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Old 06-01-10, 08:05 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 9th, '10

Since 2002


































"The first three days of 2010 were spectacular for the movie industry, a feat considering that no new movies opened Friday. Total receipts were up 50% from the first weekend last year, setting Hollywood off to a strong start after a year in which domestic ticket sales grew 10% and attendance rose nearly 6%." – Ben Fritz


"There's a shot in the film of a family in a bomb shelter, and I took it right from the cover of Life magazine 1962." – Tom Ford


"If the Digital Economy Bill as it is currently framed becomes law, it will become legal to summarily disconnect someone for alleged copyright abuse but if you want to disconnect them for accessing child abuse images then you will have to get a court order first." – ISP TalkTalk


"If only greed and ignorance could sequester carbon, Bono could FINALLY save the planet." – Cory Doctorow



































January 9th, 2010




IT Consultant Faces Trial Over OiNK File-Sharing Website

An IT consultant suspected of operating one of the world's biggest pirate music websites from a bedsit will face trial today.

Alan Ellis, 26, was arrested in 2007 as part of an Interpol-led operation to shut down a music file-sharing website which had attracted around 180,000 members.

Computer equipment and documents were seized from his Middlesbrough home in 2007 and he was charged with conspiracy to defraud the music industry and copyright infringement.

Police and music industry investigators suggested that he could have made hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from the OiNK website, which he set up in 2004.

But Mr Ellis claimed the website was not illegal and that its purpose had been misunderstood.

The former IT consultant, who worked at Virgin Media's contact centre in Stockton-on-Tees, has compared it to search engines such as Google which could also direct users to illegal music downloads.

He is the first person in the UK ever to be charged with illegal file-sharing.

He will go on trial at Middlesbrough Crown Court.

The OiNK website was a complex computer programme created to help share music and audio files amongst a community of online users.

Members of the community would "seed" the system by uploading music files or "leech" from it by downloading music files.

To do so they had to register their email address and a user name, then make donations by debit or credit card to ensure full access to the site.

The technology used - a method known as bit torrent file sharing - had three main advantages: It broke files down into small pieces of data, which made that data more easy to share, giving a higher quality download in a shorter time.

The beauty of the system was that each time a person leeched an album from the internet, they became a seeder from whom other OiNK users could download the same album.

Early online file sharing systems were so slow it could be more expensive to download an album than to buy it in a shop.

But advances in technology meant OiNK users could download very high quality music files, very quickly.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technol...5875-21944263/





Is File-Sharing Killing the Music Industry?

Some of the evidence illustrating the financial impact of our file-sharing activities is damning, but just how accurate is it?

John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said in the organisation’s 2009 Digital Music Report that “the vast growth of unlawful file-sharing quite simply threatens to put the whole music sector out of business”.
It’s a startling message, but is it true? There are certainly plenty of people who agree. Indie band Future Of The Left’s frontman Andy Falkous was so incensed by file-sharing that he wrote an impassioned blog post explaining how it was threatening his livelihood – a piece that was subsequently republished by UK Music in national newspapers.

There’s no shortage of evidence to back up his concerns. “Industry reports suggest that at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration,” reads the Copycats? Digital Consumers in the Online Age report.

“Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.”

Staggering as these figures are, they’re not necessarily conclusive. As first revealed by the Radio 4 show More or Less, the seven million file-sharers estimate was originally gleaned from a research paper written by Jupiter Research and commissioned by the BPI. As it turns out, the figure of 7m was rounded up from 6.7m – itself taken from a survey of only 1,176 households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software.

This 11.6% was then discretionally adjusted upwards to 16.3% “to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file-sharing than actually do it”. Jupiter then extrapolated the 6.7m figure by calculating that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, as opposed to the Office of National Statistics finding that there were only 33.9m people online during that year.

If Jupiter had used the Government’s figures, the total number of file-sharers would be 5.6m. If the researchers hadn’t adjusted their figures upwards, the total number of file-sharers would be only 3.9m – or just over half the figure quoted in the report.

The BPI argues that the research remains valid. “From our perspective, there are many pieces of separate substantial research that all consistently show that around seven to eight million people in the UK are file-sharing music alone,” said a spokesperson for the BPI.

“Precisely measuring illegal behaviour will always require a small degree of estimation, however – because file-sharing is illegal, people tend to under-report what they are doing.”

The difficulty of finding reliable data extends to calculating lost revenues. The CIBER report claims losses from file-sharing and counterfeiting hit £10 billion conservatively in 2004. The report quotes a press release issued by law firm Rouse & Co celebrating the Government’s decision to create an IP Crime Strategy group.

The law firm drew the figure from a report by the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, which takes in the entire gamut of fake goods in the UK, from software to handbags. The figure also assumes that every counterfeit is a lost sale, ignoring the possibility of people who sample music and go on to buy it, or had no intention of buying it in the first place.

The tendency of these reports to focus on lost sales while ignoring the potentially positive implications of file-sharing on the industry is an issue addressed by Harvard Business School’s File-Sharing and Copyright report.

“As music becomes effectively available for free, the price of concerts, a complement to music, is likely to rise, and artists who earn income from concerts might not be hurt by a decline in music sales,” reads one example, cited by report authors Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf.
ticket
“Studying 2,135 artists over a ten-year period, the demand for concerts increased due to file-sharing. One way to see this is to ask how many CDs an artist needs to sell to produce $20 of concert revenue. This number fell from 8.47 in the pre-Napster era to 6.36 in the 1999 to 2002 period.

Not surprisingly, artists responded to these incentives by touring more frequently. Overall, the shift in relative prices and activities led to a sharp increase in income for the typical artist.”

So is file-sharing killing the music industry? The answer, it seems, depends largely on what report you read, and how deeply you’re willing to dig into its sources. There’s little doubt that file-sharing is a problem, but whether it’s quite as dire as the IFPA suggests is an entirely different question.

Whatever the case, all the studies referenced in this article agree on one thing: more research needs to be done if we’re truly to understand the impact of this new technology on our creative industries.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3543...music-industry





Six Ways File-Sharers Will Neutralize 3 Strikes
enigmax

After extended legal battles, France’s President Sarkozy finally got his way. This year will see some of the most aggressive anti-piracy action against citizens which, if ministers are to be believed, will dramatically reduce online piracy. This might be possible, if the measures weren’t so easily circumvented.

After some epic legal wrangling, vote after vote, and protest upon protest, the French government finally got their way. In 2010, those caught sharing files illegally in France will be subjected to the much-touted “3 strikes” regime.

When ‘caught’ uploading copyright works for the first time, the owner of the Internet connection used for the alleged infringement will receive an email warning. On allegations of a second offense, a physical letter will drop through the door. On the the third, the account holder will be summoned to appear before a judge who will have the power to fine, or even disconnect them from the Internet.

French senator Michel Thiolliere has told the BBC that the so-called Hadopi legislation will have the desired effect, with nearly everyone warned a second time abandoning illegal file-sharing for good.

“What we think is that after the first message… about two-thirds of the people (will) stop their illegal usages of the internet,” he explained

“After the second message more than 95% will finish with that bad usage.”

It is, however, much more likely that after getting a first warning, or even before, French Internet users will try to find a way round this system. They will discover that it’s surprisingly easy.

6 Ways Savvy Internet Users Will Neutralize Hadopi

Free options

MP3 Search Engines

One of the simplest ways to find music online is to use an MP3 search engine. That won’t be difficult as there are dozens to choose from. Sites like Skreemr, Songza, beeMP3, MP3Realm and AirMP3 are very simple to use and since there is no uploading, they drive a cart and horses through Hadopi. For those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty, Google offers similar functionality with their filetype: search operator.

Direct Downloads

During 2008 and 2009, the continued rise of blogs and forums that link to music, movies, tv shows and games stored on so-called cyberlocker sites was difficult to ignore. Although links can get taken down very quickly by copyright holders, they are often replaced just as swiftly by the communities that frequent such sites. The international music industry is particularly worried about the phenomenon, as tracking those that download from sites such as Rapidshare and MegaUpload is completely impractical.

Of course there are also perfectly legal alternatives, such as the excellent Jamendo.

Streaming Music and Video

While there are dozens of sites to visit directly, for those who really can’t be bothered to look any further and don’t mind closing a couple of slightly annoying popups, OVGuide is a huge portal to thousands of movies, TV shows and general video. With the assistance of the DivX plug-in, most content can be streamed directly in compatible web-browsers.

Music fans who don’t mind to stream tracks in their web browser actually have a few dozen legal alternatives. Grooveshark is one of the most elaborate music services. It holds more content than the average download store, supports playlists and it will roll out an iPhone app.

Premium options

Overseas MP3 Sites

Just over the English Channel from France lies the UK. Research carried out there recently by the BPI indicated that usage of MP3 pay sites had increased by 47%. While users do have to hand over money to use these services, at a tiny fraction of prices they would pay in their homeland they prove attractive to those on a tight budget.

Newsgroups

Using Usenet, or newsgroups as they are commonly known, is one of the most secure ways of downloading movies, TV shows, music and video games.

While the learning curve on Usenet is considered by many to be quite steep, once an individual discovers .NZB files – the .torrent of the newsgroup world – everything is hugely simplified. Within seconds of starting a transfer, the user’s connection will be completely maxed-out.

On a practical basis, and certainly as far as Hadopi is concerned, paying a few euros each month for a decent newsgroup account means that French citizens need never fear being disconnected from the Internet. Indeed, not even the first warning email will arrive.

Anonymous VPN

While the above options require that Internet users modify their behaviors, by spending a few euros a month on an anonymous VPN account they won’t have to change any of their habits at all. They can continue to use BitTorrent, eD2K or any other P2P method of file-sharing.

Once subscribed to a service such as Netherlands-based ItsHidden (who also offer a free, but speed-limited service), Hadopi file-sharing investigators will believe that the user behind that IP address is from another country and simply move on.

As the failed and now largely abandoned campaign against file-sharers in the United States proved, scare tactics simply don’t work. There are millions of file-sharers in France and many will simply carry on their activities in the belief that the odds of being caught are extremely slim.

And they would be absolutely right.
http://torrentfreak.com/six-ways-fil...trikes-100102/





Internet Pirates Find 'Bulletproof' Havens for Illegal File Sharing
Bobbie Johnson

Internet pirates are moving away from safe havens such as Sweden to new territories that include China and Ukraine, as they try to avoid prosecution for illegal file sharing, according to experts.

For several years, piracy groups that run services allowing music, video and software to be illegally shared online have been using legal loopholes across a wide range of countries as a way of escaping prosecution for copyright infringement.

In the last year there has been a significant shift, say piracy experts, as the groups have worked to stay beyond the reach of western law enforcement.

The change is rooted in the evolution of "bulletproof hosting", or website provision by companies that make a virtue of being impervious to legal threats and blocks. Not all bulletproof services are linked to illegal activities, but they are popular among criminal groups, spammers and file-sharing services.

Rob Holmes, of the Texas law firm IP Cybercrime, which has worked to close down several bulletproof operations, said successful hosts were now starting to get stronger. "Some of the more popular ones have become more strongholds than they were previously," he said. "It's an industry and it always will be. When you think about it, bulletproof hosting is just a data version of money laundering."

Late last year a Swedish court found four men guilty of breaking copyright law through their links to the Pirate Bay website, one of the internet's most notorious gateways for pirated films and television shows.

That decision prompted many piracy services to seek jurisdictions beyond the reach of western law. Pirate Bay moved its web servers to Ukraine, while another popular file-sharing service, Demonoid, which started in Serbia, also relocated.

"Before going completely dark in October [2009], Demonoid physically moved their servers to Ukraine, and remotely controlled them," said John Robinson, of BigChampagne, a media tracking service based in Los Angeles. "Ukrainian communications law, as they paraphrase it, says that providers are not responsible for what their customers do. Therefore, they feel no need to speak about or defend what they do."

Not every controversial service has fled beyond traditional jurisdictions, however. Some problematic hosts still exist in the US, such as the infamous host McColo, which was based in San Jose, California, and remained in operation until last year.

Pirate Bay, after its brief excursion to Ukraine, is now run out of a Dutch data centre called CyberBunker, which is based in an old nuclear facility of the 1950s, about 120 miles south-west of Amsterdam.

Research published last year showed that most bulletproof hosts are located in China, where criminals are able to take advantage of low costs and legal loopholes to avoid prosecution.

Despite officials in Beijing talking in tough terms about computer crime – hacking potentially carries a death sentence in China – the authorities rarely co-operate with other countries to take action against hi-tech criminals. As a result, just a handful of firms in China are responsible for hosting thousands of criminal enterprises online.

A study of online crime conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in the US showed that more than 22,000 websites which sent pharmaceutical spam were hosted by six bulletproof servers in China.

Richard Cox of Spamhaus, a British organisation that watches spammers and monitors bulletproof hosts, said it was almost impossible to stop expansion of such services. "At the moment there are a number of individuals who are setting up bulletproof hosting sites in China," he said. "No matter how big a part of the Chinese network we block, the administrators there just do not care."

Not every controversial service has fled beyond traditional jurisdictions, however. Some problematic hosts still exist in the US, such as – the infamous host McColo, which was based in San Jose, California, and remained in operation until last year.

But the long-term impact of offshore hosting is becoming more problematic as investigators worldwide try to cut the links between criminal groups and protected internet servers.

One notorious gang of hackers, known as the Russian Business Network, after disappearing for two years amid scrutiny from the authorities in Moscow, has also reportedly returned to action. The group started as a bulletproof host in St Petersburg but had connections to a wide range of criminal activities online. Widely known in the computer security community, it is being investigated by the FBI. The Russian authorities, meanwhile, have been keen to foster greater communication to stop the spread of criminal activity online.

Some are hopeful that greater co-operation between international governments will help prevent the development of new piracy havens, but others suggest that it is unlikely that a complete block on such activities will ever be possible.

"There will always be a place to run to," said Rob Holmes, of IP Cybercrime. "Each time a law passes, or a new country creates some kind of stumbling block for them, they'll always find another place to do this. It goes back to the speakeasies in the 1920s – when one place got busted, they would just congregate in another place."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...cy-bulletproof





France Three Strikes Law Delayed by Govt's Own Data Watchdog

The French government department that examines the data privacy implications of new legislation is refusing to sign off on the country's tough new "three strikes" law until it gets more information about what data will be retained... and how.
Nate Anderson

France's "three strikes" law threatening Internet disconnections for repeat copyright infringers should have been in effect by now, but it hasn't yet become law due to one French privacy agency.

The country's Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) was created in the late 1970s in order to vet new legislation for privacy concerns, and to keep an eye on government databases and data collection efforts. CNIL's somewhat dramatic motto is "information technology must respect the human identity, the human rights, privacy and liberties"—and CNIL is not yet convinced that the new three strikes law will do that.

The sticking point is the new authority (referred to as HADOPI after its initials) that oversees the graduated response process. HADOPI will compile lists of (alleged) offenders, along with dates, number of infractions, penalties, etc. CNIL wants to make sure that this data collection safeguards privacy, and so it has refused to issue the necessary sign-off letter that the government needs to put the law into operation. First, CNIL want more information on how HADOPI's data collection and archiving processes will work.

Until it gets it, the law is on hold. The government appears ready to provide CNIL with the information it wants, so HADOPI will probably be up and running within a few months.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...a-watchdog.ars





French Government Urged to Tax Online Ad Revenue

A tax on Google -- and other ad networks -- would be used to pay artists losing out to online piracy
Peter Sayer

A report commissioned by the French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand urges the introduction of a tax on online advertising such as that carried by Google, which would be used to pay the creators of artistic and other works who lose out to online piracy.

The tax, a small percentage of revenue from online advertising shown to French Internet users, would be honor based, with advertising network operators such as Google, Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo required to declare how much they make.

Such a tax could raise €10 million ($14.3 million) a year for creators, estimated the authors of the report, Creation and Internet.

The authors recognize that France could never introduce such a tax in isolation, noting that ideally the government should encourage other European countries where creators face similar economic challenges to introduce such a tax.

The report was written by Patrick Zelnik, Guillaume Cerutti and Jacques Toubon. Zelnik is president of Impala, a network of independent record companies, Cerutti is a former head of the French consumer protection directorate and Toubon a former Minister of Culture and Minister of Justice known for championing a law enforcing the use of the French language in advertising.

Mitterrand asked the three to report on whether the range of music, films, books and other cultural products offered for legal download is attractive and reasonably priced, and on whether the creators of such products receive a reasonable proportion of the revenue derived from them.

With a significant proportion of online content offered free to consumers, supported by advertising, it was inevitable that the authors would turn their attention to the services by which that advertising is sold and delivered, with Google chief among them.

In their report, the authors also called on the French antitrust regulator, the Authorité de la Concurrence, to look at whether Google has a monopoly on search engine and search advertising services in France, and whether the problems faced by online publishers could in any way be related to Google's business methods.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/331699





Spain Fast Tracks P2P Site Shutdowns
Ernesto

The Spanish cabinet has today passed legislation that will enable the authorities to shut down file-sharing sites more rapidly. The new legislation gives in to the demands of the US and local copyright lobby, who see Spain’s lenient copyright law as a thorn in their side.

Operating a file-sharing oriented website without profiting directly from infringements falls within the boundaries of the law in Spain. In an attempt to change this situation, the Spanish Government has today passed new legislation under which sites offering links to copyright works could be taken offline within days of a complaint.

Under the new law, a newly formed Intellectual Property Commission will file complaints with a judge, who will then have to decide within four days whether or not a site should be pulled offline. The law is the result of an extensive lobby from the entertainment industries who have criticized Spain’s lenient stance towards file-sharing sites.

The Government’s plans have been met with firm opposition from the public. Critics of the new legislation are outraged and argue that it represents a violation of individual Internet users’ rights.

“Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression,” wrote a group of activists recently in a response manifesto on the rights of Internet users.

Initially, the proposed legislation would allow for the closure of file-sharing sites without a warrant or judicial oversight. In the latest plans a judge does have to review the takedown request to guarantee that no fundamental rights are violated.

Although the new text has improved, there are still many critics who claim that no websites should be taken offline without going through all the judicial steps to actually confirm that they operate illegally.

Tomorrow, a group of bloggers, experts, and activists will meet in Madrid to coordinate actions to defend civil rights on the Internet. Many feel that the new legislation has been fast-tracked after pressure from the US and local entertainment industry lobbyists, without carefully reviewing the implications it has for the public.
http://torrentfreak.com/spain-fast-t...tdowns-100108/





U.S. Software Maker Sues China, Alleging Piracy
Michael Wines

A California software company has sued two Chinese technology firms, charging that they stole its computer code to make an Internet-monitoring program that China’s government sought to install on every computer in the country last year before backing down.

Cybersitter’s lawsuit also names as defendants seven Asian computer makers — including Sony, Lenovo and Acer — accusing them of willingly joining a Chinese government scheme to spread the software, known as Green Dam Youth Escort, throughout the country. The Chinese government was also named as a defendant.

Cybersitter said the two Chinese software companies had pirated 3,000 lines of its code to create Green Dam, which was ostensibly designed to block Web sites that featured pornography and violent content.

But critics and computer experts said the Chinese version was also tailored to enable Chinese government censors to block some political and religious speech and other content, such as references to the 1989 Tiananmen square protests, that the government deemed unsuitable.

Cybersitter’s suit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for California’s Central District, alleges that the pirated lines of code “include the heart of Cybersitter software: its proprietary content filters” that instruct a computer to block sites containing banned keywords.

The principal defendants, Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Ltd. and Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd., developed and marketed the software. They could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit. Lenovo, China’s largest computer maker, said it does not comment on pending litigation.

Each of the computer makers complied with a Chinese government requirement to install Green Dam on new computers, or to include a CD containing the program with each new computer. The lawsuit alleges that the computer makers eventually found out that the software included pirated code, but continued to comply with the government directive for fear of losing market share if their computers were banned in China.

The government originally sought to require that Green Dam be installed on every new computer sold in China. But authorities backed down last summer after an outcry from computer users, from ordinary web surfers to businesses, that saw the software as a threat to their free-speech rights and their computer security.

Some analysts had expressed fears that the software included “back doors” that might allow outsiders to see computer users’ files. Others said the software was so poorly designed that crashes and other problems posed a threat to the security of users’ data.

“They were conspiring to distribute an illegal program to millions of users. They continued to distribute even after everyone knew they were stolen programs,” Gregory Fayer, an attorney for Cybersitter, said in a phone interviewon Wednesday. “There were reports just last week that some of the defendants continue to distribute in China.”

The Chinese companies’ theft was so shoddily executed, Mr. Fayer said, that some of the software code in Green Dam includes announcements directing users to visit the Cybersitter Web site.

China has long been notorious for the ease with which films, computer games, music software and other intellectual property are pirated and sold openly, often on Chinese Web sites that are thoroughly patrolled and regulated by the government. Chinese authorities have made sporadic and unsuccessful stabs at limiting the piracy, but intellectual property rights have become a major point of disagreement between China and some Western nations.

Cybersitter said its $40 software has more than 2.4 million active users worldwide. But in the space of months, the suit alleges, China mandated the installation of the pirated program on 53 million computers designed for home use and a half-million school PCs. The software was downloaded by other users 3,270,000 times, the suit stated.

The suit seeks more than $2.25 billion in damages, a figure attained by multiplying the number of Chinese computers using Green Dam by the price of the Cybersitter software.

David Barboza in Shanghai contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/te.../07censor.html





US Film Giants Appeal in File-Sharing Case
Christine Demsteader

In a corporate David and Goliath-style case, a Stockholm-based internet operator is fighting a file-sharing lawsuit against a collective of large US film companies.

A list of 14 companies, including Disney Enterprises, Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures, have lodged an appeal to force Swedish broadband operator Portlane to shut-down a so-called tracker, a device they state is being used illegally to simplify file-sharing.

In early December, Stockholm District Court denied the film companies’ demands and concluded that Portlane’s main business activity, supplying internet access, could not be considered as a contribution to copyright infringement.

The movie moguls are now countering the court's decision. They claim that by offering bandwidth along with the tracker it is simpler to find and download illegal files via the internet.

An appeal was consequently lodged before Christmas and the case will now be heard in Sweden’s Court of Appeal.

According to an article in Wednesday’s Svenska Dagbladet, Portlane’s tracker is suspected of replacing a device from the controversial Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The film companies state that Portlane has not done enough to put a stop to suspected file-sharing and the operator must therefore take responsibility.

For the less technologically-minded, the appeal document uses an analogy which compares Portlane’s actions to a landlord who turns a blind eye to a tenant performing illegal sexual acts for financial reward.

“An example of a similar type of contributory responsibility is a landlord embroiled in pimping,” the document states. “It is not enough that the landlord attempts to persuade the tenant to put an end to their actions if they do not then stop.”

Speaking to Swedish Radio after the District Court verdict, lawyer Jonas Forzelius, representing Portlane, was confident that the company would come out on top.

“What the court has said in this interim decision is that taking the side of the film companies in this matter would result in far-reaching consequences for any internet operator,” he said. “And that has been Portlane’s take on the case all along.”
http://www.thelocal.se/24230/20100106/





Senator Demands IP Treaty Details
David Kravets

That a U.S. senator must ask a federal agency to share information regarding a proposed and “classified” international anti-counterfeiting accord the government has already disclosed is alarming. Especially when the info has been given to Hollywood, the recording industry, software makers and even some digital-rights groups.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is demanding that U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk confirm leaks surrounding the unfinished Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, being negotiated largely between the European Union and United States. Among other things, Wyden wants to know if the deal creates international guidelines that mean consumers lose internet access if they are believed to be digital copyright scofflaws.

He also wants to know whether internet service providers could lose “safe harbor” protection for failing to police their customers’ digital content for copyright infringement violations. Such a move would heap copyright liability onto the ISP, and fundamentally alter U.S. copyright law.

What “legal incentives,” Wyden asked Kirk in a Wednesday letter, would “encourage Online Service Providers (OSPs) to cooperate with copyright owners to deter the unauthorized storage or transmission of copyrighted materials.”

