Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 24th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"So, what have we got here? An adequately secure version of Windows, finally? I think not." – Thomas C Greene


"The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!" – Hugh Thompson


"People do get better at many things in their 40s. The odds were against thrash-metal being one." – Ben Ratliff


"Despite that unfortunate house-on-woman matter, Mr. Raabe says his days in Oz were among the happiest of his life." – Dan Barry


"I find it peculiar that Apple would launch a flagship product without securing its own trademark first." – Yuval Barzakay


"In a sense, the letter is asking us to pursue an investigation, and as the service provider we don't see that as our role." – Steve Tally


"You know, downloading is such a part of student culture that college kids will never stop." – Loren Halman



































February 24th, 2007






US Copyright Lobby Out-Of-Touch

Internet law professor Michael Geist takes a look at intellectual property protection in the US and finds it somewhat out of step with the rest of the world.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, an association that brings together US lobby groups representing the movie, music, software, and publisher industries, last week delivered its annual submission to the US government featuring its views on the inadequacy of intellectual property protection around the world.

The report frequently serves as a blueprint for the US Trade Representative's Section 301 Report, a government-mandated annual report that carries the threat of trade barriers for countries that fail to meet the US standard of IP protection.

The IIPA submission generated considerable media attention, with the international media focusing on the state of IP protection in Russia and China, while national media in Canada, Thailand, and Taiwan broadcast dire warnings about the consequences of falling on the wrong side of US lobby groups.

While the UK was spared inclusion on this year's list, what is most noteworthy about the IIPA effort is that dozens of countries - indeed most of the major global economies in the developed and developing world - are singled out for criticism.

The IIPA recommendations are designed to highlight the inadequacies of IP protection around the world, yet the lobby group ultimately shines the spotlight on how US copyright policy has become out-of-touch and isolated from much of the rest of the globe.

The IIPA criticisms fall into three broad categories. First, the lobby group is very critical of any country that does not follow the US model for implementing the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Internet Treaties.

Those treaties, which create legal protection for technological protection measures, have generated enormous controversy with many experts expressing concern about their impact on consumer rights, privacy, free speech, and security research.

Double standards?

The US implementation, contained in the 1997 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, represents the world's most aggressive approach to the WIPO Internet Treaties, setting very strict limits on the circumvention of digital rights management systems and establishing a ban on devices that can be used to circumvent DRM, even if the circumvention is for lawful purposes.

Given the US experience, it is unsurprising that many countries have experimented with alternate implementations.

This experimentation invariably leads to heavy criticism from the IIPA as countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Israel, Mexico, and India are all taken to task for their implementation (or proposed implementation) of anti-circumvention legislation.

Further, countries that have not signed or ratified the WIPO Internet treaties (which still includes the majority of the world), face the wrath of the US lobby group for failing to do so.

Second, in a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do", many countries are criticised for copyright laws that bear a striking similarity to US law. For example, Israel is criticised for considering a fair use provision that mirrors the US approach.

The IIPA is unhappy with the attempt to follow the US model, warning that the Israeli public might view it as a "free ticket to copy." Similarly, the time shifting provisions in New Zealand's current copyright reform bill (which would permit video recording of television shows) are criticised despite the fact that US law has granted even more liberal copying rights for decades.

The most disturbing illustration of this double standard is the IIPA's criticism of compulsory copyright licensing requirements.

Countries around the world, particularly those in the developing world (including Indonesia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Kuwait, Nigeria, and Vietnam) all face demands to eliminate compulsory licensing schemes in the publishing and broadcasting fields.

Moreover, the report even criticises those countries that have merely raised the possibility of new compulsory licensing systems, such as Sweden, where politicians have mused about an Internet file sharing license.

Long list

Left unsaid by the IIPA, is the fact that the US is home to numerous compulsory licenses.

These include statutory licenses for transmissions by cable systems, satellite transmissions, compulsory licenses for making and distributing phonorecords as well as the use of certain works with non-commercial broadcasting.

Third, the IIPA recommendations criticise dozens of efforts to support national education, privacy, and cultural initiatives.

For example, Canada, Brazil, and South Korea are criticised for copyright exceptions granted to students and education institutions.

Italy and Mexico are criticised for failing to establish an easy method for Internet service providers to remove allegedly infringing content (without court oversight), while Greece is viewed as being offside for protecting the privacy of ISP subscribers.

Greece is also taken to task for levying a surcharge at movie theatres that is used to support Greek films.

Moreover, countries that have preserved their public domain by maintaining their term of copyright protection at the international treaty standard of life of the author plus an additional fifty years are criticised for not matching the US extension to life plus 70 years.

There are literally hundreds of similar examples, as countries from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America are criticised for not adopting the DMCA, not extending the term of copyright, not throwing enough people in jail, or creating too many exceptions to support education and other societal goals.

In fact, the majority of the world's population finds itself on the list, with 23 of the world's 30 most populous countries targeted for criticism (the exceptions are the UK, Germany, Ethiopia, Iran, France, Congo, and Myanmar).

Countries singled out for criticism should not be deceived into thinking that their laws are failing to meet an international standard, no matter what US lobby groups say.

Rather, those countries should know that their approach - and the criticism that it inevitably brings from the US - places them in very good company.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6379309.stm





Music Industry Tries to Enlist Schools in Piracy Crackdown
Ted Bridis

In a crackdown on college students, the music industry is sending thousands more complaints to top American universities this school year than it did last year as it targets music illegally downloaded over campus computer networks.

A few schools, including Ohio and Purdue universities, already have received more than 1,000 complaints accusing individual students since last fall — significant increases over the past school year. For students who are caught, punishments vary from e-mail warnings to semester-long suspensions from classes.

The trade group for the largest music labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, identified the 25 universities that received the most copyright complaints it sent so far this school year. The group long has pressured schools to act more aggressively against online pirates on campus.

"It's something we feel we have to do," Cary Sherman, president of the association, said. "We have to let people know that if they engage in this activity, they are not anonymous."

The top five schools are Ohio, Purdue, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. The recording industry group complained about almost 15,000 students at those 25 universities, nearly triple the number for the previous school year.

"They're trying to make a statement," said Randall Hall, who polices computers at Michigan State University, seventh on the list with 753 complaints. Michigan State received 432 complaints in December alone, when students attended classes for only half the month.

Hall meets personally with students caught twice and forces them to watch an eight-minute anti-piracy DVD produced by the recording group. A third- time offender can be suspended for a semester.

"I get the whole spectrum of excuses," Hall said. "The most common answer I get is, 'All my friends are doing this. Why did I get caught?'"

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — which received 897 complaints — first- and second-time offenders receive escalating warnings about piracy. After a third complaint, the school unplugs a student's Internet connection and sends the case to a dean for additional punishment.

Each complaint represents an accusation that a student was identified sharing a single song over the campus network. The recording industry group files civil lawsuits against egregious offenders, who make available hundreds or thousands of songs to other students online. Unlike lawsuits, formal complaints are typically sent to colleges every day by e-mail messages.

The music group said each university should set its own penalties for illegal downloading. "When we look at the problem, it's particularly acute in the college context," the RIAA chief executive, Mitch Bainwol, said.

The association said popular software programs it has targeted at schools include AresWarez, BitTorrent, eDonkey and other programs that operate on the Gnutella and FastTrack services.

Under U.S. law, universities that receive complaints about students illegally distributing copyrighted songs generally must act to stop repeat offenders or face legal action. The entertainment industry typically can identify a student only by his or her numerical Internet address and must rely on the school to correlate that information with its own records to trace a person's real- world identity.

Some schools aggressively warn students after they receive complaints. Others do not. Purdue, which has received 1,068 complaints so far this year after only 37 in 2006, said it rarely even notifies the accused students because it is too much trouble to track down alleged offenders. Purdue said its students were not repeat offenders.

"In a sense, the letter is asking us to pursue an investigation, and as the service provider we don't see that as our role," a spokesman, Steve Tally, said of the association's complaint letters. "We are a leading technology school with thousands and thousands of curious and talented technology students."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technolo...logy-headlines





Ohio U Is Number 1!

US Crackdown on Students' Illegal Downloads
Conor Clarke

The US recording industry today embarked on a new drive against illegal music downloading on campuses throughout America.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents around 90% of music companies, has drawn up a list of the universities with the worst offenders and bombarded the university authorities with complaints.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, said students were the worst offenders, adding: "We know that piracy is most acute on campuses. Students have high-speed access, and have more time than money."

The RIAA, which has in the past taken out lawsuits against offenders, can identify individual computers on campuses from which the music is being downloaded for free, but not the students.

Universities are expected to take action ranging from revoking the rights of students to use campus computers to forcing them to watch eight-minute education videos about piracy.

The RIAA has sent out 15,000 complaints - triple the number it sent out the previous academic year - to 25 universities identified as having the most offenders.

Some earlier RIAA campaigns against the wider public have ended in embarrassing failure. The most notable mishap was a subpoena served on 83-year-old Gertrude Walton, a grandmother alleged to have been swapping rap music.

However, Mr Lamy defended past attempts at tackling piracy, saying: "We believe our previous deterrent efforts have made an impact. A lot of illegal operations have gone."

He said there were a number of reasons why people had stopped, and that one of those was the fear of a lawsuit.

Piracy, he added, was a "primary reason" for a sharp decline in music sales between 1999 and 2005.

Some critics claim the RIAA acts as a cartel that pays only a tiny percentage of profits to the artists. They also argue that downloading actually increases artists' exposure and, as a result, increases legitimate sales.

Others say downloads should be free and that artists and companies could make money through advertising on the sites.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, the company responsible for the iPod, this month urged record companies to begin selling songs online without copy protecton.

Some universities have adopted a relaxed approach to the complaints, saying it is not their job to police piracy, but others are trying to co-operate.

Jessica Stark, the media relations co-ordinator for Ohio university, which had the highest number of complaints last year, said the university respected intellectual property rights.

Asked why illegal downloading was so prevalent at Ohio, she said: "We do have an open network, we do have a student body that's very well connected to the internet - and that's a problem."

The university tried to educate students, with periodic reminders about copyright laws, and was working with a technology company in an effort to make legal downloads affordable.

But Ms Stark added: "We can and do shut off their network access, and we send them warnings, and we can suspend them."

Some students are sceptical about the crackdown. Loren Halman, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was identified as the sixth worst offender, said: "You know, downloading is such a part of student culture that college kids will never stop."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...018226,00.html





RIAA Appeals Attorneys' Fees Award
Eric Bangeman

The cartel of record companies in Capitol v. Foster have filed a motion for reconsideration of US District Court Judge Lee R. West's decision to award the defendant Debbie Foster attorneys' fees. In it, the plaintiffs lay out their disagreement with the judge's reasoning while taking time to point out that the fees awarded far exceed any damages they could have recovered should their suit have been successful.

Although the RIAA is careful to take issue with all of Judge West's conclusions, its primary concern is his ruling on secondary infringement.

Throughout its legal attacks on file sharers, the RIAA has argued that the owners of ISP accounts used to share copyrighted material should be held liable, even if they had no knowledge of the alleged infringement. Judge West called the RIAA's secondary infringement claims "untested and marginal" in his order, a characterization the labels take issue with.

Instead, the plaintiffs argue that if the defendant has "a reason to know" of the infringing activity, she should be held liable. The RIAA also points to Foster's subscriber agreement with Cox Communications, her ISP, which the RIAA says "expressly required" her to keep others using her account from infringing copyrights.

The RIAA also bemoans what it calls the premature end of the discovery process: "Finally, plaintiffs believe that discovery would have revealed substantial other evidence of defendant's knowledge and material assistance in the underlying infringements. For example, the computer may well have been in a common area such that defendant heard music coming from the computer when admitted infringer Amanda Foster was using it," argues the RIAA. That's right... the RIAA is arguing that mere act of listening to music on one's PC is evidence of copyright infringement.

Awarding attorneys' fees to Debbie Foster would do little more than reward the defendant for choosing to "litigate long after this case should have been dismissed," according to the motion. The record labels say that Foster failed to take advantage of the plaintiffs' offers to "end this litigation without paying anything." Instead, she chose to fight the lawsuit vigorously in hopes of clearing her name completely. The RIAA also argues that should the attorneys' fees award stand, it would deter other copyright owners from pursuing infringement claims.

This is an important issue for the RIAA and the stakes are high. Even if the RIAA changes its legal tactics and decides not to press secondary infringement claims in future lawsuits, there are still numerous lawsuits wending their way through the courts where the record labels have used the exact same tactics seen in Capitol v. Foster. The labels recognize this, noting that "defense counsel in other cases like this across the country are already citing the Court's statement, albeit out of context, in an effort to suggest that this Court has found that contributory and vicarious infringement claims in cases like this one are not viable." Should other courts find Judge West's reasoning applicable to their cases, the RIAA is at risk of writing a lot of large checks, drastically tilting the risk-reward equation in the wrong direction for them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070222-8902.html





Warez Leader Faces 10 Years in Jail
enigmax

After spending nearly 3 years in a detention center fighting his extradition from Australia, a leader of notorious warez group ‘DrinkorDie’ was yesterday arraigned before a U.S. District Court to face charges of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of actual criminal copyright infringement. If found guilty he faces 10 years in jail & a $500,000 fine.

Founded in Moscow in 1993, DrinkorDie (DoD) was a major underground warez network who, amongst many other achievements (including the release of their own DVD ripper) embarrassed Microsoft by pre-releasing Windows95 2 weeks before its official launch. DoD consisted mainly of university undergraduates and was heavily supported by employees of software houses, whose role would be to leak copies of software to the group.

