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Old 09-12-09, 08:07 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 12th, '09

Since 2002


































"Even with a conservative estimate of increased traffic together with the increased number of sites and more options, you can say that file sharing is healthier than ever." – Kristoffer Schollin


"James Cameron has proven his point: He is king of the world." – The Hollywood Reporter


"The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down. This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this." – Christoph Keese


"We see history repeating itself. These guys went to leftist meetings in the ’30s, did heroic science in the ’40s and were persecuted in the ’50s." – Robert M. Nelson


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December 12th, 2009





Dec. 7, 1999: RIAA Sues Napster
David Kravets

1999: The Recording Industry Association of America sues Napster, the online, peer-to-peer file sharing service that’s allowing millions of computer users to score free, copyright music. The rules are about to change.

Napster founder Shawn Fanning won rock-star celebrity with the service. But music-industry heads were spinning.

So, the RIAA sued Napster and all of its financial backers in federal court in San Francisco. The outcome eventually defined the rules of online, peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

The case began 10 years ago today and dragged on for almost eight years.

A federal judge and an appeals court in San Francisco both ruled in 2002 that Napster was liable for contributory or vicarious copyright violations, because it was allowing millions of users to download music for free. Napster eventually shut down and went bankrupt, later re-emerging as a legitimate, online music service.

The Napster trial was about big money. Along the way, the case mutated into a cannibalizing feeding frenzy: The music industry was searching for deep financial pockets, and targeted one of its own.

With a bankrupt Napster unable to cough up big financial damages, the industry turned to the transnational German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The lawsuits accused Bertelsmann of copyright infringement for propping up Napster financially with loans totaling $85 million. The lawsuits claimed the firm wanted “to preserve Napster’s user base for Bertelsmann’s own commercial advantage.”

At the time of the loans, Bertelsmann’s chairman, Thomas Middelhoff, explained that “Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.”

Bertelsmann paid millions of dollars to settle the claims. The media concern agreed in 2006 to pay the world’s largest label, Universal Music Group, $60 million to settle the allegations. EMI got an undisclosed amount in 2007, and Warner Music Group settled that same year for $110 million.

The Napster case closed its final chapter in August 2007, when Bertelsmann agreed to pay the National Music Publishers Association $130 million to settle the remaining copyright claims.

The case also served as the impetus, in part, for the RIAA’s litigation campaign against individual users, as the industry could not keep up a legal game of Whac-A-Mole against flourishing file sharing services like Kazaa and Limewire. In the last six years, the RIAA has filed about 30,000 copyright cases against individuals, most of whom have settled out of court.

The two individual defendants who went to trial were assessed more than $2 million combined in damages.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2...-sues-napster/





Record Industry Faces Liability Over `Infringement'
Michael Geist

Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.

The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $60 billion. If the dollars don't shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit in October 2008 after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement (I am adviser to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, which is co-counsel, but have had no involvement in the case).

The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as "exploit now, pay later if at all." It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a "pending list," which signifies that approval and payment is pending. The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

Over the years, the size of the pending list has grown dramatically, now containing more than 300,000 songs.

From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

It is difficult to understand why the industry has been so reluctant to pay its bills. Some works may be in the public domain or belong to a copyright owner difficult to ascertain or locate, yet the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Cockburn, Sloan, or the Watchmen are not hidden from view.

The more likely reason is that the record labels have had little motivation to pay up. As the balance has grown, David Basskin, the president and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd., notes in his affidavit that "the record labels have devoted insufficient resources for identifying and paying the owners of musical works on the pending lists." The CRIA members now face the prospect of far greater liability.

The class action seeks the option of statutory damages for each infringement. At $20,000 per infringement, potential liability exceeds $60 billion.

These numbers may sound outrageous, yet they are based on the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages.

After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing "the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers."
http://www.thestar.com/business/arti...r-infringement





Student Ordered to Destroy Downloaded Music Files
Denise Lavoie

A graduate student who must pay four record labels a combined $675,000 in damages for downloading and sharing songs online has been ordered to destroy his illegal music files — but a judge declined to force him to stop promoting the activity that got him in trouble.

Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student from Providence, R.I., was ordered Monday to refrain from future copyright violations and to destroy copies of recordings he downloaded without authorization.

Record companies wanted U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner to go further. They claimed Tenenbaum has been encouraging people to visit a Swedish Web site where they can illegally download the songs he was sued for sharing.

Tenenbaum said he had nothing to do with the Web site, and Gertner said she would not attempt to silence Tenenbaum's criticism of the recording industry and copyright laws.

Tenenbaum said he was pleased.

"She said, look, this isn't your business, he can say whatever he wants about the issue, he has First Amendment rights," Tenenbaum said.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the group was satisfied that the judge required Tenenbaum "to destroy all illegal music files and refrain from further theft of our music."

In July, a federal jury in Boston ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs.

Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, said Monday that he plans to file a motion for a new trial by Jan. 4.

In a separate memorandum released Monday, Gertner described her reasons for rejecting Tenenbaum's "fair use" defense before the case went to trial in July.

Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognizes that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose — such as education or scholarship — it may be considered "fair" and not infringing.

Gertner said Tenenbaum acknowledged that a purpose of his song-sharing was so that his friends could enjoy the music — "that is, the very use for which the artist or copyright holder is entitled to expect payment as a reward."

Gertner said that although Tenenbaum's case does not constitute fair use, she could envision a fair-use defense for someone who shared files only during a period before the law concerning file-sharing was clear and before legitimate download services were widely available. She urged Congress to consider changing copyright law. The judge wrote that "there is a deep potential for injustice in the Copyright Act as it is currently written."

"There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood," Gertner added.

Duckworth said the industry disagrees with Gertner's assessment.

"Judge Gertner's hypothetical statements on fair use are not supported in the law, and courts have routinely rejected this theory since it would essentially strip copyright owners of the important right to control the use of their work," Duckworth said. "Regardless, it wouldn't apply to Mr. Tenenbaum, who admitted to illegally downloading music long after iTunes and other services emerged."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/latest-...es/ci_13945654





Police Shoot and Kill Man Outside Hotel in Times Square
Michael S. Schmidt and A. G. Sulzberger

A plainclothes police sergeant fatally shot a 25-year-old man on Thursday morning outside the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square after the officer confronted the man, who he believed had been a part of a scam to use CDs to intimidate tourists, the authorities said. The slain man was armed with a loaded Mac-10 semiautomatic machine pistol, the police said.

A major police response followed the shooting, which occurred around 11:15 a.m. at 46th Street and Broadway, a tourist-packed intersection, during a weekday morning when the streets were filled with shoppers.

Emergency medical workers took the man to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he died. The man was not identified, but the authorities said he lived in the Bronx and was wanted on assault and disorderly conduct charges.

A second man, his brother, was held by the police and being questioned at the Midtown South Precinct, the police said.

On the man’s body, police found a business card for a Virginia gun dealer, Gary A. Lewis, who runs Gary’s Guns & Transfers in Manakin-Sabot, a pair of villages northwest of Richmond.

Hand-written on the back of the card, the police said, were these words: “I just finished watching ‘The Last Dragon.’ I feel sorry for a cop if he think I’m getting into his paddy wagon.” The gun had been reported stolen in Richmond on Oct. 28, the police said.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, offered a detailed account of the shooting.

They said the sergeant — who is 41 years, with 17 years on the force — was ordinarily assigned to a detail charged with enforcing regulations governing street vendors and peddlers, but had been detached to work on a special crime-fighting unit.

On Thursday morning, the sergeant noticed two men who he believed had been responsible for a scam to intimidate visitors: They would first approach the tourists, then ask them their names, write their names on the CDs and then demand payment of $10.

The sergeant confronted the men outside of 1515 Broadway, south of 45th Street, asking them for a tax stamp that would demonstrate that they had the right to sell CD’s.

One of the men ran north, then west on 45th Street and onto the driveway of the Marriott, toward 46th Street. The sergeant gave chase, ordered the man to stop. Instead, the man pulled out a gun. Shots were exchanged: the man fired two rounds, while sergeant fired four.

Mr. Kelly would not say who opened fire first.

The man’s machine pistol was recovered at the scene, and investigators quickly determined that one round had shattered a store window and that a second was fired toward the box office of the Marriott Marquis Theater. A third round lay on the ground, evidently because the gun had jammed. Inside the weapon were 27 live rounds of ammunition.

Shannon Maggio, 32, a visitor from New Orleans, was on the 16th floor of the nearby Edison Hotel in a room facing the Marriott, with both windows open, when she heard yelling, and then an eruption of gunfire.

“I heard it clear as day,” she said. “I’d never heard a gunshot before, but I knew it was a gunshot. Pow-pow-pow-pow — just like that. Then I heard a guy yell. Then sirens.” She added: “I froze. My hair stood on end.”

The first 911 call about the shooting came in at 11:19 a.m., and emergency workers arrived a minute later, the authorities said. Preliminary accounts indicated that the shooting occurred at the entrance to the garage, which is under the hotel. A street-level driveway runs under the hotel the length of the block between 45th and 46th Streets.

The hotel was sealed off after the shooting, and the police shut the entirety of Broadway from 45th to 46th Street to both traffic and pedestrians, and much of 46th Street to the east and west, as well.

“Right now, the police are on property,” Kathleen Duffy, a spokeswoman for the hotel, which has 1,900 rooms and is one of the city’s largest hotels, said in a phone interview from outside the hotel. “It’s our understanding it didn’t involve any of our guests or any of our associates.”

The intersection of 46th and Broadway is in the heart of Times Square. The hotel — and a giant Bank of America illuminated sign — is at the southwestern corner; a large new American Eagle Outfitters store is to the northwest; Father Duffy Square (and the TKTS booth that sells discounted Broadway tickets) is to the northeast; and a traffic island is to the southeast.

In the shooting’s aftermath, there did not appear to be significant alarm, at least as judged by tourists who, far from avoiding the area, seemed to push forward to get a view of what had happened.

Emer Rooney, 33, a visitor from Ireland on the last day of a trip to New York, walked with a friend from a nearby hotel to take pictures of the scene. She said she had never felt unsafe in New York. “I actually feel it’s very safe,” she said. “Look at all the police officers.” She cited the shooting, in fact, as one of the more exciting moments of her trip, including recovering lost luggage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and getting tickets to the musical “Wicked.”

A tourist from Australia, Suzanne Davis, 42, stopped to take images with a video recorder. “It’s my first day in New York, so it makes very real what you see in the movies,” she said.

Nearby, vendors continued to sell tickets for double-decker bus tours.

The people who sell the CDs are well known to the businesses and street vendors in the Times Square area. “They give people the CD, sign it then make people feel obligated to buy it,” said Greg Carroll, who does sidewalk promotion for a comedy club. “Normally they just stay on the corner and ask people but sometimes they do get in peoples faces.”

Employees at Embassy Electronics said they had called the police repeatedly for what they described as sellers harassing tourists outside their store. “First they give it to you like its free, then when they sign it they ask for money,” said one employee who declined to give his name.

Other people on the street expressed more sympathy. “They’re good guys, I see them all the time,” said James Evans, who helps run a table for the United Homeless Organization — which has itself been accused of being a sham — on Seventh Avenue and 46th Street. “All of them do the same thing, they give them a CD and then they ask for a donation.”

“Nothing in life is free,” he added.

Sewell Chan and Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...mes-square/?hp





Police Seize DJs' Laptops

New police chief apparently condones policy that critics call illegal and punitive
Joshua Emerson Smith

San Francisco Police Department officers have added a controversial tactic to their aggressive raids on house parties: they're seizing laptop computers from DJs at the events.

While SFPD officials deny the laptop seizures is a new policy, they admit it has been condoned by Police Chief George Gascón, who took over in August and last month told the Guardian's editorial board he wants to make the SFPD more transparent and accountable to the public.

"The police chief is aware that officers are being proactive in gathering evidence," Sgt. Lyn Tomioka told the Guardian when asked about a string of laptop seizures by undercover cops over the last 10 months, most of them in cases in which the DJs weren't even charged with a crime.

Many of the raids have occurred in SoMa, and were spearheaded by undercover officers who penetrated the parties and were followed by uniformed officers. San Francisco Entertainment Commission member Terrance Alan called the crackdown a "disappointing and dangerous trend."

Tomioka said it's a judgment call for officers to seize laptops as evidence of an illegal party, but Alan said the tactic is a punitive measure that proves nothing: "Taking laptops [is] not necessary to prove the underlying crime, and in many cases damages people's ability to earn a living."

One of the most recent raids happened on Halloween. It was about 2:30 a.m. and music was pumping out of a warehouse party on Sixth Street. The people throwing the party had hired a doorman, and attendee Eric Dunn was standing in line waiting to get in.

"We were right at the front of the line," Dunn told the Guardian, when, he said, two plainclothes officers drove up on the sidewalk, jumped out of an unmarked car, and rushed up to the doorman. "[The officers] pretty much started demanding entry right away. The doorman was really polite. He basically told them that you have to know somebody to get into the party."

Dunn said the officers waited until an exiting guest opened the door from the inside and then made their move. "One guy barged in, and the other guy followed. They never asked permission or received permission to enter the building," Dunn said.

Inside, the two undercover officers immediately shut down the event. Justin Miller, a DJ at the event, said she remembers it very clearly. "The cops at that point were telling everybody to leave the party, telling me to turn the music off. I turned the music off. Everyone was quietly leaving."

But Miller said it didn't stop there. One of the undercover officers approached her and asked if she had a laptop. She said she did. "I was a little confused at this point because I didn't know what my laptop had to do with anything. I was playing CDs." She said she pulled her computer out from underneath a table and unzipped it from a case. The officer then "grabbed it from me."

The undercover police officer — later identified by witnesses and the evidence receipt as Larry Bertrand — instructed Miller to follow him down to the street to get a property receipt for her laptop.

At this point there were uniformed officers on the scene as well. Miller started to cry. "I begged him. I said, 'This is my livelihood. You're talking my laptop. This is my livelihood. I hope you realize that.' He said, 'This is how you're going to learn then, I guess.'"

Miller said Bertrand (who did not return Guardian calls for comment) then told her he was "going to take it upon himself to shut down every illegal party in San Francisco."

She said he then opened the trunk of his car, revealing several other laptops. A person at the party pointed out that one of the laptops belonged to a friend of his, and asked if he could get the property receipt for the laptop. Miller said Bertrand turned to the inquiring person and said, "You will never see this laptop again."

She continued: "He then looked at me and said, 'I'm going to make sure your paperwork gets so tied up that maybe you won't see this laptop until December, January, February, who knows when.' I felt so violated."

Miller has been working as a DJ in the Bay Area, under the name DJ Justincredible, for more than 10 years. She says she's never had any of her equipment confiscated by the police before. But at that party, three DJs had their laptops confiscated, even though none were charged with a crime.

Shortly after the Halloween incident, Miller and the two other DJs who were at the party contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group specializing in technology and privacy issues. Jennifer Granick, a civil liberties lawyer with EFF, said most people haven't heard about this because few of these DJs, if any, ever get convicted of a crime.

"DJs and the police department know that sound equipment and laptops are being unlawfully seized. But the public and the courts haven't heard much about it because every time a DJ asks for a hearing, the cops just give them their property back rather than show up and defend the practice in open court before a judge," she said.

Sean Evans has been working as a DJ in San Francisco, under the name DJ 7, for more than 10 years. He said that over the summer he had his laptop seized by police during an after-hours party in SoMa. He was given no property receipt, and his case was dismissed. But it took him three months to get his computer back.

"To lose our sole means of income, it's a huge setback. It puts us out of work. In this recession, we're struggling, and we need our laptops to get by," he said. Evans grew up in the Bay Area and he said has never had anything like this happen to him before.

Granick argued it is illegal for police to seize property without issuing citations or arrests. She also said there are serious privacy issues at stake. "If we were to find out that the police were doing something else with the laptops, like searching through them or copying the data, we would definitely go to court," she said.

SFPD Sgt. Wilfred Williams said he could not say what was currently being done with the laptops. In general, he said, private events that emit "extraordinary amounts of sound" need permits. And if they don't have the proper permits, he said, property can be seized as evidence, "be it the speakers, be it the laptops, be it a mixer."

Both Tomioka and Williams say the seizures aren't a new policy. "If you look back in time, laptops haven't been used for music," Williams said. "There used to be old types of equipment that was taken in the past. But now laptops are being used. So yes, today, laptops [are] being seized."

Entertainment advocates have called on Mayor Gavin Newsom and Gascón to come forward with an explicit policy concerning these raids and seizures. The Mayor's Office did not respond to Guardian inquiries. Critics of the policy say it's having a chilling effect on nightlife in San Francisco.
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_...4&issue_num=08





Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales
Patrick McGeehan

At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

J&R Music, at 23 Park Row southeast of City Hall Park, now carries 21 different turntables at prices ranging from $85 to $875. Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.

Rachelle Friedman, the co-owner of J&R, said the store is selling more vinyl and turntables than it has in at least a decade, fueled largely by growing demand from members of the iPod generation.

“It’s all these kids that are really ramping up their vinyl collections,” Ms. Friedman said. “New customers are discovering the quality of the sound. They’re discovering liner notes and graphics.” In many instances, the vinyl album of today is thicker and sounds better than those during vinyl’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sales of vinyl albums have been climbing steadily for several years, tromping on the notion that the rebound was just a fad. Through late November, more than 2.1 million vinyl records had been sold in 2009, an increase of more than 35 percent in a year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That total, though it represents less than 1 percent of all album sales, including CDs and digital downloads, is the highest for vinyl records in any year since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Sales of CDs, meanwhile, have been falling fast, displaced by the downloading of digital files of songs from services like iTunes. Sales of albums on CD, which generally cost half as much as their vinyl counterparts, have dropped almost 20 percent this year, according to Nielsen.

With overall sales down, numerous big music-store chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and HMV have pulled out of Manhattan, leaving music sales largely to online merchants and the few small, die-hard record shops scattered about Greenwich Village and Brooklyn.

One exception has been Best Buy, a national electronics chain that recently opened its sixth store in Manhattan. A year ago, the chain started stocking vinyl albums in about 50 of its stores, including one on the Upper East Side. Their presence, with their alluring cover art, still has the power to stun.

“Some individuals come into our store and they stop in their tracks,” said Andre Sam, a sales representative at Best Buy’s store on East 86th Street. “They don’t expect to see this. You can see them reminiscing as they start looking at the album covers.”

Last week, that store and a new Best Buy on Union Square installed departments, dubbed Club Beats, where customers can test out turntables and other equipment that DJs use to mix music. “They can spin, they can mix, they can scratch, whatever they want to do,” Mr. Sam said.

He suggested that video games deserved some credit for the resurgence of interest in vinyl albums and turntables. Popular games like Guitar Hero and Rockband have introduced young customers to classic rock and pop artists like the Beatles and Metallica, while DJ Hero has inspired some to try their hands at mixing music for real.

Not all of the turntables in these stores are designed to do anything so old-school as spinning actual records. A few models are still made for that purpose, many of them with cables that connect to computers so that the music can be transferred to portable devices. But others simply allow their users to simulate the manipulation of records while the songs they are mixing are being fed from iPods.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/nyregion/07vinyl.html





Billboard Names 'Bad Day' as Decade's Top One-Hit Wonder
AP

As far as one-hit wonders go, Daniel Powter is king of them all, for this decade, at least.

Powter, whose hit ``Bad Day'' reigned on top of the Billboard pop charts for five weeks in 2006, was named as the decade's top one-hit wonder by Billboard.

The magazine describes one-hit wonders as acts whose second hit did not reach the top 25; they only included acts from 2000 to 2007, since someone from last year might just be taking a break.

No. 2 on their list is the Terror Squad for ``Lean Back''; No. 3 is Crazy Town with ``Butterfly''; No. 4 is MIMS with ``This Is Why I'm Hot''; and No. 5 is D4L, remember them?, with ``Laffy Taffy.''
http://www.wcbs880.com/Who-s-the-Top...2000s-/5836759





MySpace Buys Imeem Music Site for Under $1 mln
Ryan Nakashima

MySpace's online music venture with recording labels completed its purchase of song streaming site imeem on Tuesday, scooping up its 16 million users and mobile phone applications for less than $1 million.

In a blog post, MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta said the deal would allow the MySpace Music venture to integrate imeem's offerings over time.

One of imeem's functions that MySpace lacks is a mobile phone application that streams songs on Apple Inc.'s iPhones and devices using Google Inc.'s Android operating system, such as the new Droid phone.

"In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music," he wrote.

The music industry continues to experience falling sales of CDs, while digital revenues have not yet made up the difference, in part because consumers tend to buy singles rather than full albums when they do pay for music.

Efforts such as MySpace Music and imeem are meant to allow people to listen and share music freely online, with revenue generated from advertising.

San Francisco-based imeem launched its free music business in 2007, but advertising revenues were unable to support debt and music royalty payments, and the company was running out of money.

The price tag of less than $1 million represents a bargain for MySpace and is an indication of how difficult the free music business remains.

In May, Warner Music Group Corp. wrote off its entire $16 million investment in imeem and also forgave $4 million it was owed by imeem in song royalties in exchange for a small, minority equity stake. Warner, EMI Group PLC, Vivendi SA's Universal Music and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment are all part of the joint venture with MySpace, a unit of News Corp.

Imeem visitors are now being directed to MySpace Music, and imeem users who have set up profiles and song playlists will have them migrated over to the MySpace Music platform soon.

Imeem Chief Executive Dalton Caldwell, Chief Technology Officer Brian Berg, Chief Operating Officer Ali Aydar and Vice President of Sales David Wade are staying on as consultants during the transition. It is not clear whether they will become permanent employees.

Imeem was majority owned by private equity firm Morgenthaler Ventures, but none of the equity investors got their money back.

MySpace is revamping its music service under Van Natta, who took over in April as CEO from co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...9UUfgD9CFC8G80





Apple Buys Music Streamer Lala, But What's it Getting?

Apple has once again dipped into its massive cash hoard to purchase a small company, in this case the music streaming service Lala. Many are seeing this as a sign that the company is finally ready to move beyond music downloads.
John Timmer

Last week's rumors have become this weekend's facts, as various sources are confirming a possible deal we discussed on Friday: Apple has purchased the music streaming service Lala. Right now, Apple's iTunes dominates the US music download sales, and does very well in many overseas markets, but the company has so far refused to experiment with any delivery model other than downloads. That will almost inevitably change, but the purchase of Lala isn't necessarily a sign that "inevitably" means "soon."

An unnamed source in a Reuters report made the case that Apple is ready to start streaming, saying, "Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level." As our original report noted, Apple has also been rumored to be testing a streaming service for video content; adding music to the menu seems like an obvious choice.

But if Apple is already testing a functional streaming service, there seems to be little need to buy an entire company to obtain similar technology. In fact, Lala uses Flash for wrapping its streams, and Apple has been notably averse to using that software for just about anything—it's certainly not displayed within iTunes as things currently stand.

And then there's the licensing issue. Various reports suggest that Lala's streaming license is non-transferrable, meaning that Apple would need to engage in additional negotiations with a music industry that has very publicly described its unease with Apple's dominance of download sales. Plus, each country that Apple operates in would involve a separate licensing agreement; Lala only had a license for within the US.

Finally, Lala wasn't turning a profit, and apparently wasn't on track to do so in the near future. It could easily be argued that Apple's brand name and advertising budget could change that, but the company has generally resisted jumping into markets where hardly anybody has figured out how to make money (instead, it tends to go after profitable but heavily fragmented markets and defragment them).

So, it's difficult to see anything tangible that the acquisition provides Apple. The alternative take, one that a different unnamed source fed to The New York Times, is that this acquisition follows the PA Semi model. In that case, Apple bought a fabless PowerPC design firm, but not with the intention of actually using any of its existing products; instead, all indications are that it simply wanted access to the engineering talent, which it's now deploying to provide improved ARM chip designs for future portable devices.

The Times' source suggests that Apple is simply after an engineering team with extensive storage and distribution skills. In addition to its current streaming offerings, Lala allows users to upload their existing music collections and then gain access to the songs from anywhere with Internet service (although the music companies have reportedly limited that feature). There are any number of existing and rumored Apple ventures that this sort of expertise might improve.

Apple could probably get the engineering team at a price that wouldn't put much of a dent in the company's $23 billion pile of cash. Lala was privately backed, and, as reports indicate that profits were not in its immediate future, its backers may simply have lost interest in waiting for them. More generally, streaming and subscription services haven't gained much traction in the market, so there's a real danger that "not any time soon" might mean "never."

Lala's terms of service also indicate that it "is not obligated to support or update the Site or Services," meaning that Apple can back out of the streaming market with a minimum of fuss if it chooses to do so.

On balance, the purchase appears to give Apple the chance to bring in engineers that will be useful now, and could be even more so if it chooses to enter streaming or subscription services. But, for the moment, there's nothing about the purchase that seems to provide the company with any key technologies it was missing in terms of diving into markets. Until another company demonstrates that there's money to be made (or iPods to be sold) through streaming, there's no reason to think that a move of this sort is imminent.

In any case, Apple is clearly following the PA Semi model in one regard. Its spokesman is simply stating that Apple buys small companies from time to time, but has no interest in explaining what it's doing with them.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...it-getting.ars





Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now
Jenna Wortham

IAN LYNCH SMITH, a shaggy-haired ball of energy in his late 30s, beams as he ticks off some of the games that Freeverse, his little Brooklyn software company, has landed on the iPhone App Store’s coveted (and ever-changing) list of best-selling downloads: Moto Chaser, Flick Fishing, Flick Bowling and Skee-ball.

Skee-ball, Mr. Smith says, took about two months to develop and deploy and then raked in $181,000 for Freeverse in one month. The company’s latest bid for App Store fame? A game featuring a Jane Austen character in a lacy dress who karate-chops her way through hordes of advancing zombies.

“There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,” Mr. Smith says of the App Store boom. “This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content.”

As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications into what analysts and aficionados describe as a platform that is rapidly transforming mobile computing and telephony, it is changing the goals and testing the patience of developers, bolstering sales of the Apple motherships the applications ride upon — the iPhone and iPod Touch — and causing Apple’s competitors to overhaul their product lines and business models. It even threatens to open chinks in Apple’s own corporate armor.

Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age.

They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars.

“Apple changed the view of what you can do with that small phone in your back pocket,” says Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst. “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.”
Ms. Huberty likens the advent of the App Store and the iPhone to AOL’s pioneering role in driving broad-based consumer adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. She also draws comparisons to ways in which laptops have upended industry assumptions about consumer preferences and desktop computing. But, she notes, something even more profound may now be afoot.

“The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior,” she says. “The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.”

The popularity of Apple’s app model has reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of independent developers are clamoring to write programs for it, and the App Store’s virtual shelves are stocked with more than 100,000 applications. Apple recently said that consumers had downloaded more than two billion applications from its store.

Major players like Research in Motion (maker of the BlackBerry), Palm (maker of the Pre), Google (maker of the Android mobile operating system) and Microsoft (maker of Windows Mobile) are taking note and scrambling to replicate the App Store frenzy.

App fever has even prompted cities like New York and San Francisco to open reservoirs of city data to the public to spur software developers to create hyperlocal applications for computers and phones.

One need not look further than the lobby of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to see that the iPhone and applications that run on it are centerpieces of the company’s mobile strategy. Planted squarely in the lobby of the main office, at 1 Infinite Loop, is an impressive, 24-foot-wide array built out of 20 LED screens populated with 20,000 tiny, brightly colored icons.

As Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple, describes how the wall works — each time an application is purchased, the corresponding icon on the electronic billboard jiggles, causing its neighbors to ripple in unison — he, too, becomes animated.

Normally reserved and on message, Mr. Schiller waves his hands back and forth and allows his voice to ascend into giddy registers as he speaks about the potential unleashed by the App Store.

“I absolutely think this is the future of great software development and distribution,” Mr. Schiller says. “The idea that anyone, all the way from an individual to a large company, can create software that is innovative and be carried around in a customer’s pocket is just exploding. It’s a breakthrough, and that is the future, and every software developer sees it.”

APPLE cloaks most of its inner workings in a shroud of secrecy — a tactic that has helped preserve the company’s mystique and generate intense interest in its product rollouts.

But the App Store relies on vast cadres of outside developers to populate its virtual shelves with products, leaving Apple in the unfamiliar and at times uncomfortable position of having to collaborate with folks who haven’t drunk the company’s corporate Kool-Aid.

This has led Apple to be deeply supportive of developers once shunned by big telecommunications companies, while also frustrating many of them more recently with what developers see as the company’s inscrutable and arbitrary process for accepting programs into the App Store.

Apple frames the issue differently.

“I think, by and large, we do a very good job there,” Mr. Schiller said. “Sometimes we make a judgment call both ways, that people give us feedback on, either rejecting something that perhaps on second consideration shouldn’t be, or accepting something that on second consideration shouldn’t be.”

For Apple, the review process is a necessary evil. The company places high value on what it describes as “customer trust,” or the idea that users have faith that an application distributed on the iPhone won’t crash the platform, steal personal information or contain illegal content.

Mr. Schiller says the majority of applications sail through the review with no difficulty, and those that do require greater scrutiny are largely those that are slowed down by bugs or glitches in the coding.

“We care deeply about the feedback, both good and bad,” he says. “While there are some complaints, they are just a small fraction of what happens in the process.”

Apple says it receives more than 10,000 application submissions each week. Most become available in the App Store within two weeks (creating yet another problem: the difficulty consumers have in efficiently and effectively trolling through 100,000 apps to find hidden gems they hadn’t known about).

Still, the App Store is markedly better than the alternative, says Peter Farago, a marketing executive at Flurry, a mobile analytics company in San Francisco. Gone are the days when mobile developers had to negotiate with major telecommunications companies if they had any hopes of publishing their applications on a mobile phone.