The questions came weeks after leaked documents from the European Union suggested the United States was taking those positions on the accord’s draft internet section.

Nefeterius Akeli McPherson, a Kirk spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that the office is “looking forward to responding” to the letter that was disclosed Thursday by human-rights lobby Knowledge Ecology International.

Wyden wrote that the “objectives behind the negotiations still remain inadequately clear to the American public.”

The administration has shared the secret treaty’s internet-section contents with more than three dozen individuals in the private sector, from the left and the right of the copyright debate. Those individuals include Business Software Alliance attorney Emery Simon, Google copyright czar Bill Patry and president of Public Knowledge Gigi Sohn. Lawyers for the movie studios and record labels, which stand to gain the most from the accord, were also given access.

All signed confidentiality agreements with Kirk’s office.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act claim from Knowledge Ecology International, Kirk’s office declined to divulge the accord’s working draft — maintaining that the negotiating texts were “properly classified” national security secrets. Kirk said last month that the international community would walk away from the negotiating table if the public could see the working drafts.

The ACTA negotiating nations include Australia, Canada, European Union states, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States. They are to meet Jan. 25 in Mexico City.

The agreement does not require congressional approval.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...mands-details/





A World of Megabeats and Megabytes
Jon Pareles

MY 21st century started in 1998, when I got a new toy. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300, a flimsy plastic gadget the size of a cigarette pack. PMP stood for Portable Music Player. It had a headphone jack, and it played a recently invented digital file format: MPEG-1 Audio Layer Three, or MP3.

The Rio’s 32 megabytes of storage held a dozen songs at passable fidelity. Its sound was clearly inferior to a portable CD player; its capacity was comparable to a cassette or two. But the beauty of it was that it didn’t need any CD or cassette inserted, just digital files — copies of songs — loaded from a computer, to be changed at whim. They might come from albums people owned or borrowed; they might come, even back then, from strangers online. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to have the PMP300 taken off the market and failed — the prelude to a decade of lawsuits trying to corral online music.

It was already too late. For those who were willing to be geeky — learning new software, slowly downloading via dial-up — music had forever escaped its plastic containers to travel the Web. The old distribution system was on its way to becoming irrelevant. “You really think you’re in control? Well, I think you’re crazy,” Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley sang in 2006.

Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine, presaging what would happen to other art forms as Internet connections spread and sped up. For the old recording business everything went wrong. Sales of CDs have dropped by nearly half since 2000, while digital sales of individual songs haven’t come close to compensating. Movies and television (and journalism too) are now scrambling not to become the next victims of an omnivorous but tight-fisted Internet.

By now, in 2010, we’re all geeks, conversant with file formats and software players. Our cellphone/camera/music player/Web browser gadgets fit in a pocket, with their little LCD screens beckoning. Their tiny memory chips hold collections of music equivalent to backpacks full of CDs. The 2000s were the broadband decade, the disintermediation decade, the file-sharing decade, the digital recording (and image) decade, the iPod decade, the long-tail decade, the blog decade, the user-generated decade, the on-demand decade, the all-access decade. Inaugurating the new millennium, the Internet swallowed culture whole and delivered it back — cheaper, faster and smaller — to everyone who can get online.

For artists of all kinds (with musicians on the front lines) a 21st-century habitat of possibilities and pressures is taking shape — one that demands skills their predecessors forgot or never needed. The art they make can be created, as well as disseminated, faster and more cheaply. But it will also face exponentially more rivals for attention, and many more temptations toward superficiality and sellouts.

Through much of the 2000s delivery systems threatened to upstage the content. The iPod — a smarter, sleeker, roomier Rio PMP300 — arrived in 2001, prompting the creation of the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Five years later iTunes was the top music retailer in the United States, as its competition in the physical universe dwindled.

But the arrival of iTunes itself was playing catch-up, since MP3 files had long been available free through Napster (started in 1999) and other file-sharing services. Copyright owners’ prosecutions and shutdowns of Napster and Grokster only sent file-sharing elsewhere, and despite continuing efforts to enforce copyright laws, files now circulate everywhere. For sellers of recordings, it’s what Jay-Z rightly calls “a hole in the universe.”

Yet for audiences the decade has been both a sheer paradise and an overwhelming glut. Like countless other music fans, I spent the 2000s wallowing in abundance and drowning in it. Napster and its siblings opened up the music collections of multitudes, at first to be downloaded song by song, and that alone was overwhelming. Now music blogs post links to entire albums via a click or two.

Rare is the cultural artifact — hit single, out-of-print imported album, old or new live performance (and for that matter, cult movie or TV show or fine-art masterpiece) — that isn’t accessible somewhere online, legally or not. Google a song, and you can probably listen to it whole within seconds. Perhaps that sacrifices the thrill of the hunt. But I’m not turning down instant gratification.

Our era of immediate distribution and bottomless archives is in some ways a utopia for artists — who are, after all, among the most dedicated fans of others’ works. Musicians can study and sample a world of source material. There’s no need to leave your desktop to hear (or watch) Sierra Leonean bubu music or Flemish Renaissance polyphony. Recording technology always strove to make music portable; the 2000s were its culmination and it might get even easier when everything recorded is available in what computer buffs call “the cloud” of universally accessible information.

Ease of consumption is paralleled by ease of production. The computer is the definitive 21st-century studio, now that do-it-yourself musicians can record professional-sounding tracks onto a laptop in a bedroom. The ubiquitous software ProTools offers endless overdubbing and can put errant musicians back on the beat or tune them up, though it’s not always an improvement when dull robot precision replaces individual quirks.

The cut-and-mix, mashup procedures of hip-hop and disc-jockey culture have only accelerated. Beats from old vinyl discs were foundations of hip-hop back in the 1970s. Now no one needs to track down the physical disc because some aggregator or collector has probably put it online. And if Timbaland wants to grab a Bollywood flourish, or M.I.A. wants to study Brazilian baile funk, they don’t need subway fare, much less a plane ticket.

Even the acoustics of beloved concert halls and studios, which were once the definition of site-specific (and expensive) workspaces, have been digitally sampled, modeled and simulated, to be offered as effects within recording software. Many of the large studios themselves are gone for lack of business. Paradoxically, as digital fidelity continues to improve (and video moves toward high definition), many listeners just don’t care.

The tolerable-quality files (128 kilobits per second) that seemed like a good compromise when MP3s arrived via dial-up, and storage was measured in mere megabytes, still fill portable players, stripping away the depth and nuance that were in the original recordings. Now, like 1950’s producers who mixed their singles for the era’s car radios, certain musicians go directly for the crisp, hollow textures that will survive a digital squeeze. Maybe they’re practical, as their music gets played back through dinky earbuds or itty-bitty computer speakers anyway.

As the music whizzes around, artists can get a reaction to new work as soon as they want. Introduce a song in concert, and it might be on YouTube the same night; create a demo, and fans will snap it up, to get passed along forever. The same channels are open to every other artist (using the term loosely) with a MySpace page or a YouTube account. Local bands may not be local for long. But the flip side of disintermediation — not having to rely on any middleman for approval or distribution — is a near-infinite slush pile. All the filtering that used to take place out of earshot, in A&R and club bookers’ offices, can be bypassed.

With the artifacts come the arguments: the online magazines, blogs, forums, fan pages and celebrity news sites where rumors spread, reputations bloom, backlashes seethe and associations multiply. Radio (itself struggling against online alternatives) and television can still advance careers — hello, “American Idol” — but so can considerably less corporate tastemakers.

For indie-rock bands like Arcade Fire, or for a rapper like Wale building a reputation on mixtapes, a mention in the right places online — accompanied, likely enough, by a free MP3 or a link to a YouTube clip — can be the makings of a national and perhaps international tour circuit: a star is blogged. And what once was a post-gig discussion among a handful of friends can now be a worldwide colloquy, complete with photos and video as documentary evidence. Less and less takes place behind the scenes, even if it belongs there.

The blockbuster mentality that settled over popular music in the 1980s has not disappeared. The 2000s still had multi-platinum pop stars, some who got a running start in the ’90s (like Eminem, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake) and some who made their way through the debacle (Kanye West, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Norah Jones, Lil Wayne, Taylor Swift). But as disc sales fell, the Top 10 was repeatedly breached by acts with cult followings — the Mars Volta, for instance — rather than mass-market consensus. It was a good time for indie-rockers and for older musicians who weren’t going to get played on contemporary hit radio.

And without being able to depend on album sales, musicians’ job descriptions changed. Increasingly it was up to the performers — not their struggling major label if they had one, not the radio stations that had long treated them as disposable — to get themselves noticed. That could mean making silly novelty videos for YouTube, or it could involve what was once considered selling out: placing a song in a commercial, where people could hear it repeatedly (and then track it down online).

Instead of waiting for royalties to trickle in from sales, musicians were happy to get paid upfront for licensing their music to advertisers and to TV and movie soundtracks. A distracted listener was better than none at all.

In the 2010s musicians can look forward to working harder for smaller payoffs. They’re resuming — if they ever really left it behind — their age-old role as troubadours, touring more frequently to make up for disappearing album sales. (Big stars with expiring contracts went independent instead of renewing their major-label commitments, or set up so-called “360 deals” that depend as much on touring and merchandising as on selling albums.)

There are newer demands on them as well: interacting with fans who never had to accept the top-down, broadcast model of the old music business and have come to expect the individualized tone of the Internet. To perform offstage musicians now hone social-networking skills: mastering the blog post, the semi-candid photo, the not too overtly promotional self-promotion, the guarded personal revelation, the clever Tweet. Those with true star ambitions will also have to manage the meta-careers that a little bit of fame now entails, knowing that any time they show their face in public, it can turn up on a photo blog, any interview can be cross-referenced forever, any live performances or television moment might show up on YouTube. The smart ones, like Lady Gaga, already have their costume changes planned.

Musicians and their managers will also be improvising their own routes amid a wilderness of marketing and career strategies. They’re experimenting with what an album is now worth, like Radiohead’s pay-what-you-will album in 2007, “In Rainbows,” or Nine Inch Nails’ 2008 spectrum from luxury (an elaborate limited-edition $300 package of “Ghosts I-IV,” which sold out instantly) to free (digital versions of half of “Ghosts” and then all of “The Slip”). But those aren’t baby bands who had to do it themselves from the start. Newer acts may well be cottage industries — in wired cottages — for life.

One emblematic album for the 2000s was Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” in 2004, which backed up a cappella raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with finely micro-sliced samples from “The Beatles,” a k a the White Album. All of its sounds, in other words, were recycled; the musicality was in the cleverness of the cut and paste. There was no permission from the Beatles and no official commercial release. The album simply escaped onto the Internet, where it can still be grabbed, earning nothing but good will for the musicians, but ready to play any time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/ar...ic/03tech.html





CBS, Pandora Top Ando Internet Radio Rankings For November
FMQB

Ando Media has released its Internet radio rankings for the month of November, with CBS Radio and Pandora leading the pack. Ando notes that their November data shows a drop in listening across the board on Thanksgiving and the Friday after, "validating significant in-office listenership." Also, Clear Channel's listing now includes data from listeners using mobile devices, with CC seeing an increase in "session stars" but a decrease in its Average TSL, "due to the consumption behavior of mobile listeners."

Looking at weekdays from 6a-8p, Pandora ranked #1 with an average of just over 251,000 Average Active Sessions, followed by CBS Radio and Clear Channel. Citadel and Entercom rounded out the top five. Looking at the "all streams ranker" data, CBS Radio came out on at #1, followed by 977Music.com and 1.fm. Entercom and Digitally Imported followed at #4 and #5.

Expanding to 6a-midnight and all seven days of the week, Pandora remained #1 with Average Active Sessions. CBS Radio and Clear Channel were also still #2 and #3, along with Citadel and Entercom at #4 and #5. With the "all streams ranker" data expanded to all week and 6a-midnight, CBS Radio remained #1, with 977Music.com and 1.fm, Digitally Imported and Entercom rounding out the top five.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1648105





The Geek Freaks

Why Jaron Lanier Rants Against What the Web has Become
Michael Agger

Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget has one of the more sobering prefaces to be found in recent books. "It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons," it begins. The words will be "minced into anatomized search engine keywords," then "copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement," and then, in a final insult, "scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers." Lanier's conclusion: "Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases." My conclusion: Is that really such a bad thing?

Lanier is best known as a pioneer of virtual reality and an early star of Wired magazine. He was the guy with the dreadlocks and the giant V.R. goggles perched on his forehead, the epitome of the hippie-shaman-guru strain in tech culture. In what may have been a high point, Lanier's V.R. glove was used to power the graphics in a Grateful Dead video. Lanier lost his company in the early '90s in a then-legendary flameout, and he has been working in the seams of academia and Silicon Valley ever since. He's the barefoot guy in the conference room, ever creative, childlike.

You Are Not a Gadget is basically a collection of his Internet columns and postings, bound, set into type, and called a "manifesto." Over the years, Lanier has become a skeptic of that amorphous thing called Web 2.0. He directs most of his ire toward the "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups" that flit through our browsers and Twitter feeds. But he's also critical of bigger Internet landmarks, such as Wikipedia, the open-source software Linux, and the "hive mind" in general.
It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter. Lanier maintains, for example, that musical development has essentially stalled. He has a challenge: "[P]lay me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s." Lanier claims that listeners can't distinguish between recent musical eras because music is "retro, retro, retro." I would like to see that debate play out in the forums on Pitchfork. Being scanned and rehashed in a blog post somewhere will be the best thing that ever happened to some of these words.

That is mostly because Lanier is an unreconstructed geek who throws around terms like realistic computationalism and numinous neoteny, which make your ears hurt. He will spend a few pages bemoaning the fact that a "locked-in" technology such as the computer "file" has cut off other, potentially more beautiful ways of organizing information on a computer.

As near as I can make it out, Lanier's view is that the Web began as a digital Eden. We built homepages by hand, played around in virtual worlds, wrote beautiful little programs for the fun of it, and generally made our humanity present online. The standards had not been set. The big money and the big companies had not yet arrived. Now Google has linked search to advertising. The Internet's long tail helps only the Amazons of the world, not the little guys and gals making songs, videos, and books. Wikipedia, a mediocre product of group writing, has become the intellectual backbone of the Web. And, most depressingly, all of us have been lumped into a "hive mind" that every entrepreneur with a dollar and a dream is trying to parse for profit.

Yet, just when you're about to sigh and go check your Twitter feed, Lanier writes something that gives you pause. On who really benefits from Facebook, for instance:

The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up.

A touch overblown, but we can easily forget that Facebook needs to build a profit with our friendships. Our favorite distraction awaits a Messiah that will justify its billion-dollar valuation. "The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view," Lanier writes, "is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable." Have you checked your privacy settings recently? Lanier has been proven prophetic.

Like others who have been on the Web from its early days, Lanier thinks the place has "lost its flavor." Perhaps homepages in the mid-'90s did have a folk-art quality to them, though one heavily dominated by Simpsons and Star Trek references. Perhaps our regimented Facebook selves have made things more vanilla. Perhaps you did stumble down more idiosyncratic paths of knowledge before Wikipedia dominated the top Google search results. But these are the kinds of nostalgic observations that are ridiculous to anyone young. The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor. What Samuel Johnson wrote about his hometown holds true for the Internet: "No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

In addition to the general standardization and corporatization of the Web, Lanier sees the Web's "open culture" as a failure. Instead of creating new songs or videos, we just steal from the previous decades of pop culture and create parodies and mashups. Instead of writing brilliant new computer programs, computer jocks toil at improving the free, open-source Linux, which offers no real innovation over the decades-old Unix. His best and most comprehensible critique of how the Web has smothered creativity involves what you could call the Ani DiFranco problem:

In the old days—when I myself was signed to a label—there were a few major artists who made it on their own, like Ani DiFranco. She became a millionaire by selling her own CDs while they still were a high-margin product people were used to buying, back before the era of file sharing. Has a new army of Ani DiFranco's [sic] started to appear?

In Lanier's eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn't expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That's not a crazy idea, but it's just Lanier's hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today's theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There's also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn't found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: "We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed." Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don't see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it's Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn't want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It's time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.
http://www.slate.com/id/2239466/pagenum/all/





Ten for the Next Ten
BONO

Dublin

IF we have overindulged in anything these past several days, it is neither holiday ham nor American football; it is Top 10 lists. We have been stuffed full of them. Even in these self-restrained pages, it has been impossible to avoid the end-of-the-decade accountings of the 10 best such-and-suches and the 10 worst fill-in-the-blanks.

And so, in the spirit of rock star excess, I offer yet another.

The main difference, if it matters, is that this list looks forward, not backward. So here, then, are 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.

Intellectual Property Developers

Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.

Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object

How is it that the country that made us all fall in love with the automobile has failed, with only a few exceptions, to produce a single family sedan with the style and humor and grace of the cars produced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s? Put aside the question of whether those models were male (as in longer, lower and wider, Dr. Freud) or female (as in fender skirts, curvy belt lines and, of course, headlights). Either way, they all had sex appeal. (In Ireland in the ’70s, it was the E-Type Jag that made sense of puberty.) Today, however, we have the mundanity of our marriage to the minivan and the S.U.V. and long-term relationships with midsize cars that are, forgive me, a little heavy in the rear cargo hold.

Are aerodynamics to blame? Economics? Or that most American of inventions, design by committee? It hurts me to say this about democracy (and I know because my band is one), but rarely does majority rule produce something of beauty.

That’s why the Obama administration — while it still holds the keys to the big automakers — ought to put some style fascists into the mix: the genius of Marc Newson ... Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive from Apple ... Frank Gehry, the architect, and Jeff Koons, the artist. Put the great industrial designers in the front seat, right along with sound financial stewardship ... the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me. Check out the Tesla or the Fisker Karma car, designed by the same team that gave the world the Aston Martin.

Festival of Abraham

Here’s something that could never have happened in the Naughts but will maybe be possible in the Tweens or Teens — if there’s a breakthrough in the Mideast peace process. The idea is an arts festival that celebrates the origin of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every year it could be held in a different location; Jerusalem would obviously be the best place to start.

In Ireland, at the height of the “Troubles,” it was said that the only solution for rabid sectarianism was to let 1,000 punk-rock bands bloom: music helped create a free space for dialogue (of a high-volume variety). So no politicians allowed. Artists only.

An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle)

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.

A Person (Dr. William Li) and a Word (Angiogenesis)

Angiogenesis is the process by which new blood vessels grow. This is good — except when it’s very bad, as in the case of cancerous tumors. Blood vessels are their supply lines. Dr. William Li of the Angiogenesis Foundation has called research in this realm the “first medical revolution of the 21st century,” and he should know. (I shouldn’t, given my lack of a medical pedigree, but I learned about it from my bandmate the Edge, who supports Dr. Li’s foundation.) Work on angiogenesis inhibitors is at the vanguard. In a world worrying about whether it can afford health care, advances in prevention are at a premium.

Factoid: Cancers start as tiny nests of malignant cells that do not enlarge until they recruit new vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients; then a cancer can expand 16,000 times in only two weeks.

Taking the Fight to Rotavirus

The thing is, they exist, these vaccines. They’re not a mere hope, like an AIDS vaccine. And one of the brightest bits of news in 2009 is that rotavirus vaccines have been shown to work not only in nations with low child mortality, but in the poorest countries, where diarrhea (not a killer in our house) caused by rotavirus infections takes the lives of 500,000 children a year. The World Health Organization just this summer issued a strong recommendation that rotavirus vaccinations be part of every nation’s immunization program. From this vantage point, I like the look of the next decade.

Matter Doesn’t Matter

God, it appears, is a Trekkie. (God help us.)

Dr. Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, is becoming a rock star of science for his work in quantum teleportation, which I know very little about but which I think I may have achieved backstage one night in Berlin in the early 1990s. At any rate, it seems to have something to do with teleporting properties or bits of information, not physical objects; even though Dr. Zeilinger plays down the possibility of a “Star Trek” moment, his breakthroughs are catching the attention of the nonscientific world for their metaphysical implications. His own version of E=mc2 ends in a cosmic punch line: that when it comes to the origin of the universe, information matters more than matter.

Could it be that God is a nerd?

People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid

A lot of us have seen or lived the organizational chart of the last century, in which power and influence (whether possessed by church, state or corporation) are concentrated in the uppermost point of the pyramid and pressure is exerted downward. But in this new century, and especially in some parts of the developing world, the pyramid is being inverted. Much has been written about the profits to be made at the bottom of the pyramid; less has been said about the political power there. Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

The world is taking notice of this change. On her most recent trip to Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bypassed officials and met instead with representatives of independent, nongovernmental groups, which are quickly becoming more organized and more interconnected. For example, Twaweza, a citizen’s organization, is spreading across East Africa, helping people hold local officials accountable for managing budgets and delivering services. (Twaweza is Swahili for “we can make it happen.”)

Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolución

“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work,” President Obama said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence.”

So, he might have added, are the Germans and Eastern Europeans who came out a couple of months ago to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Wall. And so are the brave Iranians who continue to take to the streets despite the certainty of brutal repression. Like Neda Agha Soltan, they are living (and bleeding and dying) testimony.

The start of the decade ought to be a time for a little bit of hope — not the wispy stuff, but battle-hardened hope, forged in the grim, purposeful spirit of the times. So I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that the regimes in North Korea, Myanmar and elsewhere are taking note of the trouble an aroused citizenry can give to tyrants, and that people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.

The World Cup Kicks Off the African Decade

It’s getting easier to describe to Americans the impact of the World Cup — especially the impact it will have in Africa, where the tournament is to be held this summer. A few years ago, Ivory Coast was splitting apart and in the midst of civil war when its national team qualified for the 2006 jamboree. The response was so ecstatic that the war was largely put on hold as something more important than deathly combat took place, i.e. a soccer match. The team became a symbol of how the different tribes could — and did — get on after the tournament was over.

This time round, for the 2010 World Cup, naysayers thought South Africa could not build the stadiums in time. Those critics should be red-faced now. South Africa’s impressive preparations underline the changes on the continent, where over the last few years, 5 percent economic growth was the average. Signs point to a further decade of growth to come. Canny investors will put more capital there. This in turn has the potential to shore up fragile young democracies across the continent.

It would be fitting if Nelson Mandela, who has done more than anyone for Africa’s rising, would kick off the opening ceremonies. If he shows up, the world will weep with joy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03bono.html





TalkTalk Condemns Bono's 'Misguided' Filesharing Claims

Broadband provider TalkTalk has described U2 singer Bono's views on illegal filesharing as "seriously misguided", it has been revealed.

The company, which offers broadband and home phone services in bundles, has claimed the star's column on the issue in the New York Times included several inaccuracies.

According to the firm, claims that broadband providers generate revenue through filesharing are incorrect and the need for extra bandwidth means they often incur costs.

In addition, calls for efforts to tackle filesharing to follow a similar plan as those used against child pornography were branded "outrageous".

TalkTalk stated: "If the Digital Economy Bill as it is currently framed becomes law, it will become legal to summarily disconnect someone for alleged copyright abuse but if you want to disconnect them for accessing child abuse images then you will have to get a court order first."

The court issue is one reason why the internet service provider is against government plans to introduce a three-strikes policy to cut illegal filesharing. It also claims that widespread Wi-FI hijacking means innocent parties could also face disconnection.
http://www.cable.co.uk/news/talktalk...aims-19541649/





Bono Net Policing Idea Draws Fire
BBC

Bono, frontman of rock band U2, has warned the film industry not to make the same mistakes with file-sharing that have dogged the music industry.

Writing for the New York Times, Bono claimed internet service providers were "reverse Robin Hoods" benefiting from the music industry's lost profits.

He hinted that China's efforts prove that tracking net content is possible.

The editorial drew sharp criticism, both on its economic merits and for the suggestion of net content policing.

"The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we're just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of '24' in 24 seconds," he wrote.

"A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators...the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business."

In a move that drew significant criticism, Bono went on to suggest that the feasibility of tracking down file-sharers had already been proven.

"We know from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content," he said.