Considered by many to have reached their peak before the dawn of 1997, DoD remained firmly on the FBI’s radar. In 2000, U.S. Immigration and Customs began their investigation into DOD and other warez networks such as RiSC, RAZOR1911, RiSCISO, Request To Send (RTS), ShadowRealm (SRM), WomenLoveWarez (WLW), and POPZ. In 2001 DoD was busted during US Customs co-ordinated raids as part of Operation Buccaneer.

More than seventy search warrants were carried out globally across 12 countries, including raids in the US, Australia, Great Britain, Finland, Norway and Sweden with the subsequent arrest of 65 people.

The investigation claimed to have revealed two leaders of DoD. The first, 28 year old US citizen John Sankus Jr from Philadelphia aka ‘eriFlleH’ was convicted and sentenced in 2002, receiving 46 months in a federal prison (along with co-conspirator, Barry Erickson, who was sentenced to 33 months). At the time, US Attorney Paul McNulty said “John Sankus and his techno-gang operated in the faceless world of the internet and thought they would never be caught. They were wrong. These sentences, and those to follow, should send a message to others entertaining similar beliefs of invincibility.”

The second leader is claimed to be 44 year old Hew Raymond Griffiths, a British national and previous resident of Bateau Bay, Australia. After fighting extradition to the US from an Australian detention center for the last 3 years, Griffiths finally lost his battle in the Australian courts and yesterday was brought before Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz sitting in U.S. District Court, Alexandria, Va.

According to the indictment, it is claimed that Griffiths, aka “Bandido,” was an established leader of DrinkOrDie and a major player in the ‘warez’ scene. It is claimed that he also held important positions in other warez groups including Razor1911 and RiSC.

“Griffiths claimed to be beyond the reach of U.S. law, and today, we have proven otherwise,” said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher. “This extradition represents the Department of Justice’s commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe.”

“Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders,” said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.

The Court claims that prior to its dismantling, DrinkOrDie was estimated to have enabled the illegal reproduction and distribution of more than $50 million worth of pirated media including software, movies, games and music.

However, its is worth noting that it has never been proven that any member of DoD profited financially from their activities. Indeed, at the trial of other DoD members in the UK in May 2005, Bruce Houlder QC, prosecuting, said he acknowledged that the defendants were not involved in the software piracy scene to make money but rather they saw themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

For many in the warez scene and beyond, this is how DoD will be remembered.
http://torrentfreak.com/warez-leader...years-in-jail/





Driver’s License Emerges as Crime-Fighting Tool, but Privacy Advocates Worry
Adam Liptak

On the second floor of a state office building here, upstairs from a food court, three facial-recognition specialists are revolutionizing American law enforcement. They work for the Massachusetts motor vehicles department.

Last year they tried an experiment, for sport. Using computerized biometric technology, they ran a mug shot from the Web site of “America’s Most Wanted,” the Fox Network television show, against the state’s database of nine million digital driver’s license photographs.

The computer found a match. A man who looked very much like Robert Howell, the fugitive in the mug shot, had a Massachusetts driver’s license under another name. Mr. Howell was wanted in Massachusetts on rape charges.

The analysts passed that tip along to the police, who tracked him down to New York City, where he was receiving welfare benefits under the alias on the driver’s license. Mr. Howell was arrested in October.

At least six other states have or are working on similar enormous databases of driver’s license photographs. Coupled with increasingly accurate facial-recognition technology, the databases may become a radical innovation in law enforcement.

Other biometric databases are more useful for now. But DNA and fingerprint information, for instance, are not routinely collected from the general public. Most adults, on the other hand, have a driver’s license with a picture on it, meaning that the relevant databases for facial-recognition analysis already exist. And while the current technology requires good-quality photographs, the day may not be far off when images from ordinary surveillance cameras will routinely help solve crimes.

Critics say the databases may therefore also represent a profound threat to privacy.

“What is the D.M.V.?” asked Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a privacy advocate. “Does it license motor vehicles and drivers? Or is it really an identification arm of law enforcement?”

Anne L. Collins, the Massachusetts registrar of motor vehicles, said that people seeking a driver’s license at least implicitly consent to allowing their images to be used for other purposes.

“One of the things a driver’s license has become,” Ms. Collins said, “is evidence that you are who you say you are.”

The databases are primarily intended to prevent people from obtaining multiple licenses under different names. That can help prevent identity theft and stop people who try to get a second license after their first has been suspended.

“The states are finding hundreds of cases of fraud each year in each state,” said J. Scott Carr, executive vice president of the Digimarc Corporation, which says it has sold biometric technology to motor vehicle departments in seven states and has a role in the production of more than two-thirds of all driver’s licenses in the United States.

But the databases can also be used for law enforcement purposes beyond detecting fraud.

A page concerning Mr. Howell, printed out from the “America’s Most Wanted” Web site, is taped to the wall of the investigators’ office here. It is a kind of trophy.

“It’s always exciting when you get a hit and you’re getting someone really bad off the streets,” said Maria Conlon, a facial-recognition specialist at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. “That’s when everyone’s morale goes up.”

Most of the work is less glamorous. The analysts’ main job is to check roughly 5,000 new driver’s license photographs every day against the database. A computer algorithm that takes into account about 8,000 facial data points does a rough cut, and analysts examine potential matches, rejecting the vast majority.

That computers alone cannot do the job does not surprise Richard M. Smith, an expert in digital security. “It’s probably one of the more inaccurate biometrics,” Mr. Smith said, referring to facial-recognition technologies.

After computers narrow the field of potential matches, Ms. Conlon and her colleagues get to work.

“We don’t look at hair,” Ms. Conlon said. “We do look at lips, noses, ears.”

Scars and tattoos can be useful, but what seem to be birthmarks are often passing blemishes. Some people make it easy by wearing the same clothes, though they are seeking licenses under different names. They have, Ms. Conlon said, “a registry outfit.”

The program, in place since April, has yielded more than 1,000 apparent fraud cases referred to the state police. Other potential matches identified by the computers and confirmed by analysts have turned out to be clerical errors where, for instance, the wrong information was attached to a person’s photograph. In the six months ending in January, analysts found 157 twins among the images flagged as potential matches.

The database’s second function, as a resource for law enforcement agencies, is growing in popularity. Police chiefs from around the state e-mail digital photographs for comparison with the database, sometimes several times a day.

And other uses are not hard to imagine. Coroners have on three occasions sent over photographs of dead people they could not identify. The analysts struck out, perhaps because of the quality of the images.

“To make it work at all,” Mr. Smith said, “you have to have good control of camera angle and lighting.” Passport and driver’s license photographs, along with mug shots, are ideal.

Other sorts of images are not useful — yet. “A video surveillance camera is probably not going to give it to you,” Mr. Smith said.

In time, though, the combination of facial recognition and other information — from financial records, mobile phones, automobile positioning devices and other sources — may do away with the ability to move anonymously through the world, Mr. Tien, the privacy advocate, said.

“The real question with biometrics,” he said, “is that they are part of a cluster of technologies that will allow for location tracking in both public and private places.”

The case against Mr. Howell fizzled last week. He had been charged with invading a home at gunpoint in Dorchester in August 2002 and holding three people captive for hours, repeatedly raping one of them. He fled after being released on bail, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, leading to his inclusion on the television show’s most-wanted list.

But after Mr. Howell was caught through his license photo, the prosecutors re-examined their case. In the intervening years, the victims disappeared, and prosecutors think they may have left the country. Without their testimony, prosecutors concluded, there was no way to take the case to trial. Prosecutors formally abandoned the case on Friday, and they let Mr. Howell go.

“He is in the wind right now,” Mr. Wark said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/us/17face.html





Sweden

Film Industry Lobbyists Train Police on Internet Piracy

It is reported that Swedish police officers are being advised by a Hollywood lobby group how to catch people illegally downloading from the internet.

The newspaper, Computer Sweden, says that representatives from the Motion Picture Association and the FBI have been invited in to give lectures at Sweden’s National Police Academy.

The police do not see any conflict of interest in welcoming the lobby organisation but Sweden’s Pirate Party, which campaigns for copyrighted material to be free for everyone, says the MPA should not be able to get involved in this country’s justice system, ”just to protect their old, lucrative monopoly”.

Internet Piracy was a hot topic in Sweden last year, after Swedish Police closed down one of the world’s biggest bit torrent sites, The Pirate Bay.

It was alleged Washington had threatened to go to the World Trade Organisation to get sanctions imposed on Sweden if the site was not stopped. It was back up and running three days later.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Internation...rtikel=1210749





Can Sweden Sink Piracy?
Thomas Mennecke

Sweden has grown to become the focal point of online distribution. As the home country of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker that has grown into something of a cultural phenomenon, it has gained a reputation that it may not be particularly fond of. With millions of dedicated users, The Pirate Bay remains a thorn in the side of the entertainment industry, which has been unable to successfully disrupt this massive operation.

That doesn't mean attempts to destroy The Pirate Bay's operation haven't been tried. Throughout its lengthy history, numerous legal threats, letters from the MPAA to the Swedish government, and most importantly, the temporary shutdown in May 2006, have all failed to permanently deter The Pirate Bay. If anything, the failure to pull the plug on The Pirate Bay has only emboldened their operation. Just last week, The Pirate Bay opened up "Oscartorrents", a BitTorrent website dedicated to Oscar nominated films. This has not gone unnoticed in the eyes of the entertainment industry.

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) specifically names The Pirate Bay, among other distribution methods, in its 2007 "Special 301 Report." The report focuses squarely on Sweden as a “Safe Haven” for piracy, as the report states a lack of past effective copyright enforcement has helped fuel the current situation.

“Sweden also is the host country to ThePirateBay.org, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker and one of Sweden’s largest web sites. The site has over 785,000 registered users, between 1.7 and 1.9 million peers, with 120,000 indexed torrents. Operators of the site proudly flaunt their role in facilitating infringements, often taking pot shots at rights holders from whom they receive notices of infringing activity. ThePirateBay was raided in mid-2006 by the Swedish police, and although the site is back up and running, it is expected that its prosecution will take place in the middle of 2007.”

The report paints a grim picture for copyright enforcement in Sweden. It consistently notes that despite international pressure, local police and prosecutors are reluctant to enforce intellectual property rights.

“The police take no ex officio action at all, even though they have the authority to do so. MPA reports that about 150 police reports have been filed against filesharers in Sweden, and of those, only eight have gone to trial so far - seven were convicted and one acquitted. These few notable exceptions of concrete action also resulted in public backlash.”

To get a handle on this increasingly dire situation, it appears the cavalry is being called in. Perhaps in preparation for a “middle of 2007” prosecution against The Pirate Bay, a new anti-piracy unit will finally be created in early 2007. According to the IFPI, the FBI, MPA and AntiPiratByran have taken on the task of training this new unit.

“The FBI, MPA, and AntiPiratByran (the umbrella organization for anti-piracy operations carried out on behalf of the film and games industries) participated in a training seminar for police on January 24, 2007. APB has continuously pressed for a special copyright unit to be created within law enforcement. This unit will be established in early 2007 and a special training will be provided on source piracy. The industries plan additional training and educational work with police officers and prosecutors in 2007.”

Considering The Pirate Bay’s geographical distribution, it may be tough to fully dismantle this organization. It seems they may be feeling the heat however, as they have recently been interested in buying Sealand and other offshore commodities. But is The Pirate Bay worried?

"Nope. We still haven't done anything illegal, no matter what the Americans think about us," Peter from The Pirate Bay told Slyck.com.
http://www.slyck.com/story1404.html





Attorney Proposes Licensing Music Distribution, Not Downloading

Everybody knows the music business is broken; the question is, "how it can be fixed?"

Bennett Lincoff, an "intellectual property law attorney, consultant and writer with more than 25 years of experience" that includes a spell as Director of Legal Affairs for New Media at ASCAP, emailed me his proposal for fixing the music business: altering copyright law so that the only right consumers would need to license from record labels is the right to distribute music.

Downloading or streaming it would be free; consumers and owners of networks would only need to secure licensing in order to redistribute a song. Suffice it to say, this would constitute a dramatic restructuring of the music business, but that's exactly what the digital age seems to require.

The paper is twenty eight pages long, so I asked Lincoff to summarize it for this blog. Here's Lincoff's summary of "Fixing What Is Badly Broken," in which he proposes ending DRM, allowing free listening, and putting all potential distributors of digital content on equal footing:

--------------------

"Recently, I published a Musical Licensing White Paper through my web site. In it, I propose an alternative to the music industry’s traditional sales-based revenue model for purposes of digital transmissions of sound recordings and of the musical works embodied in them. Mine is a comprehensive approach to rights licensing and rights management that does not depend on the efficacy of exclusionary DRM technologies for its success; a solution to the ongoing crisis of the digital music marketplace that simultaneously protects the integrity of copyright, promotes technological innovation, facilitates the growth of all manner of digital audio services, and meets consumer demand...

"To begin with, consumers would not incur any liability merely for surfing the web, accessing streaming media, or downloading music files. Copying for personal use also would not require authorization. To be sure, consumers still would be required to pay network operators for Internet access, and they may be required to pay audio service providers for their activities on particular web sites or services. But whether consumers listen to streams or download recordings; make one or many copies of a recording for personal use; or use recordings on one or several playback devices would have no effect on their obligation to music industry rights holders. None of this conduct would require consumers to obtain licenses or pay license fees under the digital transmission right; and should not otherwise.

