to say, the Bush administration raised every argument it could to avoid having to disclose this information. These disclosures will reveal -- among other things -- which telecom lobbyists and other representatives were meeting with DNI Michael McConnell in order to secure telecom amnesty, as well as which members of Congress McConnell and other Bush officials privately lobbied. As an argument of last resort, the administration even proposed disclosing these documents on December 31 so that -- as EFF pointed out -- the information would be available only after Congress passed the new FISA bill. The court rejected every administration claim as to why it should not have to disclose these records.

It is vital that this information be publicly available. The administration is eager to have Congress bestow onto this industry an extraordinary gift, whereby the entire industry becomes retroactively immunized from the consequences of its past lawbreaking. The administration's primary spokesman on this issue is DNI McConnell, who continously invokes shrill national security warnings to justify this amnesty, though it is rarely mentioned that McConnell has more extensive ties to this industry than almost any other government official.

It should go without saying that Americans have the right to know which telecom companies have had doors opened for their lobbyists and executives at the highest levels of Bush's national security apparatus in order lobby Bush officials for this legislation (and which key Senators were privately targeted by McConnell). As the judge concluded, "the public interest will be served by expedited release of the requested records because it will further the FOIA's core purpose. . . ." (p. 10).

But all of this reasoning applies with equal force to those Senators who have been so instrumental in working on behalf of telecoms to keep amnesty in the FISA bill. As Ryan Singel of Wired first noted, the key amnesty proponent in the Senate, Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, has been the beneficiary of an enormous increase in contributions from the telecom industry this year, immediately preceding his extreme efforts (in tandem with Dick Cheney) on behalf of that industry to secure amnesty.

Additionally, telecoms have engaged in a massive bipartisan lobbying campaign to target key Senators to pressure them to support telecom amnesty. For exactly the reasons the court cited in compelling disclosure by the Bush administration of this information, it would be completely unconscionable for the Senators who are working the hardest to gift this industry with amnesty to conceal from Americans the extent to which they have communicated with these companies' lobbyists.

This morning, I called several of the Senators who have thus far been most instrumental in helping the telecom industry keep amnesty in the FISA bill: Senators Rockefeller, Feinstein and Whitehouse. The latter two Senators voted against stripping amnesty out of the FISA bill in both the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee (although both of them seem now to be attempting to work on a "Specter compromise" whereby telecoms would still be granted amnesty but the federal government would take their place as defendants). By e-mail, I also contacted the office of Sen. Reid, whose actions over the next couple of weeks will be crucial, perhaps dispositive, in determining the outcome of the efforts to keep amnesty out of the Senate bill.

I asked each of them for their reaction to the court ruling and specifically:
(1) Does the Senator agree with the federal court that the Bush administration should release this information to the public so that it can be considered as part of the debate over telecom amnesty?; and

(2) Will the Senator him/herself do the same and disclose the same information -- i.e., will s/he disclose with which telecom lobbyists and executives s/he has communicated regarding the pending FISA legislation?

The reason this information is so vital is because it shines the real light on what is going on, both with this bill and more generally with how our political system functions. Led by Bush officials, amnesty proponents have been engaged in a non-stop, Cheney-style fear-mongering campaign, trying to scare Americans into believing that they will be slaughtered by Terrorists unless telecoms are immunized from lawsuits arising out of their past lawbreaking.

The reality, of course, is that these telecoms are able to exert so much influence because of their huge donations and their ability to hire the most well-connected lobbyists from both parties. It very well may be that these donations and lobbying efforts have absolutely nothing at all to do with these Senators' eagerness to work on behalf of telecom amnesty. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Of course it's possible that these Senators on their own just developed a passionate, intense belief in the noble and just cause of bestowing this industry with immunity and that such a commitment is wholly independent from lobbying and donation activities.