Several commentators assailed both the logic of net monitoring and the economic arguments of the essay, pointing out that U2 topped 2009's list of top-grossing live acts.

"Bono has missed that even a totalitarian government...can't effectively control net-content," tweeted Cory Doctorow, a blogger and journalist noted for his study of file-sharing policy.

"If only greed and ignorance could sequester carbon, Bono could FINALLY save the planet," he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8439200.stm





Music Downloader Takes Issue with $675,000 Penalty
AP

A graduate student who was ordered to pay four record labels a combined $675,000 for downloading and sharing songs online is asking a judge to grant him a new trial or reduce the damages.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted last year that he illegally downloaded and distributed 30 songs.

In a motion filed Monday, the Boston University student's lawyers say a federal jury's damage award in July was too high.

They argue that Tenenbaum was one of millions of people who downloaded and shared music.

During the trial, Tenenbaum's lawyer suggested the damages should be as little as 99 cents per song, roughly the same amount Tenenbaum would have to pay for a legal online purchase.

A lawyer for the recording labels described Tenenbaum as a "hardcore" copyright infringer.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Imeem to Pay The Orchard $1.77M in Copyright Judgment
Mark Hefflinger

Streaming music service imeem, which recently sold certain assets to News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace, has been hit with a $1.77 million copyright infringement judgment, GigaOM reported.

The suit was originally filed by digital music distributor The Orchard (NASD: ORCD) in October, and the default judgment was issued by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin on Dec. 17 after imeem failed to appear in court.

A spokesperson for MySpace, which is rumored to have paid less than $1 million for imeem, told GigaOM that the company was not involved in the lawsuit.

MySpace's acquisition included only "certain assets" of imeem, which apparently did not include thousands in royalty payments owed to independent artists.

GigaOM speculated that the deal could also have been structured by MySpace to include only assets that "were not being sued."
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2010/01...right-judgment





Warners, Netflix Agree to New-Release Delay

Deal also increases the amount of catalog titles on Netflix
Carl DiOrio

Got "Invictus" in your Netflix cue in hope of renting it the day the movie hits DVD?

Time for a rethink. Warner Bros. and Netflix on Wednesday unveiled a dramatic pact that will delay the studio's new-release discs reaching Netflix's 11 million online rental subscribers for 28 days.

Netflix agreed to the deal because it will boost the number of Warners catalog titles that Netflix will be allowed to offer while providing the delayed rental titles on less expensive terms. New-release rentals account for an estimated 30% of shipments by Netflix, whose customers skew toward catalog product.

Still, Blockbuster and other disc-rental operations will gain a competitive advantage among those wanting to rent new-release DVDs and Blu-ray Discs on the same day they hit stores. Eventually, the deal could have broad ripple effects within the home entertainment industry, but for now, the 28-day policy applies only to Netflix.

Similar agreements between other studios and additional retailers might proliferate during the coming months, if only as a means of dealing with the trend toward dollar rentals. Studios have become increasingly concerned about consumers' willingness to buy DVDs when Redbox and other DVD-kiosk companies are renting discs for a dollar a night.

Warners starts its new Netflix policy with two titles hitting the rest of the rental community Jan. 19: "The Invention of Lying" and "Whiteout." Netflix begins offering those titles Feb. 16. (Netflix does not offer new-release titles for digital viewing, a policy that will continue.)

"These new agreements build upon the strong relationship we have had with Netflix for nearly 10 years," Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders said. "The 28-day window allows us to continue making our most popular films available to Netflix subscribers while supporting our sell-through product."

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said some of the company's rental customers have been unable to obtain new releases because of insufficient product supply. In the future, customers will have to wait four weeks but then are assured of getting titles shipped immediately upon request.

"We're able to help an important business partner meet its objectives while improving service levels for our members by acquiring substantially more units than in the past after a relatively short sell-through window," Sarandos said. "At the same time, we're able to extend the range of choices available to be streamed to our members."

The Warners agreement reflects a belief among Netflix execs that "the long-term business is in digital streaming," he said.

Netflix proposed the deal to Warners a year ago and is in various stages of talks with other studios about similar agreements, Sarandos said. But nothing is likely to emerge from those discussions until current pacts with the rental companies expire.

Warners was out of contract with Netflix for most of last year but continued to supply discs.

Even before dollar rentals began to threaten disc sales, Hollywood was grappling with a significant decline in DVD revenue. But many execs believe that dollar rentals have exacerbated the decline in sales from format fatigue.

In any event, a decline in DVD revenue is expected to continue until at least 2011. That's when execs hope rising revenue from Blu-ray Disc sales will begin to compensate for the drop-off in DVD revenue dollar for dollar.

Meantime, a multistudio court battle wth Redbox has not been sorted out.

Should studios lose that showdown with the kiosk king, the major suppliers may create an industrywide "sell-through window" of 28 days or so, during which rentals would be prohibited and only disc sales would be allowed. That would get around Redbox's claim that it's being illegally singled out by studios refusing to supply discs to its kiosks.

Warners estimates that its new pact will be revenue-neutral for the studio in its dealings with Netflix. But Warners execs hope the deal will boost revenue from digitally distributed content and help protect its sell-through cash cow.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara said Warners has had talks about a similar deal with Blockbuster. But those discussions have proved more complicated than negotiations with Netflix because of the rental giant's more diverse footprint in bricks-and-mortar retail, online subscriptions and dollar-rental kiosks.

"Never say never," Tsujihara added when asked whether a Blockbuster deal is possible.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...c98d04441cf7b6





Move Over BoxeeBox, Here Comes PopBox!

Following closely on the heels of the December announcement of D-Link’s BoxeeBox, Syabas Technology today said it will ship a $129 Internet-based A/V streaming set-top box (STB) in March. Both new gadgets have the potential to give Roku’s popular Netflix-streaming STB a run for its money.

All three boxes can deliver range of Internet-based A/V streaming and social networking services to consumer’s TVs. Like Roku’s digital video player STB, the PopBox will include Netflix on-demand video streaming when it first ships. D-Link, meanwhile, is rumored to be scrambling to add Netflix streaming support to its BoxeeBox device as well, prior to inaugural shipments of that device. All three run embedded Linux OSes, and all are expected to sell for less than $200.

Syabas says it will demo a PopBox prototype running the 20 apps listed below this week at CES in Las Vegas, with additional apps expected to be on the box when it ships in March.

Initial PopBox Built-in Apps

* Netflix
* Revision3
* Funspot Games
* Photobucket
* Next New Networks
* Livestation
* Pico Channel
* Thinking Screen Media
* Mediafly
* Weather Bug
* Twitter
* Facebook
* IMDB
* SHOUTcast
* Crunchy Roll
* Blip TV
* Waterfront Entertainment
* Channels.Com
* FrameChannel
* Internet Video Archive

According to Syabas COO Alex Limberis, the PopBox is a spinoff of the company’s pioneering Popcorn Hour STB.

Relative to the Popcorn Hour, the PopBox has a substantially redesigned UI (user interface), a more finished-looking case, 2GB of internal nonvolatile storage (flash), and a new, extensible application platform through which third-party-developed apps can be downloaded directly into the device. On the other hand, the PopcornHour’s media-server functions have been omitted, resulting in a simpler, less expensive device.

Limberis says the PopBox’s configuration requirements and redesigned UI are intended to implement a consumer-friendly device that’s “easy enough for my mom to setup and use.” In this regard, the company appears to have taken a cue from Roku’s highly popular Netflix-streaming STB.

Notably absent from the 20 apps listed above is YouTube. As Limberis explains on his blog, YouTube asked Syabas to remove YouTube video streaming capability from the Popcorn Hour STBs based on a “terms of use” restriction pertaining to the use of YouTube’s video-streaming APIs (application programming interfaces) by commercial STBs.

What’s inside the box?

According to Limberis, the PopBox is based on essentially the same hardware design as its Popcorn Hour predecessor, except without the option of a user-added internal hard drive or of the ability to provide media streaming server functions (dubbed “networked media tank” capabilities) on the home LAN.

Specifically, the PopBox will run a customized Linux 2.6 kernel-based OS on a Sigma Designs SMP8643 system-on-chip (SoC) processor. The SMP8643 SoC integrates a 667MHz MIPS application processor (on which the Linux OS runs), a 2D graphics processor, a trio of 333MHz audio DSPs (digital signal processors), and a dedicated 333MHz security processor (MIPS 4KEc IPU). The chip’s hi-definition A/V outputs support MPEG-4.10 (H.264), SMPTE 421M (VC-1), AVS, WMV9, MPEG-4.2, and MPEG-2 media formats.

The SMP8643’s on-chip security processor provides robust digital rights management and “conditional access” content protection, which apparently satisfy Netflix’s requirements for the streaming of its on-demand video titles. Further details regarding the innards of the PopBox’s SMP8643 processor can be spotted on this detailed block diagram.

Summary of hardware specs

All told, the PopBox’s key hardware specs will include the following:

* Sigma Designs SMP8643 system-on-chip processor:
o 667MHz MIPS application processor
o 333MHz security processor
o 3x 333MHz audio DSPs
* Memory:
o 512MB DDR2 SDRAM
o SD Card slot equipped with a 2GB card
* Audio/Video outputs:
o HDMI v1.3a (up to 1080p)
o Component video (up to 1080p)
o Stereo analog audio
o S/PDIF optical digital audio
* Interfaces:
o 10/100 Ethernet interface
o 2x USB 2.0 ports
* Remote control technology: IR
* Power consumption: < 15W
* Enclosure:
o Size: 8 x 6 x 1.25 inches
o Fanless

Supported multimedia formats and standards

Syabas claims the device will support the following codecs, DRM, metadata, and media access standards:

* Video: MPEG1/2/4, Open MPEG-4 HD, Xvid-HD and WMV9-HD, VC-1,H.264
* Audio: MP1/2/3, WMA, WMA Pro, OggVorbis, AAC, AC3, DTS, PCM, WAV and FLAC
* Container: ASF, ISO, IFO, MPEG-TS, MPEG-4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WM-DRM, VOB, MP4, RMP4
* Photos: JPEG, animated GIF89a, BMP and PNG
* Subtitles: MicroDVD (*.sub), SubRip (*.srt), Sub Station Alpha (*.ssa), Microsoft’s Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange -SAMI (*.smi)
* Streaming standards: SMB, Bonjour, UPnP, DLNA, WM-DRM, etc.

The bottom line

All in all, if Syabas successfully delivers on its promise of a truly easy-to-use UI, the $129 PopBox could become a highly popular family room gadget during 2010. In particular, the device’s support for a wide range of third-party-developed applications could be a significant selling point vs. the more restricted set of user-selectable apps on Roku’s similarly-priced STBs.

Limberis says the PopBox will become available for $129 in March from “etailers” such as Amazon and direct from the PopBox website. Additionally, Syabas is in discussion with undisclosed brick-and-mortar retailers in the North American market, he adds.
http://www.deviceguru.com/popbox-vs-boxeebox/





Trying to Add Portability to Movie Files
Brad Stone

It is easy to take a DVD to a friend’s house and watch it on his TV. But things are more complicated when digital video downloads are involved. A movie file bought from Blockbuster.com will not work on a Sony HDTV, for example, and videos from iTunes work only on devices with Apple software.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, a big high-tech gathering that will begin Wednesday in Las Vegas, Hollywood studios and consumer electronics makers plan to lay out some steps they are taking to simplify this digital future — and perhaps stem the worrying decline in home entertainment sales.

Hollywood and its high-tech partners are deeply concerned that their customers will rebel against some of the limitations taking shape as video moves away from physical discs.

Consumers, the industry believes, could balk at buying digital movies and TV shows until they can bring their collections with them wherever they go — by and large the same freedom people have with DVDs.

In the last year and a half, a broad alliance of high-tech companies and Hollywood studios has been trying to address this problem through an organization called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE. Five of the six major Hollywood studios (Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, Sony, Paramount and Fox, but not Walt Disney) are involved, with Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Intel and Best Buy.

The group is setting out to create a common digital standard that would let consumers buy or rent a digital video once and then play it on any device. It might sound technical, but it could be crucial to persuading consumers to buy all the splashy new Internet-connected gear that tech companies will demonstrate at C.E.S., like HDTVs and set-top boxes that can download TV shows and films.

Under the proposed system, proof of digital purchases would be stored online in a so-called rights locker, and consumers would be permitted to play the movies they bought or rented on any DECE-compatible device.

So, for example, business travelers might find that their hotel room television could tap into their personal movie collections. Consumers could buy Blu-ray discs and have digital copies of those films accessible from all of their devices, even their mobile phones. And a PC maker could customize a new laptop for buyers by loading it with all their movies and shows — and eventually even their video games and e-books.

These advances may not be all that far off. On Monday, the digital content organization plans to announce several moves that signal it is ready for companies to start building devices and services with the technology this year. Industry observers expected such an announcement last year.

The group is announcing that it has adopted a new file format that, like the DVD, will allow any company to create a compatible device or digital video store. It is also selecting Neustar, a company based in Sterling, Va., to create the online hub that will store records of people’s digital purchases, with their permission.

The group is also announcing 21 new members, pushing the effort even further toward cross-industry unity. The new companies include consumer device makers like Samsung Electronics, Nokia and Motorola, entertainment retailers like Netflix and the European chain Tesco, and the cable companies Cox Communications and Liberty Global.

Disney is still a holdout. It is advocating a similar plan called KeyChest, which analysts say it may introduce working with Apple. A Disney spokesman said the company would give an early look at its rival technology at C.E.S.

The DECE says that it is further along and that the technical specifications of its system will be available to other companies in the next few months. Devices and services could be available to consumers as soon as early next year.

“There were many skeptics out there who believed that with so many companies, we could never achieve anything,” said Mitch Singer, the president of the DECE and chief technology officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment. “We’ve actually achieved almost everything.”

But the effort still has a long way to go before it can claim anything like success. The proof will be whether it revives home entertainment sales by getting consumers excited about the new freedoms of the digital world.

Hollywood needs consumers to buy more digital content. DVD and Blu-ray revenues contribute significantly to Hollywood’s bottom line, but spending on those discs is dropping sharply. It declined 3.2 percent to $4 billion in the third quarter of last year. Digital sales were up nearly 20 percent in the quarter, but amounted to a relatively paltry $420 million.

And movie studios can only guess how much revenue is lost to piracy, which they say tends to grow as the speed of Internet access increases.

Hollywood also wants to avoid having a single company like Apple enticing people to buy only from its own closed digital system, and ending up with an inordinate degree of control over matters like pricing. Movie executives shudder at the power Apple accumulated over the music labels with iTunes and the influence Amazon appears to be gathering over publishers with e-books.

“The possibility is there for a single player to completely dominate the economics,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm.

Hollywood “runs the risk of being held up and surpassed by powerful entities going it alone,” he said, adding that Amazon showed signs of doing just that with its introduction last month of Disc+ On Demand. That service lets consumers who buy certain DVDs and Blu-ray discs view the same titles on demand at no additional cost.

There is also the possibility that the DECE is making a flawed bet on the direction of technology and emerging consumer habits. Its system is primarily aimed at getting people to buy and own digital copies of films, in the same way people collected VHS cassettes and DVDs.

But an increasing number of Web services allow people to more cheaply stream movies and shows without ever permanently storing a copy. The DECE says its technology can accommodate streaming — allowing members of a family, for example, to watch the same movie at the same time in different locations. But it is not clear that such a rights scheme is necessary in a purely on-demand, watch-it-once world.

“The market desperately needs this, but in some senses it is already moving past it toward rental of content over ownership,” said Danielle Levitas, an analyst at IDC. Ms. Levitas also said DECE’s progress had been slower than she expected: “I wanted to see devices in the market already announced by C.E.S.”

Mr. Singer acknowledges that “every single company knows that time is not their friend right now.” But he says that to truly spark the digital media revolution, the industry must embed its technology so deeply into digital services and devices that customers will not even notice it — so that getting access to their digital content is as easy as bringing a DVD to a friend’s house.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to know what’s inside,” he said. “They should just know it will play.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/te...y/04video.html





Disney Unveils KeyChest Technology
Alex Dobuzinskis and Sue Zeidler

The Walt Disney Co on Tuesday unveiled a technology called KeyChest to enable consumers to buy films or television shows from various distributors, store them on remote servers, and play them on multiple platforms ranging from TVs to computers and phones.

Disney said it plans to roll-out KeyChest for both the U.S. and the international market, and that it will soon announce partners who will participate in the program.

"Discussions are going to step up dramatically at the Consumer Electronics Show," said a Disney spokesman, referring to the upcoming technology conference in Las Vegas.

Disney said negotiations with content distributors, cable companies and telecommunications services have been ongoing for several months.

Disney hopes the technology will be deployed before the end of 2010.

The company also said a third-party company will operate KeyChest, and that it expects other studios to make their content available through the authenticating technology Disney has developed.

Company officials said the goal of KeyChest is to make it easy for viewers to see a movie accessed from various outlets and to address the issue of compatibility in maneuvering content from device to device as well as limited storage space on consumers' hard drives.

She also said this was not intended as a Disney only venture.

"The idea is to have all the movies consumers want to buy available in this way," said Kelly Summers, vice president of digital distribution at Disney, on Tuesday in a briefing about KeyChest. "If it's Disney only, there really isn't much value here," she said.

Disney officials said they hope to use KeyChest to build momentum for the long-stalled digital distribution of films.

It comes at a critical juncture for the industry which saw the sale of films on DVDs and Blu-rays drop by an estimated 13 percent in 2009. Online sales of movies, the hoped-for bright spot for the industry, grew from $150 million to $250 million in 2009, but not an enough to offset the decline in physical sales.

With KeyChest, a consumer can buy a movie from a participating store. That customer's account with other participating services, such as telecom services or cable companies, would be updated to show the film is available for viewing.

Summers stressed that KeyChest will not be a service that consumers access directly.

Rather, Disney envisions KeyChest as a program that retailers can tap into to verify that consumers have already purchased the right to access a movie, and then make that movie available to the consumer across different devices.

(Editing by Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





"Potter", "Avatar" Spur Box Office Record in '09
Carl DiOrio

Crowd-pleasing pics and extra-dimensional tix combined to lift Hollywood to new box office heights in 2009.

Sales rose more than 8% to a record $10.61 billion, while the number of tickets sold (i.e. admissions) climbed almost 4%.

Paramount's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" ($402.1 million), Warner Bros.' "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" ($302 million) and 3D phenoms such as Fox's "Avatar" ($352.1 million) and Disney/Pixar's "Up" ($293 million) helped set the new box office mark.

But admissions in the United States and Canada -- at 1.41 billion, compared with 1.36 billion in 2008 -- fell a bit short of beating the all-time record of 1.60 billion set in 2002. The box office year began January 5, with tracking firm Nielsen EDI always starting its calendar on the first business day after New Year's.

The race for some of the top spots in annual studio market share rankings went right to the wire, though Warner Bros. had the gold-medal position nailed down early and finished with an industry-record $2.13 billion and a 20% share.

Paramount finished second in a tightly bunched group of majors with $1.46 billion (13.8% share), and Fox was third with $1.45 billion (13.7%), according to EDI estimates. Sony was fourth on the year with $1.44 billion (13.6%), followed by Disney with $1.21 billion (11.4%) and Universal with roughly $900 million (8.5%).

The year's remarkable industry performance came despite predictions from some quarters that climbing ticket prices would prevent the theatrical business from displaying its usual recession-resistant ways. Equally of note, moviegoers' enthusiasm for 3D pictures shows movie theaters still offer a theatrical experience that can compete effectively against increasingly sophisticated home-entertainment systems.

"What we've seen with 3D releases this year, most recently with 'Avatar,' is a reinvention of the moviegoing experience," said Gerry Lopez, president and CEO of No. 2 chain AMC Entertainment. "It's definitely the direction the industry is going."

Sequels proved as strong as ever in 2009, with a $282 million theatrical run for Summit Entertainment's vampire romance "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" joining the "Potter" and "Transformer" pictures among the most successful '09 entrants in the tried-and-true category. Yet Fox's year-end box office bonanza with "Avatar" and Sony's overachieving 11 months earlier with "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" ($146 million) could boost industry enthusiasm for original concepts headed into the new year -- if only as a path to creating new franchises.

It's hard to see Fox not green lighting a follow-up to "Avatar" or Warners not producing a second "Sherlock Holmes" pic. (The latter, starring Robert Downey Jr., closed the year at $140.7 million through just 10 days of release.)

Meantime, 3D cinema has been great for movie theaters, but extra-dimensional theatrical releases can present an awkward mission for studios marketing the same movies as 2D home-entertainment titles.

"3D is very much here," said Adam Fogelson, recently installed as film chief at Universal following the studio's series of '09 box office disappointments. "But while we have absolutely seen an uptick in box office revenue, the movies that have been released in 3D have faced an even tougher challenge in that the DVD releases of 3D films have performed less well and enough to question whether the total revenue was greater than a 3D the film would have had in 2D."

Universal will release its first 3D movie next summer, when animated comedy "Despicable Me" hits theaters July 9.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





'Avatar' Soars Into $1-Billion Territory

Strong foreign ticket sales help make the science-fiction movie the fifth in history to pass the watermark.
Ben Fritz

One of the riskiest movies of all times is now officially one of the most successful at the box office.

When "Avatar" opened, its solid but far from stellar results left 20th Century Fox uncertain about whether the $430 million that it and two financing partners had invested to produce and market the 3-D film would pay off.

Less than three weeks later, there's no doubt. Director James Cameron's science-fiction epic on Sunday became only the fifth movie in history to gross more than $1 billion worldwide and, by far, was the fastest to do so.

The first three days of 2010 were spectacular for the movie industry, a feat considering that no new movies opened Friday. Every film in the top 10 dropped less than 38% from the previous weekend; a drop of less than 40% usually is seen as a modest figure.

Three of last week's releases -- "Sherlock Holmes," "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" and "It's Complicated" -- continued to have strong box-office appeal, but "Nine" was unable to recover from its disastrous start.

Total receipts were up 50% from the first weekend last year, setting Hollywood off to a strong start after a year in which domestic ticket sales grew 10% and attendance rose nearly 6%, according to Hollywood.com.

Ticket sales for "Avatar" fell only 10% in the U.S. and Canada to a studio-estimated $68.3 million, the biggest-ever third-weekend take. It blew away the previous record of $45 million set by "Spider-Man" in 2002, even accounting for inflation.

With $352.1 million already in the bank from domestic theaters, "Avatar" is on track to end up with at least $450 million domestically and perhaps significantly more if declines stay modest.

But "Avatar" has been strongest overseas, where it grossed $133.5 million in 110 markets this weekend, bringing its total to $670.2 million. It is already the fourth-highest grossing movie internationally and soon is expected to become the second, surpassing the $752 million collected by "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King."

"Avatar" already is the highest-grossing film ever in Russia, the fourth-highest in Spain and Australia, and the second-biggest U.S. movie ever in France, India and South Korea. It opens Monday in China, an increasingly lucrative market for effects-laden pictures.

Its only real competition in raking in more money than any film ever is Cameron's last film, "Titanic," which grossed $1.8 billion in 1997 and 1998. To beat that mark, "Avatar," which is currently at $1.03 billion, would have to keep generating big returns well into February or March.

Theaters with 3-D screens have accounted for about 75% of its returns in the U.S. and Canada and 59% to 88% in major foreign countries.

Ticket sales for Warner Bros.' re-imagining of "Sherlock Holmes," with Robert Downey Jr. in the starring role, dropped 38% in its second weekend, more than any other movie in the top 10. But with $38.4 million this weekend and a domestic total of $140.7 million, it's on solid ground given its $90-million production budget.

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" slid 25% from its opening, collecting $36.6 million and bringing its total ticket sales since Dec. 23 to a healthy $157.4 million. Fox and New Regency spent $70 million to produce the family film.

Universal Pictures' romantic comedy "It's Complicated," starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, fell 15% in weekend receipts, bolstering director Nancy Meyers' reputation for making movies that play well for a long period of time. It grossed $18.7 million over the weekend and has collected a total of $59.1 million domestically. If declines stay small, Universal and Relativity Media should make good on the roughly $85 million they spent to make the movie.