“It took six to nine months to build a relationship with a carrier, maybe a quarter-million to get the infrastructure built, and the company took 50 percent or more from each dollar,” Mr. Farago says, a process that limited access to mobile platforms. “Apple has helped create a much healthier middle class of developers and expanded the pie for everyone.”

Apple pockets 30 percent of the revenue earned by any App Store program, with developers keeping the balance. Although barriers to entry for software developers have dropped considerably, Mr. Farago acknowledges that “friction points have changed.”

Developers now cite instances in which applications have been held in approval limbo, neither accepted nor rejected for months. And as bigger companies begin churning out programs, the smaller, garage-size outfits worry that they will be squeezed out.

FreedomVoice Systems, a company in San Diego, couldn’t wait to roll out a mobile version of its telephone software for the iPhone. The company submitted an application to the App Store last year and excitedly waited. And waited. And kept waiting.

“We’re facing 396 days with no contact from Apple,” says Eric Thomas, chief executive of FreedomVoice. “The app has been ‘pending’ in the App Store for a year.”

Mr. Thomas says he understands that it is Apple’s decision whether to accept his app. “But the idea they wouldn’t tell us it was a no — or even why — so we could try to do something about it,” he said, “is a very strange and unneighborly approach.”

Freeverse, which Mr. Smith founded in 1994, also creates games and desktop programs for computers. But like legions of other software developers, the company shifted its focus to the iPhone as the popularity of the device skyrocketed. But that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy road to riches.

“For our size and seriousness, we are still treated like a college freshman who is doing this as a side project,” Mr. Smith says. “The trade-off being that there is a much lower barrier to entry for developers. Anyone can have a shot.”

No one knows that better than Cerulean Studios, a software firm in Brookfield, Conn. After e-mail generated only automated responses from Apple for three months, Cerulean got a call in November from an Apple employee.

“He didn’t say much, just that our app would be going live in the App Store that afternoon,” recalls Scott Werndorfer, a co-founder of Cerulean. “We knew what we were getting into with Apple. They want everything to be pixel perfect, and you have to play ball by their rules.”

Some Apple developers are willing to go to greater lengths — underground — to avoid dealing with Apple’s policies and to get their software out quickly and on their own terms. To do that, they create programs for “jailbroken” iPhones and iPod Touches. Such devices are modified to allow anyone to upload a program onto them, which Apple says is illegal.

“Developers are just tired of the review process and navigating opaque hurdles,” says Mario Ciabarra, who operates Rock Your Phone, an online storefront containing a small catalog of applications for jailbroken iPhones. “They’ve been defecting to the jailbroken community or other platforms, such as Android. That demand has created the marketplace for our products and attracted developers.”

Mr. Ciabarra says about 1.5 million iPhones have visited his storefront, an impressive figure though still a small fraction of the 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches that Apple says it has sold.

As the App Store has matured, so has the need to come up with more sophisticated ways to profit from it. Simply having a great application is not enough. Bart Decrem, chief executive of Tapulous, a start-up company that publishes musical rhythm games, recalls the early days when it was enough to develop a shiny application that used the iPhone.

The company’s first game, Tap Tap Revenge, was available in the App Store when it opened in 2008. It quickly climbed the store’s charts, and Apple eventually ranked it as the most popular free iPhone game that year.

These days, Mr. Decrem says, that kind of instant and relatively easy success is much rarer because more companies are competing in the App Store. They include giant game publishers like Electronic Arts, which recently released a version of its popular video game Rock Band for the iPhone.

“It’s still the Wild West, but the stakes are higher,” Mr. Decrem says.

Tapulous has begun working with record labels and musicians to introduce paid special editions of Tap Tap Revenge featuring big-name artists. “Simply selling applications is ultimately not a scalable model,” he says.

IT’S unclear how concerned Apple is about some of the tensions swirling around the App Store. The company’s App Store policies have faced criticism — and even prompted a Federal Communications Commission investigation of Apple’s decision to reject an iPhone application developed by Google, which is still under way. Critics say they wonder whether the company can be trusted to maintain a fair marketplace, especially when developers release products that could compete with Apple’s current or future line of products.

Apple runs the App Store under the aegis of its iTunes unit (the operation that, wedded to the iPod, transformed music downloading in a way that analysts say the App Store, wedded to the iPhone, is now transforming mobile computing).

“A rocket ship is even too small of an analogy,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president for iTunes, of the App Store’s popularity. “We’ve been able to leverage a lot of our iTunes technology for the App Store. But it’s completely different. We’re reviewing all of those apps. We really don’t have to review each and every song.”

Apple executives are quick to point out the importance of ensuring that third-party applications run smoothly and provide a high-quality experience for users.

“Our goal is very simple: We want to have the best platform for applications that there has ever been on any product,” notes Mr. Schiller, the marketing executive. “We know we’re not perfect, but we know we’re better than anything else that has been and we want to keep improving it.”

Apple says it has increased the number of product reviewers working on the App Store and has tried to improve and streamline the way it communicates with developers.

The App Store’s success — as much a surprise to Apple as it has been to competitors — has given rise to a new digital ecosystem. Today, hundreds of software aspirants, from individuals tinkering in their bedrooms late at night to established companies looking for lucrative new revenue streams, are jumping into the App Store fray.

And smartphone manufacturers across the board are trying to make their platforms more attractive and lucrative to bring in the kind of creativity and enthusiasm that Apple has.

It’s easy to see why: Although Apple doesn’t release specific financial figures for the App Store, analysts estimate that it generates as much as a billion dollars a year in revenue for Apple and its developers.

At a recent conference in San Francisco organized by Research in Motion for BlackBerry developers, the company said it would make several changes to its mobile operating system to increase the kinds of applications developers can create for its devices, including allowing advertising and e-commerce within applications. Jim Balsillie, a co-chief executive of Research in Motion, says he isn’t focusing on the sheer number of apps available on a BlackBerry (3,000) but on their utility.

“Is it about 20,000 apps or 200,000 apps or is it about changing those 20,000 apps and their deep integration and how they interrelate to one another?” asks Mr. Balsillie. “We’re much more interested in changing the applications and changing the user experience and really unlocking the promise and the money and revenue opportunity for the ecosystem.”

Regardless, says Mr. Balsillie, apps and smartphones have created a new playing field.

“It’s inevitable that all cellphones will be smartphones,” he says. “There will be more services and new ways to monetize and more consumption. Growth is a given; it’s just a question of who is going to innovate in the right way to drive that value proposition to capture that growth.”

ALTHOUGH Palm is still rolling out the e-commerce portion of its own app store, called the App Catalog, the company hopes to draw developers to write for Palm devices like the Pre because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same programming languages used to create Web sites — meaning developers are already familiar with the tools they will need to create mobile apps.

So far, however, Palm offers 500 applications, a relatively slim selection compared with the iPhone, and many analysts believe that this has made the device less attractive to consumers. Palm, like Research in Motion, says it doesn’t need an avalanche of applications to compete.

“Two years ago, the iPhone blew away expectations for what mobile devices are capable of. And mobile devices and applications are the future of the computing industry,” says Ben Galbraith, co-director of Palm’s developer relations team. “But the market is becoming saturated with a large volume of applications. When you’re number 50,000 out of 200,000, how do you survive?”

Palm says it is offering a breezier review process to developers — including allowing them the option of submitting their programs as candidates for Palm’s App Catalog or immediately publishing their applications in a third-party, online storefront — which may help it avoid some of the conflicts plaguing Apple’s relationship with developers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, which analysts have criticized for its sluggish approach to the smartphone market, also says it is emphasizing quality for the application store it introduced in October, Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

“Our strategy is to look holistically at how we can provide the best all-around user experience,” says Victoria Grady, director of mobile strategy at Microsoft. The Marketplace now has more than 800 apps.

Many developers and analysts think Google’s mobile operating system, most recently placed in the Motorola Droid, may evolve into the fiercest competitor to the iPhone. Unlike Apple, Google has eschewed a review process, allowing any developer to publish an application to the Android Marketplace, its version of the App Store, instantly. About 14,000 applications are available for Android-powered smartphones.

“We’re doing everything we can to open the device to both developers and consumers,” says Eric Chu, group manager of the Android platform at Google. “That is a critical part of what we think makes Android unique: applications are no longer limited to a single device.”

Mr. Chu said the growing number of Android-powered phones available on multiple wireless carriers increases the financial opportunity for developers. “Last year at this time, we only had one device,” he says. “The volume is going up at a tremendous pace, and the developer ecosystem is seeing that.”

Besides being a business opportunity for all of these companies, apps offerings may also be a matter of survival in a make-or-break market. Apple has another strong advantage: the iPhone offers developers a uniform, standard platform.

“When we create an application for the iPhone, you know it’s going to run exactly as you tested it on every single model,” says David Lieb, co-founder of Bump Technologies, which creates software that lets users share contact information by tapping two phones together. “The same isn’t true for the rest of the smartphones, which have varying screen sizes, processor speeds and form factors.”

HOWEVER the competitive landscape shapes up, the App Store phenomenon shows no signs of slowing. IDC, a technology research firm, predicts that the number of iPhone apps will triple next year, fueled by the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices. Along the way, analysts say, the App Store will continue to upend the architecture of the smartphone business and threaten competitors that don’t have vibrant and extensive offerings.

The way the industry once operated, “Each handset company would come up with its latest iterations and maybe have the hottest device of the season or not,” says Ms. Huberty, the Morgan Stanley analyst. “Enter apps into the equation, and that changes. It goes from being a product cycle game to a platform game.”

“People will look back on the iPhone as a turning point in the industry,” says Craig Moffett, a telecom analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “The iPhone will be remembered as the first true handheld computer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/te...gy/06apps.html





Android Porn Market from MiKandi
Rob Jackson

Google has rules and standards for Android Market that prevent application developers from incorporating adult content. But thanks to Android’s open nature you can get pretty much anything you want on your phone and now a service called MiKandi is helping you find all the naughtiest things you can possibly think/dream/fantasize of in one place – MiKandi Market.

If you visit MiKandi.com on your Android Phone you can download MiKandi Market which is a portal for Android users to find, download and use adult themed applications in one central location. Likewise, it serves as a place where application developers can distribute their free or paid adult-themed locations without fear of being rejected from Android Market. In fact, they’ll allow any type of content into MiKandi Market as long as it doesn’t violate the law (you have to be 18+ years old to download).

Regardless of whether or not you’re into adult content you have to admit from a pure business opportunity standpoint this is pretty brilliant. There is a reason that pornography leads the internet in traffic and revenue and with everybody going after the mobile web, it’s a wonder that some enterprising adult company didn’t pursue this earlier.

Adult stuff stays out of Android Market which is reasonable, but if you’re determined to get some adult goodies on your android phone Google isn’t going to stand in your way. While MiKandi is planning a solution for the iPhone, users would need to have a jailbroken phone for the apps to work properly. Android win.

One concern I have about MiKandi is that they’ve got a great idea but don’t have the resources to follow through. Take for example developer payments to be made through Amazon or PayPal:

Quote:
Note: For any type of payout or remittance, we will require an invoice from you. Based on the sales report for the applications that MiKandi distributed, you will generate an invoice so MiKandi can remit payment against this invoice.
Sounds pretty weird/bizarre to me. If MiKandi is the one with the stats why would the developer be forced to produce an invoice? I don’t get it.

But what I DO get is that if these folks can get this right… they could have a HUMONGOUS hit on their hands. It won’t be the type of hit where people readily admit they use MiKandi, feature it on their home screen and show all their friends… but I promise you that if they actually offer a variety of adult applications this WILL get a ton of use.

So I… uh… downloaded MiKandi Market for uh… reviewing and testing purposes and just to let you know – nothing worked. After accepting an End User Agreement it loaded a screen titled Staff Picks that was otherwise blank. Pressing menu provided a couple options but no matter what you selected you would always get a force close. So the pictures above are likely just reference designs and I have no clue when/if real content/apps will actually be used.

Don’t forget that you assume a risk when downloading ANY application on Android Market. When you download ONE application that is from an “unknown source” there is a potential it could be harmful. Downloading an application that acts as a medium to download lots of other application from various unknown sources is inherently more risky. So be careful. Just sayin’

[Thanks Kandi]

http://phandroid.com/2009/11/27/andr...-from-mikandi/





Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List
Kim Zetter

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document. So far, Young has refused.

Yahoo’s letter was sent on Wednesday, within hours of the posting of Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement at Cryptome. In addition to copyright infringement, the letter accuses the site of revealing Yahoo’s trade secrets and engaging in “business interference.” According to the letter, disclosure of its surveillance services (.pdf) would help criminals evade surveillance.

The Compliance Guide reveals, for example, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash file.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not have the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.

Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.

Young responded to Yahoo’s takedown request with a defiant note:

Quote:
I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.

Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.
—–

Note: Yahoo’s exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.

The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.

Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company added.

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...hoo-spy-prices





Promoting the Car Phone, Despite Risks
Matt Richtel

Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving.

Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones.

“There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”

It was the early 1960s.

Long before cellphones became common, industry pioneers were aware of the risks of multitasking behind the wheel. Their hunches have been validated by many scientific studies showing the dangers of talking while driving and, more recently, of texting.

Despite the mounting evidence, the industry built itself into a $150 billion business in the United States largely by winning over a crucial customer: the driver.

For years, it has marketed the virtues of cellphones to drivers. Indeed, the industry originally called them car phones and extolled them as useful status symbols in ads, like one from 1984 showing an executive behind the wheel that asked: “Can your secretary take dictation at 55 MPH?”

“That was the business,” said Kevin Roe, a telecommunications industry analyst since 1993. Wireless companies “designed everything to keep people talking in their cars.”

They succeeded. The federal government estimated in 2007 that 11 percent of drivers were talking on their phones at any given time. But that success has come at a cost. Researchers at Harvard have estimated that, even seven years ago, drivers using cellphones were causing 2,600 fatal crashes a year in the United States and 570,000 accidents that resulted in a range of injuries, from minor to serious.

And studies show that a driver talking on a cellphone is four times likelier to crash and that using a hands-free device does not eliminate the risk.

The industry notes that the mobile device has moved well beyond its origins as a car phone and argues that research on the dangers of distracted driving is inconclusive, even as wireless companies have spent millions on campaigns to educate drivers.

But the industry’s chief spokesman, Steve Largent, acknowledged in recent interviews that those efforts have fallen short. He said the companies plan to do more, particularly in light of the explosion of text messaging, which they say poses a profoundly serious risk.

The CTIA, the industry’s trade group, supports legislation banning texting while driving. It has also changed its stance on legislation to ban talking on phones while driving — for years, it opposed such laws; now it is neutral.

“This was never something we anticipated,” said Mr. Largent, head of the CTIA, adding that distracted driving is a growing threat now that more than 90 percent of Americans have cellphones. “The reality of distracted driving has become more apparent to all of us.”

Critics of the industry argue that its education efforts over the years provided a weak counterbalance to its encouragement of cellphone use by drivers and to its efforts to fight regulations banning the use of cellphones while driving, or at least requiring drivers to use hands-free devices.

The critics — including safety advocates, researchers and families of crash victims — say the industry should do more, by placing overt warnings on the packaging and screens of cellphones.

The critics also say that even as the industry continues to pay lip service to the risks, companies are marketing a new generation of technology, like GPS applications for smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry, and wireless Internet access for cars. A description of one new application for the iPhone reads, “Maps on iPhone shows you live traffic information, indicating traffic speed along your route in easy-to-read green, red and yellow highlights.”

Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group, was invited last month to speak about distracted driving by the Federal Communications Commission. He told the audience that the cellphone industry was selling a product consumers can use dangerously — without properly warning them or providing safeguards.

He added: “The only questions are: what did they know, and when did they know it?”

Dawn of the Car Phone

On Oct. 13, 1983, hundreds of people, including reporters, photographers and TV crews, gathered at Soldier Field in Chicago for a special event.

The big draw? A cellphone call.

An executive from Ameritech, the regional phone company that sponsored the event, sat in the driver’s seat of a Chrysler convertible and phoned a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, who was living in Germany.

That call signified the introduction of mass-market commercial cellphone service, the equivalent of a moon shot for the telecommunications industry.

“The whole idea of placing a call from anywhere — without wires — it was amazing,” said Joe Colson, then a department head at Bell Labs, the prominent research arm of the nation’s telephone giants, who was part of the crowd.

Their work capped an effort that began decades earlier with radio telephones.

On its Web site today, AT&T notes that the first mobile telephone call, using that early radio technology, took place in 1946. An accompanying picture shows a trucker, phone to his ear. “A trucker rolls with one of the first mobile phones,” the caption says.

But because of the expense and limits of that radio technology, wireless phones were used early on mostly by truckers and other professional drivers. In the 1960s, AT&T says, New York City had 2,000 customers with these phones, and they typically waited 30 minutes for a call to go through.

Early innovators, like Mr. Colson, saw new possibilities with the advent of smaller computer chips and batteries, as well as advances in wireless technology to simultaneously carry millions of conversations.

In ads, the industry promoted car phones as must-have accessories for the elite. In addition, it made sense to market to business people, who could justify the cost of cellphones as a way to make commuting time more productive.

In August 1987, an ad in The New York Times for Metro One, a mobile service provider, showed a man talking on a cellphone while driving a sports car with a surfboard in the back. The ad read: “You can reach all those important clients and still beat the traffic.”

A television commercial for Centel, an early cellphone provider that merged with Sprint, shows a handsome businessman leaving the city in his Jeep while talking on his phone. His wife is on the other end, using her own portable phone, standing in a speedboat.

The marketing paid off. Cellphones, including portable models with brick-size batteries, became status symbols, used by Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” (The first phones, like the one at Soldier Field, cost about $2,800, with installation — around $6,000 in today’s dollars.)

“It was like carrying around a Prada bag,” said Ray DeRenzo, now chief marketing officer for MobiTV, a TV service for phones, who in 1986 worked at Pacific Telesis.

In the late 1980s, one company even succeeded in selling tens of thousands of a $16 replica of a car phone called the “Cellular Phoney.” The company motto: “It’s not what you own, it’s what people think you own.”

In late 1985, wireless companies had 340,000 customers. Only 10 years later, as the price of phones fell sharply, there were almost 34 million.

The industry poured profits back into expanding networks. In just 10 years, the number of cell sites rose to 68,000 in 1995 from 913. The industry planted many cell sites near highways, partly because it was easier than persuading homeowners to put them in neighborhoods, and drivers were crucial customers.

Mr. Roe, the longtime industry analyst, estimates that in the 1980s and early ’90s, wireless companies got 75 percent or more of their revenue from drivers, a figure that fell below 50 percent by the mid-’90s and is now below 25 percent (the cellphone industry says it does not break out such figures).

In the late 1980s, the market remained heavily focused on drivers, even though the original car phones gave way to slimmer and less expensive portable cellphones.

Well into the 1990s, Mr. Roe said, wireless companies focused on three questions: “Can we cover the highways, do we have enough capacity to handle all the people on the highways, and is the signal strong enough?”

Mr. Colson, the engineer, said he was astonished by the popularity of cellphones, but he and others in the industry rarely paused to wonder about risks. “Driver distraction?” he said. “I mean, come on.”

Troubling Studies

Mr. Cooper, now 80, and commonly referred to as the father of the cellphone for his early work at Motorola, sensed early on that the technology had risks.

“I’d pass by the exit I was supposed to take because I was talking on the phone,” he said. Thinking back, he said he was “absolutely” aware of potential dangers but did not think roads would become filled with distracted drivers.

Other early innovators of cellphones said they felt nagging concerns. Bob Lucky, an executive director at Bell Labs from 1982-92, said he knew that drivers talking on cellphones were not focused fully on the road. But he did not think much about it or discuss it and supposed others did not, either, given the industry’s booming fortunes.

“If you’re an engineer, you don’t want to outlaw the great technology you’ve been working on,” said Mr. Lucky, now 73. “If you’re a marketing person, you don’t want to outlaw the thing you’ve been trying to sell. If you’re a C.E.O., you don’t want to outlaw the thing that’s been making a lot of money.”

Revenue for wireless service providers was soaring — to $16 billion in 1995 from $354 million in 1985. The industry had revenue of $148 billion in 2008.

One researcher who spoke up about his concerns was quickly shut down. In 1990, David Strayer, a junior researcher at GTE, which later became part of Verizon, noticed more drivers who seemed to be distracted by their phones, and it scared him. He asked a supervisor if the company should research the risks.

“Why would we want to know that?” Mr. Strayer recalled being told. He said the message was clear: “Learning about distraction would not be very helpful to the overall business model.”

Outside the industry, others started raising red flags. In 1984, the AAA urged drivers to park before using their phones. In 1991, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety financed a laboratory study that found that drivers talking on cellphones had difficulty responding to challenging situations.

In 1997, the Canadian Ministry of Health and other groups helped finance research to determine whether drivers distracted by cellphones were more likely to crash. The researchers’ answer: a resounding yes.

They found that drivers using cellphones were four times likelier to get into accidents than drivers who were focused entirely on the road.

“This relative risk is similar to the hazard associated with driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit,” the researchers wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. They said hands-free devices were no safer than hand-held phones because of the distraction that comes from focusing on a conversation, not the road.

In subsequent years, dozens of researchers also determined that phone use by drivers divides attention, slows reaction time and increases the risks of crashing. Their ranks included Mr. Strayer, who left GTE for academia to research distracted driving.

Using a driving simulator at the University of Utah, he showed that drivers distracted by calls miss otherwise obvious sights along a virtual highway and that they face a four times greater crash risk, echoing other studies’ findings.

The research was not easy for the industry to ignore, particularly given that a wireless company, AT&T, had helped pay for a widely publicized study.

AT&T paid Harvard researchers to study the economic value created by drivers using cellphones. In 2000, the researchers put that value at $43 billion. But in late 2002, based on an update to the findings, it was those researchers who estimated that distracted drivers using phones also caused 2,600 deaths each year and 570,000 accidents that caused injuries.

Similar findings piled up. In 2005, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a bibliography of more than 150 scientific papers from the previous eight years about the dangers of cellphone use by drivers.

“It’s been a very consistent picture,” said Chris Monk, a researcher at the agency. “Frankly, I get a little annoyed that we continue to see studies that investigate the effects of cellphone use on driving, because they all show the same thing, whether you’re talking hands-free or not.”

Mixed Messages

Critics say the wireless carriers have sent mixed messages about the risks posed by drivers using cellphones.

The industry has resisted legislation to regulate cellphone use and, critics say, it has not warned drivers about dialing and talking as forcefully as it now warns them about texting.

Cellphone companies point out that for a decade they have run numerous public service ads, like AT&T’s 2001 “Be Sensible” campaign, telling customers not to talk while driving through bad weather or heavy traffic. On its Web site, Verizon Wireless cites government recommendations that the safest course is to stay off the phone while driving.

The CTIA ran its first distracted-driving campaign in 2000, with the tagline: “With Wireless, Safety Is Your Most Important Call.” Its latest slogan: “On the Road, Off the Phone.”

On its Web site, the CTIA offers safety tips including, “Do not engage in stressful or emotional conversations that might divert your attention from the road” and “Use a hands-free device for convenience and comfort.”

Those warnings do not acknowledge the many studies that show that hands-free devices do not eliminate risks. The industry says the research is inconclusive. One widely cited study, for example, shows that hands-free devices do limit the risk of talking while driving. However, that study, by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, also showed that the act of dialing while driving poses serious risks.

Cellphone industry leaders also say studies have not shown a link between cellphone use and crashes. But little data exists on the number of crashes caused by drivers using cellphones because police either do not collect such data or started doing so only recently.

The industry says the number of reported accidents fell to six million in 2007 from 6.7 million a decade earlier — at the very time cellphone use has soared. Its critics say that the drop reflects the many safety improvements to vehicles and roads and that, besides, fatality rates have stayed fairly constant.

Ultimately, the industry has been motivated to educate customers because of good corporate citizenship, not because of research, said Mr. Largent, the head of the CTIA. “We don’t like to see our devices used in a way that puts drivers at risk,” he said.

The most aggressive education effort has come in recent months, focused on texting. “Texting or mobile device usage in a car is an issue on par with drunk driving itself,” said Daryl Evans, a vice president at AT&T, which has begun adding a sticker that reads “don’t text and drive” to the screens of nearly all new phones.

Verizon Wireless has put up billboards and is running television and radio spots. Last month, Sprint Nextel put out a news release urging customers not to text and drive and urging employees to agree not to do so. The CTIA has started a public service campaign to warn teenagers.

But why, critics ask, does the industry accept researchers’ findings on the dangers of texting when it found their studies lacking on the dangers of dialing or talking on the phone while driving?

“There’s probably little difference between making a phone call and texting,” Mr. Largent conceded. “If you have to take your eyes off the road, it can’t be a good thing.”

But he said the industry is not taking a position on whether states should ban dialing or talking while driving. “We’re not saying anything about that,” he said. “We’re going to let our consumers make their voices heard.”

For critics, it adds up to an effort by the industry over the years to appear responsible without hurting its core business. The companies’ warnings, critics argue, have not been loud enough to register (Over the last decade, the percentage of drivers talking on the phone at any given time has doubled, the government estimated).

“The landfill-sized accumulation of studies about the dangers of using these devices while driving should have prompted a much more engaged posture on the part of the industry to be leaders to attempt to rein in this behavior,” said James E. Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers.

Other critics go further. “The real message was: continue to use our product,” said Mr. Ditlow, from the Center for Auto Safety.

He and others say a legislative battle in California shows that the industry’s actions speak louder than its words.

The Fight for California

“I am at an absolute loss,” Joe Simitian said, standing at the podium, facing fellow members of a California Assembly subcommittee.

It was April 23, 2001, the day Mr. Simitian, Democrat of Palo Alto, submitted legislation to require California drivers to use hands-free devices.

Mr. Simitian could not understand why major cellphone companies opposed his legislation, even though their educational materials urged drivers to use hands-free devices.

He cited such materials published by AT&T, Cingular and Sprint — companies that opposed the bill. “When using your Sprint PCS phone in the car, focus on driving, not talking, and use your hands-free kit,” Mr. Simitian said, reading from Sprint’s own materials. “Failure to follow these instructions may lead to serious personal injury and possibly property damage.”

Mr. Simitian, who seized on the issue after seeing dangerous behavior on the roadways, told his colleagues the legislation merely sought to codify “the very practices this industry has been promoting for the last several years.”

Verizon Wireless was the first wireless company to testify. Breaking with the other major companies, as it often has on this issue, it supported Mr. Simitian. Its representative called the Simitian legislation necessary because education was not enough.

Representatives from AT&T, Sprint and Cingular said their education efforts were working. Their lobbyists added other concerns: research did not show cellphone use as a major cause of accidents; wireless phones should not be singled out from other kinds of distractions like eating; and mobile phones were essential emergency tools.

The representative from AT&T said the legislation did not adequately define “hands-free device.”

Mr. Simitian saw a contradiction. “These are the folks who wrote the brochure and now tell us they don’t know what a hands-free device is,” he said.

The legislation did not make it out of committee, a result Mr. Simitian attributed to heavy company lobbying. In each of the next five years, major wireless companies opposed the same proposal in California, saying education was sufficient.

Companies also said they were looking out for consumers. They argued, for instance, that a hands-free law would provide an excuse for police officers to pull over minority drivers. There is “the very real possibility it will lead to unfair and discriminatory consequences,” Sprint Nextel wrote in a letter opposing the 2006 bill.

But that version passed and the law took effect in 2008.

The industry’s position has since changed. In a recent interview, Mr. Largent conceded that the opposition in California was “a mistake.”

“At the time, we were all operating on the science that was before us and the evidence we had,” he said.

Mr. Simitian, now a state senator, finds that position “disingenuous.”

“The science at the time was the science that caused them to publish brochures telling people to use hands-free devices,” he said.

And Mr. Simitian says the industry had ample evidence at the time that its education efforts were not working.

Mr. Largent conceded recently that the industry’s education efforts were inadequate. He added that if people say, “ ‘That’s not your position 10 years ago,’ I say, ‘You’re right.’ This industry continues to evolve. We think it’s evolving in the right direction.”

“The bottom line is safety. That’s our position.”

The Next Wave

The industry is evolving. It focuses less on marketing the car phone. But some ads promote a new generation of devices for cars.

A recent Sprint television ad shows a driver and four passengers in a car. The ad is for a mobile wireless service that allows people to use the Internet not just on phones but also computers. “Right now, five co-workers are working from the road using a ‘Mi-Fi,’ a mobile hotspot,” the voiceover says. One person is checking e-mail, another is streaming music, a third is using Mapquest and two are downloading and revising a presentation, the voice says.

Sprint says that despite what the voiceover says, not all five co-workers are actually working. “Throughout this television commercial, the driver has both hands on the wheel. He is not engaging in any unsafe behavior and is focused on driving,” Sprint says. The company also says the product’s instructions warn about distracted driving.

And the newest phones let people do many tasks at once. A recent ad in People magazine for the Nuvifone, sold by AT&T, shows a woman, apparently in the lawn-ornament business, explaining how she got directions from her phone while making a work call.

“I just tapped the address and followed spoken, turn-by-turn directions right to the front door,” it reads. “And I was able to take the call about pink palm trees — while still navigating.”

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said safety is paramount. “Your first priority in the car is driving safely,” he said. The marketing for the Nuvifone, he added, is “not intended to override our position.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/te...istracted.html





AT&T Takes the Blame, Even for the iPhone’s Faults
Randall Stross

I LOVE my iPhone. I just wish it were matched with Verizon Wireless, the carrier with the most envied reputation as fast, ubiquitous, reliable, nigh perfect.

Consumer Reports has just released its annual survey of cellphone service, and its respondents collectively agree with me about the rankings: AT&T occupies the bottom and Verizon, the top.