"On the other hand, consumers would need licenses whenever they act as digital audio service providers in their own right; that is, whenever they are responsible for the digital transmissions at issue. By way of example, consumers would need authorization if they operate music-enabled personal or hobby web sites; or if they upload music files to a web site or service that does not have its own license under the digital transmission right authorizing this activity by users of its service (known as a 'through-to-the-user license'); or, if they offer recordings to others through participation in a P2P file-sharing network, or similar service, that does not have a through-to-the-user license.

"Under my proposal, through-to-the-user licenses would be made readily available on non-discriminatory terms to all sites and services wishing to obtain them. It stands to reason that consumers would seek out services that obtain licenses that authorize their activities (to the limited extent necessary under the digital transmission right) in connection with the web site or service in question. Individual users of sites and services that obtain through-to-the-user licenses would not need to obtain licenses in their own right. Moreover, licensed services, being lawful, would be able to operate openly, attract investment capital (without exposing investors to copyright infringement liability), and offer users the most sophisticated functionalities. And, there being no reason remaining for music industry rights holders to undermine them, licensed services would be free of many of the security and related privacy concerns that plague users of their black market counterparts.

"A similar analysis applies to the P2P file-sharing context. P2P participants who download music files through the network but do not offer works to others would not need a license under the digital transmission right. Individual P2P participants who configure their computers to enable transmissions of recordings to others through the network would need authorization. Operators of centralized P2P networks would be jointly and severally liable with their network participants who share recorded music with others on the network. For centralized P2P networks, a single license held by the network operator would authorize all transmissions of the licensed recordings through the network. In such circumstances, individual network participants would not need to obtain licenses themselves, and yet would be free to share the licensed recordings through the network whenever they wished.

"Decentralized P2P file-sharing networks, on the other hand, do not have network operators, as such, through whom a network-wide license could be made available. Accordingly, each participant in a decentralized P2P file-sharing network would be responsible for securing authorization for their own conduct on that network. Licenses for these individual file-sharers would also be made readily available.

"Again, it stands to reason that the vast majority of consumers who are interested in P2P would likely seek out networks that had secured licenses that authorize their file-sharing activities; especially if the file-sharing that is permitted actually offers consumers whatever it is that they want from the P2P experience at any given moment.

"To date, the music industry has steadfastly refused to authorize services – especially P2P file-sharing networks -- that offer consumers full, unfettered, DRM-free access to music. To be sure, the industry supports services that offer DRM-encumbered music files; files in obscure formats, such as MPQ; files that are tethered to particular playback devices; files that cannot be shared; files that time-out; are only available while the consumer remains a subscriber of the service from which the music was obtained; or that are subject to other use restrictions. These are, at best, alternatives to the services that consumers demand, not substitutes for them. Because these offerings fall short of responding to consumer demand, they leave the sales-based revenue model vulnerable to widespread infringement by consumers who refuse to accept less than they already know they can have.

"By its refusal to meet consumer demand, the industry has relegated consumers to unlicensed services where adware, spyware, and privacy violations abound. In turn, the industry uses technological measures in an effort to disrupt these services. It seeds them with corrupted music files that damage consumers’ computers. It also engages in a practice known as “spoofing” by which consumers – including, no doubt, some young children – who search P2P networks for music files have been sent pornography instead. And, of course, the industry has launched a campaign of infringement litigation against consumers seeking ruinous damages and imposition of criminal penalties for conduct occurring in the privacy of people’s homes.

"All of this would change under my proposal: Licensed transmissions of recorded music would be made available from the largest number and widest array of sources, anytime, anywhere, to anyone with network access; and consumers would be free to enjoy music when, where and how they themselves decide."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/02/...paper_pro.html





Legally licensed to show movies, TV shows

Former File-Sharing `Pirates' Now Forging Pacts With Studios
Elise Ackerman

It's the ending entertainment kingpins would have ordered Hollywood to produce if the industry's struggle with peer-to-peer piracy had been a scripted reality show: After years of ferocious legal battles and high-tech hijinx, the unsavory purveyors of illicit music, TV shows and movies come in from the cold, pledging to respect copyrights and to use their popular software to benefit the industry.

It's the ending the kingpins would have wanted -- and it's the ending they appear to be getting.

Next week, BitTorrent, the creator of software that made it possible to easily exchange full-length movies at virtually no cost, will launch a marketplace of licensed movies, television shows, video games and music. While details of pricing and available titles have yet to be unveiled, the San Francisco company says it has cut deals with 40 studios, production houses and game publishers.

The creators of Kazaa, a once-popular music-sharing program, are seeking similar licensing deals for Joost, a new European-based service that hopes to use its peer-to-peer network to legally distribute TV shows. Joost is currently available only for approved beta testers.

Peer Impact, of Sarasota Springs, N.Y., has deals with three major studios to offer legal downloads of TV shows like ``The Loop'' and ``Firefly,'' as well as movies like ``X-Men'' and ``Office Space,'' at prices ranging from 99 cents to $3.99.

Veoh Networks, a San Diego company partly backed by Time Warner, distributes episodes of shows like ``Beverly Hillbillies'' and ``Veronica Mars'' for free.

``Conceptually there is a place for peer-to-peer in the legal marketplace,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, an industry trade group. ``There is a ton of experimentation going on, not just here in the U.S. but all over the globe.''

``What the pirates showed us is that peer-to-peer is a great way to distribute content,'' said Dmitry Shapiro, who founded Veoh Networks in 2004 after first building a computer-security company called Akonix that prevented corporate networks from being used for illegal file sharing.

Shapiro isn't the only technologist to switch from fighting peer-to-peer to attempting to profit from the cost-saving efficiencies it offers. Robert Summer, ex-president of Sony Music International, is executive chairman of iMesh, a once renegade music-sharing service based in New York, which now uses audio filtering technology to screen out unlicensed content.

Ed Kozel heads Skyrider, a peer-to-peer advertising company based in Mountain View whose software was initially used by major studios to monitor and suppress copyrighted content being shared on peer-to-peer networks. Skyrider now tracks requests for files on the LimeWire peer-to-peer network and responds with advertising and/or licensed material.

``It was just a commercially larger opportunity,'' Kozel said.

Randy Ditzler, a partner from Sequoia Capital, which has invested in Skyrider, said the 420 million daily searches conducted on peer-to-peer networks around the world rivals the number of searches on either Google or Yahoo. Sequoia was an early investor in Google and YouTube.

According to research firm BigChampagne, about 100 million people use peer-to-peer services each month, as many as visit MySpace.

Thanks to the clever design of peer-to-peer networks, it costs next to nothing to reach this huge audience. While sites that stream video, like YouTube, pay hefty bandwidth fees to connect to their users, companies that use peer-to-peer distribution benefit from giant networks of personal computers that share the cost of moving data around the Internet.

This architecture has made peer-to-peer attractive to the giant corporations that own major studios and record companies. Still, it's unclear if companies like Time Warner can successfully co-opt giant peer-to-peer networks, which were built around the idea of sharing free content.

Copyrights have also been an obstacle. Allan Klepfisz, chief executive of Brilliant Technologies, which owns Qtrax, a peer-to-peer music service that is striving to go legit, said Qtrax will have to delay an anticipated launch into later in the year, as it continues to negotiate rights with both record labels and publishers who represent songwriters.

Legally distributing television shows on networks, such as peer-to-peer, is even more complex, as copyrights exist for individual performances, music and scripts. Shows themselves can have more than one owner.

So far, the video content available on both legal peer-to-peer services and conventional download services like Apple's iTunes is limited.

Finally, piracy of both music and videos continues to be a growing problem. According to the IFPI, an umbrella organization representing the international recording industry, an estimated 20 billion songs were illegally swapped or downloaded in 2005. That same year, the Motion Picture Association of America said its members lost $2.3 billion to Internet piracy worldwide.

``Illegal file sharing remains at unacceptably high levels that inhibit the development of the legal marketplace,'' said Bainwol of the RIAA.

Even as new legal peer-to-peer services launch, the prosecution of illegal file-sharing will continue. So far, the RIAA has taken about 18,000 people to court.

``Our work is not yet done,'' Bainwol said.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16727733.htm





Malaysia Raids Illegal Software Sellers
Sean Yoong

Malaysian authorities have begun raiding computer retail outlets offering pirated software amid concerns that illegal copies of Microsoft Corp.'s newest operating system, Windows Vista, are already on sale.

The strategy marks a shift from crackdowns over the past year that mainly targeted companies using unlicensed software, Ahmad Dahuri Mahmud, the Domestic Trade Ministry's deputy director general of enforcement, said Friday.

"Computer dealers often sweeten computer purchases by offering consumers free (pirated) software pre-loaded onto their personal computers," Ahmad Dahuri told a news conference.

The current clampdown started Thursday with the arrest of a store owner in a Kuala Lumpur suburban shopping mall. Officials seized three computers with pirated versions of Windows XP from a 28-year-old suspect's premises, Ahmad Dahuri said.

The man is expected to be charged under copyright laws that provide for maximum prison sentences of five years and a fine of up to 20,000 ringgit ($5,700) per infringement.

Officials were also investigating claims by the public that some dealers have been loading pirated versions of beta copies _ unofficial versions released for tests _ of Windows Vista, Ahmad Dahuri said.

"We haven't found (pirated copies of) Windows Vista yet, but there have been complaints," Ahmad Dahuri said. "The government has no choice but to hit hard at the source as software piracy at the retail end has become rampant."

Windows Vista, Microsoft's long-delayed operating system upgrade, was released with much fanfare to consumers at the end of January.

Ahmad Dahuri did not say how many outlets were suspected to carrying illegal software, but stressed that "a high percentage" of computer retailers were believed to be involved.

"This is hurting the business of honest dealers," Ahmad Dahuri said.

Malaysian enforcement officers seized more than 28,000 copies of pirated software worth roughly 23 million ringgit ($6.6 million) in 2006, mainly from companies, factories and offices nationwide, Ahmad Dahuri said.

Some 60 percent of all software used in private businesses in Malaysia was illegal in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, according to the Business Software Alliance, an anti-piracy watchdog. Malaysia's software industry lost $149 million to piracy that year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021600213.html





In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes
Donald G. McNeil Jr.

Asia is seeing an “epidemic of counterfeits” of life-saving drugs, experts say, and the problem is spreading. Malaria medicines have been particularly hard hit; in a recent sampling in Southeast Asia, 53 percent of the antimalarials bought were fakes.

Bogus antibiotics, tuberculosis drugs, AIDS drugs and even meningitis vaccines have also been found.

Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly.

“The impact on people’s lives behind these figures is devastating,” said Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the organization’s chief of health technology and pharmaceuticals.

Internationally, a prime target of counterfeiters now is artemisinin, the newest miracle cure for malaria, said Dr. Paul N. Newton of Oxford University’s Center for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos.

His team, which found that more than half the malaria drugs it bought in Southeast Asia were counterfeit, discovered 12 fakes being sold as artesunate pills made by Guilin Pharma of China.

A charity working in Myanmar bought 100,000 tablets and discovered that all were worthless.

“They’re not being produced in somebody’s kitchen,” Dr. Newton said. “They’re produced on an industrial scale.”

China is the source of most of the world’s fake drugs, experts say. In December, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, the former chief of China’s Food and Drug Administration and two of his top deputies were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs.

The director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was in office from the agency’s creation in 1998 until he was dismissed in 2005 after repeated scandals in which medicines and infant formula his agency had approved killed dozens of Chinese, including children.

“The problem is simply so massive that no amount of enforcement is going to stop it,” said David Fernyhough, a counterfeiting expert at the Hong Kong offices of Hill & Associates, a risk-management firm hired by Western companies to foil counterfeiters.

The distribution networks, he said, “mirror the old heroin networks,” flowing to Thai distributors with financing and money-laundering arranged in Hong Kong. The penalties are less severe than for heroin.

Daniel C. K. Chow, an Ohio State University law professor and an expert on Chinese counterfeiting, said he believed that the authorities would pursue counterfeiters “ruthlessly” for killing Chinese citizens but be more lax about drugs for export.

“The counterfeiters aren’t stupid,” he said. “They don’t want anyone beating down the door in the middle of the night and dragging them away, so they make drugs for sale outside the country.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that he had “no idea” whether most of the world’s counterfeits came from China, but that Mr. Zheng’s arrest proved China was cracking down. He also said counterfeiters would get the same punishment no matter whom they hurt.

Many of the fake artesunate pills found by Dr. Newton’s team were startlingly accurate in appearance — and much more devious in effect than investigators had suspected.

Not only did the pills look correct, as did the cardboard boxes, the blister packing and the foil backing, but investigators found 12 versions of the tiny hologram added to prevent forgery.

In one case, even a secret “X-52” logo visible only under ultraviolet light was present, though in the wrong spot.

Another hologram was forged by hand, Dr. Newton said, by someone who obviously spent hours with a pin and a magnifying glass making tiny dots on a circle of foil to imitate the shimmer.

But the most frightening aspect appeared when the pills were tested. Some contained harmless chalk, starch or flour. But the latest, he said, contained drugs apparently chosen to fool patients into thinking the pills were working.

Some had acetaminophen, which can temporarily lower malarial fevers but does not kill parasites. Some had chloroquine, an old and now nearly useless antimalarial.

One had a sulfa drug that in allergic people could cause a fatal rash.

And some had a little real artemisinin — not enough to cure, but enough to produce a false positive on the common Fast Red dye test for the genuine article.

Those would not merely fool a laboratory, Dr. Newton noted. They could also foster drug-resistant parasites, so if patients were lucky enough to get genuine artemisinin treatment later, they might have already developed an incurable strain and could die anyway.

Such resistant strains could spread from person to person by mosquito and ultimately render the drug ineffective, as already happened with chloroquine and Fansidar, two earlier malaria cures.