The musical adaptation "Nine," which was financed by Weinstein Co. and Relativity, dropped only 22% from its Christmas Day opening in wide release. After a dismal start, however, its $4.3-million weekend leaves it with a total of just $14 million.

Several movies in the top 10 saw ticket sales increase this weekend, an unusual occurrence. Receipts for "The Blind Side" grew 10%, and "The Princess and the Frog" rose 11%.

But "Princess," Disney's first hand-drawn cartoon in five years, is at roughly the same domestic total after four weeks in wide release as such financially disappointing recent animated features from the studio as "Bolt" and "Meet the Robinsons."

Among movies playing on only a handful of screens, "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and the late Heath Ledger, took in a solid $130,817 at four theaters, bringing its total after two weeks to $348,677.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,4580669.story





"Avatar" Headed to No. 2 at All-Time Box Office
Carl DiOrio

By this time next week, James Cameron should have the two highest-grossing films in history.

The amazing feat for Cameron, his Lightstorm Entertainment production shingle and "Avatar" -- which has topped $1 billion worldwide -- follows the filmmaker's success in 1997-98 with "Titanic," the top-grossing picture ever. Fox is handling worldwide distribution on "Avatar" after partnering with Paramount for the release of "Titanic."

Like that film, "Avatar" is ringing up far more foreign revenues than in the United States and Canada. In fact, the pricey picture only now is poised to crack the list of top 10 all-time domestic grossers.

"It doesn't matter where we are domestically," said Jon Landau, Cameron's producing partner at Lightstorm. "The movie business has become an international business. When you release movies, you have to figure out whether the movies will play internationally."

Landau deflected a question about how high "Avatar" could fly by recalling the comment of one-time Fox distribution executive Tom Sherak, now president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "It depends how many people go to see it," Landau deadpanned.

Meanwhile, even executives at rival studios seem to be getting a kick out of the mind-bending performance of Fox's motion-capture/live-action 3-D blockbuster, and Landau said he knows why.

"It shows the potential of the industry," he said. "It shows people want to go to the movies."

The eventual rise of "Avatar" to the silver-medal position among all-time global grosses will see the December 18 opener blow past two pictures still ahead in the pecking order. Coming off the weekend with $1 billion and counting, "Avatar" in coming days will rise above 2006's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" ($1.07 billion) and then 2003's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" ($1.12 billion).

"It's not a likelihood -- it's just a question of when," mused one industry observer.

On the other hand, few would suggest "Avatar" has any chance of outdistancing "Titanic," which registered $1.84 billion during the course of its months-long theatrical cruise.

Still, "Avatar" any day now should also replace "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" ($380.3 million) as the 10th-highest-grossing film in domestic box office history. Through Sunday, the film had socked away $352.1 million in North America.

The 2-1/2-hour epic has fetched far more in foreign lucre at an incredible $676.9 million. Action films tend to outperform overseas, but the outsized international tally for "Avatar" also reflects the growing opportunity for film releasing worldwide.

"There are markets in the international marketplace that are just emerging as cinematic forces," Landau said. "Take Russia, for example. Russia has more screens now than they did six months ago, and 'Avatar' is able to capitalize on that. Moviegoers are craving films that they didn't get to see before, to go to the movie theater and escape. Cinemas just didn't exist in many of their hometowns 10 years ago."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





Writer-Directors Wear Both Hats Comfortably
Janelle Tipton

"There's a famous story about Billy Wilder," Nancy Meyers recalls of the days when Wilder was a screenwriter but had not yet become a director. "He wrote a (scene) where a man was having a bowl of soup, and his tie fell into the soup."

Wilder went to the set, only to discover that the scene had changed: The man was no longer wearing a tie, but rather a bowtie -- an object somewhat unlikely to fall into a bowl of soup.

"That was the moment he decided he needed to direct," quips Meyers.

When the age of the Hollywood auteur hit its stride in the 1970s and an explosion of talent wanted to do it the Wilder way, filmmakers like Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma chose to shoot their own screenplays with a minimum of outside interference -- in contrast to the Hollywood heyday of the factory system, when the two tasks were poles apart. These heavyweights set the stage for contemporary auteurs like Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, and while the level of freedom may not be the same as it was in the anything-goes '70s, the advantages remain.

Not every writer wants to direct, but those who do both jobs relish the challenge. How they handle that challenge, however, differs greatly from one filmmaker to another.

Writer-director Scott Cooper thought of those '70s filmmakers when he came to make "Crazy Heart."

"I never attended film school, so what I did was watch films from the 1970s," he says. "I would watch them with the sound off, so I could watch how Terrence Malick or Peter Bogdanovich or Hal Ashby would tell stories with just the frame, the characterization, the lens, and see how they would move the camera and tell the story. That was my autodidactic film school experience."

Despite this being his first time behind the camera, Cooper had a clear vision for the film that was informed by his work as an actor.

"It was all about behavior for me," he says. "So I approached it clearly as a writer, but also as an actor, and then, to give it the visual flair it needed, as a director. But I wanted the film, much like the great films of the '70s, to feel as though it were invisibly directed and edited, so that I wasn't flashy, so that I wasn't saying, 'Wow, watch how clever I am and how I move the camera.'"

That said, Cooper admits to exerting the kind of far-reaching control that comes with directing your own script: "I knew exactly what I wanted every moment. I knew the crease I wanted in (Jeff Bridges') pants; I knew the production design."

Meyers, too, exerts tremendous control over her projects. Yet she steadfastly refuses to make changes to the script once shooting is under way.

"I like the script to be locked well, well, well in advance," she says. "I spend a lot of time on the screenplay and get it in what I hope is shooting shape before I even give it to the actors. Sometimes there's little word changes; you obviously have to accommodate things (such as) a set that didn't work out. Those kinds of normal technical things I do change, but I do not really rewrite once I begin shooting."

The "It's Complicated" filmmaker, who spent 16 years as a writer-producer before shifting to directing, says her screenplays have always been "laid out very carefully in terms of what the expectations were and how (they) would look" because, as the screenwriter, she "can't help but think about how they would be staged."

"You can answer all the questions," she adds. "You understand what it's about and why the scene's in the movie, because you thought so much about it when you were writing it."

Like Meyers, Anderson normally avoids rewriting during the shooting process, but that changed once he began working on his first animated feature, a rollicking stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

"With an animated movie, the process is much slower," he says. "You edit the movie together with storyboards, and then you can watch the whole movie with recordings and drawings, so you can then start rewriting; you're rewriting a cut of the movie." On "Fox," for instance, he added the entire "whack-bat" concept -- a sport at which Mr. Fox excels but his son doesn't -- about six months into production.

Another aspect of the process that differed from the norm was Anderson's decision to do the bulk of the writing at Dahl's house (along with co-writer Noah Baumbach). This offered Anderson the writer an opportunity to hew closely to Dahl's unique world, and also allowed Anderson the director to do some early location scouting.

"I had a thought that maybe we could start writing it at Dahl's house, Gipsy House, in England," Anderson recalls. "And that's where we set to work, and it was actually very inspiring working there because our goal was to try to make the movie as much like Dahl as we could. That's where he'd written it but also where he'd set it."

When Tarantino sat down to write the first draft of "Inglourious Basterds," his audacious, blood-soaked World War II epic, the most exciting part was a task every writer must confront.

"Part of the (challenge) is facing the blank page," he says. "And then when it's all over, there's a movie, where at one point it was just a blank piece of paper."

For Tarantino one of the greatest advantages to writing his own scripts occurs in the casting stage. As the creator of the characters, he says he feels an obligation to do whatever it takes to match the actor to the role and not the other way around. It's that kind of intimate understanding of the characters, he says, that leads to a relatively obscure actor like Christoph Waltz eventually garnering raves for playing the ruthless Nazi Hans Landa.

"One of the things that's just a big thing about me being a writer-director, where they're married the most," Tarantino notes, "is, as a writer, one of the most important things I do is create these characters. And at the end of the day my obligation is to treat these characters with integrity, because I've created them."

He adds, "One of the things that I've learned is that you just always have to stay with your characters when it comes to casting. Your job isn't to get excited by a sexy actor that walks in the room and then you change the character to fit this sexy find that you have. Your job is to take care of the character, find the right actor to play them to make that character just the way you wrote it come alive on the page."

While Tarantino says he doesn't show anyone the script during the writing stage, he has developed a unique method for "finding the bad notes," as he puts it.

"People never read it until I'm done. When I hand it out, it's done. But what I do is I'll read people scenes, usually because I've just finished writing and I'm excited and I call somebody or somebody comes over -- 'I have a new victim! I can read them something!' And I'll do that all throughout the course of writing the script, just constantly read scenes out of context to people. And when I'm doing it I'm not really doing it even to get their comments; I'm doing it to hear it through their ears. I write it, and then I read it out loud, and then I (think), 'Sounds good, sounds cool.'"

Fashion designer Tom Ford didn't initially know he wanted to write his feature directorial debut, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel "A Single Man." But he knew which parts of the book spoke to him and which ones he wanted to emphasize. "If you have a story you want to tell," he says, "it (seemed) natural to me to be very direct in how I wanted to tell it."

While Ford made just two small line alterations during shooting, he did make one major change to the script by adding a voice-over, written after the film was finished.

"It needed the punctuation," he says. "Because the book is an entire internal monologue, I tried desperately not to use any voice-over and to create, in a sense, a silent film where the action would tell the story and then layer on dialogue. But at the end of the film, I realized that I needed a voice-over to set the film up and to really drive home at the end what the message was."

Given that this was his first foray into writing and directing, Ford says he willingly blurred the line between the two disciplines during the writing process.

"I broke all sorts of screenwriting rules," he says. "Since I was directing it, I wrote often even in a shot-by-shot fashion, meaning in the screenplay, it says, 'We start on the ceiling, we're looking at George, we push in, we become intimate with his face.'" Ford visualized the scenes as he wrote them and kept binders of images for each character. "There's a shot in the film of a family in a bomb shelter, and I took it right from the cover of Life magazine 1962."

Did the double task of writing and directing overwhelm him?

"Oh, I loved it," he declares. "I would come home from the office and write a couple of hours every day in the way that other people would run home and read a book. I couldn't wait to get home to rework a scene, or if I thought of something during the day. If I had a holiday, I would write the entire time, and then other times I would have to put it aside for two or three weeks because I just couldn't figure something out and I would just have to sit with it and kind of let it come to me. I absolutely loved it."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





Apple Pulls iPhone App that Upset Hollywood
Chris Matyszczyk

I am sure honest Hollywood agents do exist. It's just that they don't seem to employ the finest PR firms to proselytize their honesty.

This might explain why Oisin Hanrahan, the Irish creator of an iPhone app called SuperAgent, decided that the main character in his game might be a few scruples short of Mother Teresa.

SuperAgent seems to have been well received, a reception that might have led to its being noticed by, well, Hollywood super agents.

According to the Independent, one super agent may have enjoyed a particular interest in this app. His name is Ari Emanuel. He is the agent for so many important acting citizens such as Robert De Niro and Sacha Baron Cohen as well as directors such as Spike Lee. He is even thought to be the person upon whom the character of Ari Gold is based in the delightfully fluffy "Entourage" on HBO.

What is important for today's story, however, is that he has reportedly set his more toothsome legal dogs upon Oisin Hanrahan and his company, Factory Six. You see, the slightly less than honest agent in the SuperAgent game is called Ari.

While I leave you to gather your breath for a moment, let me just whisper that it is not the mere mention of Emanuel's first name that appears to have ruffled his hairline.

The Independent kindly offers details of the cease-and-desist letter that has caused Apple to remove SuperAgent from the App Store.

"The game uses the name 'Ari' for the main character, which clearly is a reference to Mr Emanuel, the co-chief executive officer of WME, one of the world's premier talent agencies," begins the forceful cease-and-desist letter.

It continues as forcefully it began: "[It] clearly intends to capitalize on using Mr Emanuel's and WME's names for the game and possibly mislead the public into thinking that Mr Emanuel and/or WME endorse the game - effectively trading off the goodwill, reputation and fame established by our clients."

Hanrahan deftly told the Independent that because of the "Entourage" series, "Ari" is a name that symbolizes Hollywood in general, not one person in particular. He added: "We're a very small firm, of just three people, and since Apple pulled it we have had no income."

I feel sure that many of you will sympathize with Hanrahan's plight. His arguments appear plausible. His game, just as the "Entourage" show, seems but an amusing diversion from the pains of everyday existence.

But perhaps others might consider that while saying truth to power is an often alluring concept, one should always think carefully before saying jokes to power. Power is a sensitive soul, one that isn't always comfortable with japes. Somehow, for some powerful souls, taking a joke is like Samson admitting he'd always wondered what it would like to be bald.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10423505-71.html





A Look at Apple's Love for DRM and Consumer Lock-Ins

Apple makes great products—you'll get no argument from us. But Apple also likes keeping tight control over those products, and if anyone outside of Apple's blessed circle attempts to get in, the company is more than willing to try to use (or abuse) the law to its advantage.
Jacqui Cheng

Apple is a company known for many things, but embracing copyright freedoms has not been one of them. The company loves creating new and innovative products that challenge the world's perception of what it thought it wanted, but it then turns around and aggressively protects those products from being poked or prodded too much by curious onlookers. Some believe Apple is in the right to do this, while others feel the company could set a better example when it comes to using (or abusing) copyright legislation for its own self-serving purposes.

This is a topic that recently came up during our Premier Subscriber chat with Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. von Lohmann pointed out that Google—a company that is often compared to Apple—has been at the forefront of the pro-innovation copyright agenda, fighting the good fight on behalf of tech companies and their users for many years. When it comes to Apple... not so much. The two companies could not be more different. Let's take a moment to summarize some of Apple's latest pro-DRM and pro-DMCA moves.

Apple <3s DRM
Apple has insisted for years that it would embrace an entirely DRM-free world if music, movie, and TV producers would get behind it. Those walls have largely been broken down when it comes to selling some forms of media (namely music), but Apple isn't exactly anti-DRM in any other sense. Aside from still offering DRM-laden movies and TV shows on iTunes (which can reasonably be attributed to content producers), Apple itself is happy to employ DRM to keep its own products from being used in unapproved ways.
The most obvious is the fact that the company uses DRM to guarantee that iPods and iPhones can't be used with any other software besides iTunes. Not only that, but Apple also uses technology to block out non-Apple devices from syncing with iTunes—à la the Palm Pre saga.

Apple also happily employed HDCP in its implementation of the Mini DisplayPort for its portable machines starting in 2008. This means that certain movies that are HDCP "aware" can now detect whether the movie is being output to an approved display—if not, the movie won't play. DisplayPort itself was designed as an open, extensible standard for computers that offers lower power consumption over DVI, so it was Apple's choice to massage HDCP into the mix for its own (and partners') interests. This is, of course, on top of the HDCP that's already implemented in the Apple TV.

Apple vs. jailbreakers

Given the above, Apple's stance against iPhone jailbreakers isn't too surprising. Jailbreaking allows third parties to create applications and add additional functionality to the iPhone that wouldn't otherwise be allowed, including running background applications and inevitably unlocking the device to be used on unapproved carriers.

Apple argues that this kind of activity is against the DMCA and should be illegal. Why? Because jailbreaking, to Apple, means circumvention of DRM, and why would anyone want to circumvent DRM except to do illegal activities? In its argument to Congress earlier this year, Apple said that the "class of works" (that is, unapproved software) that would come out of jailbroken iPhones infringe on Apple's copyrights—not to mention that such an activity could lead to the total and utter meltdown of the cellular network.

The EFF, on the other hand, says that neither jailbreaking nor installing legally produced programs would violate Apple's copyrights, and that's why jailbreaking should continue to be allowed under the DMCA (at least for the next three years). And, let's be honest here: there are relatively few iPhone users in the world who even want to jailbreak their phones. The threat of a hostile takeover by people using rogue iPhones is practically nonexistent, but Apple wants to exercise its control over all users, not just most of them.

Apple vs. people talking on the Internet
Again, this builds upon Apple's overall stance on DRM and users "breaking" it. Earlier this year, Apple took action on that stance by making legal threats against the company behind BluWiki, OdioWorks LLC, after members posted information discussing how to use the iPod with third-party software. Apple accused OdioWorks of disseminating information to circumvent Apple's DRM and enabling copyright infringement by hosting the pages on iTunesDB, which Apple believed was in violation of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA.

OdioWorks first complied, and then filed a lawsuit against Apple in order to defend the rights of its users. "Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussion," OdioWorks owner Sam Odio said in a statement at the time.

The company asked the court for a judgment saying the discussion didn't violate the DMCA, but that challenge never got a chance to be tested in court—Apple decided to back off in July, notifying the company that it was withdrawing its takedown notifications. However, this wasn't the success that some had hoped for, as Apple didn't withdraw because of anyone's First Amendment rights. "Apple has stopped utilizing the code in question, rendering the code obsolete for the purposes at issue in this action. Publishing that code is no longer of any harm or benefit to anyone," the company said in its letter.

This means that if someone decided to post a new discussion to BluWiki discussing how to use the iPod with third-party software under Apple's new authentication methods, such threats could (and probably will) bubble up again.

It won't be over anytime soon
These are just a few (albeit major) examples of the steps Apple has taken to squelch open discussion and tinkering with its products, despite the fact that these activities barely affect the company's bottom line. Though most of Apple's customers don't know or care about these issues, they do affect us all to some degree or another—especially if Apple tries to use the DMCA in what some consider to be abusive ways. It certainly seems that Apple has embraced the concept of using DRM for the purposes of control, and this behavior is likely to continue for a long time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go make a call on my iPhone while watching some movies on my Apple TV.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...r-lock-ins.ars





Apple Buys Quattro, a Mobile Ad Company
Claire Cain Miller

Apple has bought Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising company, Quattro said on Tuesday. The price was about $300 million, according to a person briefed on the deal.

The purchase, announced in a post on a Quattro company blog, marks Apple’s first move into the advertising business. It will put the company into direct competition in the mobile ad market with Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, which in November agreed to acquire AdMob, another mobile advertising network, for $750 million. That acquisition has attracted antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. Apple had also been interested in buying AdMob, according to people with knowledge of that deal.

Quattro is involved in the young but quickly growing business of placing mobile ads on smartphone screens. Its clients include Ford, Procter & Gamble and Visa, and the ads range from full-blown applications to small brand ads on a group of Web sites that include those of Time, CBS Interactive and Gawker Media. Quattro places the ads on iPhones, Android devices and other smartphones.

According to Nielsen, the number of smartphone subscribers in the United States jumped 72 percent to 26.1 million between the second quarter of 2008 and the same period in 2009. Twenty percent of cellphone users use their phones to read the Web, where they are also served ads, and that group is growing. Apple has sold 78 million iPhones and iPod Touches, analysts say.

Andy Miller, Quattro’s chief executive and co-founder, who previously co-founded and sold m-Qube to VeriSign, will report directly to Steven P. Jobs, the person briefed on the deal said. In the post on the Quattro blog, Mr. Miller revealed that his new title was vice president for mobile advertising at Apple. Apple’s plan to buy Quattro was first reported Monday by AllThingsD, an industry blog.

Quattro, which is based in Waltham, Mass., was founded in 2006. It has raised about $28 million in funding from Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...ad-company/?hp





Demand for Android Phones Makes 'Monstrous' 250% Jump

ChangeWave sees huge leap in Google Android interest; Apple iPhone demand to slip
Gregg Keizer

A "monstrous" jump in demand for Android-equipped smartphones has turned the market upside down, a retail pollster said today.

Of the people who told ChangeWave Research in a mid-December survey that they planned to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 21% said they expected to purchase a handset powered by Google's Android operating system. That number represented a 250% increase over the 6% that pegged Android as their mobile OS of choice when ChangeWave last queried consumers' plans in September.

"That change rivals anything that we've seen in the last three years of the smartphone market," said Paul Carton, ChangeWave's director of research, adding that the sudden surge in consumer interest in Android had "roiled" the market.

"This is an indication that Android has finally caught consumer interest," added Carton, who cited the recent advertising campaign by Motorola for its Droid smartphone as the reason why interest in the operating system has skyrocketed.

In September, the Android OS was tied for last place in consumers' preference among the major mobile operating systems. Since then, it "has surged into second place ahead of all competitors except the iPhone OS," said Carton.

The iPhone remained the No. 1 desired smartphone, according to ChangeWave's latest survey, with 28% of those who plan on buying in the next three months saying that they would choose an Apple device. However, that figure was down four percentage points from September, when 32% said that they would acquire an iPhone.

The drop in the iPhone's planned purchasing percentage wasn't unexpected. "The first two quarters after the introduction of the iPhone 3G [in mid-2008], you saw this huge pop in buying plans, and then a downtick," Carton said. "Same for the 3GS ... actually, the drop-off for the iPhone after the 3GS was far less than the 3G."

Android's leap translated into good news for Motorola and HTC, the most prominent makers of Google-powered handsets, with the former reaping most of the benefit. Motorola's share of smartphone purchases in the next 90 days shot up from 1% in September to 13% in December. Carton tagged the company's Droid as the reason.

"[It's] the first increase for Motorola we've seen in three years," said Carton.

All smartphone makers and mobile operating system developers are benefiting from the industry-wide upswing in sales, Carton contended. Approximately 42% of the 4,000-plus American consumers surveyed in December said they owned a smartphone, a three-point increase over September and 10 points higher than a year ago. "If a rising tide lifts all boats, then just by itself, the increase [in sales] means that it gets dicey to bet against anybody, or to bet on just one company," Carton said. "But Android phones are clearly going to benefit the most from this tick up."

The only mobile OS makers that Carton would peg as being in real trouble from Android's new popularity were Palm and Microsoft. "This puts a lot of pressure on the Palm Pre," he said, noting that the Pre didn't have enough time to solidify its place in the smartphone market before Android handsets became the newest and latest rage. "And Windows Mobile ... those are the [operating systems] that have to worry about Android's numbers, they're the ones that have to strike back somehow, not Apple or RIM. It's hard to bet against those two."

Consumers who own an Android-powered smartphone are almost as satisfied with their purchases as are iPhone owners, who have been historically extremely happy with their hardware. Of the people who told ChangeWave they had an Android handset, 72% said they were "very satisfied;" 77% of those who reported they own an iPhone answered the same way.

By comparison, only 41% of the people who own a BlackBerry said they were very satisfied, and just 25% of Windows Mobile-equipped smartphone owners rated their satisfaction using that phrase.

While he acknowledged the buzz around the expected announcement on Tuesday of a Google-branded smartphone, Carton argued that it was unlikely that the Nexus One would kill sales of other Android smartphones. He cited Motorola's Droid as especially immune, in large part because of its link to Verizon.

"Unless Google's phone is magnitudes better, I can't see people walking out of Verizon and heading to T-Mobile," he said. Reports have pegged T-Mobile as the likely carrier partner for Google's own smartphone. "Look at Google's move not in the short term," Carton said. "But for three or four years from now."

ChangeWave has posted some of the smartphone survey data on its Web site.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...trous_250_jump





A Rival Looms Over the iPhone
Miguel Helft

Google’s expected unveiling on Tuesday of a rival to the iPhone is part of its careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next.

The rapid emergence of the smartphone as a versatile computing device may be as much a challenge as an opportunity for Google, which built its multibillion-dollar empire largely on the sale of small text ads linked to search queries typed on PCs.

As people increasingly rely on powerful mobile phones instead of PCs to access the Web, their surfing habits are bound to change. What’s more, online advertising could lose its role as the Web’s primary economic engine, putting Google’s leadership role into question.

“The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That has the potential to change the economics of the Internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”

In recent decades, the power of industry giants like I.B.M. and Microsoft, which once seemed unassailable, waned as computing shifted from big mainframes to PCs, and from PCs to the Internet. Many analysts say it is now Google that is faced with a less certain future in the face of another shift.

Still, they say Google saw this coming years ago and has been preparing for it. Google executives now say they are confident that the company will thrive as the mobile Internet grows.