But at the very least, if these Senators plan on giving this enormous and extremely rare gift to this industry, the public ought to know what dealings they have with this industry and their lobbyists -- just as the court compelled the Bush administration to disclose this information (EFF's summary of the court ruling is here). I'll post responses to these inquiries as I receive them.

UPDATE: From Sen. Feinstein's spokesman, Scott Gerber:
As for the district court ruling, the court has spoken.

Senator Feinstein or her staff has met with or spoken to organizations and individuals that have requested a meeting on this issue.

This includes:

* Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other plaintiffs;

* Defendants including Verizon and AT&T;

* Privacy and civil liberties groups; and

* Representatives from the Department of Justice and the Intelligence community.

She has also reached out to legal experts for their views on alternatives to immunity, including substitution.

This is an important issue, and Senator Feinstein is interested in the views of all sides of the debate.
That's quite a lot of meetings she had. It looks as though, at least thus far, she found the pro-amnesty arguments of Verizon, AT&T and "representatives from the Department of Justice and the Intelligence community" most persuasive.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...nion/greenwald





When Networks Collide: AT&T Suddenly Doesn't Like Apple so Much.
Robert X. Cringely

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson this week said what I have been saying since last July -- that Apple and AT&T would soon introduce an iPhone that works with AT&T's faster 3G wireless data network. I said it because I had heard last summer that AT&T was already testing 3G iPhones in Florida, but the better question is why Stephenson said it and why now? For AT&T, his announcement looks, frankly, stupid.

Here's a guy who is head of the largest telephone company in America and its largest mobile phone company. He has a five-year iPhone exclusive giving AT&T the number one selling U.S. smart phone and a huge generator of primo subscribers mainly poached from other carriers. Christmas is a month away and 1-2 million Americans have been planning to give -- or hoping to get -- an iPhone. So what does the guy do? He lets it slip that next year Apple will release a faster iPhone that will make the existing model obsolete. The only impact this can have on current iPhone sales is to stop them in their tracks, unless Apple offers a free 3G upgrade, which believe me they never intended to offer and may not.

So what's up? Was it a simple slip? Or is the guy so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize that with a few words he has probably deferred -- maybe forever -- at least a million new customers worth to Wall Street at least $1 billion in market cap for his company?

I don't think Stephenson's statement was by accident and I don't think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York. He came to the turf of his "partner" and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn't really need Apple despite the iPhone's success.

It's one thing to have a private disagreement between companies but quite another to take it public in a way that costs real money.

What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T's discovery that -- as I have predicted for weeks -- Apple will be joining Google in bidding. AT&T thought its five-year "exclusive" iPhone agreement with Apple would have precluded such a bid, but that just shows how poorly Randall Stephenson understood Steve Jobs. Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.

To his credit, Stephenson took the dispute to the streets this way, showing he isn't intimidated by Jobs. It was a bold and rare response for big business and was definitely unexpected by Cupertino, which won't underestimate AT&T again.

I'm not privy to any inside details here, but there are two ways I can see Jobs rationalizing his auction position and they aren't necessarily exclusive. He could claim to intend the 700-MHz auction participation as a pure investment, just a good use for the $30+ billion Apple has squirreled away.

Nah.

Or Jobs could tell AT&T that Apple is investing solely in a DATA network for which it has no voice ambitions. Maybe all MacBooks will soon get 700-MHz access cards.

This excuse rings truer, but of course it would still be a scam on Steve's part.

It would not surprise me at all if this were the case and when the 700-MHz network is finally up and running Jobs claims astonishment that the most popular data application is Voice over IP, a direct competitor to AT&T Wireless. This may be part of the reason why Apple has been so slow approving third-party iPhone applications. Wouldn't your first application be a VoIP client?

Of course to this point Apple hasn't even said it will participate in the 700-MHz auction. Apple has said nothing at all on the subject. I said it and still believe it to be true. And I'd say Randall Stephenson's remarks this week pretty much confirm I was correct.