“We make no apology for the use of the term ‘manslaughter’ to describe this criminal lethal trade,” Dr. Newton and his co-authors said last year in an article in The Public Library of Science Medicine. “Indeed, some might call it murder.”

In the United States, finding counterfeit drugs in pharmacies is very rare, “but we’ve seen a lot from Internet sellers posing as legitimate pharmacies,” said Dr. Ilisa Bernstein, director of pharmacy affairs for the Food and Drug Administration.

Thus far, few counterfeits of life-saving drugs have been found in the United States. Most are drugs used or abused for fun, like Viagra, the painkiller Oxycontin and sleeping pills. Investigators have, however, found fake statins, which could eventually lead to a heart attack, and fake Tamiflu, which could be fatal in a pandemic of lethal flu.

Fake drugs have a long history; the film noir masterpiece “The Third Man,” based on a real criminal case, involves adulterated penicillin in post-war Vienna.

And in the 1600s, after conquistadors discovered that South American cinchona bark cured malaria, Europe was flooded with fake bark. “It caused a great loss of confidence in it as a cure,” Dr. Newton said. “We’re seeing history repeat itself.”

The problem with antimalarials is worst in Asia, but is growing rapidly in Africa.

For example, in September, Nigerian authorities found $25,000 worth of counterfeit malaria and blood pressure drugs concealed in a shipment of purses from China.

The temptation for counterfeiters is likely to grow because money to fight malaria is being poured into the third world.

President Bush’s $1.2 billion Malaria Initiative avoids the problem by buying directly from Western pharmaceutical companies like Novartis, said Dr. Trenton K. Ruebush II, an adviser to the initiative.

By contrast, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria gives money directly to poor countries to buy their own drugs, and sends auditors to follow up. But 80 percent of the world’s nations, pharmacology experts estimate, lack drug agencies capable of detecting sophisticated counterfeits.

“The countries are supposed to purchase from W.H.O.-qualified manufacturers, but there are places where things can go wrong where we wouldn’t necessarily have control,” said Dr. Bernard Nahlen, the fund’s malariologist. “In some countries, there is, let’s say, a certain lethargy about paying attention to these issues. You have to take the government’s word for it, and anybody can pull the wool over anybody’s eyes.”

The Global Fund, which appointed a new director on Feb. 8, is considering adopting central purchasing, a spokesman said.

A global alert system for counterfeit drugs has existed for 16 years, first by fax, and now on the World Health Organization Web site, said Dr. Valerio Reggi, chief of the anticounterfeiting task force created last year by the organization.

“But it isn’t used very much,” he said. “Regulators are human beings, and it’s difficult to identify a benefit for those who report to it.”

Dr. Reggi said the task force would try to change that by drawing attention to the problem and getting harsher laws passed. As he pointed out, in many countries, “counterfeiting a T-shirt means 10 years in jail, but counterfeiting a medicine can be a misdemeanor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/sc...coun.html?8dpc





A Pianist’s Recordings Draw Praise, but Were They All Hers?
Alan Riding

In the autumn of her life, decades after she had last performed in public, the British pianist Joyce Hatto was rediscovered by a small group of musicians and critics who contended that her recordings of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and others ranked alongside those of the 20th century’s most exceptional virtuosos.

When she died last June at 77, some of those same enthusiasts again proclaimed her to be a neglected genius, in glowing obituaries written for British newspapers. In The Guardian, the music critic Jeremy Nicholas described her as “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.”

Mr. Nicholas and others, it seems, had accepted the explanation for her lack of renown among music lovers: a long battle against cancer had forced her to abandon her concert career in 1976 and led her to devote her energy to recording all the great works in the piano repertory, from Scarlatti to Messiaen, for the small British label Concert Artist.

“Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of,” Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe in 2005.

But now Ms. Hatto’s reputation for excellence and originality has been shaken by a charge of plagiarism. Gramophone, the London music monthly, has presented evidence that several of the recordings issued under her name were in fact copied from recordings of the same music by other pianists.

“We’re only just starting our investigation,” Gramophone’s editor, James Inverne, said in a telephone interview from London on Friday. “Already since we broke the story, people are coming forward expressing doubts about other recordings by Joyce Hatto.”

In an article posted on the magazine’s Web site (www.gramophone.co.uk), Mr. Inverne said initial doubts about Ms. Hatto’s recordings had been confirmed by a sound engineer, Andrew Rose, who compared the sound waves of her recording of Liszt’s 12 “Transcendental Études” with those of an earlier version by Lazlo Simon. In 10 of the études, the sound waves were identical.

Mr. Rose, who runs Pristine Classical, a small company based near St. Émilion in southwest France, has since created a Web page (pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html) where Liszt recordings by Ms. Hatto can be heard alongside those by Mr. Simon and one by the Japanese pianist Minoru Nojima. Mr. Rose has also concluded that Ms. Hatto’s supposed recording of Godowsky’s studies after Chopin études was in fact the work of Carlo Grante.

The findings have stunned admirers of Ms. Hatto, who in just the last two years have promoted what began to resemble a cult.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Nicholas defended his earlier impression that the CDs credited to Ms. Hatto were “the most extraordinary recordings I have ever heard.”

He added: “You never ask yourself: ‘Did this person ever go into a studio? Was I being conned?’ She was, after all, someone who had a concert career.”

Mr. Nicholas said that Ms. Hatto performed in Wigmore Hall in London in the 1960s and made a few records before her retirement from the stage. “I am one of the few people in the music world who actually met her,” he recalled. “But no, I never heard her play.”

William Barrington-Coupe, Ms. Hatto’s husband and the owner of Concert Artist, which issued more than 100 of her recordings (available online at concertartistrecordings.com), is perhaps the only person who can clear up the mystery. But he could not be reached at his home near Cambridge on Friday and did not respond to telephone or e-mail messages.

Mr. Inverne said that he had spoken to Mr. Barrington-Coupe by telephone on Thursday. “He was very charming,” Mr. Inverne said. “He sounded utterly puzzled. He said he could not explain it and asked to be informed if anyone shed any light on the affair.”

As it happens, questions about the authenticity of Ms. Hatto’s recordings had for some time been aired in Web chat by music lovers who asked how it was possible for an aged and ailing woman to record so much. They also pointed out that most of Ms. Hatto’s more than 100 CDs were issued over the last 10 years and a number since her death.

These doubts prompted Mr. Nicholas to write a letter to Gramophone last July asking for evidence of possible fraud. “No one came forth,” he said.

Then, this month, Jed Distler, a composer and music critic who was among Ms. Hatto’s admirers, contacted Mr. Inverne with a strange story. When he put the Hatto CD of the Liszt études into his computer, Mr. Inverne recounted, “his iTunes player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording.” Instead, it identified Mr. Simon as the performer.

Looking for scientific evidence of a hoax, Mr. Inverne then sent the Hatto and Simon recordings to Mr. Rose, a former sound engineer for the BBC. Mr. Rose said that the Liszt recordings were easy to identify as those made by Mr. Simon, but that the Nojima recording had been “manipulated” to disguise its origin.

“If all this is true,” Mr. Inverne said, “what strikes me is that this sort of piracy was made possible by technology, and later advances in technology uncovered it.”

He added: “As far as I know, the classical music world has never known a scandal like this. The art world has, but not classical music.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/ar...ic/17hatt.html





For Some Unmellowed Metalheads, Middle Age Is Nothing to Fear
Ben Ratliff

Who would have thought, back in the ’80s, that the clatter of Slayer’s rhythm section would someday become one of those archaic folk forms worth preserving just as an example of human mastery, like Kansas City swing or flamenco singing?

Rhythm sections, in many kinds of metal, have gone funkier, toward deeper grooves. But Slayer’s hasn’t. Its drummer, Dave Lombardo, still plays the same way he did in the early ’80s, in wickedly fast two-beat rhythms that constantly rush the music and do not swing; the only difference now is that his sound is bigger and surer, his fills more impressive.

It’s a completely unreasonable music, set at crazy speeds for the endless riffs and strangulated, whammy-bar-heavy solos. The band’s lyrics show an equal intemperance: “Christ Illusion,” its last album, full of holy-war imagery, comes out more vehemently against organized religion — one of the band’s favorite topics — than most of its records have in the past. Mellowing is not on the band’s docket.

Yet Slayer’s show at Hammerstein Ballroom on Thursday night created its own sense of comfort and refinement; it was self-contained, expertly paced, an awesome display of self-knowledge. People do get better at many things in their 40s. The odds were against thrash-metal being one.

Slayer doesn’t do much onstage: no pyrotechnics, no leaping, very little ingratiating stage rap. Tom Araya, its singer and bassist, still puts his head down and whips his tresses around clockwise when he’s not singing. The two guitarists, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, trade off solos, sometimes positioning themselves next to each other. That’s about it.

The group just won its first Grammy, for the song “Eyes of the Insane.” In part:

These thoughts of mutilated faces

Completely possessed

Fragmented images

Flashing rapidly

Psychotically abusing me

Worming through my head

Did Mr. Araya say: “Hey, man, we just won a Grammy! How about that, New York?” No. He blazed right through it, on the way to the old song “Mandatory Suicide,” which he dedicated to the American troops in Iraq. (It’s a rendering of war as mad slaughter, but like most Slayer songs, it resists being politically lined up; it keeps reaching for the epic poet’s point of view.)

The mini-epic “Seasons in the Abyss,” with its ringing tritone interval at the beginning, its extended solos, its medium tempo, was as close as Slayer got to a groove. Otherwise, this was a set pulled into 90 minutes, with hard-core-punk tempos, arranged blasts of feedback linking songs, and ending abruptly with “Angel of Death.” The band members did not return. It is logical that they don’t believe in encores, either.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/ar.../17slayer.html





YouTube out, "piracy-proof" Joost in

Viacom Inks Deal With Video-Sharing Outfit
AP

Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. agreed Tuesday to license television shows and movies to Joost, the new online video distribution channel launched by the founders of Kazaa and Skype.

Under the deal, Viacom's MTV, Nickelodeon and BET television networks and its Paramount studios will license shows and movies for the Joost Internet platform. This comes two weeks after Viacom pulled Comedy Central clips and other content from Google Inc.'s YouTube online video sharing service, citing copyright concerns.

Joost, founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, is still in testing. The service will allow free access to programs and channels in broadcast quality, supported by ads.

The Viacom arrangement marks the first big licensing deal for Joost, which promises to be a "piracy-proof" distributor of regular episodic content rather than the individual clips that tend to make up YouTube uploads. Much like Skype and Kazaa, which enraged the music industry because it enabled free trading of content, Joost uses peer-to-peer technologies to distribute material. Joost also uses encryption and other methods to lock content down.

Viacom said some of the shows it will license include MTV's "Real World" and "Beavis & Butthead," and Comedy Central's "Freak Show and Stella." Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said Joost was chosen for its interactive user experience and its "business model that respects both content creators and consumers."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2495240.shtml





Sharing the Wealth at MTV
Dan Mitchell

A WEEK before Viacom announced that it would make video content available online through a site called Joost, the Viacom-owned MTV Networks said that it would soon allow other Web sites to embed video clips from its own sites: MTV.com, VH1.com, Comedycentral.com, BET.com and others.

“We need to open up our Web sites and content both for consumers and for other companies,” Mika Salmi, MTV Networks’ president of global digital media, told Reuters, which said the move was “part of a strategy to bring Viacom’s Web sites up to ‘Web 2.0’ standards.”

If so, it is a new strategy. For most of its history, the MTV sites have been anything but open. Until recently, clips from Comedy Central were available only to those using the Internet Explorer browser, and Macintosh users who wanted to watch a video on VH1’s VSpot broadband service were out of luck. And even now, trying to find a clip from, say, “The Daily Show” often requires an infuriating amount of searching and drilling down through several clicks. And forget about sending your friend a link directly to the video — it cannot be done.

Still, the sites have improved. And GigaOM’s Om Malik praised the MTV Networks decision to let users embed videos, writing this week that it served as evidence that the people at Viacom “seem to be correcting themselves on many fronts” (gigaom.com). And it could make up for much of the promotional boost Viacom lost when it pulled its content from YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google.

The Joost deal may improve things, depending largely on how user-friendly the site is. Unlike YouTube, Joost will feature clips and entire episodes, complete with commercials. And it does not allow users to upload videos. It is just TV on the Internet, so there are no depictions of teenagers re-enacting their favorite 50 Cent videos.

Viacom’s decision to drop YouTube and hook up with Joost has drawn vitriol from the “big media must be toppled” crowd. Viacom will be sorry, wrote Stan Schroeder on his blog at Frantic Industries, because “big media companies are not giving the people what they want.”

“They’re giving them what they, the companies, think they should have.”

Of course, Viacom’s problem with YouTube arose because so many people want precisely what big media gives them: “The Daily Show,” “South Park,” music videos, “American Gangster.” As ever, the sticking point was money.

Some are saying that Viacom may yet come to terms with YouTube, and the Joost deal may be, at least in part, a negotiating tactic. It will, writes “Mike” on TechDirt, allow Viacom to “go back to the folks at Google/YouTube and say “look, Joost is willing to pay us money!” in the hopes that it will convince YouTube to pay out as well.”

Hot-Dog Defiance It seems only fitting: The first Chicago institution to be cited for circumventing the city’s new ban on foie gras is a Northwest Side hot-dog joint.

But Hot Doug’s isn’t quite the standard under-the-el-tracks Chicago doggery (hotdougs.com). The dish that got the owner, Doug Sohn, busted was a “Foie Gras and Sauternes Duck Sausage With Truffle Sauce Moutarde and Armagnac-Truffle Chicken Mousse,” according to The Chicago Sun-Times. The price was $6.50. The Health Department hit Mr. Sohn with a $250 fine.