“We are incredibly excited about the opportunities that we see in mobile,” Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google who oversees mobile applications, said in an interview on Monday. “We have invested a considerable amount, and we can now really provide a compelling mobile experience.”

Top Google executives, including Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, have long said that the mobile Internet was Google’s biggest opportunity for new growth. They orchestrated a string of acquisitions of companies with mobile-related technology, including Android, maker of a cellphone operating system; GrandCentral, a service for making calls that can bypass telephone lines; and AdMob, an advertising network for mobile applications. The AdMob deal is awaiting approval from regulators.

Google also invested far more aggressively than its competitors in mapping technologies and services tied to a user’s location, which are likely to become the vital underpinnings of new advertising systems on GPS-equipped mobile phones. Last month, Google came close to paying more than $500 million to acquire Yelp, a Web site for business listings and reviews. While the deal collapsed at the last minute, Google’s interest underscored its determination to become a force in mobile advertising.

And in recent years, Google has worked systematically to loosen the hold that other companies have on the mobile industry.

In 2008, for example, Google bid $4.7 billion in a government auction of the nation’s airwaves. While Google had no intention of winning, it bid to ensure that the airwaves would be subject to so-called openness requirements, meaning that Verizon Wireless, which won the bidding, would not be able to exclude Google services like Web search, Gmail and maps from phones using those frequencies.

The expected unveiling on Tuesday of the Nexus One, a thin, touch-screen handset built to Google’s specifications and made by the Taiwanese company HTC, is a challenge to a newly minted industry power: Apple, whose iPhone dominates the high end of the smartphone market. While the iPhone sends millions of people to Google’s search and other services, some of the company’s applications, like Google Voice, have not been allowed to run on the phone.

Analysts say that with the Nexus One, which Google plans to sell to consumers directly, the company is trying to free itself from Apple’s growing influence. It also wants to broaden the appeal of Android’s technology. The phone is expected to be sold unlocked, allowing consumers to buy service plans separately.

Mr. Gundotra declined to discuss specifics of the Nexus One. But he said all of Google’s mobile moves were driven by one objective: pushing the industry to open up in an attempt to replicate on mobile phones the environment that has allowed the PC-driven Web to grow at explosive rates.

“Before the mobile Web really started to take off, there were many barriers to consumers,” he said. “Sometimes it was limited choice about what you could do with your phone,” he said, adding that in some cases, it could take as many as 19 clicks for a user to get to Google’s site.

Some of Google’s moves, like its bid for spectrum, confounded many in the industry. But analysts say that Google’s actions proved shrewd and that the company has, to a large extent, helped open up the mobile Web and ensure that its own services, and its ads, will be accessible to all.

“You could take a view that this is a very geeky company,” said Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” a book about the shift to Internet computing. “That underestimates the strategy that underlies all these moves.”

Some analysts say that with the early success of the Android operating system, which is built into phones from several manufacturers, Google is already beating Microsoft, its biggest rival, in the mobile business. And they note that mobile phone software is tethered to the Web more than PC programs, playing to Google’s strengths in Internet computing.

Indeed, Google has moved so aggressively to establish itself as a force in the mobile Web that it has already attracted government scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission recently stepped up its review of Google’s proposed $750 million acquisition of AdMob, as some advocacy groups are raising alarms that the deal could extend Google’s dominance of online advertising into mobile phones.

Yet some questions remain unanswered: Will advertising remain central to the Web economy as consumers shift to mobile phones from PCs? And will applications change people’s reliance on search engines?

Google’s text ads are sold through an auction system, and analysts say that some of its most lucrative ads show up during intensive online research tasks, like finding a vacation rental or securing a good rate on a mortgage. Those are more likely to be conducted on a PC than on a cellphone.

“It certainly remains to be seen how big mobile advertising will be,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Predictions about the growth potential of mobile advertising vary widely. A recent report on the mobile Internet by Morgan Stanley, for instance, said that while advertising accounts for 40 percent of revenue on the desktop Internet, it accounts for just 5 percent of revenue on the mobile Internet. That could change, as more personalized advertising technologies, including coupons and offers that are aimed at users based on their location, could usher in a new wave of growth in digital marketing.

At the same time, some surveys show that users are wary of ads that could clutter the precious real estate on their small cellphone screens. And phone users seem more willing to pay a few dollars for applications or content than PC users, potentially reducing the importance of advertising.

Another risk for Google is that popular smartphone apps could erode the power of its search engine. In a recent note to investors, Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, wrote that apps could eat into search revenue by giving users direct access to many commercial Web sites.

“When you go to Google and search for a product or for Amazon, that’s a way for Google to make money,” Mr. Schachter said. “But if you have the Amazon or the eBay app on your mobile phone home screen, you are more likely to click on that button and buy something without ever using Google.”

Mr. Gundotra dismissed those concerns. While he refused to provide specifics about Google’s mobile revenue, he said that its rate of growth mirrored the company’s results when it began selling ads on its Web site.

“It is very, very encouraging,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/te.../05google.html





In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google
Noam Cohen

IN a manifestolike e-mail message sent last month to all Google employees, Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president for product management, told them to commit to greater transparency and open industry standards. Rather than hoard knowledge to exploit it, he wrote in “The Meaning of Open,” share it and watch Google and the entire Internet prosper.

With the Chrome browser, however, Google’s inclusive principles are being put to the test: a new version of the browser allows, one might even say encourages, users to stop Google ads from appearing.

How Google got to such a position speaks to the inherent dynamism (or is that chaos?) of business on the Internet.

Google announced on Dec. 8 that the test, or beta, version of Chrome would accept extensions — little programs that improve or customize the browser’s performance — as a way of harnessing the creativity of an outside community of programmers who would work free and agree to share what they make with others. The standard version should do likewise in a matter of months, Google said.

Google’s extensions mimic the “add-on” system that has flourished on the open-source Firefox browser.

As it happens, two 28-year-olds, Michael Gundlach, an independent programmer from outside Athens, Ga., and Tom Joseph, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Mount Sinai Medical School, separately went through the exact same experience. In telephone interviews, each told of excitedly looking to see if he could install a Chrome extension of his favorite Firefox add-on, Adblock Plus, which prevents ads from appearing on Web sites, whether bright flashing animation or the text ads that Google serves up after a search.

They did not find one. So, naturally, each spent a day or so creating a rough version of such an extension, with much more work to come. AdThwart from Mr. Joseph is now No. 2 in popularity among the more than 1,200 Chrome extensions; AdBlock from Mr. Gundlach is No. 8. Together, they already have more than 120,000 users.

“When I saw they made extensions on Dec. 8,” Mr. Gundlach said, “I said I bet they have an ad blocker. When I saw they didn’t, I said I need to make this thing, and I need to make it awesome.”

Despite his enthusiasm, Mr. Gundlach, like Mr. Joseph, told of wondering if Google would even allow such potentially self-harming extensions.

Each read the rules, and when convinced that an ad-blocking extension wouldn’t be kicked off, began programming in earnest.

Mr. Joseph said he was “honestly a little surprised that they kept true to their word and allowed ad-blockers,” but then explained that in many ways, Google’s hands were tied. Programmers who make iPhone applications, whose work exists at the sufferance of Apple, he said, at least share in the profit. Google needs to give great latitude to programmers as a way of “keeping credibility with the people who make extensions.”

Both programmers said their tasks were much easier because they had borrowed from the Firefox add-on — whether its code or its carefully compiled affiliated list of Internet addresses where ads come from. The Chrome extensions work differently, though: ad blockers on Chrome cannot prevent the ads from arriving on a Web page, as is done on Firefox; instead they mask the ads after they arrive.

For now, Google is playing only on the fringes by tolerating ad-blocking programs on Chrome, despite the implied threat to its livelihood. Chrome is still a fringe browser — in the vastness of the Internet, 40 million users is still fringe — and ad-blocking browser additions are still a relatively fringe experience.

“Ad blockers are still used by a tiny proportion of the Internet population, and these aren’t the kind of people susceptible to ads anyway,” Wladimir Palant, who runs Adblock Plus on Firefox, wrote in an e-mail message. Adblock is the most downloaded add-on for Firefox and has more than seven million users.

Still, Google seems confident that Internet users will be able to distinguish between their ads and more aggressive display advertising.

Speaking at a conference on Dec. 11 in Mountain View, Calif., Linus Upson, engineering director at Google, said there were many discussions before allowing ad-blocking programs “because Google makes all of its money from advertising.”

But he explained that the prevailing thinking was that “it’s unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying.”

“So I think the market will sort this out,” he said. “At least that is the bet we made when we opened the extension gallery and didn’t have any policy against ad-blockers.”

Mr. Gundlach, who once worked for Google in Ireland helping to ensure that ads kept appearing on Web sites, says he does not fear for media companies that increasingly rely on online ad revenue. Sounding like a firm believer of Mr. Rosenberg’s embrace-the-chaos manifesto, Mr. Gundlach said a brighter day would emerge from the challenge of ad blockers.

Extensions like his, he said, will make “every one else change their ways, to make ads more useful. Everyone wins, that’s competition. The ideal result would be to retire this extension because the entire Web was covered with ads that people loved and no one wanted to block them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/bu...ia/04link.html





Google’s Nexus One Is Bold New Face in Super-Smartphones
Walter S. Mossberg

Google this week is taking two dramatic steps to try to catapult devices using its Android mobile operating system into stronger competition with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry in the battle for supremacy in the super-smartphone category.

First, the search giant is bringing out a beautiful, sleek new Android phone, the Nexus One, built to its specifications. Second, it has decided to offer the new phone—and future models—to consumers directly, unlocked, via the Web, and then invite multiple carriers to compete to sell service plans and subsidized versions of the hardware.

One carrier is ready to support the Nexus One on day one: the U.S. arm of T-Mobile, a longstanding Google (GOOG) partner. The new Google Phone, built by HTC of Taiwan, will cost $529 unlocked direct from Google, at google.com/phone. It will cost $179 from T-Mobile online with a two-year contract that will set you back $79.99 a month.

Verizon Wireless (VZ) in the U.S. and Vodafone (VOD) in Europe will sell the Nexus One eventually at subsidized prices that haven’t yet been announced. All of this will take place on a Google-hosted Web site, a much easier way to buy a phone and service than is typical today, and one that promises to further weaken the power of the carriers.

The company also plans to sell the costlier, unsubsidized version to consumers in the U.K., Hong Kong and Singapore immediately. Like Americans who buy this unlocked version, these customers will have to purchase carrier service separately, something they should be able to obtain right away by just buying and inserting a SIM card from a carrier with compatible technology. (This initial unlocked phone won’t work with Verizon or Sprint in the U.S., nor on AT&T’s 3G network, only the latter’s slower network.)
The Nexus One has a larger screen than Apple’s phone, and is a bit thinner, narrower and lighter—if a tad longer. And it boasts a better camera and longer talk time between battery charges.

I’ve been testing the Nexus One for a couple of weeks and I like it a lot. It’s the best Android phone so far, in my view, and the first I could consider carrying as my everyday hand-held computer. It is a svelte gray device with a 3.7-inch, high-resolution screen; a thin strip of buttons underneath for home, back, menu and search; and a trackball.

The Nexus One finally has the right combination of hardware and software to give Android a champion that might attract more people away from their iconic iPhones and BlackBerrys. It has a larger screen than Apple’s phone, and is a bit thinner, narrower and lighter—if a tad longer. And it boasts a better camera and longer talk time between battery charges.

Also, because it will be available on the large, well-regarded Verizon 3G network, the Nexus One could tempt American iPhone users, tired of problems with AT&T (T), to switch.

The iPhone still retains some strong advantages. It boasts well over 100,000 third-party apps—around 125,000 by some unofficial estimates—versus around 18,000 for the Android platform. And it has vastly more memory for storing apps, so you can keep many more of them on your phone at any one time. On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is allowed for storing apps. On the $199 iPhone, nearly all of the 16 gigabytes of memory can be used for apps.

In fact, the $199 iPhone 3GS has roughly four times as much user-accessible memory out of the box, though the memory on the Nexus One can be expanded via memory cards. Apple also has a more-fluid user interface, with multitouch gestures for handling photos and Web pages.

As for the BlackBerry, its user interface looks older and clumsier with each passing day, but it has a beautiful physical keyboard many users love, while the Nexus One has a virtual, onscreen keyboard.

The Nexus One is packed with its own tricks. Its version of Android is essentially the same improved edition as the one that appeared on the Motorola (MOT) Droid back in November. But it has a few new features, including an experimental dictation capability. You just press a microphone icon on the keyboard and start talking, and the words appear. In my tests, this worked only adequately at best, and very poorly at worst, but Google insists it will learn and improve.

The phone also has handsome new visual features, including “live wallpaper,” with waving grass or pulsing colored lines; and a new zooming effect when you want to view icons that aren’t on your main screens. In addition, you can now view miniatures of your five main screens to help you navigate to the one you want.

The Nexus One also has all the key software features introduced in the Droid, including free turn-by-turn voice-prompted navigation.

In my tests, overall, the Nexus One worked very well. The latency I had seen in earlier Android phones is gone, due to a slicker version of the operating system and faster chips. The phone feels good in the hand and the screen is magnificent, with much greater resolution than the iPhone’s.

I like very much the way social-networking information, including status messages, is integrated into the contacts app. One tap on a person’s picture in Contacts lets you quickly choose whether to call, email or message her, or map her address—all without opening the contact card itself.

I also liked the pictures and videos I was able to take with the five-megapixel camera and flash, which I preferred to my iPhone’s camera. You can even view a photo slideshow or listen to music when the phone is in the optional desktop dock.

But there are some downsides to the Nexus One. Like all Android phones, it relies too much, in my view, on menus that create extra steps, including some menus that have a built-in “more” button to display a secondary menu of choices.

I also found the four buttons etched into the phone’s bottom panel sticky and hard to press. In addition, although the Nexus One claims seven hours of talk time versus five hours for the iPhone, most of its battery-life claims for other functions are weaker than Apple’s.

For instance, Google claims just 6.5 hours of Wi-Fi Web use per charge, versus nine for the iPhone, and 20 for music playback versus 30. Google claims this is because, unlike Apple, it allows the simultaneous use of third-party apps, which can drain the battery faster.

In addition, the Nexus One, and other Android devices, still pale beside the iPhone for playing music, video and games. The apps available for these functions aren’t nearly as sophisticated as on the Apple devices.

Finally, the iPhone is still a better apps platform. Not only are there more apps, but, in my experience, iPhone apps are generally more polished and come in more varieties.

But, with its fresh phone and bold business model, Google is taking Android to a new level, and that should ramp up the competition in the super-smartphone space.
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100105...mod=ATD_iphone





Nexus Name Irks Author's Estate



Daughter of Philip K. Dick says moniker for Google's phone a 'clear infringement'
Nathan Koppel

As Google Inc. launches its Nexus One phone, one call that the company hasn't made is to the family members of science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, who complain the device's name infringes on one of Mr. Dick's most famous novels.

"We feel this is a clear infringement of our intellectual-property rights," said Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick and the chief executive of Electric Shepherd Productions, an arm of the Dick estate devoted to adapting the late author's works.

"Our legal team is dealing head-on with this," she said Tuesday. An attorney for the estate declined to elaborate on what legal steps it has taken.

Mr. Dick's 1968 novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," which served as the basis for the 1982 cult film "Blade Runner," follows a bounty hunter chasing androids known as Nexus-6 models.

Ms. Hackett believes Google referenced that work in coming up with the name for its new phone, but the company never called her family or attorneys for permission to license the name.

A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Ms. Hackett argues the association between the phone and the book are cemented by the fact that the Nexus One runs Google's Android operating system.

Google has its "Android system, and now they are naming a phone 'Nexus One,'" she said. "It's not lost on the people who are somewhat familiar with this novel."

Attorneys who specialize in trademark disputes don't see a clear-cut case. One key issue is whether consumers are likely to be confused and think Mr. Dick's estate was associated with Google's phone.

"Will people buying the Google phone hear the Nexus One name and think that is just like in 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'" asked Marc Reiner, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, who isn't involved in the matter.

Characters like Mickey Mouse and Indiana Jones that have served as bases for products are much more likely to be able to gain trademark protection. "A character in a book does not automatically get trademark protection," Mr. Reiner said.

It also may be more difficult to win a trademark case in regards to a word like nexus, which is used in other contexts apart from the characters in Mr. Dick's novel, said Beth Goldman, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, who isn't involved in the Google matter.

"Some words are never used for anything except in connection with a particular trademark, like Hershey's," Ms. Goldman said.

That may explain why Verizon Wireless licensed the 'Droid' name from "Star Wars" creator and director George Lucas when it recently launched a Motorola Inc. smart phone with that name.

"We were honored that Verizon chose to name their newest technological venture the DROID smart phone, and we were happy to grant them a license to use the mark," said a spokeswoman for Mr. Lucas's company, Lucasfilm Ltd.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000..._LEFTWhatsNews





Journalist, Freelance and Sci-Fi Authors Groups Take Aim at Google Book Settlement

Three national authors groups comprising more than 4,000 writers and journalists today decried the controversial agreement between Google and author-publisher groups that would allow the tech giant to sell access to millions of books online.

In a letter to Congress, the three groups -- the National Writers Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America -- pointed to what they saw as the overly confusing and ultimately unfair rules that would govern what Google could do with the books if the settlement were to be approved in federal court.

In language by turns wry and outraged, the writer groups accuse Google of inadequately explaining the terms of the agreement to the many authors it could affect, and the Authors Guild and publishing industry of fashioning a deal that favors current authors, while leaving less lucrative out-of-print authors behind.

The deal does not cover books currently in print.

"Think about it," the letter reads. "The existing competitive marketplace is best for the books that publishers care about. It's just the rest of us they want shoved into the straight jacket of the Book Rights Registry which they and the Authors Guild are proposing."

If the settlement were approved, it would include the creation of a "Book Rights Registry" to oversee licensing and revenue claims for all books covered by the agreement -- many of which are out of print but remain copyrighted. Under its current terms, authors are automatically included in the settlement, and must "opt out" if they prefer that their books not appear in Google's search results.

By the nature of older books, many authors are dead or difficult to find.

Still, many authors have objected to being automatically included in the settlement process.

"Are you ‘opting in’ or ‘opting out’ of the Google Books Settlement? If you don’t know what that means – or don’t know what it means for you and your book – you’re in good company," read the letter. "No attempt was made to locate the vast majority of authors, and the rest were sent emails. Of those, how many thought they were email spam and deleted them unread?"

Google declined to directly address the concerns expressed in the letter, noting instead that if it is approved, "the settlement will open access to millions of books while giving authors and publishers new ways to distribute their work online."

The Authors Guild did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...ettlement.html





Kurzweil Takes On Kindle With New E-Reader Platform Blio
Aaron Saenz

Amazon sold more books in digital media than on paper this Christmas and 2010 looks to be the year of the e-reader. Along with Kindle, Stanza, Barnes and Noble Reader, a new hat has been thrown into the ring. Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor and Singularity enthusiast, is planning to debut Blio at CES 2010 in January. Blio is an e-reader platform, not hardware, that can be used on PC, MAC, iPhone and iPod touch. Developed by Kurzweil company knfb Reader, Blio preserves the original format of books including typography, and illustrations, in full color. It also takes advantage of knfb’s high quality text to speech capabilities and supports animation and video content. You can even synchronize a PDF with an audio book to get read-along highlighting. By focusing on the software, and not trying to maintain a hardware device, Kurzweil hopes to provide the most versatile, life-like electronic version of print books and enhance them with multimedia. Best of all, Blio is free.

The race to dominate the electronic reader market is really just starting up. Kindle and Amazon have a firm lead but Stanza, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Samsung are all staying competitive, not to mention potential tablets from Apple and a host of other companies. Heck, for that matter, the PDF format itself is doing very well and provides much of the same experience as an e-reader for many users. While hardware evolution has focused on the best uses of e-ink or the fastest download times, software is all about formatting. How does the book look? Can I read it the way I want to? Are diagrams legible? By preserving original publishing page layouts, Blio may be providing the nearest experience to actually reading a print book you can find. Of course, the question remains, is that what we really want? As traditional media continues to struggle and new media tries to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, there’s no clear understanding of how and what humans will be reading in the next decade.

Yet even if e-readers turn out to be a transitional medium, they are still exerting a powerful influence. Best selling electronic books on Amazon are usually free, or very cheap. This may force publishers to rethink how they make money off their products. Which is why it makes so much sense for Blio to be free as well. The e-reader can be uploaded onto an iPhone or kept on your desktop. From there, users will be able to purchase reading materials at whatever price becomes feasible.

Available books will start with an extensive catalog from Baker & Taylor which should include 50,000+ volumes in January and 180,000+ soon there after. Information released from knfb (see table below) seems to suggest that more than a million books will be available in one format or another. Kurzweil and knfb are working with Google to try to make their extensive catalog of printed materials available for Blio. They are also aiming to have major publishers port their books into PDF for free. Apparently you don’t have to worry about being stuck without something to read.

The e-reading field is still too young, though, to know where it is going. Every time I see a Kindle, or a Sony Reader, I desperately want to buy one, but I never do. I keep telling myself that waiting just six months will mean a better version and more variety to chose from. So far I’ve been right. Too right, maybe. The hardware and software for electronic books keeps improving too quickly for me to settle on a platform.

With Blio, the e-readers are seemingly ready to break the bands of separate hardware and dive into multi-platform use. Tablet PCs and Netbooks, which are set to get cheaper and more popular in the next year, may kill the market for dedicated e-reader devices. In the end, it could all come down to the e-book itself. How much will we pay for these things? Like all e-readers, Blio will adopt some form of DRM and proprietary formatting, and publishers continue to try to maintain high prices for their products. Yet anyone with five minutes can find a torrent and pirate a PDF of a book for free. Where’s the balance?

The bigger question may be, as new media kills printed media will the book as a concept die as well? We live in a hyper-linked digital world here on the Internet, rich with comments, multimedia displays, and advertisements. Books as a format are much simpler (some would say better). As we raise a generation that does most of its reading online, we may see an end to books all together (e- or otherwise). Which is perhaps where Kurzweil’s wiley reasoning starts to become apparent. Blio isn’t just an e-ink version of a paper product, it’s a full color multimedia platform that reads text out loud. I don’t know if Blio will be successful, but it just might be the future.
http://singularityhub.com/2010/01/04...platform-blio/





Microsoft CEO Unveils New HP Tablet
Bill Rigby and Gabriel Madway

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer unveiled a new Hewlett-Packard Co tablet computer on Wednesday, beating Apple Inc's hotly anticipated move into the market.

But analysts were skeptical that Microsoft and HP could generate as much consumer excitement as Apple's new device, widely expected to be unveiled on January 27, though the company has not said anything about it publicly.

Ballmer showed off the new device at the end of his keynote speech at the CES technology show in Las Vegas.

"This great little PC -- which will be available later this year -- I think many customers are going to be very excited about," said Ballmer, using finger touches to flip through a book on the screen using Amazon.com's Kindle software.

"Everyone's fired up about this type of device," said Kim Caughey, senior analyst at fund manager Fort Pitt Capital Group. Microsoft has "a lot of the pieces in place" to make such a device work, she said, but it's not clear that it can claim significant market share.

"How do you make them usable and at a price point people will pay, which I suggest is sub-$500?" asked Caughey.

Ballmer did not detail pricing or when the device will hit stores. An earlier New York Times report said it could go on sale by mid-2010.

Microsoft's presentation, which kicked off the world's biggest consumer technology show, started late after a power outage and suffered a few tech hiccups.

After Ballmer, Microsoft's entertainment and game chief Robbie Bach announced that a new installment of the hugely successful Halo game will be out this year, and its controller-less game system Project Natal will be in stores by the holiday season.

Big Hype

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, and HP, the top personal computer maker, are the latest companies to eye tablets that bridge the gap between laptops and smartphones.

Endpoint Technologies analyst Roger Kay said both companies have experience in designing a touch-screen, tablet-style device but that consumer interest in the category has never lived up to the hype.