Now AT&T is going to have to decide whether it is worth $10+ billion to fight Apple, Google, and probable third and fourth partners by bidding, itself, for the spectrum, which it wouldn't otherwise have done.

A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services.

Yeah, right.

Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.

We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion.

The appearance of motion: it's sad, wouldn't you say, when this is what American business has come to.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2...29_003521.html





Verizon Wireless Says ‘Bring Your Own’ Device
Saul Hansell

Verizon Wireless has stunned the wireless world by announcing that by sometime next year it will open its network to “any apps, any device.”

There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.” The company went on to say:

While most Verizon Wireless customers prefer the convenience of full service, the company is listening through today’s announcement to a small but growing number of customers who want another choice without full service.

Verizon Wireless had several reasons to get ahead on unbundled access. If it didn’t do so, T-Mobile or Sprint would surely have taken the lead. And the move helps attract devices that could compete against the Apple iPhone.

The timing most certainly relates to the coming 700-megahertz spectrum auction. The government is selling off frequencies that had been used by UHF television — soon to be freed by the switch to digital broadcasting — that are seen as especially useful for mobile voice and data service. Google, which has said it will bid in this auction, has called for rules that would force carriers using the spectrum to open their networks to any device. Verizon’s move today is a way to head off that sort of mandate and open up on its own terms.

Most of all, it helps tweak the spreadsheet models of future revenue so Verizon can be confident in bidding for spectrum. Simply put, the more customers it can count on–either traditional or “bring your own” device–the more comfortable it can feel paying for bandwidth.

Interestingly, Ralph de la Vega, the chief executive of AT&T Mobility, spoke about the need for spectrum in a long interview with Engadget published yesterday.

I think the auction is very key because 700MHz is premium spectrum and our wireless company runs on spectrum. That’s the lifeblood of any wireless company. … We have seen the growth of the use of data, in particular with devices like the iPhone. My take is that as more and more companies try to step up to that bar that Apple has established, they will produce maybe not exactly but very close to an Apple-compelling device that is going to drive more and more usage. And so, we have looked ahead and we probably don’t need that spectrum for several years, but we are bullish on the future of this business and what customers are going to do with these applications.

Mr. de la Vega also tried to portray AT&T as the network that gives customers the most options. “I’ve never called it open access,” he said. “I’d like to think of it as giving customers more choices about the devices and the applications that they want to run.”

With Verizon’s announcement today, AT&T and the other wireless carriers will have a lot more choices to consider.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1.../index.html?hp





Ottawa Opens Up Wireless Industry to More Competition
CBC News

The Conservative government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry.

About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada's big three providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus.

The government will also mandate roaming agreements, which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally. If a new carrier is unable to reach a "reasonable" roaming agreement with an existing provider, an outside arbitrator will be brought in, Industry Canada said.

The government is also forcing existing carriers to rent space on their cellphone towers to newcomers, again at "reasonable" rates, or risk having an arbitrator come in.

In handing down the rules, Industry Minister Jim Prentice gave potential newcomers, including Quebecor, MTS Allstream, Shaw and Eastlink, virtually everything they asked for.

Key numbers
Bell, Rogers and Telus wireless revenue: $11.8 billion (2006 data)
Cellphone subscribers in Canada: 19.3 million (Sept. 2007)

Prentice told a news conference that he agreed with their assessment that prices are too high and the wireless industry needs more competition. "Our goal at the end of the day is lower prices, better services, and more choices," he said.

Those who had been arguing for more competition were delighted with the ruling. "This is a grand slam for consumers," telecom analyst Eamon Hoey told CBC News. "It really puts a heavy knife into the oligopolic style of structure we've had in the cellular business."

Chris Peirce, chief regulatory officer of MTS Allstream, was pleased as well.

"They have really gotten their policy right and it's good to see they were able to resist the arguments" of the incumbents, he said.

But Liberal industry critic Scott Brison was not pleased. "There's no proof it will lead to lower prices," he argued, saying regulation would have been better. Brison said the auction decision will result in a $200-million windfall for the new entrants.