“People are actually dying from the cold, and I’m getting hassled because of some sausage,” he told The Sun-Times on a day when the temperature hovered around zero. Mr. Sohn, who calls Hot Doug’s an “encased-meat emporium,” is an outspoken opponent of the ordinance.

Those Pesky Allergies Jessica Simpson, a spokeswoman for Pizza Hut, has said that she is allergic to cheese, tomatoes and wheat, according to an article in Elle magazine. “You know,” writes Meghann Marco of The Consumerist, “it’s not that we require that every celebrity constantly use the product they’re shilling for, but we’d like to think that the spokesperson is able to eat the food without getting sick”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/te.../24online.html





YouTube Justice

Doreen Carvajal writes:

I’m just back from covering the start of the trial of 29 people accused in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Most of the time, I was jostling for space for my laptop in a cramped press room adjoining the main courtroom. With more than 150 people with precious press credentials, there wasn’t enough room for all of us in the courtroom crowded with more than 40 lawyers and families of the 191 victims.

The adjoining press room was equipped with giant plasma television screens and wireless connections, but I found it extremely difficult to concentrate with journalists hushing others who were chatting during testimony. When I left late in the day to file again from my hotel, I was delighted to make the discovery of streaming live coverage of the trial.

The days when everyone could stroll over to the courthouse and witness a historic event - a la “To Kill a Mocking Bird” - are long over. But for the first time, I felt that an international event could be local again with instant access to the inner sanctum of Spanish justice.


Thomas Crampton responds

Yes, the definition of local has changed considerably. Local formerly meant something that occurred physically nearby, but with the death of distance brought by the Internet, passionate interest becomes more important than physical proximity.

Those passionately interested in the Madrid trial - from around the world - can now be brought into the event like never before.

I wonder how this new access could change the trial?
http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/techno...etamedia/?p=49





Social Networking Meets IPTV
Fred O'Connor

A new application from Raketu Communications aims to integrate IPTV (Internet Protocol television) with social networking, two of the Internet's hip technologies.

Raketu.tv, which became available in beta mode on Tuesday, delivers IPTV and video on demand (VOD) programming. The social-networking component factors in when using the IPTV or VOD services with Raketu's other communication and entertainment application, which shares the company's name. Raketu, which debuted last September, aims to integrate separate communication and entertainment programs that should be combined into one client, said Raketu CEO Greg Parker. It includes VOIP (voice over IP), instant messaging and file-sharing.

While simultaneously using other applications and Web sites accomplishes the same tasks as Raketu, Parker said that his software eases communicating and information gathering by combining several services into one program. Users no longer have to use multiple programs and Web sites to accomplish the same task that one application provides, said Parker.

For example, friends could use Raketu to watch a video on surfing while discussing it via VOIP or instant messaging. The friends could then use a travel search feature in Raketu that locates airfares in an effort to plan a surfing vacation.

"We're a bit of YouTube, a bit of MySpace, a bit of Joost, a bit of different social-networking technologies," said Parker. "We feel that we do a better job of integrating these services."

Parker also noted that Raketu differs from other P-to-P (peer-to-peer) services, like Skype and Joost, by not using super nodes, which link multiple computers together to transfer data.

"This means you don't use your bandwidth to help other people get content, which means users get a more secure and faster service," said Parker.

Media Global Intertainment will provide the IPTV content. As of Tuesday, the service offered five stations, including Cartoon TV and BBC Parliament. VOD content will come from Klikvu.com, which offers shows in categories such as extreme wrestling, soccer and sports. VOD selections offered four categories as of Tuesday, including action sports and documentary.

The VOD offerings are pay-per-view, which is how the media service will generate revenue, according to Parker.

Social networking, which permits users to find friends and create and manipulate online content, has increased in popularity with the advent of Web sites such as MySpace.com, which News Corp. purchased for $580 million in 2005, and Google's YouTube video-sharing site.

While Internet video is seen as playing a major role in the Web's development, the availability of content is crucial to this service. YouTube has been sorting out charges of copyright violations from entertainment companies whose content users illegally uploaded to the site. Meanwhile, Joost, an IPTV company launched by Skype Ltd.'s founders, announced Tuesday that it entered a deal with Viacom International to offer its television shows and feature films.
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=7314





EMI Confirms Warner Music Takeover Offer
Jane Wardell

Struggling music company EMI Group PLC -- scarred by two profit warnings in as many months and a recent accounting scandal in Brazil -- was thrown a potential lifeline Tuesday in the form of a possible new takeover bid by former suitor Warner Music Group.

A tie-up would bring major U.S. selling artists including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to London-based EMI, whose Beatles remix album has dropped out of the Billboard top 40 and whose great hope for cross-Atlantic appeal, Robbie Williams, has received more publicity for entering rehab than for his music.

"A deal would be a no-brainer," said Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers analyst Richard Hunter, citing around 350 million pounds (US$680 million; euro520 million) in initial cost savings and synergies.

Shares in EMI, whose book includes Norah Jones, Coldplay, Kylie Minogue and the Beatles back catalog, rose 8.4 percent to close at 240 pence (US$4.69; euro3.57) on the London Stock Exchange -- despite concerns from some analysts about the regulatory outlook and business appeal for a potential deal.

EMI and Warner each made approaches worth around US$4.6 billion (euro3.5 billion) to the other last year, but abandoned the attempts when a European Court ruling scuppered another big merger between the music units of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG.

Several analysts said the announcement Tuesday that New York-based Warner had made a fresh approach, without a formal proposal, suggested that the industry believes that the EU will clear the Sony BMG merger in a ruling expected by March 1.

Warner said it had the support of Impala, the trade association which represents independent music labels and licensing companies, for the acquisition. Impala has been vocal in opposing previous record company mergers and is considered a key influence on European Union antitrust authorities' historically tough stance on sector deals.

But some analysts remained skeptical.

"The key issue within any corporate activity remains regulatory risk, following the European Court's decision to annul the authorization of the Sony BMG merger," said Iain Daly at Bridgewell Securities. "There is little clarity on this point and we continue to believe that this makes an EMI/Warner combination difficult to put together."

A merged EMI and Warner Music would control about 25 percent of the global recorded music market based on sales, ranking second to Vivendi SA's Universal Music, according the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Music companies have been looking to consolidate as the market for physical CDs declines rapidly. The IFPI estimates that overall music sales fell around 3 percent in 2006 as a doubling in digital sales failed to compensate for falls in physical CD sales and digital piracy.

EMI has blamed the overall industry decline for its own troubles, citing disappointing North American CD sales last week when it announced its second profits warning this year. But analysts say that the overall industry's woes do not entirely explain EMI's poor performance, pointing out that Warner and Universal have weathered the storm better.

They instead highlight EMI's persistent weakness in the United States, lack of promising new tunes and internal control problems.

The company announced the departure of two top executives in January when it issued its first profit warning this year. It also unveiled a raft of cost-cutting measures as it said that Music Chief Executive Alain Levy -- who was recruited five years ago to turn around the fortunes of the ailing music company -- and Vice Chairman David Munns were leaving immediately.

The two profit warnings followed revelations last year of accounting fraud at EMI's Brazilian recorded music division, which resulted in the company's EMI Music arm overstating profits by around 9 million pounds (US$17 million; euro13.5 million) and revenues by around 12 million pounds (US$22.5 million; euro18 million). The company suspended several senior Brazilian managers over the scandal.

Analysts said the other major problem is that EMI only captures 10 percent of the U.S. music market, the most lucrative in the world.

The company did have a U.S. No. 1 last month when it released Norah Jones' acclaimed new album, and British singer Lily Allen is also tipped for American success.

EMI could also be in for a windfall from its Beatles catalog if it agrees to online sales of Fab Four's songs. Analysts expect an announcement on a digital catalog sometime soon after iPod maker Apple Inc. recently resolved a bitter trademark dispute with The Beatles' guardian Apple Corps Ltd. over use of the apple logo and name.

In the meantime, with superstars Coldplay unlikely to release a new album before the end of the year, analysts say that EMI simply does not have enough good talent on its books.

Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that Warner may be seeking to take advantage of the recent drop in EMI's share price, after the British company terminated discussions with an unidentified suitor -- widely believed to be European private equity firm Permira Advisors Ltd. -- in December.

However, Collins Stewart analyst Simon Wallis said the benefits of a merger were difficult to calculate because "both businesses are suffering a structural decline."

Warner, while performing better than EMI, has its own problems, reporting earlier this month that first-quarter profit fell 74 percent due to fewer albums released during the period and soft domestic and European sales.

"While EMI management are highly vulnerable to a bid, we think that the risk-reward on these shares is unattractive and that today would be an excellent day to sell," Wallis said.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan.../D8NDIMKO1.htm





EMI/Warner - The Background
Katie Allen

EMI has its roots in the 1897-founded Gramophone Company, which counted Enrico Caruso among its early artists. As the 1930s Great Depression hit the recording industry the Gramophone Company and Columbia Graphophone Company merged to create Electric and Musical Industries, or EMI.

By the mid-20th century EMI had ramped up its roster of artists to include Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. With music industry consolidation back on the agenda at the start of this century, EMI and US rival Warner first attempted to combine in 2000. Those efforts were abandoned, however, because of competition issues.

Soon after EMI said discussions with BMG, the music arm of German media group Bertelsmann, had also ended due to regulatory fears. In 2003 EMI was reportedly in talks with US private equity group Blackstone and towards the end of that year it lost out in the auction of AOL Time Warner's music business, which went to former Hollywood mogul Edgar Bronfman Jr - current head of Warner.

Last summer EMI bid for Warner and Warner counterbid for EMI. Private equity joined the fray later in the year, but EMI rejected Permira's £2.5bn approach. This year started with an EMI profits warning and the departure of music boss Alain Levy. Last week EMI came out with another profits warning and news of Warner's latest approach came soon after that.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2017437,00.html





The XM-Sirius Deal May Not Fly

The combination needs approval from the FCC. But the commission's chairman is skeptical—and the regulatory body has rejected similar deals
Phil Mintz

The long dance that led XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio to agree to what's being termed a $13 billion "merger of equals" announced Feb. 19 may have been the easy part. Now the two companies need the Federal Communications Commission to go along. And that might very well be even tougher than reaching an agreement on how to combine the two long-standing rivals.

The long-rumored deal, unveiled on President's Day, looks a lot like an acquisition of XM by Sirius, despite the "merger of equals" language. XM shareholders will receive 4.6 shares of Sirius stock for each share they own and will get a premium of roughly 22% above the Feb. 16 closing price. Mel Karmazin, Sirius' chief executive, will take the CEO post at the combined company, while Hugh Panero, XM's chief executive, will not have an executive role. Gary Parsons, XM's chairman, will continue in that position at the combined companies.

"This combination is the next logical step in the evolution of audio entertainment," said Karmazin, in the merger announcement. "Together, our best-in-class management team and programming content will create unprecedented choice for consumers, while creating long-term value for shareholders of both companies.

The two companies also said in their announcement Monday that the transaction is subject to "regulatory review and approvals, including antitrust agencies and the FCC." But it doesn't explain how the merger, which the companies said they hope to close by yearend, is going to pass regulatory muster.
Precedent for Rejection

On Jan. 17, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told reporters that XM and Sirius' satellite radio licenses would preclude a merger. Shares of XM (XMSR) dropped 10%, and shares of Sirius (SIRI) dropped 7% that day. In a statement late Monday Martin said the companies would have to clear a high hurdle in making their case for the merger. "The companies would need to demonstrate that consumers would clearly be better off with both more choice and affordable prices," Martin said.

Industry observers note that the FCC has the leeway to change the rules or permit an exception, particularly if it concludes that satellite radio is just part of a larger constellation of providers, including traditional broadcast radio and the Internet. However, if you're looking for a precedent, you need go back no further than 2002, when the FCC rejected a merger between satellite TV companies EchoStar Communications (DISH) and DirecTV Group (DTV) on the grounds that it would have created a monopoly in rural areas. As the XM-Sirius merger gained steam last week, several investment analysts said that FCC approval was possible but not assured (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/16/07, "Analyst to XM, Sirius: Quit Quibbling").
Industry Criticism

Industry competitors are certainly going to put pressure on to block the merger. Within hours of the merger announcement, the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents broadcast stations, labeled it "anti-consumer" and called on the FCC to block it. The broadcasters took a swipe at an argument that proponents of the merger would be expected to use, that the two services are not profitable and are being hurt by competition.

"When the FCC authorized satellite radio, it specifically found that the public would be served best by two competitive nationwide systems," the NAB said a statement. "Now, with their stock prices at rock bottom and their business model in disarray because of profligate spending practices, they seek a government bail-out to avoid competing in the marketplace."

The FCC issue is just one of the questions that are going to face Karmazin and Parsons. But it may be the one with strongest likelihood of stopping the merger in its tracks.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...220_325862.htm





Satellite Radio: A Good Idea, but a Bad Investment
Floyd Norris

It is the genius — or perhaps the great flaw — of the American capital system that really clever, but totally uneconomical, ideas can be financed by investors.

That process creates enterprises that may eventually be valuable, even if not to those who put in the original money.

So it was with satellite radio, a onetime Wall Street darling that is again the subject of investor enthusiasm after the announcement of plans to merge the only two players in the American market: XM and Sirius.

Perhaps satellite radio will finally work out as an investment now. The hope is that the two companies can use the threat of financial failure to obtain regulatory approval for creation of a satellite radio monopoly.