My sense of Verizon’s superiority is confirmed every time I see a “there’s a map for that” Verizon commercial, graphically showing how far more extensive Verizon’s 3G network coverage is in less populated areas. And it is reinforced when AT&T executives publicly confess — as Ralph de la Vega, the chief executive and president of AT&T mobility and consumer markets, did last week at an industry conference — that the company’s wireless service in New York and San Francisco was “below our standards.”

When I set about looking for independent data, however, to confirm the superior performance of Verizon’s network, I was astonished to discover that I had managed to get things exactly wrong. Despite the well-publicized problems in New York and San Francisco, AT&T seems to have the superior network nationwide.

And the iPhone itself may not be so great after all. Its design is contributing to performance problems.

Roger Entner, senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen, said the iPhone’s “air interface,” the electronics in the phone that connect it to the cell towers, had shortcomings that “affect both voice and data.” He said that in the eyes of the consumer, “the iPhone has the nimbus of infallibility, ergo, it’s AT&T’s fault.” AT&T does not publicly defend itself because it will not criticize Apple under any circumstances, he said. AT&T and Apple both declined to comment on Mr. Entner’s assessments.

Neither AT&T nor Verizon was willing to reveal its internal data on performance. But Global Wireless Solutions, one of the third-party services that run network tests for the major carriers, shared some of its current findings. The service dispatches drivers across the country with phones and laptops equipped with data cards. They have covered more than three million miles of roads this year, while running almost two million wireless data sessions and placing more than three million voice calls, said Paul Carter, the president.

The results place AT&T’s data network not just on top, but well ahead of everyone else. “AT&T’s data throughput is 40 to 50 percent higher than the competition, including Verizon,” Mr. Carter said. AT&T is a client and Verizon is not, he added.

More evidence that AT&T’s data network is head-and-shoulders above Verizon’s comes from Root Wireless, a start-up in Bellevue, Wash., that is developing software for consumers to install on their smartphones to do continuous network tests. This generates empirical data for consumers who “today are buried under opinions and advertising slogans,” said Paul Griff, the chief executive. Root Wireless has no business relationship with any carrier.

This year, Root Wireless ran 4.7 million tests on smartphones for each of the four major carriers, spread across seven metropolitan areas: Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles/Orange County, New York, Seattle/Tacoma, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington. In every market, AT&T had faster average download speeds and had signal strength of 75 percent or better more frequently than did Verizon. (A Verizon spokesman declined to comment about these test results or those of Global Wireless Solutions.)

I asked Ron Dicklin, chief technology officer at Root Wireless, how these results, showing AT&T as the clear leader, could be reconciled with the negative appraisal of Consumer Reports’ respondents. He explained that his company’s tests of AT&T’s data network were done with handsets other than the iPhone, which does not allow non-Apple programs like his to run in the background.

AT&T’s besting of Verizon in these tests is all the more remarkable considering the sudden jump in the volume of mobile data that its network has had to handle with the introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008: approximately 4,000 percent.

Chetan Sharma, a telecommunications consultant whose clients have included AT&T and Verizon, said that when the network and the handset were improved, customers “just used it all the more.” AT&T didn’t anticipate the rate of growth and didn’t upgrade fast enough in some markets, he said. “Other operators have the luxury of watching and learning from AT&T,” he said, “which has the most number of next-generation smartphones, with full browsers and built-in video players.”

The data seem incontrovertible: AT&T, while meeting 4,000 percent growth in data use, has acquitted itself quite nicely. But the company is saddled with an awful public image as the perennial laggard.

AT&T and Apple could both gain by swapping talent.

Apple, send your marketing wizards to lend your partner a hand. It sorely needs help.

AT&T, send some engineers to redesign the iPhone to make better use of the country’s fastest wireless network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13digi.html





AT&T to Urge Customers to Use Less Wireless Data
Jenna Wortham

AT&T is considering ways to encourage customers to use less wireless data as its network struggles to keep up with demand, a company executive said Wednesday.

“What we are seeing in the U.S. today in terms of smartphone penetration, 3G data, nobody else is seeing in the rest of the planet,” Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive for mobility and consumer markets at AT&T, told analysts at a conference in New York. “The amount of growth and data that we are seeing in wireless data is unprecedented.”

AT&T is the exclusive United States carrier for the iPhone, whose owners are big users of network capacity as they surf the Web and download videos.

The company has been criticized by owners of the phone for delayed text and voice messages, sluggish download speeds and other network problems.

Mr. de la Vega cited the heaviest data users, saying that 40 percent of AT&T’s data traffic came from just 3 percent of its smartphone customers.

But he emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use.

“We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage, so they don’t crowd out the customers on those same cell sites,” he said.

The company might consider a “pricing scheme that addresses the usage,” Mr. de la Vega said. But he said that would be determined by regulatory factors and industry competition, among other issues.

Although the company declined to provide further details, analysts speculated that AT&T could be talking about a tiered pricing structure, not unlike a voice plan.

“You use more minutes, you pay more,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst. Mr. Sharma pointed out that carriers in other countries put data-use limits on iPhone customers to manage demand.

Still, Mr. Sharma said pricing plans based on use were only part of the answer to AT&T’s network congestion.

“They still have to improve things on the back end so they can deal with the issues of multiple users on the network at the same time,” he said.

AT&T has announced a goal of adding 2,000 cell sites to improve its network this year. And this week it released an iPhone application called Mark the Spot that lets users report data problems, dropped calls and spotty coverage.

All wireless carriers are preparing for growth in the use of smartphones and mobile computers that will place high data demands on their networks, said James Brehm, a senior mobile consultant with market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

“AT&T and other service providers want to be smarter about how they bill customers and maximize all streams of revenue, while growing the number of connected devices and data traffic at the same time,” Mr. Brehm said.

Mr. de la Vega acknowledged the company’s difficulties in meeting the demands of its customers, but said things were improving in some areas. “In New York, I think we’ve turned a corner,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/te.../10iphone.html





AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink
Bill Snyder

George Orwell would be proud of AT&T's latest series of ads.

The company is attempting to convince us that it favors Net neutrality and an open Internet, when in fact it is lobbying hard for the opposite result. The strategy was foreshadowed in October when Sen. John McCain, the recipient of more telco money [1] in the last two years than anybody in the U.S. Senate, authored a bill disingenuously labeled "The Internet Freedom Act of 2009." But if McCain and AT&T were being honest, they would have called it "The Internet Robber Baron Act."

More than semantics are at stake here. The new chairman of the FCC is moving to put teeth into a series of rules [2] that would do much to guarantee real Net neutrality. Naturally, the big carriers oppose this. But given the political climate in the country and their companies' record of alienating consumers and businesses that need an open Internet, AT&T's spinmeisters know that it can't just come out and say what it really means.

Instead, the company cleverly disguises its real intent with a campaign aimed at convincing the public that, as Orwell put it in "1984," ignorance is strength. OK, that's a bit harsh. But there is going to be a big fight about this in 2010, and whether we are IT professionals, consumers, or both, we need to know exactly what's going on.

What Net neutrality really means

Early on, the debate about Net neutrality centered on the issue of tiered or metered pricing. Carriers argued with some justification that customers who use more bandwidth -- and, thus, more network resources -- should pay accordingly. That's not too different than charging by the gallon for water service or by the kilowatt-hour for electricity.

That debate is largely over, though it's not clear which carriers will implement tiered pricing and how much it will cost consumers. (AT&T recently moved to start such tiered pricing for data services [5].)

The argument now is much more complex and centers on control of content and applications on both the wired and wireless Internet. If a carrier can pick and choose among different types of content and different types of applications, its competitors (and, ultimately, the users) are severely disadvantaged.

The FCC has for some time favored Net neutrality in principle, but it has never turned those principles into enforceable rules. But in October, Julius Genachowski, the new chairman of the FCC, proposed to codify the four existing principles and added two more. (Here's a complete list of the six pending rules [6].)

Most significantly, rule no. 5 says broadband service providers "would be required to treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner." The other new rule would make ISPs disclose relevant information concerning network management and other practices.

It's probably easier to understand what Net neutrality means by looking at its opposite. Suppose AT&T decided that customers who want to reach their Gmail accounts would get slower connection speeds than customers who were using its own U-verse service or its partner's Yahoo Mail. Or what if AT&T had a partnership with say, Amazon.com, and allowed its transactions to move faster than those on the Barnes & Noble site? Talk about anticompetitive. If rule no. 5 takes effect, those scenarios are illegal.

Two years ago, Comcast tried to throttle peer-to-peer networking traffic and backed down only when the FCC started making noises about new rules. Comcast may indeed have been experiencing network issues because of the heavy BitTorrent traffic. But instead of acting openly, it acted like a hacker, using a technique called packet forgery [7] to slow the traffic. Such behavior would be stopped by rule No. 6.

When AT&T, Verizon, and other carriers say they want the Internet to be free and competitive, what they really want to do is maintain the status quo: They want to be free of regulation so that they can set the rules, not let you be free to do what you want. As long as Net neutrality is upheld by unenforceable "principles" instead of actual rules with consequences for violation, life is good -- for them.

At the same time and in the same misleading ads, AT&T trumpets its desire to extend broadband to everyone in the country. Sure, that sounds great, but read the fine print. AT&T is asking asking the government to define broadband as anything over 768Kbps downstream and 200Kbps upstream [8]. That low-speed level hasn't been considered "broadband" in years. Comcast reportedly set the bar even lower, defining broadband as 256Kbps upstream or downstream. So much for VoIP, streaming video, or any new applications that may need relatively high speeds. And did I mention there would likely be a whopping subsidy to carriers that provide this crippled version of "broadband" service?

McCain's bill would stifle innovation

When the FCC was in Republican hands, McCain and friends had no need to push a legislative agenda. Now that Genachowski and other Obama appointees are in the majority, the carriers' buddies have to do something.

That something was the Internet Freedom Act McCain sponsored in the fall. The bill says the FCC "shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services."

Aside from the utterly misleading title of the bill, there's a rather large irony here. Conservatives generally believe, or at least claim to believe, that the market works best when competition is allowed to flourish. And they argue that government regulation will stifle innovation.

But the McCain bill would do exactly the opposite. It would give the largest players -- the biggest service providers -- an even greater advantage over new and potentially more innovative competitors. After all, if a startup faces especially high tariffs because its application is seen as competitive with that of a carrier or its partner, it's likely to fail. That sounds like the robber-baron era of the late 1800s and early 1900s to me.

By contrast, the FCC's new rules would keep the Internet open for consumers, businesses, and innovators. AT&T, Verizon, and the politicians carrying their water want to lock it up, in the name of freedom. It's not hard to see who's on the right side of this one.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/regulatio...oublethink-636





Local Governments Offer Data to Miners
Claire Cain Miller

A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?

In Washington, a Web site called Stumble Safely makes that possible. It is one example of the kind of creativity that cities are hoping to mobilize by turning over big chunks of data to programmers and the public.

Many local governments are figuring out how to use the Internet to make government data more accessible. The goal is to spawn useful Web sites and mobile applications — and perhaps even have people think differently about their city and its government.

“It will change the way citizens and government interact, but perhaps most important, it’s going to change the way elected officials and civil servants deliver programs, services and promises,” said Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, which is one of the cities leading the way in releasing government data to Web developers. “I can’t wait until it challenges and infuriates the bureaucracy.”

Advocates of these open-data efforts say they can help citizens figure out what is going on in their backyards and judge how their government is performing.

But programmers have had trouble getting their hands on some data. And some activists and software developers wonder whether historically reticent governments will release data that exposes problems or only information that makes them look good.

It is too early to say whether releasing city data will actually make civil servants more accountable, but it can clearly be useful. Even data about mundane things like public transit and traffic can improve people’s lives when it is packaged and customized in an accessible way — a situation that governments themselves may not be equipped to realize.

A Web site called CleanScores, for instance, tracks restaurant inspection scores in various cities and explains each violation. After School Special combines data from San Francisco schools, libraries and restaurants so parents can plan after-school activities and see how children’s nutritional options compare by neighborhood. And Trees Near You, available for the iPhone, lets people identify trees on New York streets.

By releasing data in easy-to-use formats, cities and states hope that people will create sites or applications that use it in ways City Hall never would have considered.

San Francisco recently unveiled DataSF, a Web clearinghouse of raw government data that the public can download. The data sets include seismic hazard zones, street sweeping schedules and campaign finance filings. New York City’s Data Mine includes directories of sidewalk cafes, property values, horseback riding trails and historic houses.

Washington was a leader in releasing its data, and the federal government is doing it too at Data.gov.

Much of this data has always been publicly available, but until recently it has been almost impossible to find. Getting hold of it might have required tenacity, drive and endless phone calls.

The push to publicize government data goes as far back as the 1960s, but technology has made it possible for people to use the data in ways that would not have been possible even a year ago, said Eric Gundersen, president of Development Seed, the Washington company that created Stumble Safely. The company builds data and map applications for international development programs.

“The timing now with the open data movement is really critical because there are a lot of open-source tools that really make that data usable,” Mr. Gundersen said. These include the mapping tool he used to build Stumble Safely and also a site for the United States Agency for International Development that maps public health clinics.

Some activists are skeptical that governments will release politically risky data that could show that people are not doing their jobs. Mayor Newsom said he wants to release all kinds of data, and said he would not be surprised if “people who love to hate their mayor” create an application that maps his public schedule, to bolster their cases about which parts of town he neglects.

There is also the concern that people might misinterpret what the data is telling them.

“In the most basic of forms, with regard to crime stats and unemployment numbers, these kinds of bulletin boards are very useful,” said Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, an environmental nonprofit group, who has been an activist in San Francisco for three decades. “But on detailed data dealing with very complicated material, you really have to know what you’re looking for in order to distinguish between good data and junk data.”

Mr. Bloom also worries that cities could manipulate data to gloss over things like unemployment rates by neighborhood.

Governments are trying to make data openness a more open process itself by asking people to vote for data sets they want to be released. In New York, for example, people have requested data on school violence, public restroom locations and bicycle accidents.

Still, asking for the data is often not enough. Software developers in New York have been unsuccessful in getting data feeds of pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and fatalities from the Police Department, said Noel Hidalgo, who is director of technology innovation for the New York State Senate and has been working with developers on building city-data applications. He envisions applications that overlay accident information on city bike maps.

Paul J. Browne, a deputy commissioner of the New York City Police Department, said it releases information about individual accidents to journalists and others who request it, but would not provide software developers with a regularly updated feed. “We provide public information, not data flow for entrepreneurs,” he said.

There have been other scuffles over who has the right to data. Routesy, an iPhone application, uses data from San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency to show train and bus schedules and locate stations on a map. It stopped working for a while because a private contractor working with the agency wanted to charge a licensing fee for the information. The agency now requires its contractor, NextBus, to make the data freely available.

There is evidence that governments’ attitude toward publicizing data is changing. Two years ago, when a Web design and research firm called Stamen Design started a Web site, Crimespotting, that mapped crime data for Oakland, Calif., the city cut off access to the data a week after the site went up.

Bob Glaze, the city’s chief technology officer, said the frequent data requests from the site were disrupting the city’s own crime site. The city eventually changed its mind. And in August, Stamen’s designers unveiled a San Francisco version of Crimespotting with Mayor Newsom at their side.

Some government leaders are making data disclosure an official policy. Mayor Newsom signed an executive order saying city data should be released, and the White House is about to publish a directive expected to give similar instructions to federal agencies.

San Francisco, New York and Washington have all organized contests to encourage software developers to create applications with their data. And the developers are using the data to build businesses. Stamen, for example, uses Crimespotting to show potential clients what it could create for them. Other firms are selling the iPhone apps they have built.

The cities, meanwhile, are to some degree using developers to provide citizens with a service so they do not have to.

“We are increasingly governing in a time when the demand for services exceeds our resources,” said Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States. If the contests “spur dozens of innovative applications,” he said, “then we’ve essentially achieved a policy objective at virtually no cost.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/te.../07cities.html





Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers
Eric Pfanner

When Axel Springer, the founder of the German newspaper publishing business bearing his name, laid the cornerstone in 1959 for a high-rise headquarters in Berlin only steps away from the tense line separating East from West, people called him crazy, arrogant or both.

While the Berlin Wall has come and gone, Springer executives are looking into another ideologically divided realm — cyberspace — with a similarly stubborn mien.

Springer, which publishes the biggest daily in Europe, the tabloid Bild, as well as other newspapers in Germany and Eastern Europe, says it wants publishers to get paid for their work on the Internet, at a time when many people assume that online news should be free.

“The meta-philosophy of free — we should get rid of this philosophy,” said Christoph Keese, Springer’s head of public affairs and an architect of its online strategy. “A highly industrialized world cannot survive on rumors. It needs quality journalism, and that costs money.”

Springer is not the only publisher looking for ways to earn money from digital sources, as readers turn away from printed newspapers and the promise of Internet advertising fades. In the English-speaking world, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., has been telling anyone who will listen that he plans to erect so-called pay walls for his company’s newspaper Web sites. Other publishers, including The New York Times Co., which owns the International Herald Tribune, have also said they were considering charging for online access.

But while newspaper companies elsewhere have generally been vague about their intentions, Mr. Keese, during an interview at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, provided a detailed overview of the company’s digital ambitions.

Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Mr. Keese wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag.

What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example.

“How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said.

A single mouse click would allow the user to pay for and view the pictures. Readers could also buy flat-rate packages providing access to content from a variety of media companies, Mr. Keese said, just as they can subscribe to unlimited data access plans via mobile phone networks.

Axel Springer’s plans are contingent on cooperation with Google, a company that Mr. Murdoch has accused of “theft,” contending that it earns billions of dollars of advertising revenue on the back of newspapers’ journalistic endeavors. But Mr. Keese said Axel Springer was happy to work with Google, acknowledging that publishers could not match its expertise in monetizing digital content.

Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, said an online marketplace like the one envisioned by Mr. Keese was an “obvious extension” of the company’s previously announced plans to create an Internet store for digital books. He declined to comment specifically on talks with German newspapers.

“It’s safe to say it’s a global discussion going on with a number of publishers,” he said. “Publishers are still in the exploratory stages of this.”

While German publishers are talking to Google about collaborating on a system for selling their content online, they are battling it in another area. They want the company to pay for the use of snippets of their articles by Google News, which compiles extracts from a variety of sources and links to the full stories.

Mr. Cohen ruled out any such payments, saying publishers benefited from the links by generating increased traffic to their Web sites, allowing them to sell more advertising.

“We have no intention to pay anyone for indexing their content,” he said. “If publishers don’t want us to show their headlines or snippets, they can already opt to take them out.”

Publishers say pulling their contents out of Google News, or the search engine, is not a fair choice because of the company’s powerful position on the Internet, leaving them with nowhere else to go; in Germany, Google accounts for roughly 80 percent of Internet searches.

To try to improve their leverage, German publishers have lobbied for a new kind of copyright preventing the secondary use of journalistic content online without express permission. The governing coalition headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged to enact such a law, though the timing remains unclear.

Mr. Cohen said the measure was unnecessary because Google abided by existing copyright laws, showing only portions of published works on Google News, unless it had agreements in place to display full articles.

Some analysts say, however, that the proposed copyright law could cover even the use of excerpts. That, they add, could have a chilling effect on aggregators, bloggers and others who now freely cite newspaper articles online.

“It’s a backward-looking way of dealing with the problem,” said Robin Meyer-Lucht, a digital media consultant in Berlin. “Publishers should be looking at aggregation and collaboration with their users, rather than wasting money on legalistic solutions that don’t work.”

Mr. Keese said, however, that the proposed law was an important prong in German publishers’ plans for digital business models.

With the copyright in place, businesses that used newspaper content online, including aggregators, might be required to buy licenses, much as restaurants, nightclubs or hair salons now need licenses to play recorded music. A new agency, modeled on the collecting societies that gather royalties for record labels, composers and artists, would administer the licenses.

Mr. Keese said he did not know how much revenue such licenses, or the other plans, could generate. But he noted that GEMA, the main collecting society for German music copyright owners, raises more than €850 million, or $1.3 billion, a year.

The proposed copyright has broad support among German publishers, and Mr. Keese said they also generally agreed on the need for an industrywide approach to the development of future digital business models. In the United States, some newspaper publishers have been wary about that kind of cooperation, citing antitrust rules.

While Axel Springer is often seen as one of the most pro-American of German newspaper owners, Mr. Keese had some sharp criticism for his U.S. counterparts. American publishers, he said, have been too timid in dealing with threats to their future — a problem that he attributed to a lesser cultural appreciation of the importance of the print media in the United States than in Germany.

“The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down,” he said. “This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/bu...pringer07.html





Iran Chokes off Internet on Eve of Student Rallies
Ali Akbar Dareini

Government opponents shouted "Allahu Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator" from Tehran's rooftops in the pouring rain on the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday. Authorities choked off Internet access and warned journalists working for foreign media to stick to their offices for the next three days.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilizing the masses as Iran's clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent. Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out Monday and show their movement still has momentum.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi threw his support behind the student demonstrations and declared that his movement was is still alive. A statement posted on his Web site said the clerical establishment cannot silence students and was losing legitimacy in the Iranian people's minds.

"A great nation would not stay silent when some confiscate its vote," said Mousavi, who claims President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election victory from him by fraud.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, accused the opposition Sunday of exposing divisions in the country and creating opportunities for Iran's enemies.

Iran's universities have been strongholds of the opposition movement that grew out of the disputed election, and authorities have besieged campuses nationwide with a wave of arrests and student expulsions. The pro-government Basij militia has also recruited informers on campuses to blow the whistle on any opposition troublemakers, according to students.

Despite heavy rain Sunday night, rooftop cries of "Allahu Akbar" or "God is Great" and "Death to the Dictator" were heard from many parts of the capital Tehran on Sunday night. The protest reprised one of the main tactics of the anti-shah movement in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and was revived in the days and weeks after the disputed elections.

The rooftop chants had not been heard since the opposition's last attempt to mobilize, a Nov. 4 rally coinciding with state-sanctioned events to mark the anniversary of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover. That demonstration drew far fewer protesters than at the height of the summer's unrest. But it still provoked a violent response from security forces.

For weeks after the disputed June presidential election, demonstrations triggered by claims of massive fraud in the vote brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, but the relentless crackdown that followed has taken a heavy toll.

Seeking to deny the protesters a chance to reassert their voice, authorities slowed Internet connections to a crawl in the capital, Tehran. For some periods on Sunday, Web access was completely shut down — a tactic that was also used before last month's demonstration.

The government has not publicly acknowledged it is behind the outages, but Iran's Internet service providers say the problem is not on their end and is not a technical glitch.

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been a powerful voice of dissent from within the ranks of the clerical leadership, accused Iran's hard-line rulers of silencing any constructive criticism.

"The situation in the country is such that constructive criticism is not tolerated," Rafsanjani was quoted by several news agencies as saying in reports on Sunday.

Throughout Iran's postelection crisis, Rafsanjani has appeared to side with critics alleging that the vote that gave Ahmadinejad a second term in office was rigged.

Seeking to confine journalists working for international media to their offices during the protests, Iran's Culture Ministry suspended accreditation allowing them to report from the streets from Monday to Wednesday.

The ministry also warned the few remaining pro-reform newspapers not to publish "divisive" material, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Reporters have been among those arrested in the postelection security sweeps, as the government has sought to control the media landscape.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in statement Saturday that 28 journalists and bloggers are currently being held — including two arrested last week: a blogger supporting women's rights and a reporter for a business daily.

The group said reporters have been repeatedly threatened, summoned by the intelligence services and given long prison sentences after questionable judicial proceedings.

Largely swept off the streets, the opposition relies on the Web and cell phone service to organize rallies and get its message out.

The call for Monday's demonstrations was put out on dozens of Web sites run by supporters of opposition leaders Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, who both ran against Ahmadinejad in the June 12 election. Most of those sites have been repeatedly blocked by the government, forcing activists to set up new ones.

Monday's demonstrations mark the anniversary of the 1953 killing of three students at an anti-U.S. protest during the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a close American ally.

Since the 1990s, that anniversary has served as an occasion for protests by those urging Iran's Islamic leadership to allow more social and political freedoms.

Signs have mounted in recent days of a potentially explosive confrontation, especially if the protesters take their demonstrations off campuses. Extra police and other security personnel were deployed around Tehran University Sunday, and the nation's police chief, Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, warned that security forces will crush any protests.

"If any unauthorized gatherings take place outside the universities, police will confront them," Moghaddam was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency.

Students say there is a government campaign to not only keep a handle on security on campuses but also to control ideas. Some courses seen as too Western-based have been replaced with more "Islamic" ones. And morals police in universities have been stopping women at campus gates for wearing clothes that are too colorful or not all-covering enough.

Nearly 100 student leaders have been detained in the past weeks, human rights groups say.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091206/..._mi_ea/ml_iran





U.K. Phone Thieves "Targeting More Live Music Gigs"

Music-lovers watching their favorite acts at live concerts are increasingly becoming targets for gangs of mobile phone thieves, British police said on Monday.

Detectives warn that they have seen a growing problem of organized criminals at both indoor and outdoor gigs hoping to make off with top-of-the-range phones.

Many victims will also often believe they have lost their phone, perhaps helping to mask the scale of the issue.

"We are concerned that organized thieves are targeting concerts to steal phones from genuine fans," said Detective Superintendent Nev Nolan, head of the National Mobile Phone Crime Unit (NMPCU).

"A lot of people like to use their mobile phones to film or take photographs of the concert, but will then return the phone to an insecure bag or pocket, where thieves are able to snatch it."

NMPCU said it had made nine arrests at events in London in the last two weeks based on intelligence it had received. Other arrests had been made across the country.

Detectives said they were working with venues to put up posters warning concertgoers to take care of their phones.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Steve Addison)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





What Do Baby Boomers Want From Technology?
Steve Lohr

By next year, one-third of the United States population will be over 50 years old. That graying demographic is expected to outspend younger adults by $1 trillion in 2010. And among other things, the over-50 crowd shows the highest intent to purchase consumer electronics of any age group.

But is the over-50 demographic really a distinctive market for technology goods and services? And if so, how so?

Those were the sorts of questions explored in a somewhat unusual marketing research project sponsored by AARP and Microsoft. Earlier this year, 60 people in total gathered for dinner and after-dinner discussions about their attitudes toward, use of and expectations for technology. The lengthy sessions were in four cities: San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago and New York. The participants ranged in age from 50 to 60.

The recordings of those conversations have been sifted and distilled, and the results published in a report called “Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation.” The research project was led by Michael Rogers, an author, futurist and consultant. Mr. Rogers was formerly the vice president for The Washington Post Company’s new media division, and served a stint as a consultant to The New York Times.

In a conversation recently, Mr. Rogers said the purpose of the research exercise was to try to detect “weak signals.” These, he explained, are nuggets of insight about future trends that typically go undetected in broad-brush public opinion polls and surveys with their multiple-choice questions and one-to-five ratings.

What did he learn?

First, Mr. Rogers said, “It surprised me how much boomer technology habits are still in flux.” In the past, he said, studies have shown that as people reach 60, “technology adoption falls off a cliff.” Not so with the boomers. They grew up with technology, he noted — they were in their teens to early 30s when the first Apple computers and IBM PCs appeared.

The dinner conversations, he said, suggested enthusiasm for cutting-edge gadgets with practical uses like microprojectors (also known as pico projectors) — pocket-sized devices that can take video and play it on any surface, turning a wall into a 50-inch screen.

Boomers, Mr. Rogers predicted, are also going to be the driving force behind the use of information technology in health care. The dinner attendees who had access to electronic health records, he said, were “just ecstatic” about the benefits of setting up appointments online, e-mailing doctors and reviewing their records over the Web. As they age themselves, the incentive for using technology tools to manage health and wellness programs grows as well.

Boomers, he said, are not big fans of anonymity on the Web, especially anonymous blog comments. An idea that seemed sensible to many was the concept of a “identity passport” for using the Web.

“There was a real sense that if you always knew who it was, the Internet would be a relatively safer place,” Mr. Rogers observed. “This is a generation that is going to support the rule of law on the Internet. They, in general, are not among the ‘info-libertarians’ on the Net.”

A repeated complaint from the boomers was tech products that are cluttered with “excessive features.” Still, he noted, the smartphone users do want to call, text, play games, browse the Web, and tap into online applications they download — all from a single, powerful device.

What does that mean for marketers and product designers? “There is a real opportunity for companies to aim for a smart middle group that may well appeal to everyone,” Mr. Rogers said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...echnology/?hpw





Aliens vs Predator Game Banned, Will Not be 'Sanitised' for Australia
Chloe Lake

* Popular game banned for violence
* Developer refuses to edit the game
* Says it's made for adults, not children
* Australia has no adult rating for games

A POPULAR sci-fi horror game has been banned in Australia - and the developer refuses to "sanitise" it for a local release.

Aliens vs Predator, a video game based on the popular movie series, has been refused classification for containing high-impact violence, according to the Classifications Board.

"We will not be releasing a sanitised or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices," the game's maker, Rebellion Developments, told gaming blog CVG.

Unlike other developed nations, Australia does not have an adult rating for games, which means that anything stronger than an MA15+ rating has to be refused classification.

Aliens vs Predator was banned for showing close-ups of human characters experiencing "explicit decapitation and dismemberment" as well as "stabbing through the chest, throat, mouth or eyes," according to a copy of the Board's report published on GameArena.com.au.

"Characters can be stabbed with a Predator's wrist blade or an Alien's tail in depictions reminiscent of impalement," the report says, adding that players can combine explicit violent moves, such as decapitation or eye-gouging.

Similar actions are depicted in the movie series that inspired the game, with none of the films rated above MA15+.

Previous Alien vs Predator games – released by other developers and publishers – have been rated M and MA15+.

Rebellion Developments said it was "disappointed" by the ban, but remained defiant.