Lawson Hunter, executive vice-president and chief corporate officer of Bell, agreed with Brison and said the government was costing taxpayers money by subsidizing new entrants. The spectrum could go for up to 40 per cent less than what it would have if the auction were open to the highest bidder, he said.

"Basically you've sold an asset of Canada at well under market price."

He also said the auction rules were a direct reversal of the government's previous stance on the telecommunications market, which advocated deregulation and determination by market forces.

The other two major players were also disappointed by the announcement, with Telus saying that new companies are sufficiently large and have enough resources to bid in an auction without government aid.

Rogers head of regulatory affairs, Ken Engelhart, said the decision was about as bad as it could have been for the big three cellphone companies.

New entrants could launch by late 2008

The auction process is to begin on May 27, 2008, and is expected to last several weeks. Industry Canada expects new players will start up by the end of next year, at the earliest.

Attention will now turn to who the new bidders will be, with analysts expecting Quebecor, MTS, Shaw and Eastlink to enter the auction. Prentice said the amount of spectrum reserved for new entrants, or 40 megahertz, is enough to facilitate a new national carrier.

"It's reasonable to assume that will happen," he said.

Peirce said the MTS board will now have to decide on what portions of spectrum to bid on. Industry Canada stopped short of applying its set-aside rule on a national spectrum licence, which MTS had asked for, opting instead to apply the special condition only on regional licences.

Prentice said a number of regional players could, however, band together to form a new national cellphone provider.

Foreign companies, although faced with ownership restrictions, could also bid on the spectrum in partnership with a Canadian company.

The auction traces its roots to April 2005, when the Liberal government put together the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel to look at the state of the industry and the Telecommunications Act.

The panel submitted its report in March 2006 to the newly elected Conservative government and, among its broader telecommunications recommendations, suggested several changes to the wireless industry to make it more competitive.

Industry Canada, under then Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, launched a public consultation in February 2007 that incorporated some of the panel's suggestions.

The ministry asked whether special conditions should be imposed on the auction, including whether some spectrum should be set aside for potential new entrants and whether caps should be installed on how much any one company could own.

The framework also asked whether government intervention was needed in the commercial negotiation of roaming deals between cellphone carriers. Roaming agreements allow customers of one provider to connect to the network of a different provider, which allows subscribers to use their cellphones where their carrier doesn't have infrastructure.

About 90 submissions were made from various industry players, including incumbents Bell, Rogers and Telus, potential new entrants Quebecor, Shaw and MTS Allstream, the Competition Bureau and various consumer and business groups.

Dominant companies wanted free-market auction

The incumbents argued that no special rules should be imposed and that spectrum should go to the highest bidder.

The potential entrants argued that special rules were needed because the incumbents had every incentive to bid up the price of the spectrum to keep new competitors out of the market.

They also said mandated roaming deals were necessary because the incumbents had no incentive to sign reasonable agreements with newcomers. Without the ability to offer roaming onto other networks, the new entrants would have a difficult time attracting customers, they argued.

The potential new entrants cited high prices and the lack of competition between the incumbents as the reason for Canada's poor showing among developed nations in mobile phone adoption.

Canada's rank of 29th out of the 30-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was justification for the government to get involved in the otherwise unregulated wireless industry, they said.

The United States held a similar advanced wireless spectrum auction in September 2006 that netted the government $13.9 billion US. The Federal Communications Commission is holding another auction in January of spectrum that will be vacated when analogue television broadcasting is shut down in 2009.

The U.S. wireless industry is moving toward a more competitive framework, with the FCC imposing a number of open-access rules on its upcoming auction. Winners in the auction will be forced to make all cellphones, including those from rivals, work on their networks.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2007/11/28/auction.html





Connecticut AG Warns Comcast Phone Users

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said today that subscribers to Comcast's digital phone service - due to be discontinued completely today - should immediately arrange other phone service if they haven't already.