That may be tricky, given that to secure their licenses from the Federal Communications Commission in the first place they promised never to try to merge with each other.

But it is hard to see what else will allow these companies to ever become profitable — particularly given the eventual threat of good mobile Internet service, which could give drivers access to Internet radio without having to pay hefty subscription fees.

A combined company could pay less for content, ending those bidding wars for sports events and celebrities like Howard Stern (now on Sirius) and Bob Dylan (now on XM). And it might be able to charge more as well, offering varying packages. There are many customers who love satellite radio and the choices it provides.

Whatever the future, however, the past is clear. These companies were financed in large part based on enthusiasm and belief in what turned out to be totally unrealistic expectations. A good product was created, but a lot of money was wasted in the process.

Public investors were losers, but some of the worst investments were made by auto companies, notably Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler.

An examination of Sirius’s history shows the sad reality. From the time it went public in 1994 until early 2002, when it signed up its first customers, it raised $499 million in public offerings of common stock, and much more from selling bonds and preferred stock. The average offering price was $15.05. Those shares are now under $4.

It is sometimes easier to sell securities when there are no operations. After all, a company with no revenue cannot come in below forecasts.

Wall Street was optimistic. In the fall of 1999, just as Sirius sold stock at $24.75, with Merrill Lynch as lead underwriter, a Merrill analyst forecast Sirius would earn $13.50 a share in 2007.

Ford was a buyer in that offering, putting down $20 million.

The next year, with the price up to $55, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney estimated that by 2005 the two services would split $342 million in advertising revenue. The actual figure turned out to be $26 million.

In 2000 DaimlerChrysler invested $100 million, paying $43.66 a share. It was the highest price Sirius ever got for selling stock.

By the time Sirius started broadcasting in 2002, it was in trouble. Within months it proposed a reorganization that ended with most of the company owned by creditors and new shares being sold for 94 cents each to institutional investors.

Some of those investors have done very well. Funds that are part of Apollo Management, controlled by Leon Black, managed to sell 40 million shares to public investors for $7.12 each in 2005.

Since the reorganization, Sirius has brought in Mel Karmazin, the former president of Viacom, as its chief executive, and he spent a lot of money on talent, notably Mr. Stern.

If the merger goes through, Mr. Karmazin will run the combined company. But it is fair to say he has not yet done much for Sirius shareholders, including himself. The stock is below where it was when he was hired and given 3 million shares and options to buy 30 million more at $4.72. It is also below the prices he paid for another 3.5 million shares, which ranged from $4.47 to $6.21.

Personally, I am glad all this happened. A rational market might never have financed satellite radio, and I would not be able to hear the music I like on XM, as I do now in my car and at home.

But I might feel differently if I had been one of those who believed the rosy financial forecasts.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/23.../23norris.html





The World of Black Theater Becomes Ever Bigger
Campbell Robertson

Urban theater — or what has been called over the years inspirational theater, black Broadway, gospel theater and the chitlin circuit — has been thriving for decades, selling out some of the biggest theaters across the country and grossing millions of dollars a year.

In the last two years, however, the tenor of the business has changed, especially since Tyler Perry, the circuit’s reigning impresario, took in $110 million at the Hollywood box office with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion,” movies that were based on his plays; they cost less than $7 million each to make.

The bigger players are developing television series, and veterans who have been part of the circuit for years suddenly have movie deals. The word in the industry is that urban theater is about to go mainstream.

“A year and a half from now, if you’re not coming with a play, film script and sitcom spinoff, you’re not going to be able to go anywhere in this business,” said Gary Guidry, one of the founders of I’m Ready Productions, based in Houston, another of the circuit’s big producers.

But the sight of crowds of theatergoers slowly streaming into the Lyric Opera House here on Saturday and Sunday, continuing to walk through the door throughout the first act and eventually filling just about every one of the 2,564 seats for a performance of “Men, Money and Gold Diggers,” prompts the question: If this is not already mainstream, what is?

As white theatergoers were lining up for “Wicked” at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center across town, the audience filling up the Lyric, a slightly larger theater, was almost exclusively black, mostly middle-aged women. Many said they had heard about the play through the traditional lines of the circuit’s promotion: radio ads, fliers in local business and church parking lots and an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth network that precedes the show from city to city.

Some aspects of urban theater are set in stone. Top tickets average about $30 less than those of touring Broadway shows. And it has become standard practice to sell DVDs of the plays after the tour; Mr. Perry has reportedly sold more than 11 million.

The plays, which typically take place in contemporary settings, are often sprinkled with R&B solos and duets, and tend to be a mix between melodrama and farce, with clownish archetypes, like churchy grannies and two-bit entrepreneurs. And they all have uplifting plots, usually about a woman torn between a glamorous philanderer, whose speech is laden with double-entendres, and a humbler, more dependable man, whom she eventually chooses. (The more muscular actors also have a tendency to take off their shirts.)

More than a marketer’s demographic description, urban theater is a genre like the sitcom or courtroom thriller, and experiments tend to fare poorly. David E. Talbert, a 15-year veteran of the circuit, said he once wrote a pure comedy without an inspirational message and was bluntly advised by audience members not to try it again.

Mr. Talbert, 40, is the other powerhouse on the circuit, along with I’m Ready Productions and Mr. Perry. By Mr. Talbert’s own estimate, he has grossed $75 million over the last decade and a half with 12 plays, and counting. He likens himself to Neil Simon as a playwright who tries to cater to his audience’s wants and tastes rather than hew to some establishment idea of high art.

Mr. Guidry, 33, and his producing partner, Je’Caryous Johnson, 29, the author of “Gold Diggers,” are not so content with the status quo. They have departed from the form somewhat by adapting popular romance novels to the stage; like many younger people in the business, when they first began attending the plays, they felt the quality was, well, not great. Granted, they added, theatrical distinction has never really been the main point. That point, in the view of many, has been simply to have theater by, for and about contemporary black people.

Antonio Banks, who was snapping and selling souvenir photographs in the lobby of the Lyric, summed up a prevailing attitude among theatergoers: “Not much is offered to them,” he said. “If they can find an outlet, even if it’s not really good, it helps them escape from reality for a while.”

That attitude has been changing. One reason, said Laterras R. Whitfield, a 28-year-old from Dallas who broke into the field four years ago with “P.M.S. — It’s a Man Thang,” is that the market is becoming saturated.

“It appears to be so easy,” he said, “that a lot of people say, ‘Hey, I can do this,’ and they just write a play and find somebody silly enough to promote it, and then people go see it and say, ‘What is this mess?’ ”

The target audiences, in general, do not have much disposable income, and having been burned too often with bad plays, they are more discriminating. The excitement of going to see theater made explicitly for them, Mr. Johnson said, is no longer enough. Without the equivalent of a Broadway imprimatur to guarantee a certain level of production quality, though, reassuring theatergoers is not easy.

“If I tell you ‘Les Miz’ or ‘Cats’ or ‘Hairspray,’ you immediately know what I’m talking about,” said Brian Alden, whose North American Entertainment Company promotes Mr. Johnson’s plays. “In urban theater, we’re marketing an unknown product, so generally we’re marketing a name.”

But outside of Mr. Perry — who has also acted in many of his plays, most notably in drag as the vigilante grandmother, Madea — there are no writers or producers everyone knows by name, except for some of the older gospel impresarios, who no longer have the buzz they once did.

So active producers are now heavily casting recognizable film and television actors and singers.

At a recent, crowded performance of Mr. Talbert’s new play, “Love in the Nick of Tyme,” at Newark Symphony Hall, none of the dozen or so audience members interviewed knew Mr. Talbert. They did, however, know the name of the male lead, Morris Chestnut, the heartthrob film and television actor. Mr. Chestnut and other familiar faces in the circuit are not in the top ranks of fame; former sitcom stars tend to be particularly well represented. But they are celebrities of a caliber that would have been unheard of in a gospel play 10 years ago.

Increasing star power and the box office success of Mr. Perry, who is now developing three television series and a few more movies, are signs of the circuit’s move into big business.

But there are still few signs of acceptance by the cultural establishment. Reviews of Mr. Perry’s first two movies, which were based on his plays, were overwhelmingly negative.

For now, critical disregard can be a selling point. On Feb. 13, the day before the opening of “Daddy’s Little Girls,” Mr. Perry’s latest film, he sent an e-mail message to the members of his database, complaining of the skepticism from Hollywood insiders and journalists.

“It is as though we are all so unsophisticated that we won’t support a great movie about a good father,” the message read. “We know the truth, so let’s show them at the box office.” (The first weekend grosses were estimated at a robust $17.8 million.)

Mr. Perry declined to comment for this article.

The circuit’s position in the universe of black theater — particularly as distinct from the work of black playwrights presented in literary theater — is a topic that has long been discussed. While some scholars and theater professionals have criticized gospel plays for trafficking in stereotypes, others see it as another kind of drama, even finding, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it in a 1997 article in The New Yorker, “something heartening about the spectacle of black drama that pays its own way.”

Kenny Leon, who is directing the Broadway-bound production of August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” works in the same building as Mr. Perry in Atlanta. “I look at theater that is produced at some of the regional theaters and theater that is produced on that circuit as two different things,” he said. “We shouldn’t try to make them be the same things.”

No figure attracts more conflicting opinions than Mr. Wilson, who died in 2005. Mr. Talbert, being almost hypnotically unflappable, is not shy about his view: if the audiences who go to Mr. Wilson’s plays are predominantly nonblack, he asked, then how significant could he be to black people?

But Mr. Guidry and Mr. Johnson, the young Turks, think the genre can continue to develop while still staying true to its traditions. In 2002, when they produced an adaptation of Michael Baisden’s “Men Cry in the Dark,” they did not advertise its basis as a best-selling romance novel, fearing it would alienate the church-based audiences. Now a play’s origin as a novel is a selling point.

And as for Mr. Wilson, Mr. Guidry said that “Fences,” Mr. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, could do perfectly well with some judicious trimming, a little more comedy and, of course, a savvy marketing campaign.

“Man, if it were called ‘Big Man, Stronger Woman,’ ” Mr. Guidry said, “this thing could tour.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/th...urba.html?8dpc





A Media Mogul Tries Remote Control
Ron Stodghill

ROBERT L. JOHNSON, the black billionaire, is ringside at a charity boxing match here, awash in a sea of white businessmen. A low-key deal maker, he prefers intimate dinners with the likes of Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein or John Malone. But tonight he has joined members of the South’s ultra-elite for a quasi-frat party, a swaggering, testosterone-fueled evening featuring hundreds of tuxedo-clad honchos feted with steak and martinis and greeted by scantily-clad hostesses. Mr. Johnson takes to the slugfest as the night wears on, rolling his shoulders to dodge imaginary blows, as if he himself were up against the ropes.

Which, perhaps, he is.

Mr. Johnson, who founded and then sold the Black Entertainment Television network to Viacom for $3 billion in 2000, is working hard these days to appear as more than just an outsider in Charlotte, where he also happens to own the beleaguered local National Basketball Association franchise, the Bobcats. So far, though, that is pretty much how the locals view him. There may be many reasons why the label of outsider clings to Mr. Johnson, but one easy explanation is that he rarely gives the Bobcats hands-on treatment.

As Mr. Johnson tries to recast himself as a mainstream business mogul, his calendar has become very crowded, thanks to a high-powered push to start and buy several companies. That spree has produced a sprawling portfolio of properties, including a hedge fund, a private equity firm, a chain of more than 100 high-end hotels, several commercial banks and savings institutions, a film company and several gambling ventures.

And however loudly each of those businesses may clamor for his attention, however boisterously the communities they serve may want more face time with the boss, Mr. Johnson is in no rush to soothe their nerves.

“I am not an operational executive anymore,” he says, impatience creeping into his voice. “I run a holding company, and my role is that of a rancher, running herd over a field of cattle.

“It’s not just one ball in the air for me now, but lots of them,” he adds. “This is my second act.”

As Mr. Johnson zips across the business landscape, trying to defy the aphorism that there are no second acts in American life, his handling of the Bobcats, which he bought in 2003 for $300 million, may provide a crucial litmus test. Mr. Johnson, the first African-American owner in a league populated by African-American stars, is intent on using his wealth and celebrity to break down economic and cultural walls that have historically marginalized black entrepreneurs, and to give black executives corner offices in a broad range of industries. So he sees a successful run as the head of a professional sports franchise as an emblematic challenge.

For all of that noble sense of purpose, though, Mr. Johnson is a famously flinty loner. His go-it-alone attitude has done little to soften his image among some here as a person simply looking to milk a Southern boomtown. That image, along with a reluctance to pour more money into the Bobcats, has not endeared him to local fans — helping to undermine his fledgling hoops franchise.

The basketball legend Michael Jordan, who joined the Bobcats last summer as a minority partner and manager of operations, attributes Mr. Johnson’s strains to the rigors of the learning curve. “Bob is one of the most sophisticated businessmen that I know, but being that he didn’t have any experience in this business, he may have been more tight with the dollars than he should have been,” he says. “But Bob knows now that he’s got to spend, that being successful in professional sports requires a whole different approach. Like me, he’s very competitive and knows how to win.”

Mr. Johnson’s attendance at the charity boxing match last month was a good-will gesture toward a city that has rebuffed him by considering him an absentee owner, a carpetbagger of sorts, and labeling the Bobcats as scrubs. Ever indefatigable, he says he has plenty of time to change all that.

“We’re still early in this process,” says Mr. Johnson, whose team has a record and attendance that rank near the bottom of the league. “Nobody loses money on an N.B.A. franchise, and I will certainly not be the first.”