"The authorities had no choice (...) we agree strongly that our game is not suitable for game players who are not adults," the company said.

"The content of AvP is based on some of the most innovative and iconic horror movies, and as such we wanted to create a title that was true to the source."

"It is for adults, and it is bloody and frightening, that was our intent."

Previously banned games, such as Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead 2, have been edited for local release.

Last month's release of zombie game Left 4 Dead 2 was so hastily edited that IGN game reviewers described it as "the worst censorship result in Australia's history" that was "not worth the plastic the disc is printed on."

Australia's classification laws cannot be changed without the support of every state and territory attorney-general.

South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson remains outspoken about his opposition to R-rated games.

He recently acknowledged the lack of an R18+ rating "restricts adult liberty to a small degree", but said it was worth it to protect children from violent games.

Sega, the publisher of Aliens vs Predator, said it "will continue to investigate all options available to us, including the possibility of appeal".
http://www.news.com.au/technology/al...-1225807850199





Savvy Kids Can Access Explicit Online Worlds: FTC
Diane Bartz

Even a minimally savvy youngster can figure out how to access violent or explicitly sexual content in some virtual or Internet worlds, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.

In its survey of online worlds, where users create digital alter egos called avatars and interact with other users' avatars, the commission found that seven of the worlds with the most explicit sex and violence set a minimum age of 13 and an eighth set a minimum age of 18.

If children below age 13 attempted to register, they were rejected at five of the sites.

"However, two worlds, Kaneva and There.com, rejected child registrations, but then immediately permitted users to re-register as an adult from the same computer," the report said.

Kaneva did not respond to an attempt to reach it for comment but Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com, said that they were looking to address the situation and that they tried to keep their world relatively free of sex and violence.

"We recognize that that's a problem and we're trying to deal with it," he told Reuters. "The amount of violent content and sexual content that they'll find in There is minimal."

Red Light Center, which sets a minimum age of 18 and whose home page contains nudity, also allowed users who were rejected as too young to immediately try again with a different birthday.

"Red Light Center's main purpose is to offer sexually explicit content," the FTC report said. "Yet it employed no mechanism to limit access to underage users at the time of the Commission's study. Indeed, when the Commission selected the virtual world for inclusion in its review, demographic data from comScore, Inc. indicated that nearly 16 percent of Red Light Center's users were under age 18."

Red Light did not return a telephone call seeking comment.

As part of the report, which was requested by Congress, the commission recommended virtual world operators develop better mechanisms to screen out children and ensure that adults in these virtual worlds do not interact with children or teens.

The commission also urged better enforcement of the online world's rules regarding profanity in sites aimed at children, and training for community enforcers or moderators to enforce any rules.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...5B94BX20091210





Your First Look at Nook: The Technologizer Review

Barnes & Noble's E-reader is hardly perfect. But it's the most formidable Kindle competitor to date.
Harry McCracken

In retrospect, it was probably inevitable. Bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble has spent much of the past decade and a half duking it out with online archrival Amazon.com. So when Amazon unveiled its Kindle e-reader two years ago, it pretty much demanded some sort of response from the 136-year-old merchant.

That response is the Barnes & Noble Nook, and its arrival this week signals the start of a digital transition for the bookselling wars. The Nook has much in common with the Kindle, from its playful name to the paper-esque E-Ink display to built-in 3G wireless that lets you start reading a book seconds after you’ve decided to buy it. Even the prices–$259 for the device itself, and $9.99 for most bestsellers–are identical.

(Like Amazon and Apple, B&N likes to refer to its creation without a modifying article, and also dispenses with capitals–”nook lets you loan eBooks” rather than “The Nook lets you loan eBooks.” I’ve honored the lack of a “the” in the title of this article, but will blithely ignore it from here on out.)

For all their similarities, the Nook packs more pizzazz than Amazon’s e-reader, in the form of the color touchscreen it uses for much of its navigation. It aims to be more open, letting you read tomes you buy on PCs, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries–and even on e-readers from companies other than Barnes & Noble. And it brings back a virtue of dead-tree books that people have taken for granted for centuries: the ability to loan them to pals.

For this review, I got to spend some quality time with a Nook, running the software version which will be installed on the first Nooks to reach customers. As I was finishing up my review, B&N was racing to ready itself for the Nook’s debut this week–a few features weren’t yet up and running, or had rough edges that may be eliminated by the time the first consumers turn on their Nooks for the first time.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: The Nook isn’t a Kindle killer–not in this initial form, at least. For all its pleasing touches, intriguing innovations, and clear advantages over the Kindle, it feels like a less-than-perfectly-polished 1.0 product, just like Amazon’s first e-reader did a couple of years ago. The user interface is surprisingly sluggish, there are some usability gaffes, and I encountered a major bug with the device’s most-touted feature. Even the much-hyped lending feature has a major gotcha: You can lend a book once. Period.

The good news is that these issues all relate to software, not the physical design. Barnes & Noble plans to quickly use the Nook’s auto-updating capability to push out fixes and refinements; given that the device is sold out until early 2010, it’s possible that the Nook that most purchasers get their hands on will be a meaningful improvement on the one I tried. And a slightly more zippy, less quirky Nook could indeed leave the Kindle in a clear second place.

Even an imperfect Nook is easily the Kindle’s most serious rival, and by far the most important e-reader to arrive since the first Kindle. Amazon’s e-reader may be a fixture at the top of Amazon’s home page–making its current status as the merchant’s best-selling item pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy–but it has no brick-and-mortar presence whatsoever. Sony’s Readers are widely available at retail, but in a relatively subdued fashion; Barnes & Nobles’s other bookmongering nemesis, Borders, sells Sony’s e-readers, but sticks them in unmanned, easy-to-ignore kiosks. All of which gives B&N the opportunity to introduce millions of American book lovers to the still-nascent notion of digital books.

Judging from my visit this weekend to the chain’s Emeryville, California outlet, however, the Nook will be impossible to avoid. Here’s the first thing shoppers encounter when they enter the store–and this was before it had a working Nook to demo, let alone ones on hand to sell. (The Nook is currently sold out until mid-January, and B&N won’t stock them in stores until all the earliest online buyers’ orders have been fulfilled.)

A Barnes & Noble representative told that the company intends to turn its thousands of store employees into passionate Nook advocates. If I sold books for a living, I’m not sure if I’d see the Nook as an opportunity for evangelism or as a threat to my livelihood. But in an era that’s seen so many venerable retailers of content go belly-up, it’s impressive to see Barnes & Noble embrace technological change with such gusto.

Before we go any further, here’s a T-Grid comparing the Nook with Amazon’s current Kindle and another big-name competitor, Sony’s Reader Touch Edition.

I promise we’ll dig into the Nook at the moment, but for the sake of physical comparison, here it is with some rivals. Counter-clockwise from the lower left-hand corner: The Nook, the current Kindle, the original Kindle (just for the sake of nostalgia, okay?), and the Sony Reader Touch Edition.

Ready to move on? Good.

Hardware Wars

All three of the e-readers we just compared have 6″ E-Ink displays, but they build those screens into cases that are substantially different. The Nook is a bit taller and wider than the Sony Touch Edition, but less so than the Kindle; it’s .5″ thick, which counts as chunky in this comparison. It’s also the least posh-feeling e-reader, being unapologetically made of plastic while both the Kindle and the Sony are partially clad in metal.

Overall, though, the Nook’s intermediate size feels better in the hands than the Kindle or Sony, and it’s more (coat) pocket-friendly than the Kindle. The slight curvature of its backside makes for comfy grasping, and reminds me of a well-loved paperback (see the first image to the right). And the extra thickness is at least partially explained by its removable back, which reveals a MicroSD slot for memory expansion and a swappable battery (see right image). The skinnier Kindle has neither a path for memory upgrades nor a battery you can remove.

Oddly enough, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader is the only one of the three to have nailed the most basic input action of all: turning pages. The Kindle’s left- and right-side buttons vary in a confusing manner, and the Sony has sliver-like page turning buttons on the left side of the case. But the Nook has easy-to-press, identical forward and backward buttons on both sides of the screen, making it as inviting to southpaws as it is for righties. (Technically speaking, they’re not buttons but rather pressure-sensitive areas of the case that click when you press them.)

Of course, the Nook’s page-turning buttons aren’t its most notable interface feature. It’s that 3.5″ color touchscreen that sits below the E-Ink display. You can flip pages with it as well, and you use for just about every other aspect of your interaction with the Nook, from buying books to taking notes.

If you’re expecting the touchscreen to boast all the transcendent, fluid slickness of an iPhone, you’ll be disappointed. It’s not that gorgeous, and the Nook would have been nearly as pleasing if the screen was monochrome. The big advantage isn’t aesthetics–it’s efficient use of the Nook’s limited real estate. Unlike the Kindle’s all-too-physical keyboard, the Nook can use the same space for a keyboard or menus depending on what’s more appropriate at the time. It also beats Sony’s E-Ink touchscreen, which makes you peck at an on-screen keyboard with a stylus.

The touchscreen’s showstopping feature is supposed to be a view that lets you choose books in your library or the B&N store via tiny cover thumbnails, in a rough approximation of Apples’ iconic Cover Flow feature. It’s the one aspect of the interface that really benefits from color. But it’s not the default, so it takes an extra tap on the screen to access it–and some of the covers of public-domain books I’d downloaded had type so tiny it was impossible to identify them. Worse, on my test Nook, the cover view was crippled by a bug that sometimes left the reader selecting a book other than the one I’d tapped. (A Barnes & Noble representative said the bug stems from a cacheing problem and that it’ll fix it soon.)

Mostly, I stuck with the less flashy plain-text list of books. It works fine, although I found it odd that selecting a book doesn’t immediately plunk you into its text. Instead, you get an intermediary screen, and must then choose the Read option. (I didn’t figure out that pressing and holding on the book’s title in the first place would also let you start reading until one of the Nook’s inventors pointed it out to me.)

Except in cover mode, the touchscreen gets used for navigational devices for which color is either less than essential or entirely irrelevant, including the keyboard you use for searching and note-taking.

How’s that keyboard? Adequate–which, in the land of the e-reader, counts as a compliment. I found it about as usable as the Kindle’s pill-like keys, and more tolerable than Sony’s touchscreen keyboard, which expects you to peck with a stylus. There’s no iPhone-like autocorrection of typos, but I was able to type relatively accurately. And unless you’re a copious note-taker, you just won’t do that much typing on this device, period.

My biggest complaint about the keyboard: The Submit key is dangerously close to the Clear one, which wipes out all the text you’ve just entered. That’s one of a number of quirky usability decisions I found, including the fact that you bacl out of a Nook screen to the previous display in at least three different ways, depending on where you are in the interface.

The Nook’s primary E-Ink screen is…well, it’s an E-Ink screen, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings. It doesn’t flicker and is easy on the eyes in decent lighting–outdoors, it’s spectacular–but has a dark-gray-on-light-gray look that’s unsuited to dim environments. (B&N sells a clip-on light and will offer a case with built-in illumination.) E-Ink’s low power consumption lets e-reader makers quote battery life in days, not hours, although the more power-hungry color LCD does have an impact on the Nook: Barnes & Noble says the gadget will go for ten days on a charge, versus two weeks for the Kindle. (I didn’t attempt to benchmark this claim; the color screen shuts off automatically to conserve power after a period of inactivity which you can adjust.)

Even in the best of circumstances, E-Ink is an inherently slow technology: When a page refreshes you can see the microparticles that make up the “ink” resassemble themselves before your eyes. And the Nook’s most serious drawback is that it’s slow even for an E-Ink reader. It flips its virtual pages noticeably more sluggishly than the Kindle or the Sony–not a crippling flaw given that you need a moment to move your eyes back to the top of the page anyway, but still a flaw. When you open a book, the Nook pauses for several seconds to format it, a step the Kindle and the Sony somehow avoid. Even the speed of the touchscreen feels less than satisfyingly snappy.

Barnes & Noble representatives told me that the speed of the device is limited by its use of Google’s Android 1.5 operating system, but the company is working to optimize the experience in a software update which it plans to push out to Nooks in January. I’ll try the update when it’s available and report back here.

Speaking of Android, the Nook is the first e-reader to run Google’s operating system, albeit in a form heavily modified to power an E-Ink-equipped device. (Spring Design’s vaguely Nooklike Alex may be the second.) The use of an existing OS let Barnes & Noble take the Nook from concept to shipping product in an unusually short amount of time.

You can’t install existing Android apps like Twitdroid on a Nook–there’s no installation mechanism, and they wouldn’t work with the e-ink screen even if there was–but could the use of the open-source OS let Barnes & Noble open a Nook App Store, stocked with optional software customized for its e-reader? The bookseller isn’t talking, except to say that it’s excited by the potential of Android to let it do cool things in the future.

Look, Up in the Air! Books!

It’s no shocker that the Nook matches the Kindle’s most groundbreaking feature: built-in wireless broadband that makes buying books infinitely more irresistible than if you had to do your shopping at computer, then transfer tomes to the e-reader via USB. (Sony’s Reader Touch Edition remains dependent on your Windows machine or Mac for content, but the company’s new Reader Daily Edition–due to ship any moment now–will add wireless, albeit at a pricey $399.99.)

Amazon’s most recent major revision to the Kindle dumped Sprint’s network for AT&T, and added the ability to buy books outside the U.S. (with a surcharge and a reduced selection of titles). The Nook’s 3G is also provided by AT&T, but lacks the the world-traveler angle: B&N is only selling the Nook in the U.S., and the gizmo won’t roam onto international wireless networks. Yanks who take their Nooks out of the U.S. will be able to download items they’ve already paid for (such as magazines and newspapers via subscription) over Wi-Fi, but won’t be able to purchase new titles until the return stateside.

Did I just mention Wi-Fi? Unlike its rivals from Amazon and Sony, the Nook has it. It’s faster than 3G, and enables some inventive integration between the Nook and Barnes & Noble’s 700+ retail stores. When you take the e-reader into a B&N branch, it notices you’re there, connects you to the store’s hotspot for free, and greets you–and may offer you fringe benefits such as free content or a complimentary cookie at the store’s coffee counter. Barnes & Noble also plans to let Nook owners hanging out at the company’s stores peruse books in their entirety, not just the brief samples that can otherwise be downloaded for free. (This feature isn’t quite ready yet, so I wasn’t able to test it.)

The Nook’s Wi-Fi should also work with open and password-protected Wi-Fi networks elsewhere, as long as they don’t have a sign-in page. (The device lacks the browser you’d need to enter credentials or agree to terms of service.) That means it should operate on your home network, but not at many public hotspots, such as those at Starbucks and hotels.

Over both 3G and Wi-Fi, the Nook’s wireless bookstore worked well in my tests, although here again, it was less spritely than the Kindle. The Nook shuts off its 3G connection to conserve power, and there’s a pause each time it restarts it. And unlike Amazon’s on-device store, the Nook also makes you click a second time to confirm your intent to buy something. It’s possible that that’s an understandable acknowledgement of Amazon’s One-Click patent, but it does make the shopping experience slightly less magical.

Listen In, Lend Out

Like the Kindle, the Nook has an extremely basic audio player, meant mostly for listening to MP3s as you read, which you can do over headphones or the device’s tinny monophonic speaker. However, it lacks the Kindle’s support for Audible audiobooks–and given that Amazon owns Audible, I wouldn’t bet on the Nook adding that capability anytime soon.

Two other Kindle features remain unreplicated in the Nook: Its Web browser and text-to-speech feature that can read books out loud. The lack of a browser isn’t really a downside–the Kindle’s is so rudimentary that it’s not an argument for buying a Kindle–and the absence of the book-reading feature isn’t a dealbreaker given that the Kindle’s version remains robotic-sounding and isn’t available for all books.

Besides, the Nook makes up for the omissions with a feature that Kindle owners have been pining for for two years now: book lending. Barnes & Noble calls this option LendMe, and it’s not without limitations. Like Amazon’s read-aloud feature, LendMe can be turned off by publishers, and even when it’s available, it is, bizarrely and presumably at the behest of book publishers, a one-time option: Lend a book once, and you can never do so again. The loan period is fixed at two weeks, during which the purchaser can’t read the book; once the loan’s over, it automatically returns. (That’s certainly an advance over dead-tree book lending–printed books that friends borrow have a nasty habit of never returning home.)

Even if none of your friends spring for a Nook, LendMe may come in handy: Barnes & Noble says you can lend books to users of its reader apps for Windows, Mac, and iPhone/iPod Touch, and that it’s extending lending to readers for BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile.

When you leave a Kindle or a Nook unused for an extended period, both go into a screensaver mode–and the Nook’s default screensaver shoes illustrations of noted authors that are strikingly similar to the ones on the Kindle. (I believe Barnes & Noble has been using these images in its stores since before there was an Amazon.com, so it’s entitled.) But the Nook gives you a bit of customization capability lacking in the Kindle: You can replace the default screensaver (and wallpaper) with your own photos, transferred from a computer via USB.

We’re talking E-Ink’s sixteen shades of murky gray, so you won’t whip out your e-reader to show off snapshots of your kids. But it’s a fun touch that makes the Nook feel more personal.

Books by the Boatload?

Ultimately, e-readers are still all about the books–both the sheer quantity that are available for download, and the odds that any given title you’re looking for is one of them. Barnes & Noble says that its e-book store stocks more than a million titles, which at first blush sounds like a major advance on Amazon’s quoted total of 360,000 Kindle books. But B&N’s figure includes free public-domain e-books that have been scanned by Google and which aren’t in the Kindle store. The company is a tad cagey about how its million-book claim breaks down, saying that there are over 500,000 Google tomes, but not disclosing just how many over. Even the most conservative math indicates that the public-domain offerings make up more than half of the Nook’s content stockpile of reading material.

E-Readers

As long as you understand that the Nook’s million titles include lots of public-domain freebies–both classics and forgotten curiosities–the fact that the e-reader offers Google books in such vast quantity is a pro, not a con. As for modern books you’ll pay for, the B&N, Amazon, and Sony stores’ total counts may differ, but the basic situation doesn’t: There’s lots that’s available, and lots that’s missing. All three stores had most but not all of the New York Times’ fiction and nonfiction bestsellers when I checked, for instance.

I didn’t attempt to audit the stores for significant titles that don’t happen to be current bestsellers, but it’s possible that Amazon’s lenghty head start on Barnes & Noble gives it an edge. When I reviewed the original Kindle back in 2007, I noted that Vladimir Nabokov and Ian Fleming were both missing; today, Lolita’s author is still unrepresented on the device, but James Bond is in plentiful supply. The Sony e-book store also has Bond but not Nabokov; the Nook, on the other hand, has neither. Here’s hoping that B&N will be as busy licensing additional titles in the coming months as it will be marketing its device.

Like the Kindle–but unlike Sony’s Readers–the Nook’s menu of content includes digital newspapers and magazines as well as books. Once you’ve subscribed, both the Kindle and the Nook snag each new issue automatically and notify you that it’s arrived. Which is pretty cool, although the Nook versions of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal I sampled share the disappointingly passive, plain-text feel of Kindle newspapers. (I’m still waiting for someone to really reimagine periodicals to take advantage of e-readers.)

Barnes & Noble is launching with 25 papers and magazines and plans to get to 50 quickly, with more to come in 2010. That count is less than half of Amazon’s, but the quality is good: The NYT, The WSJ, USA Today, Time, The Economist, The New Yorker, and Men’s Health are all on deck. And your subscriptions will be viewable on all of Barnes & Noble’s readers–the Nook itself, plus software for PCs, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries. Kindle subscriptions only work on Kindles. (The Nook has no equivalent to the Kindle’s 7500+ blogs and newsfeeds, however.)

Buy Once, Read Anywhere?

To date, one of the least appealing things about e-readers has been the use of proprietary formats and digital-rights management (DRM) technologies that limit your use of digital books you’ve paid for. Many of us treasure real books that have been passed down from generation to generation, but a Kindle book–right now, anyhow–is a fundamentally temporary thing. It’s readable only on the Kindle itself and in Amazon’s reader software; any Kindle owner who decides to switch to a Nook is faced with the prospect of buying a library of e-books all over again.

At the moment, much of the Barnes & Noble e-book store’s offerings are still in the proprietary PDB format. But Barnes & Noble, like Sony, has pledged its commitment to ePub, an industry-standard format for digital books embraced by practically everyone except Amazon. ePub isn’t quite an MP3 of e-books–for one thing, it enables DRM that can leave a book in ePub format unreadable on an device that supports ePub. But the whole idea of ePub is to support the kind of cross-platform compatibility that Amazon’s Kindle format inherently prevents. Any company that wants to build ePub support into a gadget or application can do so without anyone’s permission.

Already, Nook books can be read on more devices than their Kindle counterparts: Barnes & Noble offers free reader software for Windows, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries. (Amazon supports only Windows and the iPhone, with a Mac reader in the works.) Books from the Nook e-book store will also work on the iRex and upcoming Plastic Logic QUE, both of which have content deals with B&N. And the ePub support sets the stage for a scenario in which Nook books work on other devices, too. (A Sony representative told me that ePub books from Barnes & Noble should work on Sony Readers; all the Nook books I bought were in PDB form, so I couldn’t test that theory for myself.)

For now, Barnes & Noble has a real lead on Amazon when it comes to helping you read the books you buy on a variety of devices. I still look forward to the day, however, when the entire publishing industry settles on technology that makes questions of compatibility utterly irrelevant–or, ideally, that it screws up its courage and does away with DRM, period.

The Bottom Line

For book lovers who have decided to go digital–and the people who love them and want to give them gifts–the question remains: Should you buy a Nook, a Kindle, a Sony Reader, or something else? Unless you absolutely must put an e-reader under the Christmas Tree, my advice is to postpone the decision. But only a little. The Nook has the potential to decisively trump the Kindle, but I want to see if Barnes & Noble’s upcoming software update fixes the issues I encountered before I declare any winners. (Besides, you can’t buy a Nook today and receive it in time for the holidays; if the device appeals to you, patience will be required no matter what.)

There are other reasons to bide your time a bit longer before you snap up any e-reader. At least two known major e-reader players aren’t quite here yet: Sony’s Reader Daily Edition (which will ship before Christmas) and Plastic Logic’s QUE (which will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and may ship soon thereafter–whereupon it’ll be sold in Barnes & Noble stores alongside the Nook). Then there’s the 800-pound gorilla that hasn’t yet entered the room: the alleged Apple tablet that could be an exceptional e-reader…if it ever turns out to actually exist, that is.

E-reader buyers, in other words, are confronted by the same happy dilemma that almost always confronts tech shoppers: a choice between buying now, or waiting for upcoming products that are inevitably cooler (and, most likely, cheaper). No matter how Barnes & Noble’s ambitious plans for the Nook pan out, one thing seems clear: 2010 will be the most exciting year for digital books so far.

If you have an e-reader, let us know what you think if it–and if you’ve been waiting for the Nook or another new gadget, or are still an e-reading skeptic, tell us why.
http://technologizer.com/2009/12/06/nook-review/






Delay in Barnes & Noble's Nook Seen as Setback
Phil Wahba

Efforts by Barnes & Noble Inc to get its Nook electronic reader into customers' hands suffered another setback on Monday, when the bookseller said it was postponing the in-store debut of the device until early 2010 to fulfill orders already received.

Barnes & Noble said just eight days ago that it would ship the newly launched Nook to its highest-volume stores on December 7 to allow customers to buy an e-reader and take it home.

For now, only demonstration models are available in stores.

While analysts caution further delays could steer wavering e-reader buyers to rivals, such as the Kindle e-reader from Amazon.com and Sony Corp's Daily Edition device, they do not expect this latest snag to hurt Nook's market share in any lasting manner.

"You'll have some people thinking the Nook is the ideal holiday gift but they might look at a Kindle instead," said James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester Research.

But the Nook's unique features and the loyalty of Barnes & Noble customers will inure it against a backlash, he said.

Because the Nook allows users to download books from public libraries and from other sources, unlike the Kindle which only allows downloads from Amazon, customers are willing to wait, Gartner Vice President Allen Weiner said.

"The products are apples and oranges," said Weiner. "I don't know that the (Nook's) benefits have been marketed properly."

A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble said the delays stemmed from high demand, not any production snafus.

"For all the pre-orders, we have a commitment to customers to fulfill those orders on a first-come, first-served basis so we decided to hold off providing inventory to the stores until after the holidays," spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said.

Keating declined to say how many pre-orders the company had received for the Nook or how many have been delivered.

Amazon said in November that the Kindle posted its best sales yet that month.

Barnes & Noble shares fell 62 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $20.99 early Monday afternoon.

Patient To A Point

Retail experts have said e-readers -- which allow readers to use light, tablet-like devices onto which digital copies of books, magazines and newspapers can be downloaded -- will be a hot gift item this year.

But patience with the Nook's woes could wear thin.

"You really can't afford many more delays, especially because next year it's going to heat up," McQuivey said, referring to a slew of e-readers expected to be introduced at next month's CES conference in Las Vegas hosted by the Consumer Electronics Association.

Barnes & Noble is not the only one struggling to meet demand. Last month Sony said heavy demand for the Daily Edition meant shipments could not be guaranteed in time for the holidays. Last holiday season, Amazon was dogged with similar supply issues.

Barnes & Noble, which launched its e-reader in late October, said last month that it had sold out of the Nook because of strong demand. It has been scrambling to get the $259 devices into the hands of customers who ordered them before November 20. The bookseller has said orders placed after that date will not be filled until January.

Barnes & Noble's Keating said the company would only disclose after the holidays how long it will need to work through its order backlog.

Borders Group Inc has not yet released its own e-reader but is expected to disclose its plans next month.

(Reporting by Phil Wahba; Editing by John Wallace and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





In Familiar Books, a Plot Twist: Battle on Electronic Rights
Motoko Rich

William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible.”

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth.

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined not only to secure its place in the Kindle era but also to cede none of the revenue from one of its best-known authors.

In fact, Random House on Friday sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, staking out its claim on e-book rights. Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, wrote that the company’s older agreements give it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”

The discussions about the digital fate of Mr. Styron’s work are similar to the negotiations playing out across the book industry as publishers hustle to capture the rights to release e-book versions of so-called backlist books. Indeed, the same new e-book venture Mr. Styron’s family hopes to use has run into similar resistance from the print publisher of “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller.

Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

The tussle over who owns the electronic rights — and how much the authors should earn in digital royalties — potentially puts into play works by authors like Ralph Ellison and John Updike.

Some publishers have already made agreements with authors or their estates to release digital editions. All of Ernest Hemingway’s books, for example, are available in electronic versions from his print publisher, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster.

But with only a small fraction of the thousands of books in print available in e-book form, there are many titles to be fought over.

“This is a wide open frontier right now,” said Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group.

While most traditional publishers have included e-book rights in new contracts with authors for the last 15 years, many books were originally published before e-book rights were explicitly included in their contracts.

And with electronic readers like the Kindle from Amazon and the Nook from Barnes & Noble attracting new readers and sales of e-books growing exponentially, authors and publishers are trying to figure out how best to harness the new technology.

New ventures focusing explicitly on e-books are cropping up regularly. Some offer authors better financial terms than the traditional publishers, raising the tension over who should publish the books digitally.

In the case of Mr. Styron, who died in 2006 at age 81, the eight titles his family wants to re-release as e-books were published in print before 1994. This fall, Mr. Styron’s estate reached an agreement with a new company, Open Road Integrated Media, founded by Jane Friedman, the former chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, and Jeffrey Sharp, a film producer.

In October, Open Road announced that it would produce e-books of Mr. Styron’s work, along with several older titles by Pat Conroy and Iris Murdoch.

Alexandra Styron, 43, Mr. Styron’s youngest daughter, said her family liked that a company “focused on the idea of the future of the book industry wanted to make my father’s books an important part of their plan to bring old and long-gone authors into the 21st century.”

Ms. Styron said her family was happy with the job Random House, and their father’s editor, Robert Loomis, had done for Mr. Styron’s work in the print world. But with e-books, she said, “we didn’t feel that we were getting any similar kind of full-court press from Random House.”

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said that the company expected to “resolve the opportunity to mutual satisfaction and that Random House will continue to publish the Styron books we own in all formats, including e-books.”

Mr. Sharp, president of Open Road, said in an e-mailed statement: “We are confident in our agreements and only make deals with parties who represent to us that they own the rights.”

Several publishers who say retain e-book rights on old contracts are working with authors and estates to amend those agreements to insert digital royalty rates. A spokesman for Simon & Schuster, Adam Rothberg, said the company has been assertively amending old contracts. “Our plan is to publish all our backlist in e-book form,” he said.

Open Road announced in October that it planned to publish an e-book version of “Catch-22,” which is published in print by Simon & Schuster. It is a mainstay of college reading lists and this year has sold 85,000 copies in its paperback edition, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of total sales.

Mr. Rothberg would not comment directly on “Catch-22.” But Amanda Urban, a literary agent who represents Mr. Heller’s estate, said in an e-mail message that her agency, International Creative Management, believes the e-book rights reside with the author, not the print publisher.

Ms. Urban added that there was not yet a signed deal with Open Road but that discussions were continuing.

There is some precedent for arguments over e-book versions of backlist titles. In 2002, Random House sued RosettaBooks, an e-book publisher, for copyright infringement when Rosetta signed contracts with authors — including Mr. Styron — to release digital versions of previously published novels.

In its suit, Random House relied on wording in its contracts that granted it all rights to publish the works “in book form.” But a federal judge in Manhattan denied the publisher’s request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that such wording did not automatically include e-books. An appellate court similarly denied Random House’s request.

The case never went to trial. In a settlement, Random House granted Rosetta a license to release e-book versions of 51 titles. Under a different agreement with Mr. Styron, Rosetta also published two of his books, though its license to do so has since expired.

Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of RosettaBooks, which now publishes 115 titles, said each publisher used different wording in contracts, complicating negotiations with authors of old titles.