Comcast will transition its customers to its newer, Internet-based "Digital Voice Service," according to Blumenthal, and has been transitioning customers away from its old digital phone service for several months.

In mid-October, Comcast discontinued the older service but continued emergency 911 service for six weeks in case any customers were unaware of the service interruption. The extended 911 service will be terminated today.

"Consumers who received Comast Digital Phone Service that have not switched to an alternative telephone service provider should do so immediately to ensure the safety of themselves and their families," Blumenthal said in a statement today.

Comcast customers with questions should call 1-800-COMCAST, Blumenthal said.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_7571041





Global Cellphone Penetration Reaches 50 Pct

Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion -- equivalent to half the global population -- on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said.

Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.

"The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement.

"For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when," Newman said.

In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth.

The Nordic start for mobile telephony was the basis for the success stories of Finnish Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson.

Fast growth in Asian wireless markets has since helped Korean Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics as well as China's ZTE take their place among the top six cellphone vendors globally.

But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent -- where some owners have more than one phone.

"The economic difference between the more mature markets and those in developing countries is highlighted by the vast differences in operators' revenues per user," Informa said.

Hutchison Whampoa's 3 operation has an average revenue per user of just over $70 a month in Britain, while Hutchison's Sri Lankan operator counts revenues of below $3 per user.

According to the International Programs Center of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world reached 6,634,294,193 on Thursday.

At the same time 2,571,563,279 people were using the most widely used mobile technology, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), according to global trade body GSM Association.

The second largest mobile technology, CDMA, had 421.4 million users at end September.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/...yID=nL29172095





A Judge’s ‘Inexplicable Madness’ Over a Cellphone
Danny Hakim

The next time you pass through the city court system in Niagara Falls, N.Y., remember to turn your cellphone off.

Today, the Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended the removal of a judge in Niagara Falls City Court who had, what the commission’s chairman, Raoul L. Felder, called, “two hours of inexplicable madness” when a cellphone rang in his courtroom.

Specifically, on the morning of March 11, 2005, the judge, Robert M. Restaino, was presiding over a slate of domestic violence cases when he heard a phone ring in his courtroom. He told the roughly 70 people in the courtroom, according to the commission’s report, that “every single person is going to jail in this courtroom” unless the phone was turned over.

He continued: “If anybody believes I’m kidding, ask some of the folks that have been here for a while. You are all going.”

Security officers attempted to find the phone, but failed, while an officer was posted at the door.

After a brief recess, Judge Restaino returned to the bench and asked the defendant who had been standing before him when the phone rang — from the back of the room — and if he knew whose phone it was.

“No,” the defendant, Reginald Jones, said. “I was up here.”

Nonetheless, the judge scrapped plans to release Mr. Jones, set bail at $1,500 and sent him into custody. He was the first of 46 defendants to be sent into custody because of what could be called the case of the ringing cellphone.” The judge opined at length about his frustration over the phone.

“This troubles me more than any of you people can understand,” Judge Restaino said, adding: “This person, whoever he or she may be, doesn’t have a whole lot of concern. Let’s see how much concern they have when they are sitting in the back there with all the rest of you. Ultimately, when you go back there to be booked, you got to surrender what you got on you. One way or another we’re going to get our hands on something.”

One defendant, according to the report, told the judge, “This is not fair to the rest of us.” To which the judge replied, “I know it isn’t.”

Another told the judge, “This ain’t right.” The judge responded: “You’re right, it ain’t right. Ain’t right at all.”

The commission said that Judge Restaino acted “without any semblance of a lawful basis,” behaved like a “petty tyrant” and said his conduct “transcended poor judgment.”

Mr. Felder, the chairman — who is best known as a celebrity divorce lawyer — was the lone dissenter; he voted instead to censure the judge.

A judge can either accept the findings or file an appeal within 30 days.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp


















Until next week,

- js.



















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