BOB JOHNSON has spent at least half his 60 years as a pre-eminent force in African-American pop culture, a shrewd backstage operator who tied a bow around black celebrity and converted urban music, fashion and comedy into the cash cow called BET.

While running BET, which he founded in 1980, Mr. Johnson found himself routinely criticized by blacks for showing racy music videos day and night instead of creating original programs with socially uplifting themes. In Mr. Johnson’s pragmatic view, though, music videos were a television executive’s dream: they drew huge audiences and were cheap to put on the air. He reminded naysayers that the “E” in BET stood for “entertainment,” not “education” or “enlightenment.”

“My tombstone will read: ‘This is the guy who aired rap videos,’ ” Mr. Johnson says. “But you know how I deal with that? I put it where it belongs, which is in the pretty-much-irrelevant category.”

Many blacks lashed out at Mr. Johnson again when he sold BET to Viacom, a mainstream corporate buyer. Mr. Johnson, who has blended a surgeon’s emotional detachment with an accountant’s fixation on the bottom line throughout his career, seems unaffected by those barbs as well. He says he is aware that some consider him miserly and emotionally disengaged, but he shrugs that off as the price of success.

“I never saw myself as running a family business for family benefit; I always wanted to create businesses that were built on maximizing shareholder value,” Mr. Johnson says. “And my philosophy has always been predicated on the fact that talented African-Americans ought to be given an opportunity to create real wealth in this country, and that white Americans have to allow us to get onto the starting blocks.”

For Mr. Johnson, born in Mississippi in 1946 as the ninth of 10 children, the starting block was a grimy factory basement in Freeport, Ill. His mother and father had jobs at the Burgess Battery plant in Freeport, and Mr. Johnson worked there as a maintenance worker one summer while attending the University of Illinois at Champaign. According to “The Billion Dollar BET,” an unauthorized account of Mr. Johnson’s career by the journalist Brett Pulley, Mr. Johnson clashed often with his superiors and was fired. The boot, though, came with some advice. “If you’re going to get a job, you better work for yourself,” his supervisor told him, according to the book. “Working for other people just doesn’t seem to be your cup of tea because you’ve got a unique way of how you want to do things.”

After graduation from the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Sheila Crump (they divorced in 2002), Mr. Johnson studied public administration at Princeton. The couple moved to Washington in the early 1970s, a time when the civil rights movement was opening the door to more black voices in the media. Mr. Johnson worked in various public affairs posts before becoming a lobbyist in 1976 for a cable television trade group.

One of the group’s board members was John C. Malone, who was in the early stages of turning his company, Tele-Communications Inc., into one of the nation’s largest cable companies. Mr. Malone and other cable operators were scrambling for programming that would give them an edge over traditional network television giants. Mr. Johnson approached Mr. Malone with the idea of creating a cable channel that catered to audiences in cities with large black populations.

“I was like Johnny Appleseed back then, buying up lots of things that fit our model because we needed programming,” Mr. Malone says. “It was great that Bob’s idea had a positive social element to it, but it also fit my model.”

Mr. Malone jumped at the idea, and in 1979 invested $500,000 for a 20 percent stake in the newly formed BET. Over the next decade, BET slowly gained traction with black audiences, gradually expanding its air time from a few hours a day to a full weekly schedule, recruiting major advertisers and lining up other strategic partners like the HBO unit of Time Inc. BET’s gospel programs, black college sports, and black news and music gave the channel a solid niche.

“We were the unicorn,” Mr. Johnson says. “People were surprised we existed.”

In 1991, Mr. Johnson took BET public, making the network the first black-owned company on the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Johnson retained 56 percent of the voting power in a company with a market value of $472 million, according to Mr. Pulley’s book. Despite that success, BET had doubters. “I think the public was very cynical about a black-run and -controlled business,” Mr. Malone says. “There were a lot of bodies in the cable industry on the side of the road. The attitude was, ‘Let’s give it a shot, but I don’t expect it to be successful.’ ”

TO continue attracting larger black audiences without huge investments in content, Mr. Johnson began to rely more heavily on music videos. After all, with ad rates substantially lower than those of rivals like MTV or VH1, the notion of creating high-minded original programming was not financially feasible, Mr. Johnson says. But by the early 1990s, gangsta rap music was gaining cultural prominence and its messages were edgier — and more rife with images of sex and violence — than the R&B music that BET had offered earlier. Many adults were offended, but young viewers loved the stuff.

“Bob took a cold view in responding to the market, and the fact was he just didn’t have the financial muscle of an MTV,” says the media consultant Willis Smith, whose firm in Durham, N.C., specializes in black television programming. “He could not afford to offer what many viewers wanted from him. But in the end, he kept BET profitable regardless of what people have said about the quality of his programming.”

Mr. Johnson’s most vocal critic was the young black syndicated cartoonist Aaron McGruder, whose “Boondocks” comic strip ran in 250 newspapers nationwide and focused on a couple of brothers transplanted to the suburbs from their inner-city neighborhood. He routinely lampooned BET. One of his most controversial strips featured a woman’s round, nearly nude backside, with text that, among other things, said: “In order to follow the fine example set by Mr. Johnson, we present to you, the reader, in the spirit of black uplift — a black woman’s gyrating rear end.”

Some newspapers dropped the strip, and it ignited a public spat between Mr. McGruder and Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson declines to discuss the matter, and Mr. McGruder, who no longer writes the strip, was unavailable for comment.

By the late 1990s, having regained complete control of BET for himself and Mr. Malone through a stock buyback, Mr. Johnson was ready to move on. The opportunity came when Sumner M. Redstone, the Viacom chairman, offered to buy him out for $3 billion in 2000.

“A lot of black people were hurt when he sold BET because we have this history where our entrepreneurs are expected to be emotionally attached to their companies,” says Alfred Edmond Jr., editor in chief of Black Enterprise magazine. “But Bob Johnson has never been one to personalize his relationship to his companies. They are just assets to him, and he prides himself on being able to drive up their value.”

However much Mr. Johnson has sought to burnish and enlarge his reputation, his ownership of the Bobcats has resurrected some old criticisms. Like television, the basketball business is driven by ratings, advertisers and talent — and so far Mr. Johnson has stumbled, in large part over issues that have haunted him before: customer complaints about product quality, and accusations of a lack of commitment to the community.

“There has been a feeling here that Bob — and he is trying to do better — is this rich dude from Washington, D.C., and comes down and buys a franchise and doesn’t even show up here much, not even for games,” says Felix Sabates, a Charlotte businessman and minority shareholder in the Bobcats. But he expects Mr. Johnson will be successful.

Mark Packer, a local radio host, says: “In a city like Charlotte, it is important for fans to see the owner, and we don’t see much of Bob Johnson. But even more than that, the product that he is putting on the floor is an inferior product. Over the two and half years he has had this team, he simply hasn’t spent enough money to put a winner on the floor.”

The criticism does not end there. Scott Fowler, a columnist at The Charlotte Observer, wrote recently that “thousands of people in our area view the Bobcats with resentment or indifference.”

“These folks wouldn’t go to uptown Charlotte to watch a Bobcats game if someone handed them free tickets and pointed to a limousine to take them there,” he added. That’s a hard knock in a sports town where Mr. Johnson’s polar opposite, Jerry Richardson, the white founder of the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League, ferries his fans around in a golf cart. The owner-as-average-guy touch and the Panthers’ success on the field have endeared Mr. Richardson and his team to locals.

ON the afternoon before the charity boxing match, Mr. Johnson sits in a Charlotte eatery, a few blocks from the Bobcats’ yet-to-be-named coliseum, reflecting on the history of black capitalists in America — a past, he says, that is painfully slight.

“The fact is, black people do not have much of a history in creating wealth in this country. As a result, we are not trusted to handle other people’s money,” he says. “We are valued mostly for our physical talent, our artistic talent and maybe our ability to sell to other blacks. But when it comes to building value in companies, or managing the money of whites, overseeing investments, there has always been this discrimination.”

He shrugs and stabs his crab cake. “But let’s face it, on the other hand, race discrimination gives me a natural public relations advantage. Because of race discrimination, I can get a pat on the back just for being first,” he says. “That’s how I get the visibility, the first-mover advantage. That’s what I like — to enter the arena first.”

Mr. Johnson has just returned from Utah, where he attended the Sundance Film Festival in search of opportunities for Our Stories, a Los Angeles-based film company he started late last year. The trip was bittersweet. While the dearth of black-oriented films at the festival disappointed him, it also solidified his faith in the prospects for his new venture. His partner is the indie-movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose own new enterprise, the Weinstein Company, will serve as his distributor. JPMorgan Chase has sunk $175 million into Our Stories.

“What I like about Bob is that he dreams over the horizon when most people can’t,” Mr. Weinstein says. “This is about an African-American entrepreneur who is starting a black-owned movie studio because he stepped forward and had the expertise to pull it together.”

In a sense, the financial model for Our Stories — tapping the resources of mainstream white investors as a means of gaining the economic efficiencies afforded by scale — is how Mr. Johnson has built most of his companies, and it distinguishes him from most of his African-American counterparts. His private equity fund, for instance, is financed partly by the Washington-based Carlyle Group, while his hedge fund has backing from Deutsche Bank.

Other black entrepreneurs, like Madame C. J. Walker, the black hair care products maven; Alonzo Herndon, founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company; and John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, also made fortunes in niches selling products aimed at black customers — but their financial platforms were mostly homegrown and their market visions more narrow. Bankrolled with personal savings or family loans, and powered by social as well as economic goals, most African-American businesses were passed down to family members with little concern for outside investors.

There are, of course, exceptions, like Wally Amos, the founder of Famous Amos cookies. “I knew there were people who would not buy my cookies because I am black,” says Mr. Amos, who started his company (which is now owned by Kellogg) in 1975. “But that was not my problem; it was theirs. To me anybody with a mouth was a potential customer.”

Mr. Johnson says his approach is like that of the late Reginald F. Lewis, the black Harvard Business School graduate and corporate lawyer whose venture capital firm acquired Beatrice International Foods, the global food, beverage and grocery store conglomerate, in 1987 for $985 million. The transaction, bankrolled partly by the onetime junk-bond king Michael R. Milken, created the largest black-owned business in the United States, with annual revenue of $1.8 billion.

“Look, the social activist mold that was poured for Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or Vernon Jordan was not poured for me; the artistic mold that was poured for Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z was not poured for me, either — that is not the DNA that I got,” Mr. Johnson says. “The mold that was poured for me is the same one that was poured for Ken Chenault, Richard Parsons, Stanley O’Neal. I create wealth and value. That’s what I do, and I’m good at it.”

Mr. Malone concurs and says that blacks have been unfair to Mr. Johnson. “It’s a real challenge in the black race to be successful and not be regarded as having sold out,” he says. “It’s a terrible shame that the entire black community doesn’t embrace people like Bob, honor him.”

In Charlotte, at least, Mr. Johnson has his share of white critics. So while it might be convenient to attribute Mr. Johnson’s struggles with the Bobcats as partly a function of the color of his skin, there is a strong possibility that a more involved, hands-on black owner might be enjoying a smoother honeymoon than Mr. Johnson.

IN the three years since he took over the Bobcats, Mr. Johnson has — largely from a distance — initiated a series of senior management shakeups and cuts, a move from an old arena to a new one and, for season ticket holders, a price increase followed by a price reduction. As the N.B.A. showcases its top athletes today at its annual all-star game in Las Vegas, no Bobcats players will be featured. The Bobcats reside at the bottom of the Southeast Division of the league’s Eastern Conference with 19 wins and 33 losses. And in a brand new arena that the city built for the Bobcats despite local opposition, the team’s home attendance ranks 27th among the N.B.A.’s 30 teams.

“I don’t know of a professional sports franchise that can fill up an arena when they’re in last place; you have to win games,” says Mayor Patrick McCrory of Charlotte. “It’s just that simple.”

It doesn’t help that Charlotte fans still nurse a grudge over the last pro team that rolled into town. Back in the late 1980s, the businessman George Shinn started the Charlotte Hornets but relocated to New Orleans after his unsuccessful bid for a new basketball arena.

Mr. Jordan, the former Chicago Bulls star, says: “There has been a wedge that’s been created here. There was trust and respect that had been earned and then the team leaves. People are still upset about that.”

For his part, Mr. Johnson says he is ready to mend those wounds. Yet even as he tries to demonstrate passion for Charlotte and the Bobcats, he sounds the notes of a brass-tacks, no-nonsense entrepreneur. “I like this city,” he says. “It’s business-oriented. It’s got the big banks; the government is profit-oriented; it’s a transportation hub. It’s non-union.”

It is that approach that leaves some observers wondering whether Mr. Johnson has what it takes to lift the value of a sports franchise that, in the end, is linked to team loyalty and winning. As Mr. Edmond of Black Enterprise observes: “What makes him a great entrepreneur may end up handicapping him as the owner of a sports franchise where fans expect owners to love the team as much as they do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/bu...18johnson.html





For New Line, an Identity Crisis
Sharon Waxman

For six weeks in 2005, Robert K. Shaye, the founder and co-chairman of New Line Cinema, lay in a coma in a New York City hospital, fending off death from a sudden infection.

He survived, narrowly, and over many months quietly made his way back to health, a dizzying and unexpected turn for one of Hollywood’s mavericks.

Now Mr. Shaye, 67, is back to what he has done for nearly 40 years, running New Line, a midsize studio in a world of competitive behemoths, at a time when the company, owned by Time Warner, has been beset by rumors of dysfunction and executive change, and bedeviled by a slate of unsuccessful films in 2006.