That could all change, Kay said, if Apple joins the fray. Microsoft and HP faced a difficult challenge in topping whatever device Apple launches, he added.

"The elephant in the room of course is Apple. Other manufacturers are scrambling to get things together before it defines the market," Kay said. "HP may be looking to put a stake in the ground before Apple makes its move."

Talk of Apple's tablet -- potentially the company's biggest product launch since the iPhone -- has swirled in trading rooms, tech websites and industry forums for months. The speculation helped propel Apple's stock to record highs in January, though some say the device may be overhyped.

Abuzz?

HP has been heavily promoting touch technology across its line of PCs, and just announced new products such as an updated version of its TouchSmart swivel-screen convertible laptop, and a touch-enabled netbook.

Although next-generation tablet PCs are scarcely evident on the market, the technology world is abuzz about their potential.

At this week's CES show, Qualcomm Inc and Nvidia Corp are also expected to unveil so-called smartbooks based on their chips. Freescale Semiconductor already has announced its own version.

Unni Narayanan from Primary Global Research said he does not expect the new tablet to showcase any game-changing innovation, and instead may be more advanced versions of existing HP devices already on the market.

"Our expectation is that it will be a testing-the-waters sort of thing," he said.

From Microsoft's perspective, Kay said the company wants to "highlight and showcase everything that Windows 7 can do."

The new generation of devices will seek to break Intel Corp's stranglehold on PCs -- the chipmaker makes eight out of 10 microprocessors in the global market. Intel's Atom processor now dominates the fast-growing netbook market.

Microsoft's shares fell 0.6 percent to close at $30.77 on Nasdaq. HP was off 0.9 percent at $52.18 on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Editing by Edwin Chan, Richard Chang and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





The Lowdown on Laptops

Sirius Radio's Dr. Steve reveals whether portable devices can damage your family jewels
Dr. Steve

Q. When I'm using my laptop at home I usually rest it on my lap (obviously). Can this cause cancer in my testicles or stomach or anything? Is it killing my sperm count? Is it a stupid thing to do? — W. Riley, Nashville, TN

A. Laptops and other computers have to meet certain FCC criteria to make it to market. One of those criteria is that the device not radiate energy in the radio frequency spectrum. This was great until the invention of Wi-Fi — now your computer is designed to emit radiation. So what is this doing to us?

The good news is that there is no consistent data showing that exposure to radio waves from laptops is dangerous to your health. A study by a European governmental agency concluded that "there is no consistent evidence to date that exposure to RF signals from Wi-Fi and WLANs adversely affect the health of the general population. The frequencies used are broadly the same as those from other RF applications such as FM radio, TV and mobile phones."

Until further studies are done, it seems that computing is relatively safe. Unless you're cruising the "Hot Wives of Giant Rednecks" sites, in which case, good luck.
http://www.mensfitness.com/fitness/585





Washington DC Sues AT&T Over Calling Cards

The attorney general for Washington D.C. has filed a lawsuit against an AT&T Inc <T.N> unit, seeking to recover consumers' unused balances on prepaid calling cards.

The suit claims that AT&T should turn over unused balances on the calling cards of consumers whose last known address was in Washington, D.C. and have not used the calling card for three years.

"AT&T's prepaid calling cards must be treated as unclaimed property under district law," the attorney general's office said in a statement.

According to the attorney general's office, that sum, known in the industry as "breakage," represents some 5 to 20 percent of the total balances purchased by consumers who use the calling cards.

States and municipalities have often similarly used unclaimed property laws, known as escheat laws, to claim ownership of unused retail gift card balances.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The case is: District of Columbia vs. AT&T Corp, Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

(Reporting by Emily Chasan; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BU3NF20091231





USA Home to More Open Wireless WiFi Broadband Hotspots than EU and UK
MarkJ

WeFi, a free wireless Wi-Fi broadband Hotspot locator website with a database of 47,000,000 access points around the world, has revealed that 40% of Hotspots in the USA are unlocked and do not require a security password. This compares with 25% in Europe.

According to WeFi’s data, a traveler would find a higher percentage of open hotspots in countries such as Thailand, Israel, Brazil, Argentina and the Bahamas as compared with both the US and Europe. Across the world, approximately 30% of recorded Wi-Fi access points are unlocked, while some 70% are locked

Within Europe, out of the Top 10 countries in terms of Wi-Fi deployment, WeFi reveals that the most "Wi-Fi friendly countries" are Belgium and Norway, while the highest percentage of locked access points can be found in Germany and Spain.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...eu-and-uk.html





MagicJack's Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees

MagicJack's next act: Making cell phone fees disappear? Carrier applause not expected
Peter Svensson

The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that's been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that's sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.

The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.

YMax Corp., which is based in Palm Beach, Fla., said this week at the International Consumers Electronics Show that it plans to start selling the device in about four months for $40, the same price as the original magicJack. As before, it will provide free calls to the U.S. and Canada for one year.

The device is, in essence, a very small cellular tower for the home.

The size of a deck of cards, it plugs into a PC, which needs a broadband Internet connection. The device then detects when a compatible cell phone comes within 8 feet, and places a call to it. The user enters a short code on the phone. The phone is then linked to the magicJack, and as long as it's within range (YMax said it will cover a 3,000-square-foot home) magicJack routes the call itself, over the Internet, rather than going through the carrier's cellular tower. No minutes are subtracted from the user's account with the carrier. Any extra fees for international calls are subtracted from the user's account with magicJack, not the carrier.

According to YMax CEO Dan Borislow, the device will connect to any phone that uses the GSM standard, which in the U.S. includes phones from AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA. At a demonstration at CES, a visitor's phone with a T-Mobile account successfully placed and received calls through the magicJack. Most phones from Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. won't connect to the device.

Borislow said the device is legal because wireless spectrum licenses don't extend into the home.

AT&T, T-Mobile and the Federal Communications Commission had no immediate comment on whether they believe the device is legal, but said they were looking into the issue. CTIA — The Wireless Association, a trade group, said it was declining comment for now. None of them had heard of YMax's plans.

Borislow said YMax has sold 5 million magicJacks for landline phones in the last two years, and that roughly 3 million are in active use. That would give YMax a bigger customer base than Internet phone pioneer Vonage Holdings Corp., which has been selling service for $25 per month for the better part of a decade. Privately held YMax had revenue of $110 million last year, it says.

U.S. carriers have been selling and experimenting with devices that act similarly to the wireless magicJack. They're called "femtocells." Like the magicJack, they use the carrier's licensed spectrum to connect to a phone, then route the calls over a home broadband connection. They improve coverage inside the home and offload capacity from the carrier's towers.

But femtocells are complex products, because they're designed to mesh with the carrier's external network. They cost the carriers more than $200, though some sell them cheaper, recouping the cost through added service fees. YMax's magicJack is a much smaller, simpler design.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9511411





Tellyphone

America is finally poised to get mobile television

YOUR correspondent is always miffed when he sees others taking for granted things he has waited years for. Case in point: the way the Japanese think it is perfectly normal to watch live national and local television free on their mobile phones. In fact, they can do so on practically anything they care to carry around with them—from portable game consoles and electronic dictionaries to satnavs for their cars. And it is not just in Japan that you can watch live television on the hoof. It is also taken for granted in South Korea, China, Brazil and parts of Europe.

Sure, you can do it—sort of—on mobile phones in America. But it certainly is not free; nor is it widespread or capable of providing local news. Verizon, America’s largest mobile operator, offers ten channels of news, sports, prime-time shows and cartoons for an additional $15 a month. AT&T, the number two mobile-phone company, offers a larger package for somewhat less. Both carriers use a technology from Qualcomm called MediaFLO that can deliver more than 20 channels of television to mobile phones.

Unlike elsewhere in the world, though, where mobile television signals are transmitted by broadcasters along with the rest of their over-the-air programming, the “V Cast” and “Mobile TV” television services offered by Verizon and AT&T respectively are streamed jerkily across their cellular networks. That gobbles up precious bandwidth, reducing the network capacity for everyone else.

It is also expensive. It costs carriers around $4 a minute to send a video stream over a cellular network. The comparable figure for beaming live television over the airwaves is less than one cent a minute. Public broadcasting services generally absorb the small additional cost. Commercial broadcasters slot in advertising, which more than makes up the difference. Either way, when beamed rather than streamed, mobile television is free.

Television stations are more than willing to provide mobile versions of their daily fare. With plummeting audience figures, they have been desperate to bring wayward viewers back into the fold. One way of doing so is to encourage people with mobile phones that can show video to use them to catch up on last night’s sitcoms, late shows and sports events.

Better still, the biggest users of mobile television—18 to 34 year-olds—are the audience advertisers would kill for. Evidence shows that, rather than eroding the broadcasters’ viewing figures still further, letting people watch television programmes on portable devices increases audiences for their terrestrial programming generally. Offering free access seems to reinforce the broadcaster’s brand, and boosts viewer loyalty.

With their minuscule screens, mobile phones, game consoles and satnavs are never going to replace television sets. As broadcasters elsewhere have found, mobile viewers “snack” on 15 minutes or so of television programming at a time. They do so mainly to catch up on the news, the sports results and the weather.

The Japanese have been watching wansegu (“1seg”) television since 2005. The country’s early start in mobile television owes as much to its sprawling suburbs as to its broadcasting acumen. Millions of commuters with video-enabled phones in their pockets face tedious daily journeys on crammed commuter trains—with little elbow room for anything more than texting, playing video games or watching television on their phones. The reception isn’t great while travelling at speed and doesn’t work at all underground. But the quality is improving all the time.

In Japan, each of the 50 digital channels of terrestrial television in the UHF band is split into 13 segments. In each channel, high-definition television along with its lesser digital brethren hogs 12 segments, with the remaining one reserved for mobile receivers (hence the name “1seg”). Its bandwidth of 428 kilohertz means a single segment can carry a bare-bones video picture, compact disc-quality audio, and text for news flashes, weather details and emergency announcements. Before being compressed for transmission, the video stream is reformatted for the standard Japanese phone’s 320-by-240 pixel screen.

Elsewhere, the preferred technology for beaming television to mobile phones is known as DVB-H (short for digital video broadcasting to a hand-held). Nowadays, commercial services using DVB-H, which was officially adopted by the European Union in 2004, exist throughout much of Asia as well as in Europe. Brazil, with its historical ties to Japan, has adopted a version of the 1seg system.

Where does this leave America? As with much else concerning mobile phones, it leaves it once again scrambling to catch up. At the Consumer Electronics Show being held in Las Vegas between January 7th and 10th, more than a dozen companies will introduce a variety of new products for mobile television technology.

Things have certainly improved since last June, when analogue television broadcasting in the country finally fell silent. The switch to all-digital TV has released chunks of broadcasting spectrum for other uses. Some 30 television stations in 17 cities across the country have now installed additional transmitters on their towers to beam live local broadcasts to mobile receivers mostly for nothing.

The technology for doing so, known as ATSC M/H (advanced television systems committee—mobile/handheld), was formally approved a couple of months ago after years of discussion and subsequent field trials. Like mobile television services in other countries, ATSC M/H is derived from the national digital television standard for beaming programmes to fixed antennas on rooftops. As is to be expected, ordinary digital transmission is nowhere near robust enough to cope with the problems experienced by a mobile receiver, which can suffer from all sorts of doppler-shift effects and multipath radio interference as it moves around the place.

The biggest difference between the terrestrial form of ATSC and its mobile derivative, however, is that the newcomer uses the robust internet-protocol form of transport. Instead of being sent as a steady stream of data, ATSC M/H fires its video and audio information in bursts of small packets that are collected and stored at the receiving end before being reassembled into a continuous stream of television programming. This “burst mode” of transmission allows the power-gobbling part of the mobile receiver to be turned off for 90% of the time, thereby prolonging its battery life. A typical mobile-phone battery should provide about three-and-a-half hours of television viewing before needing to be recharged.

The big question now is whether the 800 television stations in America that have embraced the new ATSC M/H standard can persuade the mobile phone operators to have the necessary television-tuner chips built into their handsets. Both Verizon and AT&T, which between them account for more than half the mobile phone market in America, are committed to Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO system—and have spent fortunes beefing up their networks in a bid to improve the video experience. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has been talking about becoming a mobile-television distributor in its own right. The plot for mobile viewers thickens.

As Japanese and Korean broadcasters found in the past, it took concerted government effort to get their countries’ mobile phone companies on board. But once they were, the market for television phones took off rapidly. Over 80% of mobiles in both countries now have television tuners built in.

Carriers in America have far greater control over which handsets people can use on their networks. The mobile-phone companies have talked endlessly about “opening” up their networks so that consumers can have greater choice, but little has happened. It looks as though the Federal Communications Commission may yet have to step in if the industry as a whole is to make its long-overdue leap into the present.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetech...ry_id=15174509





Skype to Offer Video Service on LG, Panasonic TVs

Privately held Skype has forged deals with consumer electronics makers LG Electronics and Panasonic in a bid to move its Internet video service beyond the desktop computer to the living room TV.

The service, which includes free video calls between Skype members, will compete with consumer video conference services being developed by bigger companies such as networking giant Cisco Systems Inc and Polycom Inc, which plans to develop consumer video services with International Business Machines Corp.

Skype, a former eBay unit, said both LG and Panasonic will have high-definition TVs supporting its service around mid-year.

Both television makers will embed the Skype technology in television models with Internet connections and will sell separate Web cameras that have built in microphones for television viewers who want to use Skype.

Skype said Panasonic will support Skype in its VT and G series televisions in the United States, with screen sizes up to 65 inches. LG will embed Skype in 26 new LCD and plasma screen TVs, which will also come in a range of sizes.

Both LG and Panasonic are expected to demonstrate the service this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual gadget showcase in Las Vegas.

Skype also plans to announce support for high-definition video services on computers at the technology show, including partnerships with makers of high-definition Web camera suppliers faceVsion and In Store Solutions. High-definition Skype services will work on computers with a 1.8 Gigahertz processor and a high-speed broadband connection of about 1 megabits per second upward, Skype said.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Panasonic Announce World's First Integrated Twin-Lens Full HD 3D Camcorder
Tim Hanlon

Shooting in 3D has traditionally required a complex, bulky and fragile rig using two cameras and additional hardware to calibrate and adjust them. Panasonic's straight-forwardly-named Twin-lens Full HD 3D camcorder looks to radically change the 3D game, with integrated lenses and dual memory card slots allowing you to capture 3D footage immediately, with just one device.

The camcorder records onto inexpensive SDHC/SD memory cards, thankfully abandoning the P2 system used for its concept 3D camera, and the outrageously expensive P2 memory cards along with it.

While it's far cheaper than building your own 3D rig, the SRP of US$21,000 means we're not likely to see the next breakout indie film in 3D, but given the drop in price (and jump in video capabilities) between Canon's 5D Mark II and subsequent 7D, who knows what'll happen over the next couple of years.

The Twin-lens Full HD 3D camcorder will be available in Q4 2010, and Panasonic plans to release a 3D Full HD LCD monitor for use in the field, and a digital mixer for live 3D broadcasting shortly after.
http://www.gizmag.com/panasonic-twin...mcorder/13739/





Discovery, Imax, Sony Form 3D Television Channel
Brian Stelter

Discovery, Imax and Sony are forming a joint venture for a 3D television channel, two people with knowledge of the deal said Tuesday.

The joint venture will be announced sometime Tuesday, timed to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where 3D television is expected to be a hot topic.

The three companies will own equal stakes in the channel, according to one of the people with knowledge of the deal, who requested anonymity because the channel had not been announced.

Discovery Communications, which operates the Discovery Channel, TLC and other cable channels, will distribute the channel, which has a 2011 start date. It is expected to showcase a mix of 3D content, including entertainment and sports. It will also show some of the natural history programming that Discovery is well known for.

Earlier Tuesday, ESPN announced that it would debut “ESPN 3D” in June 2010. The channel will show a minimum of 85 live 3D events during the first year. USA Today reported that ESPN is “committing to the 3D network through June 2011.”

The ESPN network will only operate when live events are happening. The Discovery/Imax/Sony venture will be a full 24-hour channel.

Companies like Discovery, Imax, Sony, and The Walt Disney Company, which controls ESPN, are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as media companies did in the HDTV arms race. 3D televisions may not be mainstream for many years, but “every TV manufacturer is putting on a 3D push,” Jason Oxman, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, told the BBC.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...n-channel/?hpw





Justice Department to Review Comcast, NBC Deal

The U.S. Justice Department will conduct an antitrust review of the proposed $30 billion joint venture between Comcast Corp and NBC Universal, department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said on Wednesday.

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission divide the work of antitrust enforcement, with each agency taking mergers that fall into their area of expertise.

But there had been a question over which agency would take this deal, said Bruce McDonald, a former deputy assistant attorney general with the U.S. Justice Department. He is now at the law firm Jones Day.

"That will be a touchy one. Both have done cable. Both have done content," he said, before Talamona said that the Justice Department would take the deal.

Talamona was unavailable to comment on why the Justice Department was given this particular deal.

The Federal Communications Commission, which must approve broadcast license transfers and applications, will also review the proposal.

The U.S. government's concern will likely focus on ensuring that Comcast's rivals, like Verizon Communications, DISH Network Corp and smaller cable operators, can continue to show NBC Universal's programs.

Comcast and General Electric Co unveiled their NBC Universal deal in early December, planning to set up a joint venture that is 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The deal would give Comcast, the top U.S. cable service provider, control of a major media conglomerate.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6054VT20100106





FCC To Defend Reprimand Of Comcast For Internet Practices
Fawn Johnson

The Federal Communications Commission will go before a federal appeals court Friday to defend its 2008 citation against Comcast Corp. (CMCSA, CMCSK) for throttling Internet traffic from high-bandwidth file-sharing services, a case that could throw into question the FCC's authority to impose open Internet rules.

The FCC's Comcast decision stems from former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Bush appointee, who partnered with two Democrats on the five-person independent body to reprimand Comcast for attempting to control the flow of Web traffic based on content.

The two other Republicans on the FCC at the time voted against the action. Comcast then challenged it.

Now, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is proposing new open Internet rules to prevent companies like Comcast, Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), and AT&T Inc. (T) from selectively blocking or slowing certain Web content. Those rules could be finalized by spring, around the same time the court could be rendering a decision in the Comcast case.

"The FCC's entire work in this area depends on the assumption that we have the power we need to protect consumers against discrimination and maintain an open Internet," said FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick in an interview.

Comcast plans to argue that the FCC went too far in issuing the citation because it didn't rely on specific parts of communications law, according to a summary of court briefs. If the court approves the FCC's "expansive" theory, Comcast argues, the balance of power between Congress and the administration could be severely hampered.

Genachowski's open Internet rulemaking would be essentially terminated if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit buys Comcast's reasoning.

"If Comcast's most extreme argument were adopted by the DC Circuit, then we would have to either change fundamentally our regulatory approach, or look to the Supreme Court or Congress to restore that power," Schlick said.

The appeals court isn't likely to go that far, in part because it has ruled in the past that the FCC is entitled to regulate other emerging communications services, such as cable.

A ruling upholding the FCC's reasoning could have the opposite effect, however. The court could give an "indirect green-light to Chairman Genachowski's campaign for a bolder open Internet policy that's a cornerstone of the Obama administration's tech agenda," said Jeffrey Silva, senior media and technology director at Medley Global Advisors.

The judges also could decide that the legal provisions the FCC relies on aren't sufficient to justify its action against Comcast, which could make it more difficult for the agency to finalize the open Internet rules.

Alternatively, the court could ignore the question of whether the FCC has the authority to punish Internet companies for violating openness principles and focus instead on Comcast's argument that the FCC didn't give enough notice before it slapped the cable giant.

If the court agrees that the FCC violated basic rules of fair notice, it would be a win for Comcast, but that decision alone wouldn't necessarily upset the FCC's current open Internet rulemaking.

The case is Comcast Corporation v. FCC, No. 08-1291.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...9_FORTUNE5.htm





Little Frauds: Fox Pulls "Genius" Quiz Show
James Hibberd and Nellie Andreeva

In a shocking move, Fox on Thursday pulled the quiz show "Our Little Genius" less than a week before the series' January 13 premiere to do reshoots.

At the heart of the matter was a recent discovery by producer Mark Burnett that some contestants were provided "information" -- though not the actual answers -- ahead of time.

Hosted by Kevin Pollak, "Genius" features academically accomplished kids ages 6-12 answering tough questions for the chance to win hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"I believe my series must always be beyond reproach, so I have requested that Fox not air these episodes," said Burnett, best known as the creator of "Survivor" and "The Apprentice."

Mark Burnett Prods. will pay to reshoot the episodes, and will also pay the winnings to the contestants who took part in the original eight episodes. No new premiere date was announced.

"Even though we were incredibly pleased with the quality of 'Our Little Genius,' we respect and appreciate his due diligence and the decision to pull these episodes," Fox said in a statement. "We agree there can be no question about the integrity of our shows."

"Genius" was a key piece of Fox's midseason schedule. It was assigned Fox's most lucrative midseason time slot, following "American Idol" on Wednesday.

In the wake of its benching, Fox will air a repeat of the 450th episode of "The Simpsons" after a 90-minute "Idol" on January 13 and a rerun of the premiere of the network's new drama "Human Target" the following Wednesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





Kodak Easyshare Wireless Picture Frame - How to Show Everyone Whats On Your Frame
Casey Halverson

I recently purchased a Kodak Easyshare Wireless Digital Picture Frame off woot for an amazing price of $49.99. Infact, I bought two. The model number is W820, which is an 8″ frame, but there is also a 10 inch version as well. These picture frames have built in WiFi and can grab content off the internet.

The most exciting part about this picture frame has nothing to do with putting an SD card full of baby pictures, and everything to do with adding fun widgets to your photo roll! Facebook status updates, facebook photos, tweets, news, weather, live sports scores, flickr accounts, and the ability to have it make use nearly any RSS feed. Oh, and it shows baby pictures too I guess in the mix, if thats what you want.

The widgets are powered by FrameChannel, which is a sort of third party service that provides this functionality to Kodak picture frames everywhere. You setup an account with a special secret code that is shown on your picture frame (which nobody is supposed to have access to, otherwise they could load content on your frame before you even take it out of the box), and then you are off to widget building land where you can construct a slideshow based on time of day and frequency of display.

However, deep on the website i noticed this little innocent piece of information:

Code:
http://rss.framechannel.com//productid=KD9371/frameid=00:23:4D:B8:07:6D
Advanced Settings

What’s this at the bottom? Some strange little RSS URL?

Well, lets just plug it in and see what happens:

Code:
http://rss.framechannel.com//productId=KD9371/frameId=00:23:4D:B8:07:6D
Look, its an RSS feed of what my picture frame is showing now! I can send this nice URL to everyone I know so they can look at all my private content I have configured for this device. Now, under no circumstances would I recommend changing the last digits of this MAC address frame ID to another number….because you would get someone else’s picture frame content. Why would you want to do that?
http://seattlewireless.net/~casey/?p=13





We Are All Gadget Nerds Now
David Carr

Over the holiday, Decoder was in Lower Manhattan at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex and found himself staring at Bo Diddley’s guitar. Even, or especially, locked behind glass in an inert state, it is a thing of majestic, mysterious beauty.

Certainly, Bo Diddley, who died in 2008, was a wildly inventive musical mind who came up with one of the foundational beats of modern music. But that cigar box guitar, with its gleaming surfaces, early era pickups and tremolo effects, had a starring role as well. The man made the music, but the thing, the gadget, the device, changed everything. Without the electric guitar and its sonic possibilities, we probably wouldn’t have had the chance to fall in love with Buddy Guy, or more recently, Jack White. Technology, placed in the hands of a legion of rough hewn auteurs, created a new art form.

The intersection of culture and technology has always been a rich, mashed-up place, but today’s burgeoning army of electronic devices, rather than just hosting stories, seems to be authoring them.

On the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show, it’s worth pointing out that content, which we’ve been told is king, seems increasingly to be serving as software used to animate various devices. At the risk of going on at length and offending the equally windy Michael Kinsley, Decoder thought it might be a good time to roam across platforms and see how machines appear to be taking over the world. Again.