Agents say that some authors and their estates are seeking alternative routes for e-books in part because they are dissatisfied with the royalty rate — typically 25 percent of net proceeds — that traditional publishers offer for digital editions.

“I think the potential danger that publishers run by not talking this through carefully,” said Andrew Wylie, a literary agent who represents the estates of authors of backlist titles not yet in digital form, including Ralph Ellison and Vladimir Nabokov, “is that they will be excluded from e-book rights in a significant way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/bu.../13ebooks.html





Copyright Owners Fight Plan to Release E-Books for the Blind
David Kravets

A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind.

On Monday, dozens of nations will meet in Geneva to consider adopting the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyrighted Works for Persons Who are Blind or Have other Reading Disabilities. The proposal (.pdf) before a subcommittee of the roughly 180 World Intellectual Property Organization members would sanction the cross-border sharing of DRM-protected digitized books that tens of thousands of blind and visually disabled people read with devices and tools like the Pac Mate, Book Port and Victor Reader.

“This treaty would be the first one that is not done for the copyright owner, but for the user of the works — for the blind to make a copyrighted work accessible,” says Manon Ress, a policy analyst at Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights lobby that helped spearhead the proposal.

But that prospect doesn’t sit well with American business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest lobby representing 3 million businesses, argues that the plan being proposed by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, “raises a number of serious concerns,” (.pdf) chief among them the specter that the treaty would spawn a rash of internet book piracy.

The treaty also creates a bad precedent by loosening copyright restrictions, instead of tightening them as every previous copyright treaty has done, said Brad Huther, a chamber director. Huther concluded in a Dec. 2 letter to the U.S. Copyright office that the international community “should not engage in pursuing a copyright-exemption based paradigm.”

Echoing that concern, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry of America told the Copyright Office last month that such a treaty would “begin to dismantle the existing global treaty structure of copyright law, through the adoption of an international instrument at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms.”

The proposal before the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights could free up thousands of book titles to millions of blind people in WIPO-member nations — without payment to the publisher.

Many WIPO nations, most in the industrialized world including England, the United States and Canada, have copyright exemptions that usually allow non-profit companies to market copyrighted works without permission. They scan and digitize books into the so-called universal Daisy format, which includes features like narration and digitized Braille.

The Daisy Corp. Consortium, a Swiss-based international agency, controls formatting worldwide and has some 100 companies under its direction across the globe. The largest catalog rests in the United States, in which three non-profits, including the Library of Congress, host some half million digital titles produced by federal grants and donations.

As it now stands, none of the nations may allow persons outside their borders to access these works, which are usually doled out for little or no charge. The treaty seeks to free up the cross-border sharing of the books for the blind.

“People who oppose copyright exemptions oppose exemptions on principle that there should be no exemptions of copyright law,” says George Kerscher, Daisy’s general secretary. “They should have sole right and discretion to do what they want with their intellectual property. To a great extent, the opposition to the treaty is based on that principle.”

To receive any reading materials, the blind and disabled must prove their condition, he said. In the United States, Knowledge Ecology International estimates about 5 percent of published books have been transformed to the Daisy format.

Google is the only major U.S. corporation to side with the blind in the international tussle. In filings with the Copyright Office, the company called for American copyright holders to see past their doctrinal opposition to weakening copyright protections.

“We are concerned that some of the comments are simply stating opposition to a larger agenda of limitations and exceptions,” (.pdf) Google’s chief copyright officer, William Paltry, wrote this month. “We believe this is an unproductive approach to solving what is a discrete, long-standing problem that affects a group that needs and deserves the protections of the international community.”

Not surprisingly, U.S. book publishers are the harshest critics of the proposal. The Association of American Publishers, which represents about 300 publishers large and small, argue the treaty is not necessary. The publishers suggest the blind and disabled should pay for their materials –- the only way the market for such products could flourish.

“Under the proposed draft treaty, where it appears that privileged copies could be made even where accessible versions were commercially available, copyright owners would have understandable doubts about the wisdom of investing in the production of accessible versions for the market,” the association’s vice president, Allan Adler, wrote the Copyright Office on Dec. 4.

“Under these circumstances, publishers not unreasonably hesitate and wonder whether they can expect such a market to flourish when potential customers would still have the option of relying upon a statutory exception to get an accessible version of a work without having to pay for it,” (.pdf) Adler added.

Dan Burke, a 52-year-old blind man from Montana and a self-described “book worm,” does not agree with the publishers.

Burke, a victim of a retinal disease that blinded him decades ago, often acquires books and poems at Bookshare, an online nonprofit offering about 60,000 titles in exchange for $50 in annual dues and other volunteer work. Burke says none of the rank-and-file commercially available e-readers, including the Kindle, are adequately equipped for the blind.

“You have to be able to see to use these, to turn the machine on and navigate menus,” says Burke.

Amazon, however, said this week that it would soon produce a blind-accessible Kindle, one with an audible menu and large font for the visually impaired.

But Amazon, the Kindle’s maker, gives book authors the option of disabling the read-aloud function, notes Burke, a board member for the National Federation of the Blind, which supports the treaty. The Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers, argued earlier this year that reading a book aloud counts as an unauthorized public performance.

“Information is what we want. Information is the power to become economically viable members of society,” Burke said. “This is a world in which if you don’t have money you usually don’t have access.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/blind_block/





Facebook CEO's Private Photos Exposed by the New 'Open' Facebook

Facebook controversially forced profile pictures into public and pushed users to share candids with the whole world. So now we're blessed with pics of the social network's young CEO shirtless, romantic, clutching a teddy bear, and looking plastered.

So at least this whole privacy scandal hasn't been for naught.

As a result of it, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sharing very little of his personal Facebook content with the public to sharing a whole lot, True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has noticed. Where the public could see just one photo of the Facebook co-founder in October, strangers now have access to a cache of 290 shots, including snaps uploaded by Zuckerberg and those uploaded by people who have tagged him in their pics.

This opening may be a result of Facebook's new default settings; or could be a result of Zuckerberg trying to reverse the PR debacle of the new privacy system by opening up the content himself; or could be a combination of both. In any case, it springs one way or another from the privacy controversy. And as dogged but often frustrated chroniclers of Zuckerberg's personal side, we're thrilled. We just knew this new system would be a boon to gossips like ourselves.
http://gawker.com/5423914/facebook-c...ebook/gallery/





The Turducken Approach to Privacy Law
Adam Liptak

In June, the metaphor of the turducken made its first appearance in American jurisprudence.

“It’s a bit like building a dinosaur from a jawbone or skull fragment,” a dissenting federal appeals court judge wrote of his colleagues’ expansive reasoning, “and the result looks more like a turducken.”

A turducken is a chicken stuffed into a duck that is then stuffed into a turkey. Amanda Hesser, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2002, said that “a well-prepared turducken is a marvelous treat, a free-form poultry terrine layered with flavorful stuffing and moistened with duck fat.” But a good terrine is probably not the ideal model for a legal doctrine.

The dissenter was Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. He is a master of the dissent that might as well be a petition for Supreme Court review of the majority’s decision. This one, protesting his court’s refusal to rehear a case about the privacy rights of employees, said the law in that area had become a tangled thicket.

“It’s time to clear the brush,” Judge Kozinski wrote. “We didn’t undertake that chore today, but we’ll have to sooner or later, unless” — nudge, nudge — “the Supreme Court should intervene.”

Last month, the federal government took the hint and asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. Between the dissent and the government’s excellent track record in persuading the court to hear its appeals, it is a very good bet that the court will soon be dining on turducken.

The case was brought by 28 scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research facility operated by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.

“We run the telescopes,” said Robert M. Nelson, the lead plaintiff in the case. “We send out the space probes.”

In 2004, a Bush administration homeland security initiative expanded the background checks required for many government jobs to include contract employees like those at the laboratory.

The plaintiffs say the government investigations are needlessly intrusive and violate their privacy rights. They suggested that the federal government should have learned something from how it treated an earlier generation of scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II and was later stripped of his security clearance in the McCarthy era.

“We see history repeating itself,” Dr. Nelson said. “These guys went to leftist meetings in the ’30s, did heroic science in the ’40s and were persecuted in the ’50s.”

Dr. Nelson, who has been with the laboratory for 30 years, works on the Cassini mission, which involves a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. He and other plaintiffs do not have security clearances and are not involved in classified or military activities.

Zareh Gorjian, another plaintiff, told my colleague Andrew C. Revkin that he could not understand what the government was after. “I was at J.P.L. during the cold war when we were fighting the Soviet Union, which had the power not only to end all life in the U.S. but the entire planet,” Mr. Gorjian said. “We were able to defeat them without resorting to such intrusive tactics.”

The Ninth Circuit provisionally agreed with the plaintiffs, saying they had raised serious questions about their privacy rights. A three-judge panel of the court ordered the background checks halted while their case goes forward.

When the full court was asked to hear the case, its judges were sharply divided over whether the investigations were routine or troublesome.

Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld, in a second dissent, said the court’s decision “is likely to impair national security” by forbidding the government “from doing what any sensible private employer would do.” He mentioned espresso stands and clothing stores, adding: “Most of us do not hire law clerks and secretaries without talking to professors and past employers.”

“No revival of McCarthyism is threatened,” Judge Kleinfeld said, “by allowing as much inquiry for hiring a Jet Propulsion Lab engineer as a barista.”

Much of what the laboratory’s employees were asked to disclose was indeed perfectly ordinary. But they were also asked about drug use and counseling, and they were required to sign a form authorizing the government to collect information from schools, landlords, employers and others.

That additional information was to be sought through another form, this one soliciting “adverse information,” including “violations of the law,” “financial integrity,” “abuse of alcohol and/or drugs” and “mental or emotional stability.” There was also a space on the form for a little essay that invited “derogatory as well as positive information.”

It is not clear how the government was to use the information it gathered. But a document briefly posted on an internal Web site at the laboratory said employees might be deemed unsuitable for, among many other things, loitering, homosexuality, illegal gambling, mutilation of public records, “indecent proposal,” “black market activities (nonprofit),” “carnal knowledge” and “sodomy.” The document is available on a Web site about the suit created by the plaintiffs.

The government has neither confirmed nor disavowed that last document, and there is no indication that the criteria it listed were ever used. In the trial court, Vesper Mei, a government lawyer, said anything to do with the topic was “premature and speculative.” In its Supreme Court brief, the government said it had made no “determinations based on improper factors.”

As the turducken metaphor suggests, the law in this area is unclear. Privacy law mostly regulates disclosure of information, not gathering it. And the law gives less protection to people who are free to refuse to cooperate, even at the risk of losing their jobs, than to people compelled to cooperate regardless.

Dr. Nelson said he found the legal system to be an alien landscape.

“Usually we’re going to scientific conferences,” he said. “Courts are not our usual area of functioning.”

He added that he was not familiar with turducken. “Does one smoke it,” he asked, “or cook it in brownies?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/us/08bar.html





Boxee, a Start-Up, to Offer a Device to Put Web Video on TV
Brad Stone

Boxee, a start-up that is trying to bring the boundless selection of Web video to the living-room television, said on Monday that it would put its software into a set-top box that will go on sale next year.

At an event in New York City, the company announced a partnership with D-Link, a Taiwanese manufacturer of networking equipment, which will make a device that will allow people to browse Internet videos on their TVs. The companies hope to keep the price of the device under $200.

Boxee collects videos and music from Web sites like Netflix, MLB.TV, Comedy Central and Pandora, and presents it in a visually friendly format that resembles a television directory, while adding some features from social networks.

The service has caught on with Internet aficionados who say it represents a future in which the wide selection of content from the Web wins out over a more limited television experience controlled by big media companies.

Up until now, Boxee’s software has only worked on a PC or Mac, although some savvy users have installed it on Apple’s set-top box, called Apple TV.

Boxee now wants to move beyond that limited user base. “Today the reality is that hooking up your laptop to your television, or putting Boxee on an Apple TV, is not a mainstream experience,” said Avner Ronen, Boxee’s chief executive.

Mr. Ronen said the relationship with D-Link was the first of many deals with consumer electronics companies. “A growing number of companies see a real need to bring Internet to the TV, and they realize people will pay a premium for devices like connected Blu-ray players and HDTVs,” he said.

Boxee is facing an increasingly crowded market for such devices. More and more Blu-ray players, video game consoles and HDTVs can connect to the Internet and access streaming media services from Netflix, Amazon.com and other companies.

Set-top boxes that perform similar functions have not been mainstream hits. Roku, a company that sells a box that primarily receives videos from Amazon and Netflix, says it has sold only a few hundred thousand devices.

But Boxee and its backers believe that these kinds of devices are too limited, and they draw comparisons to older mobile phones that receive only the Web services chosen by a particular wireless carrier.

Although Boxee has forged its own relationships with Web video sites, any company can make its videos available through the service. “This is all about consumer choice,” Mr. Ronen said.

Boxee also said it would introduce a more polished test version of its software by the beginning of next year.

Boxee, backed by $10 million in venture capital, has tried to bring into its service the network television shows posted on Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC, Fox and ABC. But those networks do not want people able to receive the Web videos on their TVs, instead of watching actual broadcasts, which carry more valuable advertising.

As a result, Hulu has largely blocked Boxee from adding its videos. Boxee says it is currently working on a Web browser, based on open-source technology from Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, so its users can manually go to any site and watch the video there. “Its not as good an experience, but we want to make as much content available as possible on Boxee,” said Andrew Kippen, a Boxee spokesman.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said such an approach could end up undermining the promise Boxee is making to customers who spend money on the set-top box. “If it’s not done with explicit permission, that content is always at risk,” he said. “There is no guarantee if you buy the box you will have all this content in perpetuity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/te...t/08boxee.html





Ramifications of "Universal" Set-Top Boxes for Net Neutrality
Lauren Weinstein

I think it's important to consider the ramifications of the FCC's push toward "universal" set-top boxes for Net Neutrality concerns. In this discussion I include VDSL-delivered services like U-verse under the descriptive term "cable" for most purposes.

Such "universal" boxes exist in a limited sense today. Relatively recent TiVo units are an example. The TiVo HD tunes cable channels via cableCARDS and the Internet via standard 100BASE-TX. Programs from either source all end up in the same Now Playing list. YouTube can stream to the box, as can various movie services. The same films can in many cases be viewed via the cable company's channels or the Internet (though not necessarily with the same quality due to Internet bandwidth limitations). One glaring omission is the inability of the TiVo to process cable company PPV (pay-per-view) or other VOD (video-on-demand) services. This aspect is an enormous can of political worms, and even when TiVos begin to support these functions it will apparently be via a heavily restricted independent mode that emulates a cable company box and is directly controlled by the cable company.

But picture a future where most every set top box in most households has both cable and Internet, or satellite and Internet connections -- and can receive streaming programming from either. For many persons, the same entity providing cable TV service will provide Internet service. Some will have separate TV and Internet service providers.

Over time, the distinction between programming delivered via the digital "TV" portion of the cable and the Internet portion of the cable will become increasingly blurred. But what isn't likely to blur will be the desire of a content provider ISP who also provides general Internet access services to maximize the extent to which subscribers select "internal" vs. "external" content.

If you want to see a particular PPV film, it's in the interests of the cable company to have you pay them to see it -- not for you to pay some outside Internet-based service. A range of factors largely *under the content-providing ISP's control* will have enormous impact on these choices, including Internet speeds provided, costs per month, *bandwidth and usage caps*, and so on.

And naturally this situation will be massively exacerbated by universal set-top boxes, which will make it easy for subscribers to make such selections on the fly.

I have difficulty seeing how this universe can be made to function effectively in the absence of some sort of regulatory regime to ensure transparency and fairness in situations where the Internet access providers themselves are providing their own content that directly competes with content from the external Internet. http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg02428.html





F.C.C. May Pry Open the Cable Set-Top Box
Saul Hansell

Officially, Julius Genachowski had only a terse one-sentence statement about Comcast’s proposed acquisition of NBC on Monday. It said: “The FCC will carefully examine the proposed merger and will be thorough, fair and fact-based in its review.”

But a relatively obscure rule-making notice, also issued Monday, is warning the industry that the commission under Mr. Genachowski may well break up the cozy relationship between TV networks and cable systems, merger or not.

Specifically, the commission wants to make it much easier for anyone who makes a video program to send it directly to your television set, without having to cut a deal with a cable company.

That was the implication of a five-page document titled “Comment sought on video device innovation” that appeared on the commission’s Web site.

Technically, it relates to one of the commission’s most ineffectual areas of regulation: cable set-top boxes. In 1996, Congress ordered the commission to create rules that would let people buy “navigation devices” — in other words, set-top boxes, remote controls and other gizmos that change channels on your TV — from a consumer electronics company rather than just from their cable company. The idea was there would be a standard so that any set-top box would work in any cable system.

The last time you went to Best Buy, did you see any cable boxes? I didn’t think so.

The reason for that is the subject of a debate. Electronics companies say the cable systems have dragged their feet for a decade in supporting open technical specifications. The cable companies say they have standards, but consumers would rather rent boxes for a few dollars a month than spend hundreds up front.

In any case, the commission’s inquiry skips past this annoying argument to point out that the real question today is how TVs will connect not only to cable and satellite services but also to video provided directly over the Internet.

The commission points out that people are watching much more online video from sites like Hulu, Netflix and YouTube, and they are buying gadgets that can put those programs on their television from companies like Apple, TiVo, and Roku. Very little of that Internet video, however, comes through boxes that cable or satellite companies provide.

The commission asks four rather provocative questions, that I’ll do my best to translate into English here:

* Why can’t that box you get from your cable company also get programs over the Internet and from other sources?
* Would the availability of set-top boxes in retail stores encourage people to get broadband Internet service (something the commission wants to do) and create a competitive market in devices that hook up to cable systems?
* Should the commission mandate a technical standard that would let video flow freely around a home to any compatible device, just as the Wi-Fi standard allows any computer to hook up to your Internet connection?
* What has stopped the long-promised convergence between televisions and computers?

The words “network neutrality” don’t appear anywhere in the commission’s notice, but the rules it is asking about are exactly the sort that many in the communications industry fear as the commission pushes net neutrality principles. The commission is suggesting that since cable TV shows are fundamentally no different from any other data sent over the Internet, they might well be offered through the sort of open standards we are used to for computers, not the closed systems of cable companies. In other words, there is no reason that the company that runs a wire to your house (say, Comcast) should have any special right to sell you a bundle of programming that goes over the wire (say, a bunch of NBC networks).

The cable companies no doubt will argue that the market is working fine and that new rules will stifle innovation and keep them from earning enough money to keep investing in their networks.

Companies that just make programs are likely to be more muted. The cable companies are their biggest revenue streams today. But they are also intrigued by the idea of connecting directly to their customers and cutting out the middlemen. (That is, those companies that didn’t just agree to be sold to a middleman.)

In any case, expect these arguments to hit like a tornado. The commission has allowed less than three weeks for comments, which are due Dec. 21.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/1...you-favor-nbc/





Big Cable: Net Neutrality Violates ISP 1st Amendment Rights

The head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association lashed out at net neutrality supporters who say Internet non-discrimination is a First Amendment cause. The real issue, he says, is the First Amendment rights of ISPs.
Matthew Lasar

Speaking before the Media Institute in Virginia on Tuesday, the leading voice of the cable industry challenged the idea that net neutrality regulations enhance free speech. Quite the contrary, warned Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, "the First Amendment is framed as a shield for citizens, not a sword for government." True enough, the First Amendment "promotes democratic values," McSlarrow added, "but it does so best by freeing citizens from government regulation of their speech, not by regulating it."

The NCTA's boss was responding to the Federal Communications Commission's proposed new Internet non-discrimination rules, which would put the kibosh on ISPs unnecessarily blocking or interfering with applications, and require them to be transparent about their network management practices. Advocates of net neutrality are "standing the First Amendment on its head," McSlarrow declared, when they invoke the amendment on behalf of this cause.

Kind of creepy

Presumably, when McSlarrow used the word "citizens," he was referring to Comcast, Time-Warner, Cox, and the rest of the cable industry, a presumption that the Supreme Court validated in its famous Santa Clara versus Southern Pacific Railroad case of 1886. But he insisted that he's talking about everybody else too. And it's not like the issue came out of nowhere. In fact, the FCC requested feedback on the First Amendment implications of its suggested rules in its Notice of Proposed rulemaking.

Would these rules impose "any burdens on access providers’ speech that would be cognizable for purposes of the First Amendment, and if so, how?" the FCC asked. And: "Would any burden on access providers’ speech be outweighed by the speech-enabling benefits of an open Internet that provides a non-discriminatory platform for the robust interchange of ideas?"

Some parties in this discussion, most notably the advocacy group Free Press, have argued that the FCC should apply "strict scrutiny" principles to ISPs. "Just as the First Amendment applies strict scrutiny to effectively ban speech-discrimination on streets and in parks, the FCC should apply strict scrutiny to ban such discrimination by network operators on the Internet," Free Press wrote to the FCC in June of 2008.

Needless to say, the NCTA doesn't like that idea. McSlarrow even called the strict scrutiny argument "kind of creepy." Here are his answers to the FCC's questions.

It hasn't happened here

Much McSlarrow's speech reiterated what has become a mainstay of anti-net neutrality discourse, that the government is proposing a "solution in search of a problem."

"It is exactly that," he insisted. "Because all of the openness, all of the civic participation, all of the democratic engagement we could possibly want is happening right now . . . without net neutrality regulation." Yes, McSlarrow noted, there have been "a couple of isolated incidents that keep being held up as examples of what needs to be prevented"— presumably the Madison River ISP's agreement with the FCC not to block VoIP applications and the agency's 2008 Order sanctioning Comcast for P2P throttling. But, "nothing that suggests any threat to the openness of the Internet."

"I don't know how to say it any more clearly than this," McSlarrow reiterated. "Internet Service Providers do not threaten free speech; their business is to enable speech and they are part of an ecosystem that represents perhaps the greatest engine for promotion of democracy and free expression in history."

And this has important legal implications, McSlarrow continued, invoking the Supreme Courts' Turner Broadcasting vs. FCC decision of 1994. In that case, the high court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of the 1992 Cable Act, which established "must carry" rules requiring cable companies to set aside some of their channels for local TV broadcasters. But the Supremes also warned that lawmakers must show that they are addressing a real problem, not just an anticipated one.

Quote:
When the Government defends a regulation on speech as a means to redress past harms or prevent anticipated harms, it must do more than simply 'posit the existence of the disease sought to be cured.' It must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, and that the regulation will, in fact, alleviate these harms in a direct and material way.
That advisory "should ring loud and clear in the net neutrality proceeding," McSlarrow added. "Because when all the dire warnings of the net neutrality proponents are stripped away, there really are no signs of actual harm."

A strong implication

The NCTA also doesn't like all the talk coming from the FCC about how to handle "managed services" on the 'Net, which could include IP video. The agency says it wants to offer flexibility in this area, but only up to a point. "The growth of managed or specialized services might supplant or otherwise negatively affect the open Internet," the FCC's NOPR warns, noting, for example, that AT&T runs its U-Verse IP based video service on the same networks it offers Internet access.

"The strong implication" here, McSlarrow suggested, "is some kind of guaranteed amount of bandwidth capacity for services the government deems important." And that's where the First Amendment supposedly comes into play again. Net neutrality rules could infringe ISP First Amendment rights, NCTA argues, "because they could prevent providers from delivering their traditional multichannel video programming services or new services that are separate and distinct from their Internet access service." And cable companies are not broadcasting over the public airwaves, McSlarrow reminded his audience.

These rules could hurt applications providers too, McSlarrow warned, especially if they ban prioritized access rules, as the FCC is proposing. "The First Amendment protects the right not just to decide what to say, but how to say it," he continued. "Does the First Amendment really allow the government to prohibit a content or applications provider from paying to acquire the means to distribute its content in the form or manner it wishes?"

And here you thought the First Amendment just said that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Don't expect this debate to end any time soon.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...n-its-head.ars





Cable Freedom Is a Click Away
Nick Bilton

Welcome to our living room. Take a seat, make yourself comfortable. Would you like to watch a movie, or the new “Family Guy” episode?

Oh, that, over there. You want to know why there’s a pile of gadgets and wires on the floor? My wife and I usually don’t talk about that clutter. We actually refer to it as the Gadget Graveyard. Mostly, we pretend it doesn’t even exist. But since you asked, I’ll explain.

This digital necropolis isn’t your typical sanctuary for retired devices. Instead, here you’ll find technologies that tried to provide the best viewing experience and program options with a television, but ultimately fell short. Everything is relatively new, and comparatively unusable — to me at least.

Among this pile you can find my old remote controls and wires from my cable box. Then there’s the dreaded Apple TV, now a $250 paperweight. There’s also the $80 Roku box, a device that allows you to stream video from Netflix, Amazon.com and other sites directly to your television. But wait, there’s more! A Vudu player, a Slingbox and a handful of other single-serving contraptions.

Those devices are all behind me now. I disconnected everything, threw it to the side and canceled the cable months ago. Instead, now I have a Mac Mini, wireless mouse and a Microsoft Xbox hooked up to my television.

This quest for cable freedom has been a couple of years in the works. Before I called the cable company to bid my farewell I imagined that I would need a vast array of devices to fill the entertainment void: a device for games, something for television shows, a contraption for streaming movies through Netflix and, finally, something to control all of the above. But it turns out a computer can do all those tasks with some software upgrades and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I have to be honest, this isn’t as easy as just plugging a computer into a monitor, sitting back and watching a movie. There’s definitely a slight learning curve. One difficult part of this equation was getting used to the wireless mouse. We use a mouse called the Loop, made by Hillcrest Labs, that costs $99. The Loop looks more like a chocolate-frosted doughnut with buttons than something that navigates a television set. To navigate the screen you hold it out and wave your hand from side to side as if you are conducting an orchestra.

As for the computer, you don’t specifically need a Mac Mini. This set up can work with most inexpensive PCs; just make sure the video card can handle the streaming video requirements. Our refurbished Mac Mini cost $380 online.

Although the initial investment was costly, totaling $550, it took only a few months to recoup the money. Back in the olden days of cable we were forced to shell out a relatively standard $140 a month, for television service alone. This cost gave us access to a digital video recorder and hundreds of unwatched TV channels.

Contrast this with today, where our only expense is $9 a month to stream Netflix videos from the Web and the $30 a month that we always spent on an Internet connection. O.K., maybe that’s not completely accurate. When the wireless keyboard died a few weeks ago I was forced to spend another $4 for two new AA batteries. We’ve not yet recovered from that financial loss.

We still come home from work and watch any number of shows, just like the people who continue to pay for cable. We just do it a little differently, starting the computer and then using services like Hulu, Boxee, iTunes and Joost. Another interesting twist to this experience is that we’re no longer limited to consuming traditional programming. With these applications we can spend an entire evening flicking through videos from YouTube, CollegeHumor or Web-only programs.

Here are a few of the applications on our home setup:

Boxee is probably the most clicked icon on our television. You can download this free open-source application from Boxee.tv. It’s important to note that it’s still in test phase and a little rough around the pixels, but over all it allows you to access almost any type of video content online. You can easily stream CNN, Current TV, PBS and more. Most important for us, Boxee easily allows access to the Netflix streaming service, which offers up thousands of movies and television shows (just not always the most popular options).

Next there is Hulu Desktop, the joint venture among Fox, NBC, ABC and many other mainstream programming outlets. This service allows you to watch more than 1,700 television shows, including traditional favorites like “30 Rock,” “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Office.” Hulu’s downloadable desktop application, as opposed to hulu.com, works extremely well with large screens. Apple’s iTunes application replicates all the features of Apple TV, allowing you to buy or rent movies and listen to your music collection.

Be warned though that iTunes can get expensive. If you watch premium-cable television shows, you can pay more than $40 for the season of a single show. But even that is less than one month of cable. Since there are so many other entertainment options online, we just skip “Dexter” and “Weeds.” Trust me, there is a lot of great free or ad-supported content out there.

Finally there’s Joost.com. Although it’s not a downloadable application and only accessible through a Web browser, Joost offers free streaming movies and a strange variety of cartoons.

While Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (starting at $200), is not absolutely necessary for this setup, it delivers an array of lively entertainment options. I can, of course, play video games, but I can also rent movies (through the Xbox marketplace or through Netflix’s online viewing service), and browse Twitter and Facebook, with a new feature that lets you watch a streaming interface of your social networks flow across the screen.

I understand this kind of living room experience isn’t for everyone. It’s a lot less work to just click a button up or down on a standard remote control. And it can be difficult to explain how to use this unfamiliar toolbox of buttons, programs and devices.

Over Thanksgiving a friend graciously house-sat at our apartment. It took my wife more than an hour to write a detailed description explaining how to use our new TV setup. After explaining how to use the mouse and keyboard, we had to describe how to switch among applications. The instructions read:

“If you want to watch “Ugly Betty,” or “Saturday Night Live,” you will need to load up Hulu. If you’d like to watch some of the movies we’ve downloaded, you will have to quit Hulu, open up Boxee and navigate to the movies folder. To use Netflix, you’ll need to switch to the Xbox and. ... ” But after a few hours of randomly clicking into cyberspace, our friend figured it out.

There is one other showstopper. I know the sports and technology enthusiasts don’t often mix, but if you’re one of the few people who live in both of those worlds you might have to look for other options. To watch baseball you can buy a little dongle that plugs into the back of your computer and streams free over-the-air high-definition channels. I bought this for the Yankees games and it worked perfectly. If you’re an ESPN fan you have two options. Stick with cable, or go to a bar to watch the basketball games.

Over all, I couldn’t be happier with our computer television setup. Now, I just have to figure out what gadgets I’m going to buy with the $1,600 a year I no longer send to the cable company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/te.../10basics.html





NBC-Comcast Deal Puts Broadcast TV in Doubt
Brian Stelter

From Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC brought Milton Berle, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson into the nation’s living rooms, then broadcast local news to New York City for decades. Last Thursday, it was a stage for a cable takeover as Comcast announced a plan to acquire NBC Universal.