Decoder thought a lot about the growing dominion of the gadgets over the holidays. When the family went to the Christmas Day movie, and we looked up at an auditorium of people, it looked like row after row of nerds, everyone wearing futuristic glasses. “Avatar,” which crossed $1 billion on the way to establishing dominion over the global box office, is an homage to both the perils (the plot suggests machine-enabled people do bad things) and the dominance (the execution of the film suggests machine-enabled directors can do wondrous things) of technology.

If James Cameron ends up making his way to the stage on Oscar night to declare that he is not only king of the world, but also the universe beyond, it will be in part because he has demonstrated an innovative way forward for the movie industry. It’s not just what he made, but how he made it. Mr. Cameron has been developing the film since 1994, but he was waiting for technology to catch up. “Avatar” is a nice story and all, but it his use of stereoscopic cameras and a new generation of motion capture that has people all over the globe donning goofy glasses to see what technology has wrought. Imax and various iterations of 3-D allowed the industry to make more money off of exhibition than DVDs for the first time since 2002. It looks like Hollywood, a place were our stories are writ large, is going to be spending a lot of time walking around in geek wear.

The television industry, which got people hooked on color half a century ago and then pretty much left it at that, is now a hotbed of technological innovation. As Brian Stelter and Brad Stone write, an industry that only recently managed to entice people to buy in to the high-definition revolution is now setting about the business of bringing “Avatar”-like 3-D experiences to the home entertainment theater. With sports programming leading the way, the industry will be working to convince consumers that it might soon be time to trade out plasma and HD technology that was state-of-the-art as recently as the last Christmas season. The industry seems intent on putting much of its time and energy into making what is on the box at least look better, even if they are mostly selling old wine in a new bottle. Technology, not storytelling, is where the action is.

On Tuesday, Google, a company built on algorithms and data management, landed in the hardware business with both feet, unveiling a handset called Nexus One. Even though David Pogue says the phone itself isn’t all that and a bag of chips, it is breathtaking to see a company that took over the world by invisibly crawling across data putting its treasured name on a device that fits in the palm. After watching Apple take over a lot of mindshare with its gleaming array of gadgets, Google came to realize that technology is more than a fetish object — that it can create an intimate bond that often determines who controls, and profits from, the relationship with the consumer. (And now word comes in the Bits blog that Microsoft, a software company in every corner of its DNA give or take the Xbox, is jumping ahead of Apple by unveiling its own slate device here.)

And speaking of Apple, a number of fanboys have suggested that the likely introduction of a large-format tablet device could be a game-changer for media providers. Any number of prototypes for the gadget that has yet to show its shiny face are already in development, and the echo chamber of hype around the gadget is reaching thunderous dimensions.

Even in books, the most analog of all media platforms, most of the excitement is of the plugged-in variety. Although Amazon did not provide any sales figures to back up the claim, the company announced that on Christmas Day, it sold more Kindle reading devices than actual books — a watershed that probably foretells the future.

Much of the music business, which got run over by a gadget called the iPod, seems to be now living in the cloud. Music sampling and selling services like Pandora and LastFM seem more relevant than the labels that produce much of the music. LaLa, a music streaming service, became a piece of taffy between Google and Apple, with Apple eventually winning the prize for about $85 million. While that may seem like a software-driven shift, the growth of these services is just one more reminder that there is a vast array of embedded smart, mobile devices to be fed. The coming cohort of consumers expect to use and add to their libraries at times and on devices of their choosing.

Longtime players in the media space have been struggling to come to grips with an era in which the consumers serve as their own programmers. And now, the rapid rate of hardware innovation is metastasizing the trend, putting smaller, more powerful tools in their hands, leaving producers of all manner of software — not just the coded kind, but movies, novels, pop songs, magazine articles — struggling to format their content in way that pleases consumers and still provides a way to make a living. At this year’s show, the most anxious looky-loos are likely to be the media companies themselves. In among the blinking laser lights, the whirring whatchamacallits, and clanking of a new future being unveiled, they will be looking frantically for a safe place to land. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...-nerds-now/?hp





Study Says Tailored Music Therapy Can Ease Tinnitus

Individually designed music therapy may help reduce noise levels in people suffering from tinnitus, or ear ringing, German scientists said on Monday.

The researchers designed musical treatments adapted to the musical tastes of patients with ear-ringing and then stripped out sound frequencies that matched the individual's tinnitus frequency.

After a year of listening to these "notched" musical therapies, patients reported a distinct decrease in the loudness of ringing compared with those who had listened to non-tailored placebo music, the researchers wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Tinnitus is a common hearing problem in industrialized countries and the ear-ringing can be loud enough to harm quality of life in between one and three percent of the general population, the researchers said.

A European Union (EU) health panel raised the alarm in January about the potential hearing damage caused by young people playing their MP3 players too loud.

The EU Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks warned that listening to personal music devices at high volume for long periods could cause hearing loss and tinnitus, and their warning prompted the European Commission to issue new safe volume standards for MP3 players.

The German researchers said the precise cause of tinnitus is not known, but the auditory cortex -- the region of the brain that processes sound -- is often distorted in those who have it.

Christo Pantev of the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis at Westfalian Wilhelms-University, Germany, who led the study, said his findings on targeted listening suggested that tinnitus volume could be "significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom tailored notched music treatment."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BR32420091231





Willie Mitchell, Soul Music Producer, Dies at 81
Ben Sisario

Willie Mitchell, who shaped the elegant yet gritty sound of Al Green, Ann Peebles and other stars of soul music as the house producer at Hi Records in the 1960s and ’70s, died Tuesday in Memphis, where he lived. He was 81.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Lawrence said.

The Willie Mitchell sound — prominent horns, delicately strummed guitars, some sweet organ and a steady, straightforward beat — is instantly recognizable on records by singers like Mr. Green, Ms. Peebles, Syl Johnson and O. V. Wright, and on the instrumentals Mr. Mitchell recorded as a bandleader. Both raw and sensuous, it became Hi’s signature sound as the label rose to prominence with Mr. Green in the 1970s.

Although its legacy has been less celebrated than those of Stax or Sun, two other pioneering record labels that got started in Memphis in the 1950s, Hi was an integral part of the development of the Memphis soul sound, and Mr. Mitchell is widely credited as one of its architects.

“We had just gone past what was called race music and blues, which was looked down upon, to this R&B, this soul,” Al Bell, a former owner of Stax who is chairman of the Memphis Music Foundation, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We worked with each other so we could grow and improve our music, and Willie provided that kind of leadership. His handprint, thumbprint, footprint, heart print is all over Memphis music.”

Mr. Mitchell’s sound owed much to the musicians he used at Royal Recording Studio, a converted movie theater that served as Hi’s headquarters. They included the Hodges brothers — Teenie on guitar, Charles on organ and Leroy on bass — as well Al Jackson and Howard Grimes on drums, whose light touch and rhythmic flexibility were central to Hi’s appeal.

“It’s the laziness of the rhythm,” Mr. Mitchell said in Peter Guralnick’s 1986 book “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.” “You hear those old lazy horns half a beat behind the music, and you think they’re gonna miss it, and all of a sudden, just so lazy, they come in and start to sway with it. It’s like kind of shucking you, putting you on.”

Born in Ashland, Miss., in 1928, Mr. Mitchell began his career as a trumpeter, leading a 10-piece touring band while still in his teens. After serving two years in the Army, he returned to Memphis in the mid-1950s and became a regular in the city’s clubs, distinguishing himself as a jazzy, sophisticated player.

In 1961 Hi Records, then four years old, signed Mr. Mitchell as a recording artist, and from 1964 to 1969 he scored a number of minor R&B hits, including “Soul Serenade” and “30-60-90.” But he began to make a greater mark as the label’s combination producer and talent scout, bringing in Ms. Peebles and others. (He also produced Bobby Bland’s 1964 album “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” for another Memphis label, Duke.)

In 1968 Mr. Mitchell was booked to perform at a club in Midland, Tex., with a fledgling singer from Michigan named Al Green as his opening act. On hearing him rehearse, Mr. Mitchell invited Mr. Green to Memphis and promised to make him a star.

Coached by Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Green found his voice, and by 1971 he had reached No. 1 on the pop charts with “Let’s Stay Together.”

Mr. Mitchell’s style proved a perfect canvas for Mr. Green’s finely finessed vocals, and together they made 13 Top 40 hits between 1971 and 1976, when Mr. Green left secular music for gospel and a career as a minister. Mr. Mitchell acquired an ownership stake in Hi in 1970 and remained with the company until it was sold in the late 1970s.

With the sale of Hi, Mr. Mitchell bought Royal studio and continued to record there, preserving much of the equipment just as it had been in 1969. Among the artists he recorded were the blues guitarist Buddy Guy as well as John Mayer and Rod Stewart.

Mr. Mitchell’s two grandsons, Lawrence and Archie, whom he adopted as sons, continue to operate the studio. Mr. Mitchell is also survived by a stepson, Archie Turner; two daughters, Yvonne and Lorrain Mitchell; and a granddaughter.

When Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Green reunited in the 2000s to make two albums (“I Can’t Stop” and “Everything’s OK” ), Mr. Green recorded at Royal with the same microphone he had used in the 1970s.

Mr. Green has said that he owes much of his success to Mr. Mitchell, especially his coaching, beginning with their first recording sessions together. “I was trying to sing like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett,” Mr. Green said in a 2003 interview, recalling Mr. Mitchell. “He said, ‘Sing like Al Green.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/ar...6mitchell.html





Art Clokey Dies at 88; Creator of Gumby



The filmmaker's work enchanted generations of children.
Jason Felch

Arthur Farrington Clokey, the creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, died in his sleep Friday at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said. He was 88.

Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on "The Howdy Doody Show," Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, "The Adventures of Gumby," the first to use clay animation on television.

After an initial run in the 1950s, Gumby enjoyed comebacks in the 1960s as a bendable children's toy, in the 1980s after comedian Eddie Murphy parodied the kindly Gumby as a crass, cigar-in-the-mouth character in a skit for "Saturday Night Live" and again in the '90s with the release of "Gumby the Movie."

Today, Gumby is a cultural icon recognized around the world. It has more than 134,000 fans on Facebook.

As successive generations discovered the curious green character, Gumby’s success came to define Clokey's life, with its theme song reflecting Clokey's simple message of love: "If you've got a heart, then Gumby's a part of you."

"The fact is that most people don't know his name, but everybody knows Gumby," said friend and animator David Scheve. "To have your life work touch so many people around the world is an amazing thing."

Clokey was born Arthur Farrington in Detroit in October 1921 and grew up making mud figures on his grandparents' Michigan farm. "He always had this in him," his son, Joseph, recalled Friday.

At age 8, Clokey's life took a tragic turn when his father was killed in a car accident soon after his parents divorced. The unusual shape of Gumby's head would eventually be modeled after one of the few surviving photos of Clokey's father, which shows him with a large wave of hair protruding from the right side of his head.

After moving to California, Clokey was abandoned by his mother and her new husband and lived in a halfway house near Hollywood until age 11, when he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey. The renowned music teacher and composer at Pomona College taught him to draw, paint and shoot film and took him on journeys to Mexico and Canada.

Art Clokey attended the Webb School in Claremont, whose annual fossil hunting expeditions also inspired a taste for adventure that stayed with him. "That's why 'The Adventures of Gumby' were so adventurous," his son said.

Clokey served in World War II, conducting photo reconnaissance over North Africa and France. Back in Hartford, Conn., after the war, he was studying to be an Episcopal minister when he met Ruth Parkander, the daughter of a minister. The two married and moved to California to pursue their true passion: filmmaking.

During the day, the Clokeys taught at the Harvard School for Boys in Studio City, now Harvard-Westlake. At night, Art Clokey studied film at USC under Slavko Vorkapich, a pioneer of modern montage techniques.

Clokey's 1953 experimental film, "Gumbasia," used stop-motion clay animation set to a lively jazz tempo. It became the inspiration for the subsequent Gumby TV show when Sam Engel, the president of 20th Century Fox and father of one of Clokey's students, saw the film and asked Clokey to produce a children's television show based on the idea.

In the 1960s, Clokey created and produced the Christian TV series "Davey and Goliath" and the credits for several feature films, including "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."

Gumby's ability to enchant generations of children and adults had a mystical quality to it, said his son, and reflected his father's spiritual quest. In the 1970s, Clokey studied Zen Buddhism, traveled to India to study with gurus and experimented with LSD and other drugs, though all of that came long after the creation of Gumby, his son said.

His second wife, Gloria, whom he married in 1976, was art director on Gumby projects in the 1980s and '90s. She died in 1998.

Besides his son Joseph, Clokey is survived by his stepdaughter, Holly Harman of Mendocino County; three grandchildren, Shasta, Sequoia and Sage Clokey; his sister, Arlene Cline of Phoenix; and his half-sister, Patricia Anderson of Atlanta.

Instead of flowers, the family suggests contributions in Gumby's name to the Natural Resources Defense Council, of which Art Clokey was a longtime member.

"Gumby was green because my dad cared about the environment," his son said.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...tory?track=rss





Polanski Asks LA Judge to Sentence Him in Absentia
Alex Dobuzinskis

Fugitive film director Roman Polanski asked a Los Angeles judge on Wednesday to sentence him in his absence on a 1977 charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Judge Peter Espinoza set a January 22 date for a full hearing on the request, made by Polanski in a notarized document signed December 26 in Switzerland and submitted by the Oscar-winning director's Los Angeles-based lawyer, Chad Hummel.

But prosecutors, who have long sought to bring Polanski back to Los Angeles, said they would oppose any bid to sentence him until he turns up physically in court.

Polanski, 76, who won an Oscar in 2002 for "The Pianist", is under house arrest at his villa in the ski resort of Gstaad, Switzerland, fighting extradition to the United States. He was arrested in Switzerland in September on a U.S. warrant.

He fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. Polanski has said he feared the judge in the case, who has since died, was going to renege on an agreement to sentence him to the 42 days he had already served behind bars.

The dual Polish-French national has spent most of the past 30 years living and working in France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States covering the crime.

Wednesday's hearing followed a suggestion by a California appeals court last month that sentencing Polanski in absentia could be one way to resolve the decades-long battle to bring him to justice.

But prosecutor David Walgren said Polanski should come back to California and not continue to fight the case "from the comfort of his Swiss chalet in the Alps."

Swiss authorities have said they will make a decision on extradition in early 2010.

A California appeals court in December denied Polanski's bid to have the unlawful sex case dismissed due to alleged judicial misconduct. But the appellate panel said the misconduct allegations were "extremely serious" and should be investigated.

Hummel also asked Espinoza on Wednesday to hold a hearing on the judicial misconduct allegations.

The judge did not make a ruling on either request but indicated he was inclined to wait for the Swiss to make the next move. He also suggested another way to resolve the case, saying; "Mr Polanski could simply say, 'I'll come back'."

Under current California law, Polanski faces a maximum two years behind bars on his guilty plea but his lawyers are expected to argue that the original plea deal should be respected and that he should serve no additional time.

Polanski married his third wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner in 1989 and has two children. His other movies include "Rosemary's Baby", "Tess" and "Chinatown".

(Writing by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Eric Walsh)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...ertainmentNews





Snowed-in Britons Boost Adultery Website

Britons snowed in by the wintry weather have been flocking to an extra-marital dating site in the last 24 hours.

IllicitEncounters.com, which provides a platform for married people to conduct affairs, said on Wednesday it has seen an unexpected increase in visitors over the past 24 hours, and received a record number of new profiles on Wednesday morning.

The website said most new members are registering from areas worst hit by this week's extreme weather, including Hampshire, Berkshire, and the West Country, and the site has taken on several temporary staff members to cope with the rush.

"In light of these figures, I'd be interested to see how much work those 'working from home' have actually done," IlicitEncounters.com spokeswoman Sara Hartley said in a statement.

"Perhaps these wives and husbands have just been waiting for a time when they could join, away from the eyes of their work colleagues and, most importantly, their partners..."

The website said it has gained 2,567 new members in the last six days, suggesting that January will be its busiest month ever.

It says it has more than 350,000 members in Britain and that its aim is to create a safe and non-judgmental environment where married men and women can meet each other.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato, Editing by Steve Addison)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6054F820100106





YouTube Faces 4chan Porn Attack

Web forum 4chan declares 'YouTube Porn Day' after young Star Wars fan Lukeywes1234's account is suspended

Don't be surprised if you find some porn among the sport highlights, children's cartoons or music videos you are looking for on YouTube today. A web forum, the notorious 4chan, has declared today YouTube Porn Day.

To take vengeance for the apparent removal of the popular YouTube account of Lukeywes1234, 4chan called on its members to upload hidden porn onto the site.

But who is Lukeywes1234?

It was the username of an eight-year-old Nintendo fanboy who scored viral success with his hilarious videos. His "shows" featured childish ideas like ghost-fighting with tinfoil on his head directed by his grandmother, and performing his own versions of Super Mario Bros and Star Wars.

The videos attracted attention due to his very direct, sometimes vulgar, language. Members of the 4chan forum found the hilarious videos and gave them a broader audience on their message board, referred to as "/b/".

In the original and now deleted video Lukeywes1234 begged for 50 subscribers by February. Within a few hours, several thousand were following him, and praising him and declaring him"awesome". Lots of fan material is still online, as teenagers obviously sympathised with Lukeywes1234. Now his fans are raging against YouTube for deleting his videos, as you can see here and here and here.

Last May, 4chan started a similar campaign after YouTube deleted a lot of illegal music.

YouTube said that it is not able to comment on individual users, but it is likely that despite his 15,000 subscribers, Lukeywes1234 was suspended because he did not meet YouTube's age requirement of being 13 and over.

Meanwhile, YouTube doesn't sound too worried about 4chan's threat. In a statement it said: "We have heard rumors that a group of individuals plan to upload sexually explicit content to YouTube in a coordinated attack. As always, we are monitoring the site and will continue to remove inappropriate content as we become aware of it."

It sounds like Lukeywes1234's internet fame will soon be over. Still, there are a couple of questions.

Is it OK if underage children speak up freely and upload slightly embarrassing footage of themselves? Is posting funny videos and replying to them the way teenagers that teenagers relate to each other today? So are they destroying their future or has Lukeywes1234 launched himself into a great media career?

What do you think?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/...n-lukeywes1234





New Scanners Break Child Porn Laws
Alan Travis

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of full body scanners only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.

The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a "pseudo-image" of a child.

Dowty told the Guardian she raised concerns with the Metropolitan police five years ago over plans to use similar scanners in an anti-knife campaign, and when the Department for Transport began a similar trial in 2006 on the Heathrow Express rail service from Paddington station.

"They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way," said Dowty, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the "prevention and detection of crime" but the purpose had to be more specific than the "trawling exercise" now being considered.

A Manchester airport spokesman said their trial had started in December, but only with passengers over 18 until the legal situation with children was clarified. So far 500 people have taken part on a voluntary basis with positive feedback from nearly all those involved.

Passengers also pass through a metal detector before they can board their plane. Airport officials say the scanner image is only seen by a single security officer in a remote location before it is deleted.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: "We understand the concerns expressed about privacy in relation to the deployment of body scanners. It is vital staff are properly trained and we are developing a code of practice to ensure these concerns are properly taken into account. Existing safeguards also mean those operating scanners are separated from the device, so unable to see the person to whom the image relates, and these anonymous images are deleted immediately."

But Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, had concerns over the "instant" introduction of scanners: "Where are the government assurances that electronic strip-searching is to be used in a lawful and proportionate and sensitive manner based on rational criteria rather than racial or religious bias?" she said.

Her concerns were echoed by Simon Davies of Privacy International who said he was sceptical of the privacy safeguards being used in the United States. Although the American system insists on the deletion of the images, he believed scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an "irresistible pull" for some employees.

The disclosures came as Downing Street insisted British intelligence information that the Detroit plane suspect tried to contact radical Islamists while a student in London was passed on to the US.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was included in a dossier of people believed to have made attempts to deal with extremists, but he was not singled out as a particular risk, Brown's spokesman said.

President Barack Obama has criticised US intelligence agencies for failing to piece together information about the 23-year-old that should have stopped him boarding the flight.

Brown's spokesman said "There was security information about this individual's activities and that was shared with the US authorities."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...hild-porn-laws





The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears
Glenn Greenwald

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes several insightful and important points. Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.

This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved. John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power. For a variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and Terrorism melodrama as high as possible. The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own. For that reason, a risk that is completely dwarfed by numerous others -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have. The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it. As Adams said: fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable."

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized. We have Chris Matthews running around shrieking that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists. Michael Chertoff is demanding that we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- i.e., that there should be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize. Republican leaders have spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, matters. All in response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars, initiate racial profiling, imprison innocent people indefinitely, and torture even more indiscriminately. These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.

Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important. What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result. Policies can always be changed. What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States. Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws. Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism: the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection. This is what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in How Would a Patriot Act?:

The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power threatens to change the system of government we have. But worse still, his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to keep the nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of nation we are.

This isn't exactly new: many of America's most serious historical transgressions -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, over-reaction to external threats, not under-reaction. Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade. As the events of the last week demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.


UPDATE: Talking to one's friends and co-workers is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion on an issue. Those who want to claim that the media's hysteria over this incident is not matched by the general public's are going to have to explain this:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. . . . Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, as is currently the case.

Does that sound like a calm and sober citizenry?


UPDATE II: On Fox News yesterday, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (ret.) announces that he wants to strip search all Muslim males between the ages of 18-28, and explains that "political correctness" -- the only possible reason one might have to object to such a proposal -- is going to result in our mass slaughter at the hands of jihadists. It's hard to overstate -- or even fathom -- what happens to people who have sat there for years and ingested this sort of ugliness and panic.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...010/01/02/fear





Brief Outage of China's 'Great Firewall' Allows Glimpse of Facebook, Twitter
David Pierson

Web users reported an outage of China's strict Internet controls, known as the Great Firewall, for several hours Monday morning, allowing them brief access to banned Web sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Cautious excitement spread on some social-networking platforms as hope flared that Internet freedoms suddenly were being expanded after months of intensifying scrutiny.

"It's finally unblocked, reasons unknown," wrote a blogger named EFanZh. "I hope nothing gets blocked anymore. I can't take it any longer."

But by the time many woke up, strict restrictions had returned. Error messages once again flashed across computer screens for sites blocked by the nation's censorship filter.

"It seemed just like a dream," said Michael Anti, a social critic and one of hundreds who tweeted about the development on Twitter.

Rumors abounded that the outage was due to maintenance work administered by Internet provider China Unicom. Others believed it had something to do with the heavy snow that blanketed northern China over the weekend.

China Unicom did not respond to requests for an interview, neither did Chinese officials overseeing online security. It was unclear if all of China experienced the outage or just some regions.

Jeremy Goldkorn, whose Web site DanWei.org has been blocked since July, said banned sites are periodically accessible from location to location, such as a university. But rarely do so many high-profile sites suddenly become available, he said.

For many, the relaxing of controls would seem an unlikely development at a time when Chinese authorities have been ramping up censorship of the Web.

Primary in this push is a crackdown on pornography that has been gaining momentum for months. But critics claim that effort is just a cover for tightening controls on the world's largest Internet community.

Authorities announced last week that 5,400 people were arrested last year for crimes related to online porn, though they did not say how many were charged.

Hundreds of Web sites have been shut down, including file-sharing destinations for pirated movies and music, as well as personal blogs.

One government ministry released a pronouncement last month that local news sources interpreted to mean that foreign Web sites may one day have to register with the government before being allowed inside the Great Firewall.

As part of a new decree to screen out smut, individuals have been banned from registering personal Web sites using China's national domain, .cn. The address is now reserved for government entities and registered businesses.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_14120042





Looks Like Rupert Murdoch’s Just Started Blocking Search Engines
Martin Bryant

Looks like Rupert Murdochs just started blocking search enginesRemember when Rupert Murdoch caused a stir by saying that he was going to start blocking news search services like Google News from carrying his sites’ stories? Well, it looks like he’s started.

News aggregator NewsNow is claiming that Murdoch’s UK-based Times Online website has started blocking it from indexing stories.

The block has been put in place via TimesOnline’s Robots.txt file, a simple change for any website owner to make. NewsNow’s Struan Bartlett said “It is lamentable that (Murdoch’s company) News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out”.

It’s understandable that NewsNow would feel aggrieved by the situation – their site is essentially a list of links to news stories. It more resembles a link sharing service like Reddit than the almost magazine-like Google News.

NewsNow is a minnow in the news search business compared to Google News and it could very well be that Murdoch is ‘testing the water’ by blocking one of his many news sources from being accessed by one small aggregation service.

Murdoch has said previously that he would put paywalls up around much of his online news content, accusing aggregators like Google News of “stealing” the hard work of his journalists. How successful his plans will be remains to be seen, but if his plans are running to course the first of his UK news properties should be behind a paywall within months.

UPDATE:

Indeed, checking the contents of www.timesonline.co.uk/robots.txt reveals the following code.

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

We’ll be keeping an eye on that file to see if it grows over time…
http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/08/...earch-engines/





Spear-Phishing Experiment Evades Big-Name Email Products

Phony 'Bill Gates' LinkedIn invitation dupes Microsoft, Cisco email products and other security tools, services
Kelly Jackson Higgins

The researcher who conducted a successful spear-phishing experiment with a phony LinkedIn invitation from "Bill Gates" is about to reveal the email products and services that failed to filter the spoofed message -- and that list includes Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Express, and Cisco IronPort.

Joshua Perrymon, CEO of PacketFocus, had previously revealed that the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm Pre smartphones had all fallen victim to the spear-phishing exercise.

"Email-based attacks are probably one of the most effective in today's hacker bag of tricks. The email security industry gets by with stopping most spam and known phishing attacks," Perrymon says. "The problem lies in a directed, under-the-radar, spear-phishing attack -- the type where the attacker spends time to understand the target, create an effective spoofed email and phishing site, [and] then attacks."

The experiment was aimed at measuring the effectiveness of email security controls in several major products and services. And the simplicity and success of the test demonstrated just how powerful social engineering can be and what little technology can actually do about it, security experts say.

Perrymon sent his spoofed LinkedIn email -- which looked a lot like a real LinkedIn invite, except it spelled the social network "LinkedIN" in the "from" field of the message -- to a variety of users in different organizations who had agreed to participate in a test. The message read: "Bill Gates has indicated you are a fellow group member of Microsoft Security. I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - B. Gates."

He was able to get his spoofed message through to the recipients 100 percent of the time, and across a wide range of major email products and services in addition to the Microsoft and Cisco products, including users with GoDaddy's hosted email, Voltage, RackSpace/MailTrust hosted email, Webroot SaaS Email Security, Verizon Email Cloud Filtering with MessageLabs, a Linux and SpamAssassin configuration, SonicWall's Email Security appliance, LinuxMail with greylisting, Opera Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, according to a report that he will post online this week.

Microsoft and Cisco had not responded to media requests for comment on the report as of this posting.

In the report, Perrymon says the research shows that even the most current email security appliances, services, and clients can't detect spear-phishing messages, "even when the senders email (From does not match up with the sending email server (Spoofed). For now, the user must make the decision to identify and properly respond to directed email attacks."

The underlying problem, he says, is that email security products and services rely on blacklists. "The phishing sites are being brought up instantly on a 'new' server that has not seen Internet traffic and is not on any blacklist," he says.

Perrymon says he contacted all of the affected vendors and discussed mitigation strategies with some of them. Some told him they were looking into the issue, while others noted the problem is within email itself and requires a new protocol to provide real security, Perrymon says.

Meanwhile, PacketFocus recommends organizations create email policies that describe the risk and how to mitigate it; provide a quick desk reference for users on how to identify and respond to phishing attacks; provide regular training for new hires and existing employees; use an incident response system that lets users report potential attacks and that tracks activity; and have a browser update program that ensures holes are patched immediately.
http://www.darkreading.com/insiderth...leID=222200326





NIST-Certified USB Flash Drives with Hardware Encryption Cracked

Encrypting USB Flash memory from Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim Vergrößern Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim all sell quite similar USB Flash drives with AES 256-bit hardware encryption that supposedly meet the highest security standards. This is emphasised by the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certificate issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which validates the USB drives for use with sensitive government data. Security firm SySS, however, has found that despite this it is relatively easy to access the unencrypted data, even without the required password.

The USB drives in question encrypt the stored data via the practically uncrackable AES 256-bit hardware encryption system. Therefore, the main point of attack for accessing the plain text data stored on the drive is the password entry mechanism. When analysing the relevant Windows program, the SySS security experts found a rather blatant flaw that has quite obviously slipped through testers' nets. During a successful authorisation procedure the program will, irrespective of the password, always send the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations – and this is the case for all USB Flash drives of this type.

Cracking the drives is therefore quite simple. The SySS experts wrote a small tool for the active password entry program's RAM which always made sure that the appropriate string was sent to the drive, irrespective of the password entered and as a result gained immediate access to all the data on the drive. The vulnerable devices include the Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox, the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise FIPS Edition and the Verbatim Corporate Secure FIPS Edition.

When notified by SySS about this worst case security scenario, the respective vendors responded quite differently. Kingston started a recall of the affected products; SanDisk and Verbatim issued woolly security bulletins about a "potential vulnerability in the access control application" and provided a software update. When asked by heise Security, Verbatim Europe said that none of the affected drives have been sold in Europe – and that none will be shipped before the hole has been closed.

The real question, however, remains unanswered – how could USB Flash drives that exhibit such a serious security hole be given one of the highest certificates for crypto devices? Even more importantly, perhaps – what is the value of a certification that fails to detect such holes?
http://www.h-online.com/security/new...ed-895308.html





Obama Cyber Czar Choice Worries About Smartphones, Social Networking

Reviewing the record: Cyber czar Howard Schmidt's views on cyber vs. physical security and more
Tim Greene

In choosing Howard Schmidt as cyber czar President Obama has gotten someone who has held a similar job in a previous administration, has varied experience at high-level corporate jobs, was a frequent panelist at security conferences and who has even written a book on defending the Internet.

Schmidt served under President George W. Bush for three years, ultimately resigning after producing the "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace."

Because of his high profile past as CSO of Microsoft and CISO of eBay, during which he spoke often at public forums, there is a broad record of his thoughts on network security, from smartphone threats to equating cyber security to physical security.
Ten 2010 IT Security Predictions

The new cyber czar favors government promotion of education, research and prodding vendors to produce more secure products that will work their way into everyday use. "What is the government doing to make sure universities and companies have dollars to do research that will enhance security?" Schmidt said in a 2008 interview with Computer World. "There is R&D that needs to be done that may not benefit homeland security but it might create the next generation of the Internet that is more secure."

He thinks Internet security is greatly improved since the mid-1990s when he ranked the impact of a foreign cyberattack in the United States at 5 or 6 on a scale of one to 10, with 10 meaning attacks would have no effect. That has improved to 8 or 9 because the number of attack vectors has been reduced. "We have the ability to turn back attacks. We also could shut down systems that might be under attack and bring them internal," he says.

Getting cybersecurity considered as important as physical security -- such as protecting planes and ports -- was a hurdle that is being overcome. Schmidt says he realizes the country can't have two No. 1 priorities, but it needs to boost the effort put behind cybersecurity. "The government has recognized that work has to be done. We're getting much closer to having them on equal footing," he says.

In past interviews he has said smartphones and other such mobile devices generate the most concern. "What they've been attacking on the desktop, they'll starting attacking in our mobile devices as they become more like PCs in our pockets. We can't wait five years to do something about it. We have to do something now," he said

He has a subtle view of exactly what terrorists are likely to attack and what they are likely to preserve as potential tools for propaganda. For instance, they might leave cell phone networks and the Internet infrastructure in general intact rather than try to take them down. "Terrorists now can push Bin Laden videos to mobile phones," he says. "They're doing podcasts and Webcasts. To attack the Internet is not in their best interests because they'd suffer like everyone else."

Instead, terrorists are likely to attack financial institutions to cause damage to the economy, but that is a tough task, Schmidt says. "I think it would be the most likely target, but also the most difficult to penetrate because of all the work financial services has done," he says.

Looking ahead in a CSO story about security predictions for 2010, Schmidt says layoffs from the bad economy will prompt theft of corporate data or damage, aided by the vulnerability of network peripheral devices such as printers. "Using unsecured printers and network-connected security cameras that can be manipulated, employees are able to cover their tracks when accessing restricted areas," he says.

He breaks privacy into two parts: protecting the data from outsiders and establishing and enforcing rules about who gets authorized to access it. "We basically need a bill of rights over privacy of information," he says.

His thoughts on:

* Social networking: "Vendors and purveyors of social media sites need to take a more active role in educating their users about threats like Bredolab in 2010."

* Passports with RFID chips: "I don't think it's a bad idea, but I don't think security was as high a consideration as it should have been."

* Background checks for IT workers: "I think it's not a bad idea…If people are involved in IT, they need some scrutiny to make sure they're not at potential for doing bad things to the company or even to national security."

* Popularity of cloud computing: "The overall net effect will give us a better chance to develop more security in the cloud using better vulnerability management/reduction, strong authentication, robust encryption and closer attention to legal jurisdictions."

Two-factor authentication: "With federation of the many various types of two-factor authentication that are around today we will finally see strong authentication become the rule NOT the exception.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...yber-czar.html





Privacy Threatened by Online Life
Zoe Kleinman

People who post intimate details about their lives on the internet undermine everybody else's right to privacy, claims an academic.

Dr Kieron O'Hara has called for people to be more aware of the impact on society of what they publish online.

"If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy," he said.

"As more private lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing."

The rise of social networking has blurred the boundaries of what can be considered private, he believes - making it less of a defence by law.

We live in an era that he terms "intimacy 2.0" - where people routinely share extremely personal information online.

"When our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes."

“ When our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes ”
Dr O'Hara

Dr O'Hara, a senior research fellow in Electronic and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, gave the example of an embarrassing photo taken at a party.

A decade ago, he said, there would have been an assumption that it might be circulated among friends.

But now the assumption is that it may well end up on the internet and be viewed by strangers.

Raging debate

Privacy has long been a thorny issue but there were very few court cases until that of former motorsport boss Max Mosley in 2008.

Mr Mosley sued the News of the World over the publication in the newspaper of explicit photos of him secretly taken during an orgy.

He argued that the publication of the photos was an unwarranted breach of his privacy - and won.

Mr Mosley had taken steps to keep his private life private but Dr O'Hara's concern is that other people's disregard for privacy online will spill over into other walks of life.

As debates continue to rage over whether the new airport body scanners and CCTV are an infringement of privacy or useful protection, some argue that it already has.

"Recent security decisions have become a privacy discussion - but if security suffers, the community suffers," Dr O'Hara said.

He was due to deliver his research paper at the annual Media Communication and Cultural Studies Association (Meccsa) conference held at the London School of Economics from 6-8 January.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8446649.stm





2010 Bug Hits Millions of Germans

Many in country unable to pay bills or get cash because of software problem in credit and debit cards
Kate Connolly

A 2010 software bug has left millions of German debit and credit card holders unable to withdraw money or make payments in shops, and thousands stranded on holiday with no access to cash.

About 30m chip and pin cards – a quarter of those in circulation in Germany – are thought to have been affected by the programming failure, which meant that microchips in cards could not recognise the year change to 2010.

A French card manufacturer, Gemalto, admitted today it was to blame for the failure, which it is estimated will cost €300m (£270m) to rectify. Gemalto, whose shares dropped by 2.6%, said it was attempting a software update, but might have to replace the cards. Gemalto-manufactured cards in other countries were not affected.

The fault has led to comparisons with the millennium bug, when experts predicted the transition from 1999 to 2000 might cause computers to be fooled into thinking it was 1900. As it was, the changeover happened without much incident.

Although some cash machines were quickly reconfigured to override the 2010 problem, many bank customers were forced to queue to withdraw cash over the counter. Germany's economics minister, Rainer Brüderle, urged banks to "ensure that credit and bank cards function without problem as soon as possible, or to replace them immediately".

Many Germans were stranded at ski resorts with no way of paying hotel and restaurant bills. Holidaymakers were being urged to take travellers' cheques. Experts said it might take weeks to re-configure foreign bank machines.

Germany's consumer affairs' minister, Ilse Aigner, accused banks of carelessness and insisted that consumers should not be held liable for any resulting bank charges.

The problem will do little to boost Germans' confidence in credit cards, which are still a relatively new method of payment in a country that is probably the most cautious in Europe when it comes to taking on debt.

Olivier Piou, the head of Gemalto, said: "We are doing our best to keep to a minimum the trouble this is causing for card holders." He insisted that said Gemalto-manufactured cards in other countries had not been affected.

Customers were today being urged to call telephone hotlines to find out what to do if their cards were affected.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...llions-germans





Despite Risks, Internet Creeps Onto Car Dashboards
Ashlee Vance and Matt Richtel

To the dismay of safety advocates already worried about driver distraction, automakers and high-tech companies have found a new place to put sophisticated Internet-connected computers: the front seat.

Technology giants like Intel and Google are turning their attention from the desktop to the dashboard, hoping to bring the power of the PC to the car. They see vast opportunity for profit in working with automakers to create the next generation of irresistible devices.

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the neon-drenched annual trade show here, these companies are demonstrating the breadth of their ambitions, like 10-inch screens above the gearshift showing high-definition videos, 3-D maps and Web pages.

The first wave of these “infotainment systems,” as the tech and car industries call them, will hit the market this year. While built-in navigation features were once costly options, the new systems are likely to be standard equipment in a wide range of cars before long. They prevent drivers from watching video and using some other functions while the car is moving, but they can still pull up content as varied as restaurant reviews and the covers of music albums with the tap of a finger.

Safety advocates say the companies behind these technologies are tone-deaf to mounting research showing the risks of distracted driving — and to a growing national debate about the use of mobile devices in cars and how to avoid the thousands of wrecks and injuries this distraction causes each year.

“This is irresponsible at best and pernicious at worst,” Nicholas A. Ashford, a professor of technology and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of the new efforts to marry cars and computers. “Unfortunately and sadly, it is a continuation of the pursuit of profit over safety — for both drivers and pedestrians.”

One system on the way this fall from Audi lets drivers pull up information as they drive. Heading to Madison Square Garden for a basketball game? Pop down the touch pad, finger-scribble the word “Knicks” and get a Wikipedia entry on the arena, photos and reviews of nearby restaurants, and animations of the ways to get there.

A notice that pops up when the Audi system is turned on reads: “Please only use the online services when traffic conditions allow you to do so safely.”

The technology and car companies say that safety remains a priority. They note that they are building in or working on technology like voice commands and screens that can simultaneously show a map to the driver and a movie to a front-seat passenger, as in the new Jaguar XJ.

“We are trying to make that driving experience one that is very engaging,” said Jim Buczkowski, the director of global electrical and electronics systems engineering at Ford. “We also want to make sure it is safer and safer. It is part of what our DNA will be going forward.”

Ford’s new MyFord system lets the driver adjust temperature settings or call a friend while the car is in motion, while its built-in Web browser works only when the car is parked. Audi says it will similarly restrict access to complex and potentially distracting functions. But in general, drivers will bear much of the responsibility for limiting their use of these devices.

Computer chips and other components improve every year while dropping in cost, allowing carmakers to introduce more sophisticated devices. Harman, based in Stamford, Conn., and a maker of such systems for cars, has created a pair of high-end multimedia systems due out this year that use full-fledged PC chips from Intel and Nvidia. Such chips once consumed too much electricity to be used in cars.

“We have always looked at the PC market with envy,” said Sachin Lawande, the chief technology officer at Harman, which works with Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota and others. “They’ve always had these great chips we could not use, but now that’s changing.”

A complex new dashboard console from Ford, which it plans to unveil Thursday, brings the car firmly into the land of electronic gadgets. The 4.2-inch color screen to the left of the speedometer displays information about the car, like the fuel level, while a companion screen on the right shows things like the name of a cellphone caller or the title of the digital song file being played. An eight-inch touch screen tops the central console, displaying things like control panels and, when the car is not moving, Web pages.

The system has Wi-Fi capability, two U.S.B. ports and a place to plug in a keyboard — in short, many of the features of a standard PC.

The automakers’ efforts are backed by companies that make chips for PCs and that want to see their processors slotted into the 70 million cars sold worldwide each year.

“Cars are going to become probably the most immersive consumer electronics device we have,” said Michael Rayfield, a general manager at Nvidia, a chip company that on Thursday plans to announce a deal with Audi. “In 2010, you will sit in these things, and it will be a totally different experience.”

The giants of the industry contend they are giving consumers what they want — and the things that smartphones and the Internet have trained them to expect.

“Customers are expecting more and more, especially business people who expect to find in the car what they find in their smartphone,” said Mathias Halliger, the chief engineer for Audi’s multimedia interface systems. “We should give them the same or a better experience.”

The muscle of the computer industry adds powerful new backing to efforts by carmakers to introduce new technologies as a source of profit. Once they promoted advanced stereos, but now navigation and integrated phone systems are the hot items.

“Carmakers assume, as most consumers do, that most cars are alike in terms of line quality and safety, and all the old attributes,” Art Spinella, an auto industry analyst with CNW Research, said. “Now the way to distinguish yourself is through higher tech.”

“But they’re totally ignoring one of the key issues of the future of driving, which is distracted driving.”

Awareness of that issue is growing. Even in 2003, when fewer people were multitasking in cars, researchers at Harvard estimated that motorists talking on cellphones caused 2,600 fatal accidents and 570,000 accidents involving injuries a year.

Charlie Klauer, a researcher at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, says motorists face a much greater crash risk when looking at a screen, even if it is just a simple GPS map. She says the overall danger for drivers will rise as screens deliver additional streams of data.

The longer a motorist looks away from the road, “the risk of crash or near crash goes up exponentially — not a linear increase, but exponentially,” Ms. Klauer said. “So when you start introducing things like e-mail, Internet access, restaurant options or anything like that, the risk goes up.”

Regulators worry about the developments, too. Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, said the companies involved were on the wrong track.

“The idea they’re going to load automobiles up with all kinds of ways to be distracted — that’s not the direction we’re going, and I will speak out against it,” he said.

The companies contend that they are creating helpful systems that display crucial information. And they are quick to point out that more computing power could mean better safety technology as well, like sensors that try to predict dangerous driving situations.

Ford and Audi say they extensively tested and tweaked their systems to cut down on the amount of time that drivers spend looking at screens. Brad Stertz, a spokesman for Audi of America, said that this testing was voluntary.

“Because a lot of this is so new, there’s not a ton of regulatory testing that’s required, like would be required with crash testing,” Mr. Stertz said. He added that the company was also hoping to avoid legal troubles, saying, “It could be a legal issue if someone gets into a car accident and the cops blame the car company for a system that’s too elaborate.”

Darrin Shewchuk, a spokesman for Harman, said his company was working on safety technology like voice systems for listening to and composing e-mail messages. But he said that “generally speaking, the safety testing is really the responsibility of the automakers.”

Ashlee Vance reported from Las Vegas, and Matt Richtel from San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/te...racted.html?hp





Tenenbaum's P2P Use: The Labels Made Me Do It!

In his request for a new trial, convicted P2P copyright infringer Joel Tenenbaum says that the labels "lured" him into P2P use and are partly responsible for the consequences.
Nate Anderson

For journalists, the Joel Tenenbaum P2P case has been the gift that keeps on giving. Case in point: the team's court filing asking for either a new trial or a vastly reduced damage award. It turns out that the labels were at least partially responsible for Tenenbaum's years of P2P sharing.

"Plaintiffs, in August 2004, could reasonably be considered to have been at least partially responsible for the widespread dispersion of their recordings over peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Kazaa," writes Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, Tenenbaum's lawyer.

"Their continued conduct of releasing their recordings into a digitally networked environment on DRM-free CDs made the proliferation of their recordings on the peer-to-peer networks trivially easy. Their aggressive promotion of their recordings made such proliferation entirely predictable. Indeed, their mode of publication all but invited sharing. Plaintiffs knew, or should have known, exactly where their sound recordings would end up."

Music: the new in-ground pool?

If this sounds like a bizarre exercise in buck-passing, Nesson draws a parallel with in-ground swimming pools. Homeowners who have one are responsible for safeguarding it from small children, as the pool can be an "attractive nuisance" with potentially fatal effects on a child who stumbles into one unattended.

Quote:
In tort law, as the Court recognized, Op. at 29, a landowner is subject to liability for physical harm to trespassing children caused by an artificial condition upon the land where there is a substantial risk of serious bodily harm and the landowner fails to exercise reasonable care to eliminate the danger. An unfenced in-ground swimming pool is the classic example. In this case, the plaintiffs facilitated and enhanced the comparative availability and attractiveness of their songs on the peer-to-peer networks. They failed to fence off the songs they published on CD by encrypting them, and they refused to provide an unencrypted online alternative for obtaining them. In consequence Tenenbaum, along with millions of others like him, fell into the vast, unfenced pool of unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing.
Nesson hopes to capitalize on the judge's obvious sympathy for Tenenbaum's plight. In her last major opinion, Judge Nancy Gertner took the extraordinary step of outlining all the ways Tenenbaum might have presented a winning "fair use" claim; one of those scenarios involved claiming that his activity, at least in the early years, was "fair" because there was no online legal alternative. Nesson wants to take that argument a step further.

Were music marketers just too good?

Gertner was the first federal judge to recognize the potential of such a claim, but she wanted to draw the line at iTunes. Once iTunes went live, people like Joel could no longer claim that they had no real online alternative to getting digital singles, and therefore P2P use could no longer be considered fair. Nesson argues that the cutoff date should actually extend all the way into 2007, when the major labels finally dropped DRM on music at stores like Amazon and then (eventually) at iTunes.

"Until 2007, the songs the record companies authorized for online purchase were encrypted," Nesson writes. "Not until 2007 did they make songs available online DRM-free. This difference is critical. The fact that digital media was DRM-free on Napster and Kazaa contributed substantially to their immense public appeal. Encryption, by contrast, limited transferability and necessitated proprietary hardware and software to play the encrypted songs. The advent of iTunes did nothing to correct these deficiencies."

The argument is that consumers are entitled to buying media in exactly the way they want (singles instead of albums) and in exactly the format they want (unencrypted singles vs. encrypted singles). If media companies don't provide their works in such formats... people like Joel can simply grab a free copy instead.

A Hobson's choice

According to Nesson, here was the choice that presented itself to his client in those dark, pre-2007 days.

"He could go through the concededly inadequate process of purchasing a full album of unencrypted songs on CD and then transferring the songs to his computer and other listening devices. He could buy individual songs online, but only in encrypted form, and decrypt them to make them freely transferable, but this would make him a federal criminal under the anti- circumvention provision of the DMCA. His third option was to continue to use a peer-to- peer platform that allowed him to download these songs DRM-free with only a few clicks on his computer."

His fourth option, one never mentioned in the brief, was to not listen to the songs at all, given that he disliked the restrictions in place on them and didn't want to pay for a full CD. But this is where the "attractive nuisance" argument mentioned above comes into play; the labels had made their shiny wares so enticing that Tenenbaum almost literally had no choice but to seek out and listen to such music.

"His downloading was, in reality, an expression of both the social force of technological revolution and a consequence of the plaintiffs’ marketing strategies," says Nesson. "The plaintiffs’ conduct can be seen as effectively luring Tenenbaum into a vibrant technologically-assisted youth culture. The plaintiffs’ affirmative marketing activities and their refusal to offer an equivalent online alternative created a situation akin to 'attractive nuisance.'"

But if Gertner won't revisit her fair use ruling and grant Tenenbaum a new trial, Nesson argues that she should reduce the massive statutory damages award against him to the legal minimum of $750 per song.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...e-me-do-it.ars

















Until next week,

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