There, in Studio 6B, a town hall meeting for NBC employees opened with Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal chief executive, introducing “our new friends from Philadelphia,” and closed with a formal welcome to the Comcast family by Ralph Roberts, the cable operator’s 89-year-old patriarch. Mr. Roberts received a standing ovation.

For employees of the oldest and most storied part of NBC Universal, the broadcast network, one question lingered: will we fit into this cable family?

The studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza — and shows like “30 Rock,” which parodies NBC’s corporate culture — will not be going dark as a result of the deal. But employees inside both the thriving news division and the ailing entertainment division of the National Broadcasting Company still have reason to be anxious about it.

At every turn, Comcast has emphasized to its own shareholders that the deal’s purpose is to gain control over NBC Universal’s fast-growing cable channels. The writer and humorist John Dillon observed Thursday that in the 2,742-word news release about the deal, the broadcast network was not mentioned until word 2,170. There is even talk of changing NBC Universal’s name to play down the broadcast association.

The deal is structured to give Comcast a controlling 51 percent interest, with its partner, General Electric, initially retaining 49 percent.

“Everyone’s now talking about NBC as a cable company, and Comcast is a cable company,” a longtime NBC News staff member said. “I guess we’re wondering, do they like broadcast?”

On the record, they do. Comcast says NBC and its affiliate structure will remain intact for the time being. All day Thursday, Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, whose fortunes have come from converting broadcast viewers into cable customers, talked up broadcast as “an important part of the fabric of America.”

“We’re very committed to trying to see ways to make it successful,” he said in an interview on the cable channel CNBC.

Later, in a conference call with reporters, the first question was about the viability of broadcast, leading Mr. Roberts to say of NBC, “I think there’s more upside than downside.” He said Comcast would seek to “restore it to No. 1.” Similarly, the G.E. chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, said on CNBC the same morning that his “top priority for next year” is to get NBC back in first place.

“Let’s make no mistake, where we are today as a broadcast network is unacceptable,” he said. “And I share responsibility with that. That is job one.”

Even as its news programs remain top-rated, NBC has seen its fortunes fall sharply in the last decade. In prime time, the network ranks a distant fourth, and its 10 p.m. program, “The Jay Leno Show,” is increasingly the butt of jokes.

The network’s “Saturday Night Live” alluded to the network’s losses over the weekend, with the host of “Weekend Update” joking that the final sticking point to the deal was “G.E. convincing Comcast that it’s still 1996.” With that, the logos for NBC’s “Must See TV” shows of the 1990s — “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “E.R.” — were flashed on the screen.

The weakened state of the network aside, NBC employees said in interviews that they only sensed low-level anxiety about Comcast’s takeover, in part because changes are not expected until after the deal closes. The companies expect regulatory approvals to take a year or more. But one of the staffers acknowledged, “Some of us are worried that they’re going to have sticker shock over what it takes to do it on the broadcast side.”

Some employees said they were relieved to hear Comcast executives say at the town hall that widespread layoffs were unlikely because there is little overlap between the two companies. The employees requested anonymity to speak candidly and describe the town hall meeting because they were not authorized by the network to speak.

Strumming a Comcast-branded guitar to celebrate the Comcast news on Thursday, Conan O’Brien, the host of “The Tonight Show,” joked about the deal having “no apparent redundancy issues.”

If anyone feels redundant, it would be the NBC affiliates that deliver their signals over the air; they will now be part of a company that provides its programming via cable. Mr. Roberts said in interviews that he did not foresee changes to the NBC affiliate structure, but was not specific about how far into the future he could see.

Comcast has not yet contacted the affiliates. “From what we’ve read and what we’ve seen, their interest in content certainly aligns with ours, so there’s reason to be optimistic,” said Michael Fiorile, the chairman of the NBC affiliates board and the chief executive officer of Dispatch Broadcast Group, which owns NBC stations in Indiana.

Comcast could toss a lifesaver of sorts to the broadcast business by supporting per-subscriber payments to stations, or so-called retransmission agreements. Comcast was noncommittal about retransmission last week, saying only that it hoped to play a constructive role.

In a letter aimed at Washington lawmakers and regulators who will scrutinize the deal in the coming months, David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, expressed support for NBC on Thursday. He wrote, “Notwithstanding the turbulence in the current media marketplace and the ongoing threats to the business model of a national broadcast network, the combined company remains committed to continuing to provide free over-the-air television” through its owned and operated stations and its local broadcast affiliates.

Comcast also said it would “preserve and enrich the output of local news, local public affairs, and other public interest programming” on NBC’s stations. Public interest groups opposed to the deal called Mr. Cohen’s letter weak, noting that it did not make any funding commitments for local or national news.

Not surprisingly, Comcast did not commit to keeping the name NBC Universal after the deal closes. Internally, the company will house its stake in NBC Universal inside a unit called Comcast Entertainment. Some Comcast executives are keen on using the Comcast Entertainment name in the future, although it is doubtful that the “NBC Nightly News” will become the “Comcast Nightly News” anytime soon.

Talking to CNBC on Thursday, Mr. Roberts suggested that the NBC name sometimes distracts from the fact that NBC’s cable channels are “fantastic.”

“In a way, sometimes their name gets in the way of that,” Mr. Roberts said. He started to say that he had talked about that fact with others, then cut himself off, saying instead, “we’ve joked about that.”

Tim Arango, David Carr and Bill Carter contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/bu...07nbc.html?hpw





The Rabbit-Ear Wars

Get ready for a rumble over the future of over-the-air TV.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

You stupidly built a drive-in theater in the desert just as your customers were all deciding to stay home and watch HBO. Fortunately, the theater turns out to be sitting on a mountain of oil.

With a few asterisks, such is the situation of old-style TV broadcasters, whose viewers have fled to cable or satellite but whose spectrum is lusted after by the wireless industry. According to a much-noted study sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association, in the hands of the broadcasters, that spectrum is worth a mere $12 billion. In the hands of mobile phone carriers struggling to meet explosive growth for mobile broadband, it would be worth $62 billion.

To the Silicon Valley types who people the Obama administration, this suggests a rational policy: Pay broadcasters to give up some or all of the airwaves used to send signals to their dwindling rabbit-ear audience. Turn it over to mobile phone folks at a hefty markup.

Blair Levin, a veteran telecom analyst who heads the FCC's broadband efforts, has floated a Hindenburg of a trial balloon by broaching just such a deal with broadcasters. Virtually all agree that any such "grand bargain," to be politically deliverable, must enlist the willing, nay eager, participation of broadcast station owners. No problem—broadcasters would be the biggest winners, right?

Sadly, remember what happened to the original Hindenburg. Broadcasters, who have a keen sense of political realities, note that their broadcast licenses don't actually confer a property right, so whatever deal the FCC struck with them, Congress would certainly rewrite it to make sure Congress got all the money. Broadcasters would receive squat, and probably be vilified as bandits in the process.

"Pipe dream" was the verdict of Colleen Brown, chief of Fisher Communications, owner of 20 stations in the Pacific Northwest.

"Politically they would fall flat on their face," opined Sinclair Broadcasting's Mark Aitken, estimating the agency's chances selling a cash-for-spectrum deal to Congress.

But, hold on. We mentioned asterisks. The FCC and Mr. Levin are correct (and brave) in pointing out the need for a market mechanism to guide spectrum to its highest and best uses. But the FCC is in no position to know whether mobile broadband is that higher and better use. A reason is the regulatory straitjacket, including ownership limits, that for decades has prevented license holders themselves from exploring new broadcast business models.

For the truth is, broadcast offers impressive economies for distributing rich media content compared to the Internet. An infinity of users can be served by a single bitstream. It doesn't matter how many receivers tune into a TV broadcast. It never gets overloaded.

Consider a small company called Sezmi, now testing in Los Angeles a competitor to cable and satellite TV. Users get a box with a powerful HDTV antenna, allowing them to receive not just traditional over-the-air TV channels but also popular cable networks, broadcast locally using spare capacity leased from TV stations.

A separate broadband connection supplies on-demand movies and even material plucked from YouTube. And to help make the most of limited bandwidth, each also comes with a giant terabyte-sized disk drive capable of storing many hours of programming, automatically downloaded in advance based on a viewer's demonstrated habits and tastes.

All this, of course, would also yield a cornucopia of information with which to deliver the truly individualized advertising that TV ad buyers crave.

Who knows whether Sezmi will pan out technologically, and at the very-much-cheaper-than-cable price the company touts. The FCC quite properly worries about a coming mobile capacity crunch, with all those proliferating iPhones. But throwing spectrum at it won't be the only solution. Greater integration of fixed and wireless will help. Software innovation, cramming more bits into the same frequency, will help. So will usage-based pricing. And as Sezmi shows, local storage can substitute for bandwidth too.

The FCC is looking in the right direction, but we need more than just a "market solution" to liberate spectrum from the current government-approved incumbents. We need a market that can fully explore the potential of all the business models that might contest to find the highest and best use of that resource.

In the meantime, the agency's trial balloon is having a perverse effect, spurring broadcasters to new Potemkin feats to prove they are making full use of their existing spectrum, such as rolling out new digital "subchannels" that nobody watches. Some broadcasters even invoke the 1962 All-Channel Receiver Act and insist a new "golden age of broadcasting" is around the corner—just as soon as the FCC mandates that every smart phone be capable of receiving over-the-air TV signals.

In short, one picture is starting to come in clearly: The spectrum puzzle won't be solved by the clean and simple deal the agency envisioned just a month ago.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...148917092.html





CBS Cancels ‘As the World Turns,’ Procter & Gamble’s Last Soap Opera
Bill Carter and Brian Stelter

Procter & Gamble, the company that invented the soap opera and gave the genre its name, is no longer in the soap opera business.

CBS announced on Tuesday that it was canceling “As the World Turns,” the 54-year-old soap that is the last daytime serial owned by Procter & Gamble. The show chronicled generations of characters in fictional Oakdale, Ill., as they survived love and loss, but they couldn’t survive the harsh realities of modern television, where scripted dramas have become too expensive to justify dwindling ratings.

The demise of “ATWT,” as it is known to soap fans, means that the two most venerable examples of the genre have been given cancellation notices in the same year. “Guiding Light,” a CBS daytime staple, had been on the air through radio and television for 72 years. CBS informed Procter & Gamble of the cancellation “a couple of days ago,” according to Jeannie Tharrington, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble.

“It’s a part of our business that we will miss, and it’ll be hard for us to say goodbye to the show,” Ms. Tharrington said. Proctor & Gamble said it would try to find a new home for the series. Given the current economic climate, though, that is considered unlikely.

Soaps typically cost around $50 million a year to produce. CBS replaced “Guiding Light” this fall with “Let’s Make a Deal,” which costs about half that amount, and the network has seen increases in total audience and among the younger viewers that most advertisers seek.

“Is it the end of an era?” Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, asked. “Sort of. Only the special soaps are going to survive. It’s certainly the end of the client-owned soap.” He added, “All good things come to an end, whether it’s after 72 years or 54 years or 10 years. It’s a different time and a different business.”

“As the World Turns” had the longest-running continuing character in television history — the family matriarch Nancy Hughes, played by Helen Wagner, now 91. Despite the conservative reputation of many Procter & Gamble soaps, the show featured a male couple, Noah and Luke, and the first gay kiss on daytime television.

However, its audience, which exceeded six million viewers a week in the 1990s, has drawn less than 2.5 million so far this season, the Nielsen Company said. And the younger adult women viewers, which are favored by most advertisers, had shrunk even more.

The decline has been a continuing trend for the daytime genre. One CBS soap, “The Young and the Restless,” has posted slight gains of 3 percent total viewers and 6 percent among women 18 to 49. NBC’s last remaining soap, “Days of Our Lives,” has staged a small comeback this season. It is up 15 percent among total viewers and 10 percent among women 18 to 49.

But for the most part soaps these days are watched by older women. Every network soap now has a median viewer age over 50 and only “General Hospital” on ABC is under 53. “As the World Turns” has a median age of 57.8. That is older than most of the network averages in prime time, during which NBC’s programs have a median age of 48, ABC’s programs 51.4 and CBS’s programs 54.1.

The subtraction of the two shows means that network television, which once offered soap operas back to back throughout the daytime hours, will be down to only six serial dramas on three networks starting next fall.

For Procter & Gamble the loss is symbolic more than financial. The company, which has owned more than 20 soap operas in the past 80 years, now spends more than $7 billion in global advertising each year, making soap operas only a tiny portion of its business. Procter & Gamble said on Tuesday that it wanted to remain in the television production business and that its annual “People’s Choice Awards” will continue each year.

“The world has turned,” said Tim Brooks, a television historian and co-author of “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.” Ratings for soap operas have declined for decades because of “social changes,” he said.

“Women are working today,” he said, and fewer people are able to spend time every day watching soap operas.

The shows emerged on the radio in the 1930s during the Depression, he said, “and they seem to be ending in an era of economic downturn, too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/ar...on/09soap.html





Gene Barry, Actor of TV, Film and Stage, Dies at 90
Michael Pollak

Gene Barry, who portrayed debonair lawmen on television but whose career of more than 60 years ranged from song and dance on Broadway to science fiction, died Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Beverly Hills until about a year ago.
His death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth.

As the dapper star of “Bat Masterson” from 1958 to 1961, Mr. Barry sported a derby hat, gilt-tipped cane and spangled vest in the days, as the theme song said, “when the West was very young.” (The real Bat, whose full name was William Barclay Masterson, was a gambler, gunslinger and marshal who spent his later years as a New York newspaperman and died in 1921.)

In “Burke’s Law” (1963-66), Mr. Barry played the equally insouciant Los Angeles police captain, Amos Burke, an independently wealthy crime fighter with a mansion, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a stream of beautiful women. In its third and final season, Burke changed professions and the show was renamed “Amos Burke, Secret Agent.” A generation later, in the 1994-95 season, Mr. Barry reprised the role, this time as chief of detectives.

Mr. Barry starred as a magazine tycoon in “The Name of the Game” (1968-71), in which he rotated starring roles with Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. He also starred as a wealthy movie celebrity and secret government agent in “The Adventurer” in 1972-73.

He won a Tony nomination in 1984 for his performance as Georges, the less flamboyant half of a gay couple, in “La Cage Aux Folles,” the first Broadway musical in which the principal lovers were gay men. Mr. Barry “proves a most sensitive foil — far more sensitive than you’d ever guess from his starring roles on such television series as ‘Bat Masterson’ and ‘The Name of the Game,’ ” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Barry sang his love songs “with tender directness.”

Mr. Barry said at the time, “I’m not playing a homosexual — I’m playing a person who cares deeply about another person.”

In 1999, the 78-year-old Mr. Barry combined musical comedy with show business reminiscences in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, in a show that included among other things a Maurice Chevalier impersonation. He had made his nightclub debut in the Latin Quarter in 1962.

Gene Barry was born Eugene Klass on June 14, 1919, in New York to Martin Klass, a jeweler, and Eva Klass. He was attending New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn when he won a singing contest and a scholarship to the Chatham Square School of Music. While studying there, he began singing on the New York radio station WHN.

He soon went from the Catskills to Manhattan bistros to Broadway productions, making his debut in the labor musical “Pins and Needles.” He also performed in a series of operettas at Carnegie Hall and in Broadway productions of “Rosalinda,” “The Merry Widow” and “The Would-Be Gentleman.”

The impresario Mike Todd hired him to play opposite Mae West in “Catherine Was Great” (1944). Mr. Barry met his wife, Betty, who acted under the name Julie Carson, during rehearsals.

He left “Catherine” for the musical “Glad to See You” and then moved on to straight acting roles, winning a Critic’s Circle Award for his leading role in an Equity Library production of “Idiot’s Delight.”

Mr. Barry signed a Hollywood contract in 1951. Two years later he starred in perhaps his most famous movie role, the scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, in the George Pal production of “War of the Worlds,” based on the H. G. Wells novel. He also had a role in 2005 as Tom Cruise’s ex-father-in-law in the Steven Spielberg remake. His more than 20 movies also included “Soldier of Fortune” (1955), with Clark Gable and Susan Hayward, and “Thunder Road” (1958), with Robert Mitchum.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Mr. Barry appeared in scores of television specials and series, including “Playhouse 90,” “General Electric Theater,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

His wife of 58 years died in 2003. Besides his daughter, Elizabeth, of Los Angeles, he is survived by two sons, Michael L. and Frederick J., both of Topanga, Calif., three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In an interview with Nan Jarrett for an Internet fan site in 2000, Mr. Barry recalled that he was appearing in the final season of the television comedy “Our Miss Brooks” when a producer asked him to play Bat Masterson.

“The idea of playing a saddle-type cowboy was repulsive to me,” he said. “Then he told me about the derby hat and cane, and I went by the costume department and saw the outfit that Masterson would wear, and I couldn’t resist.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/ar...n/11barry.html





He's Back!
Mike Cidoni

The star may be Pee-wee, but his new live stage show is absolutely huge.

"The Pee-wee Herman Show,'' opening next month in downtown Los Angeles at Club Nokia theater, cost millions to mount. It boasts 11 actors, 20 puppets and marks the show's first production since 1982.

So, why now?

"Well, you know, I really want to make a movie version of 'The Playhouse,' my Saturday morning kid show,'' Paul Reubens said in an interview earlier this week in which he stayed in his exuberant Pee-wee persona.

"This seemed like a great way to do it: Reintroduce it, get back out there, introduce Pee-wee to the new generation that didn't know about it.''

An impulsive, sometimes naughty child living a fantastical world, the Pee-wee character first made a big splash with the live "The Pee-wee Herman Show,'' which debuted at Groundlings theater in Los Angeles in 1981. An HBO broadcast of the show spread the Pee-wee gospel across the country later that year, and a 1985 Tim Burton-directed feature film, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure,'' was an acclaimed and popular success.

Then came the television series "Pee-wee's Playhouse'' (1986-91), which ran for five seasons, earned 22 Emmys and attracted not only children but adults to Saturday-morning television.

Pee-wee was shelved after Reubens' July 1991 arrest for indecent exposure in an adult-movie house in Sarasota, Fla., resulting in a small fine. Reubens, now 57, continued to act, playing characters other than Pee-wee, scoring successes as the Penguin's father in "Batman Returns'' (1992) and a 1995 Emmy nomination for a recurring guest role on "Murphy Brown.'' But Pee-wee would ultimately rise again.

"Well, I went back and forth between wanting to do it and not wanting to do (the new stage show),'' Reubens said. "I had a producer that was calling me every two months for two years. And every two months, I would change my mind. And then, finally, one day I woke up and decided, 'This is it, I'm coming back.'''

As with the original stage show, the new production spins around Pee-wee's desire to fly. The menagerie of "Playhouse'' characters is back, as are some of the original cast members, including Lynne Stewart as Miss Yvonne, John Moody as Mailman Mike and John Paragon as Jambi the Genie.

"I think I am grateful for my friends,'' Reubens said. "I am grateful for my fans. I am grateful that people still support me. I am grateful that people are going to buy tickets to come see my fabulous, fantastic, unbelievably incredible show at Club Nokia. .. I hope people have tickets and that is pretty much what I am thankful for.''

"The Pee-wee Herman Show'' is scheduled to run for a limited four-week engagement, Jan. 12- Feb. 7.
http://www.wcbs880.com/He-s-Back-/5874072





Oscar Insiders Take Their Movie Chat Online
Gregg Kilday

Adam Shankman has a Twitter habit, and it's making Academy officials nervous.

Although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nothing against publicity, it likes to dole out its news about the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, set for March 7, on its own timetable.

Shankman, who is producing the Oscar show with Bill Mechanic, doesn't share that reserve, though. He enjoys talking to the fans directly via his Twitter account, which has more than 48,000 followers, as the mood strikes him.

To date, Shankman hasn't had too much to say about the upcoming awards show. Instead, a lot of his tweets have been devoted to Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance," where he became a permanent judge in October.

But this past weekend, Shankman's thoughts turned to Oscar.

It began innocently enough. Visiting New York, he tweeted on Saturday, "Had dinner last night with Oscar cohosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. Laughed so hard I almost passed out. This is gonna b goooood..."

Then, on Sunday, he tossed a question into the Twitterverse: "Curious: what and who do u wanna see on the oscars? What would make u watch?"

Fan Frenzy

Fans responded in a frenzy. Lots of requests for "High School Musical" stars Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, scattered calls for the kids from "Glee" and Neal Patrick Harris as well as impassioned pleas for "Twilight's" Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

"If Rob and Kristen present an award together, or even just Kristen since she wasn't invited (rude!) last yr, I'd 4 sure watch," one of Shankman's followers tweeted back.

Lots of singer Adam Lambert's fans demanded that he be included. (The mere mention of his name, after his pelvis-grinding turn on the American Music Awards, probably had Oscar broadcaster ABC reaching for the tape-delay button.)

When Shankman posed the follow-up question -- referring to "So You Think You Can Dance" -- "would u watch the oscars with more excitement if I cast some sytycd dancers if there are musical #s," the fans went nearly berserk with excitement. "I will watch the Oscars no matter what, but my excitement factor will be ten-fold if you have SYTYCD alumns in the show. :)," one responded.

Ultimately, after stirring up the fan frenzy, Shankman backed away from any promises. "We will C if thr R musical #s :).," he tweeted. "I h8 musical #'s in shows when they don't make sense. I'm choreographing, so the dancers will be amazing." Addressing the minority of respondents who were horrified at the thought that the Oscars might turn into some "Twilight"-meets-"High School Musical"-meets-"So You Think You Can Dance" marathon, Shankman tweeted, "I promise that the glamour and sense of occasion will be present! It's the oscRs for god sakes! I'm good at this. They are going to be great."

The whole exchange demonstrated that the Oscar process is opening up in the age of such social network sites as Twitter and Facebook.

Public Conversation

The Academy, which frowns on outright campaigning, would probably prefer that its members keep their opinions to themselves. But what's starting to happen is that those post-screening discussions that used to take place in the lobby of the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater are now beginning to pop up on online, where almost anyone can listen in.

In mid-November, for example, screenwriter John August, who was invited to join the Academy in July, tweeted, "First DVD screener came today: 500 Days of Summer. Begin 109 Days of Awards Season. Sigh." A few minutes later, he added, "No sooner did I tweet than FedEx showed up with 6 more screeners. The August Family Film Festival begins shortly."

A few days later, Killer Films' Christine Vachon chimed in that she'd been "charmed by 500 Days of Summer."

Although "(500) Days of Summer," Marc Webb's deconstructed romance starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, did a tidy bit of business -- $32 million domestic -- when it was released in July, it's a safe bet that not many older awards voters saw it during its initial release. Fox Searchlight's decision to get those screeners out early appears to be paying off because the film picked up three Spirit Award nominations last week.

Suddenly, the recommendations are pouring in from every direction.

Sarah Silverman described "Fantastic Mr. Fox" as "pure Joy" and in another tweet testified, "PRECIOUS wins it all. ... You will lose so much water weight out your eyeholes." Ben Stiller urged, "See The Messenger if it is near you. Powerful movie about the effects of war. Great performances." And visual effects supervisor Jean-Luc Dinsdale tweeted, "Just got my District 9 Academy screener. Love this movie!"

This weekend, the attention of Hollywood's twittering classes turned to "Up in the Air." Producer Frank Marshall tweeted, "National Board of Review Best Picture-UP IN THE AIR. Go see it this weekend, you'll see why..." Echoed actress/filmmaker Nia Vardalos in a tweet addressed to the movie's director, Jason Reitman, "Congrats! Up in the Air wins National Board of Review Best Pic. Please all, see this movie First Friday." August took the advice, tweeting Saturday night, "Up in the Air killed. Every little detail landed, with a minimum of fuss."

Shankman's instinct to draw fans closer to the process simply reflects the fact that in this age of Twitter even Hollywood insiders are themselves just another fan base.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





The Two-Way Street for Film Promotions
Ari Karpel

THE American release of “Broken Embraces,” the new film by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, was heralded by an unexpected product: a limited-edition series of espresso cups that Mr. Almodóvar designed for Illycaffè, the Italian coffee company.

Each of the seven cups in the series is decorated with images that evoke one of his films, including “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Volver” and “Broken Embraces,” which is from Sony Pictures Classics. But the marketing of the film, which opened in theaters last month and stars Penélope Cruz, has had little relation to the coffee cups.

“It’s not intentional to promote the film,” Illycaffè’s chief executive, Andrea Illy, said by telephone from Rome. He said, modestly, that the company did not “have the power to promote an Almodóvar film. It’s more probably the Almodóvar film that promotes Illy coffee.”

The partnership puts a new twist on the Happy Meal model of film marketing, with two powerful brands joined together to cross-promote their products, with some film marketing diverging into unexpected realms. This fall and winter, movie studios are running some creative promotions involving museum exhibits, video games and, yes, McDonald’s Happy Meals.

The Hollywood studios have long sought partners to help market their films, but as advertising and marketing budgets have been strained by the downturn and profits have sagged, they have grown even more eager to hitch their movies to potentially talked-about products, and vice versa. Happy Meals are tied to the recent animated film “Astro Boy,” but some less prominent and artier films have found an array of product tie-ins.

Aiming for blanket coverage, two films this season — “Where the Wild Things Are,” from Warner Brothers, and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” from Summit Entertainment — have teamed with multiple brands.

Studios are reluctant to discuss these partnerships, preferring that such promotions speak for themselves. A spokeswoman for Universal Pictures, which did a tie-in between its recent comedy “Couples Retreat,” starring Vince Vaughn, and the Activision video game Guitar Hero, declined to comment, stating that the studio did not discuss its marketing plans. Warner Brothers and Summit also declined to comment.

The promotions for “Where the Wild Things Are” stretched boundaries, especially in New York. NYC & Company, the tourism arm of New York, produced Wild Things Week NYC, an event in October that included a nearly monthlong exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum. That exhibit featured the original drawings and manuscripts for the children’s book, written by Maurice Sendak, on which the movie is based; giveaways of crowns like those worn by the protagonist, Max, at hotels, restaurants and retailers; and a curriculum put together by the New York City Department of Education based on the book and film and posted on the department’s Web site for teachers across the country to use as a reference.

“That was like gold for the studio because they didn’t have to go from market to market to do it,” said Karen Sortito, the senior vice president for entertainment at NYC & Company. “The studio gets instant manpower and creative solutions to break through the New York City clutter.”

The marketing for “New Moon,” the second film based on the successful series of “Twilight” books about vampires, began much like that for the first film, with a 15-city mall tour of the film’s stars at the teenage clothing store Hot Topic. The tour for the sequel included the upscale department store Nordstrom.

The toy manufacturer Mattel created limited-edition Barbie dolls based on Edward and Bella, the leading characters in the “Twilight” world.

Aside from blood, vampires don’t eat or drink, but that didn’t stop Summit from forming partnerships with Burger King and VitaminWater. Television commercials for VitaminWater featured sequences from the film and a voice intoning, “Some thirsts can never be quenched. Luckily, yours can.” At Burger King, Burger Shots value meals offer retail coupons, trading cards and other New Moon memorabilia.

AT&T offered consumers in select cities tickets to advance screenings of “New Moon” if they posted on a special message board on Facebook.

Social networking sites and services like Facebook and Twitter have also emerged as strong tools for movie marketers.

Ms. Sortito says Twitter has been useful for spreading the word about events. Even her personal Facebook account can yield opportunities, she said. “Most of my Facebook friends are studio people,” she explained, “and I’m Facebooking: ‘You’re invited to a “Where the Wild Things” event this week and, secondly, you should call me because I might be able to do a deal like this for you.’

“That was kind of gross,” she said, adding, however, that “they responded!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/bu...ia/07adco.html





"Avatar" Wows Early Movie Reviewers

Director James Cameron's long-awaited "Avatar" wowed critics at its London premiere on Thursday, with some early reviewers calling it "jaw-dropping," "mind-blowing" and a game-changer in Hollywood for its digital effects.

The 3D epic adventure by the director of 1997 blockbuster "Titanic" is one of the most expensive films ever at a cost of about $400 million to make and market. It begins its worldwide launch next week, hitting U.S. theaters on December 18.

If initial reviews and Twitter buzz are any indication, it may be money well spent for film studio 20th Century Fox.

"James Cameron has proven his point: He is king of the world," raved showbiz newspaper The Hollywood Reporter.

"As commander-in-chief of an army of visual-effects technicians, creature designers, motion-capture mavens, stunt performers, dancers, actors and music and sound magicians, he brings science-fiction movies into the 21st century with the jaw-dropping wonder that is 'Avatar,'" it said.

Britain's biggest-selling tabloid, The Sun, called it "the most dazzling film of the decade. ... The final battle scene is 20 minutes long and absolutely mind-blowing."

"Avatar" shows the forest-dwelling Na'vi fighting for survival against a colonial mining operation bent on stripping their planet. A crippled ex-Marine is chosen to make contact with the mysterious people as a remotely controlled avatar.

Empire magazine gave the movie five stars out of five, calling it a "hugely rewarding experience" whose new technology "will give directors ... one heck of a sandbox to play in."

Twitter lit up with comments from journalists leaving the tightly guarded premiere. "James Cameron is a freakin' genius! I can't say much but wow, I loved it," wrote Alex Billington of the movie website FirstShowing.net.

The London Guardian's Mark Brown wrote on Thursday that "Avatar" was "really much, much better than expected, (it) looked amazing and the story was gripping -- if cheesy in many places."

"The terrible film that some had been anticipating had not materialized. It was good," Brown wrote.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Peter Cooney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...pe=reviewsNews





Hollywood Eyes Record $10 bln Box Office for 2009
Alex Dobuzinskis

Film box offices were poised on Wednesday to eclipse 2007's record $9.68 billion in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales with Hollywood eyeing more than $10 billion this year as audiences flocked to theaters during the recession.

Movie studios began the year with January crossing the $1 billion mark for the first time ever, and box offices this month are counting on help from highly anticipated films such as "Avatar," "Sherlock Holmes" and "It's Complicated."

So far, moviegoers had snapped up $9.67 billion worth of tickets at domestic -- U.S. and Canadian -- box offices through Tuesday, said tracking firm Hollywood.com Box Office.

The firm said 2007's record was expected to be surpassed on Wednesday, as Hollywood reaps returns during a recession that, as in past downturns, has seen consumers showing up in theaters for relatively cheap entertainment.

Last year's domestic box office came in at $9.63 billion.

"The global economy is taking a major hit, and when these conglomerates that own movie studios are having a tough time, it's at least one bright spot in the equation," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com Box Office. "People are still, in 2009, going to the movies in big numbers."

For the entire year, Hollywood.com Box Office expects movie ticket spending in the United States and Canada to hit $10.6 billion.

The year has been helped by major releases such as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the year's biggest hit with $402 million in domestic ticket sales, according to tracking firm Box Office Mojo.

At No. 2, so far, was "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," which made $301 million. Also, vampire romance "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" had the third biggest movie opening of all time for the United States and Canada.

Surprise hits have included Paramount Pictures' "Paranormal Activity" raking in $107 million. Warner Bros. put out two unexpected smashes, "The Hangover" ($277 million) and "The Blind Side" ($131 million and still counting.)

The 2009 total was aided by a 28 cent increase in ticket prices from the year before to an average $7.46.

The total number of tickets sold, or admissions, is expected to reach 1.4 billion, up from 1.34 billion in 2008. Still, that figure is not expected to break the record 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, said Hollywood.com Box Office.

The United States and Canada account for about 35 percent of the global box office total, making it the largest film market in the world, Hollywood.com Box Office said.

International figures were not available.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Peter Cooney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





The TSA Makes Another Stupid Move

When the TSA make mistakes this egregious it really isn’t all that hard to pick on them.

The latest is that their Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure is published on the internet. I actually like that. I don’t think that security through obscurity is a good idea. Of course the document is marked SSI and includes this footnote on every page:

SENSITIVE SECURITY INFORMATION
WARNING: THIS RECORD CONTAINS SENSITIVE SECURITY INFORMATION THAT IS CONTROLLED UNDER 49 CFR PARTS 15 AND 1520. NO PART OF THIS RECORD MAY BE DISCLOSED TO PERSONS WITHOUT A “NEED TO KNOW,” AS DEFINED IN 49 CFR PARTS 15 AND 1520, EXCEPT WITH THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE ADMINISTRATOR OF THE TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION OR THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION. UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE MAY RESULT IN CIVIL PENALTIES OR OTHER ACTION. FOR U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, PUBLIC DISCLOSURE GOVERNED BY 5 U.S.C. 552 AND 49 CFR PARTS 15 AND 1520.

So the decision to publish it on the Internet is probably a questionable one. On top of that, however, is where the real idiocy shines. They chose to publish a redacted version of the document, hiding all the super-important stuff from the public. But they apparently don’t understand how redaction works in the electronic document world. See, rather than actually removing the offending text from the document they just drew a black box on top of it. Turns out that PDF documents don’t really care about the black box like that and the actual content of the document is still in the file.

Yup, their crack legal staff managed to screw this one up pretty badly. Want to know which twelve passports will instantly get you shunted over for secondary screening, simply by showing them to the ID-checking agent? Check out Section 2A-2 (C) (1) (b) (iv). Want to know the procedure for CIA-escorted passengers to be processed through the checkpoint? That’s in the document, too. Details on the calibration process of the metal detectors is in there. So is the procedure for screening foreign dignitaries.

It is pretty pathetic that the folks supposedly responsible for administering this “security” program cannot even be bothered to do the simplest parts of their job correctly. Then again, passing through the checkpoint every time I fly it is pretty clear that they do a lot of things incorrectly. Just chalk this one up to more of the same idiocy. More done badly.

Want to read it for yourself? Grab a copy here. Who knows how long they’ll keep it online.

Once you’ve downloaded the PDF you’ll see the black boxes. Simply highlight the text (start above and drag down to below the redaction area) so that you’re selecting all of the stuff in the “redacted” area. Copy the selection and paste it into the word processing client of your choice.

UPDATE: The original link to the document appears to be dead now but a mirror of the file can be found at www.cryptome.org with the un-redaction work already completed.
http://www.wanderingaramean.com/2009...upid-move.html





Lawmakers Want to Bar Sites From Posting Sensitive Government Docs
Kim Zetter

Three Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Homeland Security what can be done to bar or criminally penalize whistleblower sites that reposted a sensitive airport-screening manual that was published on the internet by a government worker.

They also asked about enacting regulations that would bar such publication in the future.

The congressmen are outraged that sites like Cryptome and Wikileaks republished the manual after it was posted online by a government contractor working for the Transportation Security Administration. The manual was posted last March on a government procurement site and was discovered Sunday by a blogger.

In their letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (.pdf) on Wednesday, Reps. Peter T. King (R - New York), Charles Dent (R - Pennsylvania) and Gus Bilirakis (R - Florida) asked, “How has the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration addressed the repeated reposting of this security manual to other websites, and what legal action, if any, can be taken to compel its removal?”

They also asked if DHS is “considering issuing new regulations pursuant to its authority in Section 114 of Title 49, United States Code, and are criminal penalties necessary or desirable to ensure such information is not reposted in the future?”

The letter from the congressmen was first posted by Secrecy News.

The TSA manual was not classified but was designated Sensitive Security Information, or SSI. Parts of the TSA manual were redacted, but the redaction was bungled and allowed anyone to easily uncover the concealed information. But even the unredacted parts of the document were never meant to be seen by the public. The Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure contained this warning: “No part of this record may be disclosed to persons without a ‘need to know.’”

Even if the manual had been classified, the United States does not have a law prohibiting the publication of classified information, although the government has threatened on occasion to use espionage laws to prosecute journalists for publishing such information.

The 93-page manual provided details about which passengers are more likely to be targeted for secondary screening at airports, who is exempt from screening, TSA procedures for screening foreign dignitaries and CIA-escorted passengers, and extensive instructions for calibrating metal detectors and screening for traces of explosive materials.

It revealed the limitations of screening equipment to detect certain types of electrical wire and other potential bomb-making materials and provided details about what objects — such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs — are exempt from screening.

The manual also provided sample images of sensitive identification cards for DHS and CIA personnel as well as congressional representatives. And it disclosed that passengers carrying passports from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen or Algeria are to be designated for selective screening.

The manual was removed from the government site on Sunday, but not before someone had grabbed a copy of it and submitted it to Cryptome. Numerous copies have subsequently appeared on other sites, including Wikileaks — whose servers are located around the globe.

The three congressmen, who are members of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in their letter that the release of the information had security implications that went beyond aviation security.

“TSA screeners and equipment were utilized by the Secret Service frequently during the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns to augment Service Personnel and continue to be used by the Secret Service at National Special Security Events,” they wrote.

In case terrorists didn’t fully comprehend the point they were trying to make, the congressmen added that the leak of the document “could prove to have disastrous consequences for the security of President Obama.”

Five TSA workers were put on leave this week pending an investigation into TSA’s redaction procedures and the publication of the manual on the government site.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-leak-2





U.S. and Russia Open Talks on Limits to War in Cyberspace
John Markoff and Andrew E. Kramer

The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

In the last two years, Internet-based attacks on government and corporate computer systems have multiplied to thousands a day. Hackers, usually never identified, have compromised Pentagon computers, stolen industrial secrets and temporarily jammed government and corporate Web sites. President Obama ordered a review of the nation’s Internet security in February and is preparing to name an official to coordinate national policy.

On Nov. 12, a delegation led by Gen. Vladislav P. Sherstyuk, a deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council and the former leader of the Russian equivalent of the National Security Agency, flew to Washington and met with representatives from the National Security Council, State Department, Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. Officials familiar with these talks said the two sides made progress in bridging divisions that had long separated the countries.

Indeed, two weeks later in Geneva, the United States agreed to discuss cyberwarfare and cybersecurity with representatives of the United Nations committee on disarmament and international security. The United States had previously insisted on addressing those matters in the committee on economic issues.

The Russians have held that the increasing challenges posed by military activities to civilian computer networks can be best dealt with by an international treaty, similar to treaties that have limited the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The United States had resisted, arguing that it was impossible to draw a line between the commercial and military uses of software and hardware.

Now there is a thaw, said people familiar with the discussions.

“In the last months there are more signs of building better cooperation between the U.S. and Russia,” said Veni Markovski, a Washington-based adviser to Bulgaria’s Internet security chief and representative to Russia for the organization that assigns Internet domain names. “These are signs that show the dangers of cybercrime are too big to be neglected.”

Viktor V. Sokolov, deputy director of the Institute of Information Security in Moscow, a policy research group run by General Sherstyuk, said the Russian view was that the American position on Internet security had shifted perceptibly in recent months.

“There is movement,” he said. Before, bilateral negotiations were limited to the relevant Russian police agency, the Bureau of Special Technical Operations, the Internet division of the Ministry of Interior, and the F.B.I.

Mr. Sokolov characterized this new round of discussions as the opening of negotiations between Russia and the United States on a possible disarmament treaty for cyberspace, something Russia has long sought but the United States has resisted.

“The talks took place in a good atmosphere,” he said. “And they agreed to continue this process. There are positive movements.”

A State Department official, who was not authorized to speak about the talks and requested anonymity, disputed the Russian characterization of the American position. While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.

An administration official said the United States was seeking common ground with the Russians.

The United Nations discussions are scheduled to resume in New York in January, and the two countries also plan to talk at an annual Russia-sponsored Internet security conference in Garmisch, Germany.

The American interest in reopening discussions shows that the Obama administration, even in absence of a designated Internet security chief, is breaking with the Bush administration, which had declined to talk with Russia about issues related to military attacks using the Internet.

Many countries, including the United States, are developing weapons for use on computer networks that are ever more integral to the operations of everything from banks to electrical power systems to government offices. They include “logic bombs” that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; “botnets” that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away.

The Russians have focused on three related issues, according to American officials involved in the talks that are part of a broader thaw in American-Russian relations known as the "reset" that also include negotiations on a new nuclear disarmament treaty. In addition to continuing efforts to ban offensive cyberweapons, they have insisted on what they describe as an issue of sovereignty calling for a ban on “cyberterrorism.” American officials view the issue differently and describe this as a Russian effort to restrict “politically destabilizing speech.” The Russians have also rejected a portion of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime that they assert violates their Constitution by permitting foreign law enforcement agencies to conduct Internet searches inside Russian borders.

In late October at a luncheon during a meeting on Security and Counter Terrorism at Moscow State University, General Sherstyuk told a group of American executives that the Russians would never sign the European Cybercrime Treaty as long as it contained the language permitting cross-border searches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/science/13cyber.html





Linux's Share of Netbooks Surging, Not Sagging, Says Analyst

Research firm's numbers contradict lower figures touted by Microsoft on Linux netbooks
Eric Lai

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm.

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

"Just because you live in the United States, don't assume that everything is on Windows," Orr said.

Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.

As netbooks running the ARM processor become a major factor, Orr predicted Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013. That will be driven by consumers in less-developed countries buying Linux netbooks as their primary PCs, rather than North American consumers buying netbooks as secondary machines as predominates today.

While U.S. consumers sometimes appear to have a love-hate relationship with Windows, those non-U.S. consumers have less experience with Windows -- and thus less reliance, Orr said.

For emerging ARM-based netbooks, Orr suggested that Microsoft adopt the same strategy that it did last year to wrest away Linux's initial lead on the hot netbook market, which was to cut the price of Windows XP.

That could mean offering Windows Embedded CE or Windows Mobile, both of which already run on ARM, at a discount to netbook manufacturers, he said, in order to stave off platforms such as Google Inc.'s Android or Chrome OS, or the Intel Corp.-created Moblin.

"They need to get a play started now," he said.

In a statement, Microsoft maintained that "over 93% of worldwide small notebook PCs run Windows today.

"With the recent launch of Windows 7, we believe that trend will continue," the company said. Microsoft touted Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 for ARM, but declined to say whether it would cut its license price to win manufacturers.

Microsoft has also resisted calls to endorsements from ARM vendors, such as Nvidia Inc., whose Tegra chips run Windows CE for Microsoft's Zune player, and the purported ease and power of developing on Windows CE.

ABI said its 35 million shipment figure is a reaffirmation of an earlier forecast that itself was a slight tweak of its January forecast of 39 million netbook shipments in 2009.

"That seemed aggressive at the time, but it's happening, no doubt about it," Orr said.

The largest share of netbook sales is in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

The only market that has failed to match earlier expectations, he said, is China, where inexpensive (US$250), no-name netbooks have not sold as well as predicted.

Only 17% of netbooks this year will be sold through mobile operators, with the vast majority being sold via retail, said Orr. Consumers have been reluctant to pay for expensive 3G data service contracts, which average $60 a month, since they mostly treat netbooks as secondary machines.

"Wi-Fi is good enough today," he said. That will change, he said, as more buyers get netbooks as their primary machine.

Two categories that ABI says were nearly dead are also either reviving or due for a comeback. Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which by ABI's definition include Nokia's N900 and Nokia's ill-fated N810 and exclude more full-featured portable devices, only had 30,000 shipments worldwide last year. That should grow to 1 million MIDs worldwide this year, Orr said.

Meanwhile, ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), which ABI defines as tiny, pricey laptops running full Windows, also crashed and burned this year as a category, with the closure of vendors like OQO Inc.

UMPCs could come back as thin-and-light notebooks running ultra-low-voltage processors such as Intel's CULV or AMD's Neo, he said. Those would ideally cost between $500 and $750, so as to slot themselves between netbooks and regular laptops, he said.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...g_says_analyst





New Cloud-Based Service Steals Wi-Fi Passwords
Robert McMillan

Launched Monday, the WPA Cracker service bills itself as a useful tool for security auditors and penetration testers who want to know if they could break into certain types of WPA networks. It works because of a known vulnerability in Pre-shared Key (PSK) networks, usually used by home and small-business users.

To use the service, the tester submits a small "handshake" file that contains an initial back-and-forth communication between the WPA router and a PC. Based on that information, WPA Cracker can then tell whether the network seems vulnerable to this type of attack or not.

The service was launched by a well-known security researcher who goes by the name of Moxie Marlinspike. In an interview, he said that he got the idea for WPA Cracker after talking to other security experts about how to speed up WPA network auditing. "It's kind of a drag if it takes five days or two weeks to get your results," he said.

Hackers have known for some time that these WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to what's called a dictionary attack, where the hacker guesses the password by trying out thousands of commonly used passwords until one finally works. But because of the way WPA is designed, it takes a particularly long time to pull off a dictionary attack against a WPA network.

Because each WPA password must be hashed thousands of times, a typical computer can guess perhaps just 300 passwords per second, while other password crackers can process hundreds of thousands of words per second. That means that the 20-minute WPA Cracker job, which runs 135 million possible options, would take about five days on a dual-core PC, Marlinspike said. "That has really stymied efforts of WPA cracking," he said.

WPA Cracker customers get access to a 400-node computing cluster that employs a custom dictionary, designed specifically for guessing WPA passwords. If they find the $34 price tag too steep, they can use half the cluster and pay $17, for what could be a 40-minute job. Marlinspike declined to say who operates his compute cluster.

The attack will work if the network's password is in Marlinspike's 135 million-phrase dictionary, but if it's a strong, randomly generated password it probably won't be crackable.

The service could save security auditors a lot of time, but it will probably make it easier for senior management to understand the risks they're facing, said Robert Graham, CEO of penetration testing company Errata Security. "When I show this to management and say it would cost $34 to crack your WPA password, it's something they can understand," he said. "That helps me a lot."
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...passwords.html





Spook Firm Readies Virgin Media Filesharing Probes

'Witch-measuring not witch-finding'
Chris Williams

The corridors at Detica's central London "Nerve Centre" are lined with portraits of the heroes of Bletchley Park, Britain's World War Two code-breaking powerhouse.

The black and white gallery acted as an reminder of the secret government business where the firm makes most of its money when The Register visited recently. We were there to discuss Detica's uncharacteristically public new venture, however: a bravely-timed saunter onto the illegal filesharing battlefield.

The BAE-owned firm has been engaged by Virgin Media to measure the level of music copyright infringement on its network via peer-to-peer protocols, on a trial basis beginning "by the end of this year". Detica plans to do this by inserting Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) probes into the ISP's network and looking inside a copy of users' traffic.

"There's not going to be many, because they're expensive," said Dan Klein, Detica's media accounts director, and the man in charge of the trial.

Nevertheless, it's planned the system, CView, will examine 40 per cent of the traffic sent and received by Virgin Media's four million subscribers. Those 1.6 million-or-so customers at any one time won't know their traffic is being examined and won't be able to opt out.

CView will look for three types of filesharing traffic: eDonkey, Gnutella and BitTorrent. Each is identifiable by the header data that routes each packet as it travels across the internet. Most ISPs already measure traffic passing through their networks this way, allowing them to manage bandwidth across web browsing, streaming, filesharing and other applications.

CView will go several major steps further though. Once it has identified a eDonkey, Gnutella or BitTorrent session, it will strip out the IP address of the user from each packet, replacing it with a randomly-generated unique identifier and send a copy to a central server run by Detica. There, the traffic will be reconstructed and "acoustically fingerprinted" and matched against a copyright database provided by a third party.

Klein wouldn't identify the database Detica will use during the trial, but the same technology is on offer from Audible Magic, Gracenote and Shazam.

From there a series of statistics will be generated. Reports will tell Virgin Media how much of the peer-to-peer traffic infringes copyright and what the most popular tracks and albums are.

The reports will be delivered weekly, or monthly, or even quarterly, Klein said. It's one of many details of the trial yet to be decided. "We don't know who's going to end up paying for this," he added.

Perhaps most importantly, at least at first, CView will measure how the overall level of copyright infringement via peer-to-peer networks responds to Lord Mandelson's letter-writing campaign. If the Digital Economy Bill is passed in what remains of this Parliament, those observed by rights holder groups sharing copyright material could start receiving statutory warnings in the post from their ISP as soon as April.

A year later a system of "technical measures" - bandwidth restrictions, blocked protocols and disconnections for the most persistent - imposed on ISPs by Ofcom, is likely to follow. If successful in trial, CView will allow Virgin Media to monitor how its customers respond to the regime, although it will not be involved in idenfiying infringers.

By then the ISP plans to have launched a legal music download service, so could measure whether the new laws help it convert illegal filesharers into paying customers.

Detica's CView presentation also trailed "aspirational" monitoring of iTunes and other legal music services, which might present some interesting questions for UK competition authorities when ISPs enter the record business.

Both Detica and Virgin Media are at pains to emphasis that all CView monitoring will only be possible anonymously and in aggregate.

According to Klein there is "absolutely no way" CView could ever be used to report the IP addresses of individual filesharers. "We believe identifying the consumer is an invasive use of DPI," he said.

"The key thing is the first thing we do is throw away the IP address," agreed Andy Frost, Detica's director of media, who has been working on CView for 18 months, ever since it became clear the government planned to legislate against illegal filesharing. Of course, the firm originally developed its DPI probes for another use (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11...media_detica/), at the behest its biggest customers, the UK intelligence agencies.

When the trial was announced (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11..._media_detica/) at the end of last month, in comments pages of The Register and elsewhere it prompted repeats of well-worn discussions of how to beat DPI monitoring with encrypted peer to peer. Such concerns over being identified miss the point, at least of CView, said Klein.

"We're not trying to be 100 per cent accurate," he said. "We're taking a statistical view."

Scrambled peer-to-peer packets will be counted to measure changes in the overall level of encryption, but Detica is under no illusions that it will be able to identify what they carry. "It's not realistic and not something we would try," said Klein, a Cambridge engineering graduate.

Despite the assurances of anonymity - perhaps partly because of them - it's undeniable that CView in many ways recalls the Phorm targeted advertising fiasco. Both systems rely on the same DPI technology and both firms claim they comply with all the relevant privacy legislation.

The main difference, likely to limit opposition to CView as currently envisaged, is that with internet users are not to be targeted by the system, and there should be no change to their online experience when it is switched on. Rather, CView will merely measure filesharers as a group. The test for Virgin Media and Detica will be whether, once DPI monitoring of peer-to-peer is in place, they can resist the temptation to exploit it further.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/detica_visit/





Cops Carpeted Over Leaks
Diana Lee

Twenty-one police officers have been disciplined over leaks in police data that have appeared online, Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data Roderick Woo Bun said yesterday.

Woo said the figure was confirmed in a meeting with Police Commissioner Tang King-shing, who also said the leaks were not caused by hackers or failures in the force's IT system.

Concern has been mounting over leaks of confidential information after files on blackmail and criminal damage cases were uploaded to the internet last week. It is believed the files were obtained through Foxy, a file-sharing software program.

A day later a further 104 confidential files appeared on the internet, including one saying a constable was prevented from working for the tactical unit because of her physical condition.

According to a statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Tang acknowledged that as of Friday, a total of 28 personal data leakage incidents were caused by staff saving copies of police documents as templates for future use in their personal computers, which were installed with a peer-to- peer application.

The people affected by the leaks have been alerted. However, it is possible more files from the previous leaks may appear online.

Internal cyber checks are continuing to prevent a recurrence of data leakages, Tang said.

Woo said he is satisfied with the measures the police have taken to mitigate the harm to the affected individuals and to prevent a recurrence.

A high duty of care is expected in protecting personal data, especially for information obtained from suspects or witnesses, he said.

"This is important not only in terms of protecting personal data privacy but also for the maintenance of the public confidence in the police's investigative process," Woo said.

He added he is considering an inspection of the data security system run by the police force.

The police said two sanitization exercises had been undertaken in July last year and February this year to rid all police common terminals of classified and/or personal data.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...1&con_type =1





Pirate Party MEP Proposes ‘Internet Bill of Rights’
Ben Jones

The Pirate Party’s Christian Engstrom is already making waves in the European Parliament. After his hard work on the Telecoms Package amendment he’s now working to set up an Internet Bill of Rights, attempting to codify some of the core beliefs of the Pirate Party. To achieve this he wants your help.

Together with Amelia Andersdotter, Christian Engstrom represents the Pirate Party in the European Parliament. He worked hard last month on ensuring judicial review before disconnections or sanctions over file-sharing can take place, and now he’s looking to do more with a proposed Bill of Internet Rights.

The Bill of Internet Rights would cover topics such as Net Neutrality, online privacy and freedom of information. Where possible the bill will take existing legislation as the basis. What makes this different though, is the process he’s using to help develop the document – an “Internet swarm”. Comments, suggestions and questions are all welcomed via his website, to contribute to the development of the document.

“I don’t think the problem is that there are a lot of politicians who actively want to dismount our civil liberties,” Engstrom told TorrentFreak. “It’s just that they haven’t realized that the Internet is an important part of our society, where the fundamental rights have to apply. They think it’s some kind of toy they can take away from the children if they’ve been naughty. The task is to explain to them that this is not an acceptable way of handling the net.”

The idea for the bill came from the “Internet Core Group” inside the European Greens, where the proposal has strong support. Engstrom also says that during the negotiations for the Telecom Package there was a lot of talk about the need to safeguard net neutrality, so he feels hopeful about this proposal.

“When it comes to safeguarding the fundamental civil liberties, such as the right to privacy and information freedom – well, that’s a fight we just have to win,” Engstrom said. According to the current planning, the Bill of Rights will be ready for proposal in the spring of 2010.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...rights-091209/





Anti-Piracy Group Wants To Ban You From Talking About Usenet
Ernesto

The first rule of Usenet is, you don’t talk about Usenet. This rule kept Usenet providers and users out of sight from anti-piracy organizations for years. Ironically, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN are now the first ones trying to enforce this rule in court.

The Usenet community FTD allows its nearly half a million members to discuss and report the location of material they find on Usenet, without explicitly linking to copyrighted content. The operators of the site see no harm in what they do, but according to Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN, online communities should not be entitled to allow these kinds of discussions on their websites.

Talking about copyrighted content on Usenet is illegal they argue, and BREIN wants FTD to be shut down for allowing this. The newsgroup community, however, is not prepared to tolerate BREIN’s accusations and has decided to take action. Earlier this year FTD took BREIN to court, demanding that it should retract its numerous statements that FTD operates illegally.

In a letter to the court in this ongoing case, FTD’s lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet stated yesterday that BREIN is going too far with its statements. Downloading copyrighted files and music for personal use is perfectly legal in The Netherlands, so he sees no reason why merely talking about it should be illegal.

FTD users do not ‘make files available’ and are therefore not acting against the law. “Hyperlinks, torrents, NZB-files or other technical possibilities to download copyrighted works are not provided. BREIN says in effect that it should be forbidden to talk about downloading material,” Engelfriet added.

Undeterred, BREIN maintained their stance and declared FTD a criminal operation. In a counter-claim against FTD, the anti-piracy outfit has demanded $70,000 a day in penalties if the Usenet chatter continues.

Needless to say, if BREIN wins their case this will have serious implications for many other websites and communities, including TorrentFreak. Simply mentioning that a movie such as 2012 can be downloaded through BitTorrent would no longer be allowed according to Engelfriet.

FTD’s lawyer is confident about the positive outcome of the case, arguing that FTD is operating within the boundaries of Dutch copyright law.

“We fully expect to win our case. BREIN is big on statements but often short on facts and legal arguments to back them up,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak earlier, adding that they “have the law and the facts” on their side.

The verdict in this case is expected to be announced sometime next year. Until then, here’s our Usenet tutorial.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...t-talk-091210/





Music Industry to Test Sweden's Anti-Piracy Law

The recording industry has decided to take a stab at using Sweden’s new anti-piracy laws to reveal the identity of what an industry association is calling a “rather normal” file sharer.

The Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has filed a suit with the district court in Stockholm in an attempt to force an internet provider to divulge customer information about one of its customers suspected of illegal file sharing.

Previously, publishers of audio books and a film company have filed petitions under Sweden’s IPRED law, which allows aggrieved copyright holders to pursue those suspected of illegal file sharing with the help of a court order.

IPFI has investigated a number of file sharing cases, but has at this point elected to go to court in only one case.

“We want to take one at a time. It’s a new law and we have to learn how to do this, what the courts want in terms of evidence to be sure that they’re not compromising anyone’s privacy,” the head of IFPI in Sweden, Ludvig Werner, told the TT news agency.

IFPI is ready to file petitions in a number of other cases, but is taking its time in moving ahead with the filings. Werner said he envisions submitting larger filings in the future, perhaps including as many as 100 file sharing suspects at a time.

“That’s something we’re not unfamiliar with. But we have no plans to do so just yet,” he said.

The focus of the current filing, submitted to the Stockholm District Court on Monday, used the Direct Connect (DC) file sharing network, which has declined considerably following the wide adoption of more modern BitTorrent file sharing technologies.

But IFPI still thinks there is still too much activity on the DC network.

DC is build like a network of hubs, often specialized in different types of films, music, or games. In order to be accepted into a hub, users are most often required to provide material for others to down load.

But the person whose identity IFPI is seeking to reveal isn’t a hub owner or someone who is believed to have uploaded large quantities of copyright protected material.

“We’ve been able to download about 50 songs from him. He has made 10,000 songs available as well as films. DC is still very popular in Sweden and he is a rather normal DC user," IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson told TT.

“BitTorrent technology is superior for moving large files, but DC is more of a social network. You connect to a hub and are there throughout the day, chatting and exchanging files with one another, sort of like a youth recreation centre on the internet, even if it’s not only young people who are there.”
http://www.thelocal.se/23698/20091207/





File Sharing in Sweden Nears Record High

Following a severe drop in the aftermath of Ipred, Sweden’s new anti-piracy law implemented in April, illegal file sharing is once again on the rise, reaching record high levels.

Many experts believed that the Ipred law wouldn’t have any effect on file-sharing. But the results were dramatic, with a 40 percent drop in Internet traffic the night before the law went into effect on April 1, according to statistics from Netnod, a Swedish organization that coordinates national Internet service providers (ISPs).

At the time, Netnod figures were generally considered to be the best measure of illegal file sharing.

The entertainment industry was satisfied and hoped for a boost in record sales. And according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), music sales increased by 18 percent over the first nine months of 2009.

But after the feverish downloading at the end of March and the abrupt decline in April, file sharing has steadily recovered. Several weeks ago, Internet traffic passed the previous all-time high, reported in March.

But the numbers are not so straightforward. Netnod statistics are an extremely rough measure of file sharing and there are several other factors that could have contributed to the increase in Internet traffic. Some of it can also be attributed to entirely legal businesses.

“Spotify and the various television channels ‘Play’ sites haven’t yet released their statistics. There is guaranteed to be certain increase in file sharing, but it isn’t possible to tell exactly how much,” said researcher Kristoffer Schollin, who studies file-sharing and gave expert testimony during the Pirate Bay trial in March.

At the same time, Internet security company McAfee estimates that the number of file-sharing sites has exploded by 300 percent since the spring. The decisive factor was the Pirate Bay trial in March, when many believed that the Pirate Bay site would be shut down, according to McAfee.

“Then you have the illegal video streaming sites, which aren’t file sharing in the traditional sense, but which play the same role for users. Watching a movie via a streaming video directly in your web browser is becoming more and more popular,” Schollin said.

But in terms of copyright, the practice is entirely different than file sharing. Users don’t download anything and don’t risk infringing upon copyrights.

“All together, even with a conservative estimate of increased traffic together with the increased number of sites and more options, you can say that file sharing is healthier than ever,” Schollin said.

In the long-term, however, experts believe that file sharing will become less significant even if the practice continues to spread. Spotify, Voddler and other legal services will gradually crowd out a large portion of illegal file-sharing.

“This dangerous and exciting phases will probably be entirely undramatic when the private and illegal file sharing will be relegated to a niched and auxiliary existence. Instead of now, when Spotify is subordinate to file sharing,” Schollin said.
http://www.thelocal.se/23680/20091206/





Pirate Bay Allowed To Take Bias Claims To Supreme Court
enigmax

Ever since the guilty verdict was handed down against the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial, what would happen next had been surrounded by uncertainty. Accusations of bias were leveled at both the original trial judge, and two of the judges set to handle the appeal. Today the Supreme Court handed down its decision – there will be no retrial.

tpbIn April this year, all four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a fines of $905,000 each. Of course, the defense didn’t accept the decision, and went on to file for an appeal.

The appeal was scheduled to start last month but like most things in this case, it became surrounded in controversy.

According to defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson, two of three judges could be susceptible to bias due to their membership in pro-copyright groups. Ulrika Ihrfelt was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU) and Christina Boutz a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR).

The same kind of bias accusations were earlier leveled at Judge Tomas Norstrom who presided over the original trial. The defense felt that if it could get a decision that Norstrom was biased, then the original case would have to be tried all over again, rather than going straight to appeal.

Samuelsson submitted his complaints to the Court of Appeal, but it subsequently ruled that the judgment of the two appeal judges would not be swayed by their involvement in the pro-copyright groups. Then, somewhat predictably, Samuelsson announced he would appeal this decision and take the question of bias to the Supreme Court.

Today the decision on that appeal was announced. The Supreme Court ruled that the defense will be allowed to appeal to the Supreme Court on the issue of bias in the case of the two appeal judges.

They will not, however, be able to appeal the decision in the case of Judge Tomas Norstrom, despite him being a member of the same copyright groups. Ove Nilsson of the Supreme Court admitted that it “may seem a bit strange” that Norstrom’s case can’t be appealed, but those are the rules.

The appeal of the original case is due to be heard in 2010.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-a...-court-091209/





China Closes File-Sharing Sites in Crackdown
Cara Anna

China has closed one of the country's largest file-sharing sites in what it says is a fight against copyright infringement, but could be seen as another measure aimed at controlling what content the country's Web users can find online.

The file-sharing site BTCHINA — a major source of overseas movies, television shows and games in the country — has been closed since Friday, and another site, VeryCD.com, was down Wednesday. A report in the Southern Metropolis Daily said other file sharing sites would be closed in the coming days.

The State Administration of Radio Film and Television said BTCHINA did not have a license to distribute audio and video content. "SARFT has deleted our site's registration and shut down our site," a notice on the BTCHINA site said.

The owner of VeryCD.com, Huang Yimeng, wrote on his blog that his site was down due to a server problem, but he told The Beijing News in a report Wednesday that "we also don't have a license."

An official in SARFT's news office said they would post a news release about the file-sharing sites on its own Web site by Thursday morning.

Struggles over file-sharing sites aren't unique to China, with companies in the United States and Europe being accused of illegally sharing copyrighted material. But China is known to have the world's most extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship and has stepped up its efforts in recent years, with Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites already blocked in the country.

Another popular Web site, the Chinese translation cooperative Yeeyan, has stopped publishing in recent days.

The government says the main targets of its Web censorship are pornography, online gambling and other sites deemed harmful to society. Critics, however, say that often acts as cover for detecting and blocking sensitive political content.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...own-281127.php





BT Sites Inaccessible, Netizens Distressed
China Daily

Beijing Internet users are scrabbling for downloads from BitTorrent (BT) websites following speculation that authorities will shut them down as early as this week.

"My roommates were shocked to hear VeryCD is going down," Huang Shan, a 20-year-old college student told China Daily in reference to a major BT website.

"I may never be able to download Hollywood movies or classical records again."

VeryCD went offline yesterday afternoon due to a technical failure, Dai Yunjie, co-founder of the website, posted on Sina.com, and a notice that appeared yesterday evening on the website log-on page read service may resume Thursday noon.

Internet experts told China Daily the failure might be caused by an overload of users seeking last-minute free downloads.

As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD has been on the verge of closure after the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) shut hundreds of similar peer-to-peer file sharing sites, including the 50 million-user BTChina, during the last 10 days in its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online.

Owners of the Shanghai-based website said they might suspend download feeds this weekend because the site does not have a license to provide audio and video content. The website was warned by SARFT in 2008 it was spreading unauthorized audios and videos in China.

Huang Yimeng, the co-founder of the website, told the Beijing News on Tuesday that his company is still applying for the license from the authorities. But Huang declined to comment on the future of the company.

Aside from pirated DVDs, file sharing websites are also comprehensive sources of foreign entertainment such as dramas, rare movies, books and CDs.

"I absolutely can't live without this website. It is my major source of foreign entertainment," said Beijinger Bu Bo as she checked the download speeds of her next 10 movies from her office.

The 29-year-old said the website closure meant she would not be able to get hold of rare movies, including those banned in China.

Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of the popular blog Danwei.org, said when he posted a list of Chinese file sharing sites on his website a couple of years ago, he noticed an increase in traffic from outside of China.

"None of it was coming from China," Goldkorn told China Daily Wednesday. "There are a lot of people who look for pirated content on the Interent and will go to any country's service available."

Some Internet policy experts are suggesting that Internet officials might have gone too far.

"I suggest the government apply less harsher rules on rapid-sharing websites, beause they still need nurturing the market," Fang Xingdong, a Beijing-based Internet analyst, told METRO.

A copy of the Internet document entitled Regulations on the Protection of the Right of Communication through Information, created by SARFT in 2006, was posted on its official website on Friday.

The administration said websites were not allowed to provide audio or video products without permission.

(Source: China Daily)
http://english.sina.com/technology/2...09/292002.html





Mininova Traffic Plummets After Going ‘Legal’
Ernesto

Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be.

After nearly five years of loyal service, Mininova deleted over a million torrent files when it partly shut down its website a week ago. What remains are a few thousand torrents that were uploaded though its content distribution platform, which only lists uploads by approved users.

Mininova was forced to take such a drastic measure following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN this summer. The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova’s traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, are disastrous.

In just a few days Mininova’s traffic plummeted by 66%, from well over 5 million visits the day before the torrents were removed, to just 1.8 million yesterday. If the downward trend continues at this rate, the site will have less than a million visits a day a week from now, throwing it out of the top 10 most visited torrent sites that it led for two years in a row.

Even more striking perhaps is the drop in downloads and searches. As can be seen from the graph below, the number of downloads dropped from over 10 million a day to just 371,424. The number of searches went down from 10 to 3 million, a less steep drop than the downloads, probably indicating that not everyone is aware of the reduced number of torrents on the site.

So what’s next?

There is no doubt that Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN will be proud of their accomplishment, but aside from ruining Mininova’s business it will not have a significant impact on the overall volume of BitTorrent traffic. As always, new sites emerge by the dozens as old ones are shut down and users quickly adapt to the new situation.

A network engineer at a major Aussie ISP has confirmed that Mininova’s partial shutdown has had no noticeable effect on traffic volumes. “I didn’t notice any reduction in [torrent] traffic when The Pirate Bay went down. It’s hard to see how there’d be any significant change from Mininova’s withdrawal.”

That said, the ‘end’ of Mininova does leave a scar behind. For years most torrent indexers heavily relied on torrents that were uploaded to Mininova. With over a million user-uploaded torrents, the site was without a doubt the main torrent provider on the Internet. Although most of the torrents are still mirrored on other sites, Mininova’s role as content provider has to be taken over by others.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-tra...-legal-091205/





NY Judge Declares Mistrial in NJ Blogger Trial
Tom Hays

A judge declared a mistrial Monday in the case against a New Jersey blogger accused of making death threats against three federal judges in Chicago because they wrote a ruling supporting gun control.

The mistrial came after the jury sent two notes - one during its first day of deliberation on Friday and another on Monday - saying it was hopelessly deadlocked over charges Hal Turner threatened to kill or assault a federal judge. A retrial was scheduled for March 1 in Brooklyn, where the case was moved based on a change-of-venue request.

Prosecutors had argued that Turner knew his Internet tirade, which insisted the judges "must die," could provoke violence by members of his radical audience. The defense likened Turner to a "shock jock" and argued he was expressing an opinion protected by the First Amendment.

The only juror to speak to reporters afterward, truck driver Richard Gardiner, said the jury voted 9 to 3 in favor of acquittal, with the majority seeing the government's case as weak. He said he held out for a conviction because he "did think it was a threat."

Turner, 47, of North Bergen, N.J., left the courthouse without commenting.

The case arose earlier this year after the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook and William Bauer - upheld a ruling that dismissed lawsuits challenging handgun bans in Chicago and in suburban Oak Park, Ill.

Turner blasted the decision with a lengthy, inflammatory blog post. Authorities say he went too far by writing: "Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges must die. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty."

He later posted the judges' photographs, telephone numbers and work addresses, along with maps of a federal building that pointed out truck bomb barriers, authorities said. He also referenced the 2005 slaying of the mother and husband of another federal judge in Chicago, they said.

"Apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit didn't get the hint after those killings," authorities say he wrote. "It appears another lesson is needed."

If convicted at the retrial, Turner faces up to 10 years in prison.

In a separate case, Turner is awaiting trial on state charges in Connecticut. He is accused of "inciting injury to persons" for urging blog readers to "take up arms" against state lawmakers there who proposed legislation to give Roman Catholic lay members more control over parish finances.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...120702393.html





Google Chief: Only Miscreants Worry About Net Privacy
Cade Metz

If you're concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn't be doing. At least that's the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.

But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data.

"If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

There's also the possibility of subpoenas. And hacks. But if any of this bothers you, you should be ashamed of yourself. According to Eric Schmidt.

Gawker highlights the irony of Schmidt's typically haughty proclamations. After all, this is the man who banned CNet for a year after the news site published information about him it had gleaned from, yes, Google.

But the larger point here is that Schmidt isn't even addressing the issue at hand. Per usual. When the privacy question appears, Google likes to talk about the people asking the questions. But the problem lies elsewhere: with the millions upon millions blissfully unaware of the questions.

If you're concerned about your online privacy, you can always put the kibosh on Google's tracking cookies. You can avoid signing in to Google accounts. And, yes, you can avoid using Google for anything Eric Schmidt thinks you shouldn't be doing. But most web users don't even realize Google is hoarding their data.

CNBC asks Schmidt: "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" But he answers by scoffing at those who don't trust Google at all.

Not that you'd expect anything less. As always, Schmidt's holier-than-thou attitude is wonderfully amusing. Except that it's not.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12...dt_on_privacy/





Still Counting the Ways to Infiltrate Daily Lives
Michiko Kakutani


GOOGLED

The End of the World as We Know It

By Ken Auletta

384 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

If Google were a person, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and veteran of Silicon Valley, is quoted as saying in this perspicacious new book, it would have “all the flaws and all of the virtues of a classic Silicon Valley geek.”

It’s an observation echoed by the book’s author, Ken Auletta, who in “Googled” depicts the company as a brilliant, game-changing behemoth that can be socially inept, and both naïve and arrogant in its dealings with the world. The book, more fair-minded reportage than a polemic, leaves us with a telling portrait of a paradigm-altering company, which in 11 years has utterly transformed the business and media landscape, but which also suffers at times from the sort of myopia that comes from determinedly left-brain thinking — that is, a scientific-engineering driven point of view that prizes data, efficiency and growth while often overlooking more human and political concerns like privacy and copyright.

Certainly Google’s founding by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its rocketlike ascent have been chronicled many times before — among others, in Randall Stross’s “Planet Google” (2008), “The Google Story” (2005) by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, and “What Would Google Do?” (2009) by Jeff Jarvis. Television profiles have duly noted the company’s laid-back, collegiate atmosphere, just as newspaper and magazine articles have deconstructed its emphasis on teamwork and embrace of bold, envelope-pushing moves.

In “Googled,” Mr. Auletta has not only amplified such earlier portraits through new interviews with the company’s principals, but he’s also drawn on his own experience writing the “Annals of Communications” column for The New Yorker magazine to situate Google’s rise and global expansion in context with the digital revolution and the crisis that traditional media faces as old sources of revenue dry up and people increasingly turn to the Internet as a provider of news, movies, music and video.

Already, Mr. Auletta writes, much of “the planet has been Googled, with the company becoming, as Larry Page has said, ‘part of people’s lives, like brushing their teeth.’ ” Mr. Auletta writes that Google has “transformed how we gather and use information, given us the equivalent of a personal digital assistant, made government and business and other institutions more transparent, helped people connect, served as a model service provider and employer, made the complex simple, and become an exemplar of the oft-stated but rarely followed maxim, ‘Trust your customer.’ ”

Google has become such a household term that its name has morphed into a verb. “Its index contained one trillion Web pages in 2008,” Mr. Auletta writes, “and according to Brin, every four hours Google indexed the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress.” Having acquired YouTube, the largest user-generated video Web site, in 2006, and DoubleClick, the foremost digital marketing company, in 2007, he goes on, Google boasted 40 percent of both the $23 billion spent to advertise online in the United States and the $54 billion worldwide online advertising. He adds that the company conducts some three billion searches a day, stores two dozen or so tetabits (about 24 quadrillion bits) of data and plans to digitize more than 20 million books.

The company’s famous motto is “Don’t be evil,” and in their early days, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin burned, in Mr. Auletta’s words, “with an idealism that sometimes bordered on messianic”: “They launched Google with a fervent belief that advertising tricked people to spend money, that the Internet would foster a democratic ethos that would liberate people.” And yet it is advertising that has made Google a 21st-century Goliath. The company’s exponential growth has fueled critics’ contention that the company’s size and power are turning it into another Microsoft, an Evil Empire that is stifling competition and sucking up talent — a digital bulldozer that is plowing under the profits of traditional media companies as it gobbles up new turf; a Big Brother-esque leviathan of data that could come to threaten consumers’ privacy and subvert copyright law.

In recent years Google has come under growing scrutiny for a number of controversial moves. Its decision to digitize millions of books — scanning and making them part of search options — upset authors and publishers, who see the plan as a threat to intellectual property rights and as an invitation to piracy, as the books stored on servers, like online music, might be vulnerable to hackers.

Google has been criticized for complying with Chinese censorship. (In 2006 its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said, “I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.”) And, as Mr. Auletta observes in these pages, the company’s storage of massive amounts of data about its users raises serious privacy issues, especially when the company acknowledges that it is in the advertising business and seems eager to play matchmaker between consumers and advertisers.

Because Google “enjoys a well-deserved reputation for earning the trust of users,” Mr. Auletta says, it is “hard to imagine an issue that could imperil the trust Google has achieved as quickly as could privacy.” He adds: “One Google executive whispers, ‘Privacy is an atomic bomb. Our success is based on trust.’ ”

If users, Mr. Auletta writes, “lost trust in Google, believed their private data was being exploited and shared with advertisers (or governments), the company regularly judged one of the world’s most trusted brands would commit suicide.”

Other problems also come with the company’s sonic, often pell-mell growth. Google is constantly pushing into new territory like cloud computing, the mobile-phone business and even a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia called Knol. As it does so, it is not only taking on new competitors, but it is also risking, in some critics’ view, a loss of focus. Google is “doing too many products and peanut buttering everything,” says one former executive, referring to a famous “Peanut Butter” memo once written by a Yahoo senior vice president who contended that Yahoo was spreading its investments thinly, like peanut butter, over too many ventures.

Will Google stay focused primarily on searches and what Mr. Wu calls “an engineers’ aesthetic of getting you to what you want as fast as you can and then getting out of the way”? Or will it become more of a destination in itself, a platform and source of content? How will the founders’ aversion to bureaucracy be squared with the management demands of a rapidly growing empire? Can Google find a way to monetize YouTube and other new acquisitions and projects? Will increasingly wary rivals (from Microsoft to Verizon to Facebook) forge effective alliances to stop the Google juggernaut? Will the government threaten the company’s growth through antitrust regulation?

“Google appears to be well positioned for the foreseeable future,” Mr. Auletta concludes, “but it is worth remembering that few companies maintain their dominance. At one point, few thought the Big Three auto companies would ever falter — or the three television networks or AT&T, IBM or AOL. For companies with histories of serious missteps — Apple, IBM — it was difficult to imagine that they’d rebound, until they did.”

In short, one of the few things it is impossible to Google is the future of Google.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/books/08book.html





Google and MS Sued Over Links to File-Sharing Site

Search giants dubbed RapidShare BFFs
Cade Metz

Mini music label Blue Destiny Records has sued both Google and Microsoft for allegedly "facilitating and enabling" the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.

Filed on Monday with a US federal court in Northern Florida, the suit is an attempt to choke off the distribution of Blue Destiny tunes on the Germany-based file-sharing service RapidShare, also named as a defendant. It accuses RapidShare of knowingly running "a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works," while claiming that Google and Microsoft are propping the company up.

According to the suit, RapidShare benefits from ad relationships with the two search giants. "RapidShare generates revenue by selling subscriptions for its high-speed download services, and through advertising dollars generated by its advertising partnerships with Google and Microsoft," the suit reads. "RapidShare's business success is accomplished only with the knowing assistance of these two top search engines - Google and Microsoft's Bing."

But the overarching claim is that RapidShare is able to "achieve consistent prominent ranking in search engine results that direct users to websites where illegal 'free' copies of [Blue Destiny's] recordings may be stolen." US copyright law exempts companies from liability if they're merely linking to infringing content - but only if they're unaware of the infringement and don't receive financial benefit.

The suits insists that Google and Microsoft benefit financially because they generate ad revenue from search results. And both companies have received DMCA takedown notices requesting removal of the links in question.

As Santa Clara University prof and tech law blogger Eric Goldman points out, this is hardly the first lawsuit to attack a company for merely linking to infringing content on other sites. But it's unusual that the defendants have such recognizable names.

"There have been other lawsuits against websites for linking to infringing content, but plaintiffs usually try to avoid suing power players like Google and Microsoft - both well-funded defendants who aren't likely to roll over on this issue," Goldman writes.

There is at least one precedent, he says: a 2006 suit against Google and Amazon from "adult men's magazine" and online ad outfit Perfect 10. That suit ended with a rather ambiguous court ruling, leaving the door open for the likes of Blue Destiny - though Goldman questions whether the label's destiny is a major search engine scalp.

"Given the ambiguities of [the Perfect 10 opinion], [Blue Destiny's suit] isn't clearly wrong as a doctrine matter. However, in my opinion, it is nevertheless ill-advised and unlikely to succeed," he says.

That said, the suit may highlight some intriguing differences between Google and Microsoft in this gray area of online copyright law.

The suit's wording is inconsistent, but in places it appears to accuse Google of directly linking to downloads of unauthorized tunes. "Google's consistent and prominent ranking of links to illegal 'free' downloads of [Blue Destiny's] copyrighted recordings has devastated [Blue Destiny's] business," the suit reads, before pointing to specific RapidShare links that have appeared when users search Google for the Roy Powers song "Firing Line."

It would appear, however, that Google is not linking directly to such downloads. It links to RapidShare landing pages where the download urls are listed. In other words, Google's top "Roy Powers Firing Line" result points to a RapidShare page that serves up several links where you can download the song.

According to Eric Goldman, the suit's claims against Google lose some oomph when you consider that extra degree of link separation.

According to court documents, Blue Destiny - a blues label based in Destin, Florida - have attempted to remove the Google links in question via a DMCA takedown notice. But apparently, Google has not complied.

On the other hand, Microsoft has complied with such notices. This could point to a difference in DMCA philosophy. But it may also indicate that Bing's design leaves Microsoft in a slightly tighter position than Google. Bing's results page lets you open a preview window for each result that shows you a sizable chuck of its content before you visit. The site claims that this window displayed direct links to infringing downloads.

"MS Bing goes a step further than Google by allowing users an immediate preview [of] deep linked content on the underlying website without actually opening the website link," the suit reads. "In the case of [Blue Destiny's] recordings , MS Bing provided an additional pop-up window that specifically identified each and every individual song title and the song order available at the link to the infringing website."

But the links are no longer there, thanks to those DMCA takedown notices. Which makes you wonder why Blue Destiny is suing Redmond in the first place. "I'm not sure how Microsoft could be liable if they expeditiously removed the links after receiving the copyright owner's notices," Goldman says.

Is there a case against RapidShare? The company is based in Europe, and it does not appear to accept DMCA takedowns. "The complaint says they are a German/Swiss operation, so they may be impossible to serve and sue in the US, and RapidShare may not have felt any need to satisfy a US law formality."

Microsoft declined to comment on the suit. And Google did not answer our request for comment. Par for the course, really.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12...and_microsoft/





Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction
Mark Newheiser

Facebook bragged to the public this week that Farmville, a farming sim game hosted on their site, is now more popular than Twitter, with over 26 million daily users and in excess of 69 million monthly users to its name.

Farmville's popularity is impressive on a few levels--more people are playing it than World of Warcraft, than ever bought a Wii, and a look at my own Farmville friends list indicates it's seducing players to the joys of gaming who would never even pick up a video game under normal circumstances.

Granted, Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don't pay by the month to play it, you don't even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game's content by spending money rather than time.

It exists in a social rather than solitary space, while it's not an explicit pyramid scheme like some online games such as mybrute that rely on referrals, Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

Farmville leverages the social aspects of Facebook very effectively: every time you so much as sneeze in Farmville, a message pops up and asks you if you would like to share with your friends how much fun you're having sneezing and and encourage them to come sneeze in Farmville with you.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter.

When a Farmville related message pops up on someone's wall you'll typically get a nominal reward for clicking on it, and the person who posted it usually gets an in-game bribe as well, on top of the constant encouragement from the game to share with the world how thankful you are that your friends are asynchronously playing Farmville with you and helping you out.

The grind in Farmville is different than most RPGs I'm familiar with--most RPGs require more and more experience for each level you gain in order to nudge the player towards taking on greater and greater challenges--you face diminishing returns for grinding unless you keep moving forward in the game. Farmville's grind appears to get progressively longer for the sake of getting longer.

You can go up seven levels in your first day, two on your second, but before long you slow down to gaining a level or less a day. Farmville bestows ample amounts of beginner's luck on anyone who's just starting, but gradually puts the brakes on their pace of progress until going from level 23 to 27 will mean doubling all the experience you've earned up to that point.

The rate at which you earn experience does gradually increase; provided that you have enough Farmville friends to allow expansion of your farm you'll start earning more XP a day due to that space. You can also trade coins for experience by buying buildings, but progress in the game is scaled to happen more and more slowly as you advance in it.

Farmville is not even the first farming simulation game I've played: the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory games share many of the same conventions, while Farmville takes them in a slightly different direction. For the Harvest Moon games the limiting factor is most often time and dividing it up among all the things you want to accomplish over a real-time day, in Farmville the limiting resources are money and space, both of which can be purchased if you're willing to donate to the developer.

The Harvest Moon games are designed to be played full-time so you have no downtime and can always be accomplishing something, Farmville is designed to draw you back in small doses scattered throughout the day. In Harvest Moon you plant crops and keep yourself busy while in-game days pass, in Farmville you plant crops and harvest them on a real-world schedule, crops come due in hours or days and you have a limited amount of time to harvest them before they rot.

And the most significant difference is probably that in the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games, investing in building up your farm and acquiring a fortune was a means to an end, the money and resources you acquired were funneled into secondary gameplay systems like wooing a wife, befriending your neighbors, or acquiring enough resources to fight your way through a dungeon. In Farmville, building a farm is the ultimate end-goal, and all the money you acquire is spent on decorations or the ability to arrange your farm for purely aesthetic purposes.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player's time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you're making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

You can pick the size of your window to be anywhere from two hours to four days: that time period determines how long you have to wait until you can flip your crop and get your money back, as well as how long you have from harvest time to when it rots. And so Farmville fulfills the classic elements of addictive behavior: it rewards you for playing it by letting you have the sense of advancing in the game, particularly early on, it punishes you for going too long without playing, and it rewards you for coming back at predictable habit-forming intervals.

In order to quit Farmville you'd have to make a conscious choice after harvesting your fields to not re-plant them, or else leave all your currently planted crops to die. Some of my friends have even handed out their Facebook passwords to get their friends to babysit their farms for them when they're on vacation, or just put up with the ongoing multi-minute demands of their virtual fields.

I got roped into playing Farmville when my girlfriend insisted I needed to help her out and play with her. Together we worked up a spreadsheet to figure out what the profit per hour was for each crop in the game, which lead to some interesting results: unlike the other farming games that I'd encountered, trees and animals seemed to simply be an afterthought, they offered nowhere near the profitability of harvesting crops.

Even the larger investments you can make like a dairy farm which earns hundreds of coins a day would take a few months to become profitable, which is an eternity for a simple online farming game. Analyzing the profitability per crop also revealed some odd results, while the newer crops always offered a better return over their given time period than previous crops, the most profitable crops per hour remained fairly fixed throughout most of the game, and in some cases didn't change for more than 10 levels.

We came to the conclusion that a large number of features in Farmville were purely decorative even when they weren't intended to be--the game has a number of ribbons and achievements designed to reward players for pursuing something other than the simple profit-maximizing strategy of farming the heck out of their most profitable crop, but the returns offered told their own story.

I think Farmville does a lot of promising things for a social game, you get to build and arrange your own farm and show it off in a social space that overlaps with the most widely used social network in the world--there really aren't any other games I can pick up and immediately know whether any of my friends from high school are still playing it. The interactions with other players are largely superficial--you can fertilize a few of their crops an hour, and give them gifts at spaced intervals, but there's no real economy between the players for the resources you produce, which would undermine the real purpose of the game, getting you to spend actual money on its perks.

Farmville does seem consciously designed around that goal: it virally spreads itself throughout your social network as innocently as it can, and subtly convinces players that it's more worthwhile to pay actual money than spend all their time farming to get ahead, and tempts them with decorations you can't achieve any other way. What it's missing is a depth of strategy found in traditional out of the box games, a more substantive end-game, and a more balanced grind and progression through its content.

Frankly, I think Farmville is more addictive than it is fun. I like the fact that it's instantly networked in with my social sphere and it's proved accessible to people who don't normally indulge in my hobby of choice. I would love to see a game do all the things Farmville does in terms of its accessibility and ability to leverage existing social networks, I just want that game to be better, even if I have to pay for it.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkN..._Addiction.php





Ebay Exec Emails: Feign Surprise to Craigslist
Alexandria Sage

Emails from a top eBay Inc executive showed the Internet giant was aware that a competing online classifieds site it launched while sitting on the board of Craigslist was a sensitive issue to be handled delicately, according to court testimony on Tuesday.

Technology

EBay executives were told to feign surprise if Craigslist executives were to react negatively to news that eBay was launching its Kijiji classifieds site, one email showed.

The case surrounds eBay's minority stake in Craigslist, the largest U.S. online classifieds site. EBay sued Craigslist in Delaware in 2008, claiming the company diluted its stake from 28.4 percent to 24.85 percent, thereby denying eBay a seat on its board.

Craigslist then sued eBay in San Francisco, claiming that eBay used its board seat to glean confidential information that it then used to launch its own classifieds business.

Former EBay executive Josh Silverman, who once ran the company's international classifieds business and temporarily sat on the board of Craigslist in 2007, took the stand in a Delaware court on Tuesday, the second day of trial.

Emails presented during Silverman's cross examination pointed to an awareness among eBay executives that the launch of Kijiji could rattle Craigslist executives and compromise the relationship between the two companies.

When eBay was deciding whether to launch a U.S. classifieds site, executives distributed internal emails over the best strategy to inform Craigslist.

Craigslist's attorneys showed in court an email sent to Silverman in January 2007 from eBay's corporate counsel, Brian Levey, that suggested Levey take Silverman's seat on the Craigslist board to avoid any illusion of impropriety, given the imminent launch of Kijiji.

"If we're going to compete, perhaps it's cleanest to have me be the board member since they'd have a much tougher time alleging that I'm using any confidential information to benefit our business," wrote Levey.

"Right, that could be true. However I'd expect that we would lose our Board seat right away, no?" responded Silverman, according to the email shown in court.

An email sent in January by Silverman to another eBay executive revealed Silverman's hesitancy to announce the launch of Kijiji without first informing Craigslist.

"Do you have any more clarity around timing for making a decision on a US entry into classified?" read the email. "I wouldn't want to have a board meeting and then shortly after announce an entry. Would look strange."

"Low-Key Tone"

The court also saw an internal eBay email sent to Silverman that discussed whether it was best for eBay, when talking to Craigslist executives, to cast Kijiji as a "competitor" or "complement" to Craigslist.

EBay ultimately informed Craigslist Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster, in June 2007 of its decision to launch Kijiji.

Silverman summarized his June 19, 2007 phone call with Buckmaster informing him of the competing launch in an email titled "Talking Points for Call."

"I tried to present the information in a low-key and humble manner ('with 29 free classified sites out there, we're not saying that adding a 30th is going to have a huge impact, especially given what great traction CL has ...')" read the email.

"I'd recommend that we continue the low key tone where we don't expect them to be concerned or upset (and express surprise if they do) and see how that plays out," according to the email presented in court.

Silverman -- now the head of Web telephone company Skype, which eBay recently sold -- did not deny the authenticity of the emails presented in court.

In testimony, Silverman painted Craigslist as a company with a culture vastly different from that of eBay, and said Craigslist CEO Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark did not appear to want eBay's input into its business.

Former eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman took the stand on Monday, testifying that eBay was a "good partner" to Craigslist and denying that eBay had tried to steal secrets from the company.

Newmark and Buckmaster are expected to testify on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Alexandria Sage; Additional reporting by Thomas Hals; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B75QE20091208
















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