That too is an unexpected turn for a studio that three years ago capped the phenomenally popular “Lord of the Rings” series with a best picture Oscar for the last installment, “The Return of the King” — a first for the studio.

Since then, according to both Mr. Shaye and Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president of Time Warner, the studio has been financially successful, earning more than $100 million every year for the last three, largely in revenue from previous hits that continues to stream in through DVD and other post-theatrical sales. “New Line is very profitable,” Mr. Bewkes said in an interview. “We’re making money hand over fist.”

But in Hollywood and on Wall Street, some question the focus at New Line. After the success of “Lord of the Rings,” some had expected the studio to pursue a more ambitious agenda than the urban comedies and horror films of its past. That might have included pressing ahead with “The Hobbit,” from the “Rings” author J. R. R. Tolkien, to which New Line shares the rights.

Instead, Mr. Shaye has been trading insults with the “Rings” director Peter Jackson, while the studio has struggled to find a new breakout hit.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as financial crisis, even if they had a bad year,” said Harold L. Vogel, an entertainment analyst. “It’s more like an identity crisis. It’s a fair question: where do you go from here? Everyone has the same problem, whether you’re 90 or you’re 20. And they’re facing it now with a little more emphasis.”

If critics have observed that the studio seems distracted, there may be good reason. Mr. Shaye’s illness, the seriousness of which was not disclosed to the public before now, apparently derailed the studio for a portion of 2005 and affected the slate in 2006. And last year he took time to direct his own movie, “The Last Mimzy,” a family-oriented science fiction adventure (co-written by New Line’s president of production, Toby Emmerich) that will open in theaters next month.

In an interview in his office in Los Angeles last week, Mr. Shaye said that he had as much enthusiasm for running his studio as ever, and said he believed that this year’s releases would do well. “I started this company in 1967,” he said. “I still come to work every day. I still have the same passion I had then.”

Mr. Shaye acknowledged his disappointment in the studio’s performance in 2006, with duds like “Snakes on a Plane,” which cost $33 million to make and took in only that much in domestic theaters despite higher expectations, and “Tenacious D: ‘The Pick of Destiny,” the Jack Black comedy with a budget of less than $20 million, which took in a scant $8 million in domestic ticket sales.

“After last year I will take a more considered approach to the green-light process,” he said. “I will act as more of an adversary, or critic, of the decisions advocated by others.”

But he said the studio would continue to aim for its traditional zone of comedies and genre films, with a couple of highbrow dramas and one or two big-budget bets, in the range of $100 million and above.

For this year, those big bets include “Rush Hour 3,” the next in the successful series of martial arts comedies, and “The Golden Compass,” a fantasy adventure with special effects and a budget of $150 million, a potential new franchise for the studio.

The studio has also secured a $350 million line of credit in a financing deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it a financial cushion.

Mr. Shaye spoke in detail for the first time about the illness that almost killed him two years ago. In March 2005, he said he suddenly came down with a lethal form of pneumonia, from streptococcus A bacteria, similar to a rare illness that precipitously killed Jim Henson, the “Muppets” creator, at age 53 in 1990.

On the advice of a doctor, Mr. Shaye checked into NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and was placed in a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit for six weeks. (In his film “Mimzy,” Mr. Shaye names one character Dr. Sherman, in tribute to one of his caregivers.)

He emerged from the coma and after two months in the hospital, he was permitted to go home to his Manhattan residence. Even then he took many months to recover, unable initially to walk for more than two or three minutes at a time, and slowly taking up work again.

But Mr. Shaye says he thinks more clearly now than he did before his illness. “It’s difficult to explain, but I have a clarity of thought and, I believe, of reason, which was one of the gifts” of his illness, he said. And, he added, “I certainly appreciate the normal functioning of life a lot more.”

One thing that has not been blunted by illness is Mr. Shaye’s temper, which flared last year when he was asked about a lawsuit filed by Mr. Jackson over profits from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Mr. Shaye, criticizing what he called Mr. Jackson’s “arrogance” and calling the director “myopic,” told Sci-Fi Wire: “I don’t care about Peter Jackson anymore.” He added, “He wants to have another $100 million or $50 million, whatever he’s suing us for. He doesn’t want to sit down and talk about it. He thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars.”

Asked about the remarks last week, Mr. Shaye said that he made the statement “in a moment of emotion” but did not regret it. “I regret losing a friend,” he said, as he showed a visitor a Gandalf sword that Mr. Jackson had sent him as a gift, before the lawsuit.

A representative for Mr. Jackson declined to comment.

But the ill will has held up plans to make “The Hobbit.” Without specifically saying he would not make the film with Mr. Jackson, Mr. Shaye made it plain that he had no interest in working with difficult filmmakers. “Some directors are impossible,” he said. “Are there a few people I wouldn’t work with? Yes, but I won’t name names.”

And he would not comment on reports in the news media that the “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi had been asked to direct “The Hobbit.” He said, however, that although there was no workable script yet for the film, he intended to release it in 2009.

The Hollywood rumor mill has worked overtime in debating the future of New Line, which has had to justify its existence repeatedly over its 40-year history. Some people have questioned, for example, why the studio that made Will Ferrell’s breakout hit “Elf” in 2003 has not made other movies with him.

Until now. This month New Line began production on “Semi-Pro,” starring Mr. Ferrell; Mr. Shaye said that Mr. Ferrell had not found material he wanted to make at New Line until now, and chose not to make a sequel to “Elf.”

And although the studio is now part of Time Warner, current and former executives said that it continues to operate much like a family. Mr. Shaye, the father figure of the group, described his partnership with his co-chairman, Michael Lynne, this way : “I’m emotion. He’s reason.”

But as in a family, some producers and agents complained of confusion in their business dealings with the studio. Several said they had made deals with Mr. Emmerich or another executive at the studio, only to have Mr. Shaye redefine the terms later.

An executive connected with the coming film “Rendition” said the same thing happened on that project, a big-budget production under way in Morocco, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep. Weeks after the producers closed the deal with the studio, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his business relationships, Mr. Shaye came back to them and placed additional conditions, like finding a financing partner.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Emmerich disputed that account, saying that Mr. Shaye had reservations about the script from the start.

Still, some agents and producers point out that the loose atmosphere at New Line can also lead to daring decisions, like the one that led to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Mr. Shaye denied that any executive changes were in the works, and said that Mr. Emmerich would continue to run production, while Russell Schwartz would continue to run domestic marketing.

Mr. Bewkes, the Time Warner president, said that he regarded the three years of success with “Rings” to be an anomaly — albeit one that brought in well over $3 billion in revenue to New Line.

“The business they’re in is a combination of all those ‘little titles,’ which add up to a steady stream for the indie business, and occasional but pretty regular big commercial franchises, like ‘Rush Hour,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘The Golden Compass,’ ” he said. “I feel confident about New Line’s future.”

And Mr. Shaye, whose contract is up in 2008, seemed to fully agree. “It’s never business as usual, because the business is unusual,” he said, adding, “but we’d rather work on movies than anything else — every one of us.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/bu...dia/19new.html





The Old Guard Flexes Its Muscles (While It Still Can)
Richard Siklos

JEFF ZUCKER, the newly minted chief executive of NBC Universal, ventured to the Times Square headquarters of Viacom two Wednesdays ago with Peter A. Chernin, president of the News Corporation. It was not a social call as much as a social-networking call, to see Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive. After all, Viacom had rather publicly ordered YouTube, the Internet’s most popular video-sharing site, to remove thousands of clips of MTV material.

A few weeks earlier, Viacom had also bowed out of a partnership with NBC and the News Corporation to set up their own alternative to YouTube, which was recently acquired by the search juggernaut Google. Not to be dissuaded, their idea is that a Web start-up featuring the broadcasters’ most Web-friendly fare (comedy clips and even whole episodes of their popular shows) could gather a crowd on its own and also be a powerful consortium for licensing content to other destinations around the Web — including, of course, “GoogTube.”

According to people briefed on the visit, Mr. Zucker and Mr. Chernin ran through a presentation on why they thought Viacom ought to rejoin their group. So far, Viacom has not rejoined the venture, and the project’s fate remains unclear. (No love is lost between Viacom and the News Corporation, since the latter snatched MySpace.com from under Viacom’s nose.)

Yahoo, meanwhile, eager to regain some ground on Google, has been courting the media giants to let it distribute their video wares.

YouTube is not standing still. It is trying to curry public sentiment in the same way that cable and satellite operators have done in battles with channels that won’t agree to terms with them: by public shaming.

When I tried to search for a Viacom clip on YouTube, it had not only vanished but had also been replaced by a red banner saying the video had been “removed at the request of Viacom International.”

It has become evident that the question of who will rule video on the Web is incredibly tangled. For now, most of the sticky strands lead to Google, and big media companies are trying to figure out whether to fight it or join it. That already hard question has been complicated by some fresh headaches for Google.

First, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Google had sold advertising that encouraged pirating of Hollywood movies to a couple of rogue Web sites. While the incident was minor in the context of Google’s huge advertising business, it didn’t help soothe its tense relationship with content providers.

Then, a few days later, a Belgian court ruled that Google’s news-aggregating service, Google News, has been violating copyright laws by providing links to French-language newspapers.

Google took pains to characterize both incidents as the sort that often confront big, fast-growing companies. As a company spokeswoman in London said of the Belgian ruling, “This is an isolated case, and it would be inaccurate to portray Google News as standing in conflict with the publishing industry.”

Yet it’s also not hard to detect a worrying pattern here for Google — and for those who wish to be Google. The company controls as much as two-thirds of the market in search advertising, by some accounts. That has already caused plenty of worry among print publishers who wonder if the benefit of being on Google’s global platform is mitigated by what happens to their intellectual property once Google’s search engines get their robotic hands on it.

The worry widened to include the titans of television and cable programming after Google’s buyout of YouTube late last year. The buyout raised the possibility that Google would extend that advertising dominance into video — a business that is exploding online and for which advertisers already spend some $60 billion on conventional television.

The genius of Google, of course, is that it excels at organizing the world’s information and automatically attaching advertising to search results in an efficient, relevant way. If Google can more efficiently serve ads to people who are, say, watching the Grammys on 50-inch screens in their living rooms, that may add to its dominance.

It is hard not to conclude that the media establishment’s threats to start its own rival to YouTube — as well as Viacom’s yanking of its popular clips from the site — amount to posturing. What it might really be about is securing a lucrative deal from Google that would end hostilities in exchange for guaranteed cash and a healthy split of revenue from any advertising the company derives from their video content.

Google has consistently taken the position that it is the ally of those who create and own content — these latest hiccups notwithstanding — and that its technology can help them make more money online then they could on their own.

But Google’s sheer size and heft — including its rich margins and $140 billion market value — are viewed enviously and warily by media companies. They all wonder: Just how much of that value is coming out of my pocket?

Thus, the issue of making deals with content companies has quickly led to a kind of Catch-22 for Google. As one Hollywood executive, who didn’t want to be identified because of the continuing negotiations, said of Google: “The more content they license, it begs the question: what about all that other unlicensed stuff you’ve got up there?”

To make matters even more complicated, a big focus for media companies right now is to share the wealth with everyone who creates valuable content, not just the pros. YouTube has said that it will follow the trend of other video sites and Web businesses by figuring out a way to give some share of revenue to people whose homemade videos attract the most viewers.

Google’s media partner-rivals are also now asking why Google won’t just voluntarily use its technical prowess to ferret out copyrighted material. (After all, they say, the company seems to keep pornography off YouTube rather effectively.) To drive home the point, MySpace trumpeted just such a copyright filtering feature for videos on its popular social networking site last week.

INTELLECTUAL property law is clear that the legal impetus, for now, rests with the copyright holder to tell a Web site to take down unauthorized material. Indeed, it would be cumbersome to ask every kid with a community site to spend his days policing what the members have posted.

The media giants have a point, however, when they ask why they even have to cajole Google, a self-professed friend, to make nice.

Yet Google and its brethren also have a point when they wonder if the media giants are only hurting themselves by pressing the copyright issue. They point out that their sites have served as great promotional venues — and that they do not charge the media companies a dollar for that help. Moreover, there are no barriers to entry to stop NBC, Viacom or anyone else from starting its own Web video efforts.

What we have here is the most fascinating game of digital chicken the media world has seen. Who will cluck first?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/bu.../18frenzy.html





Art Review | 'The Rape of the Sabine Women'

Present at an Empire’s Corrupted Birth
Roberta Smith

Like the Neo-Classical history paintings on which it is based, Eve Sussman’s film “The Rape of the Sabine Women” never lets you forget that it is serious art. Extravagantly beautiful, endlessly noble and largely devoid of humor, it self-consciously pushes every aspect of movie-making toward sensorial overload.

Made by Ms. Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, this dialogue-free work, which could be called a video-opera, is to have its United States premiere tonight at a sold-out screening at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. But the public-art organization Creative Time is presenting free public screenings there tomorrow through Tuesday — at 2, 6 and 9:45 p.m. — to coincide with the annual Armory Show art fair this weekend.

“The Rape of the Sabine Women” is dense, lavish and drawn out. It is larded with art historical references, startling juxtapositions and brilliant camera work and enriched by the faces, bodies, movements and general sexiness of a tribe of handsome young actors. Intricately edited, it jumps back and forth in time and alternates between color and black-and-white scenes, sharp and grainy definition, slow-motion and normal speed. Cinematic space deepens and then flattens. We see the actors in character, but also in their dressing rooms; we also glimpse cameras, crews and the musicians.

Most notably, all dialogue is replaced by an amazing original score by Jonathan Bepler. He worked with a host of musicians and singers, who sometimes improvised during filming. The heady weaving of sound and image is the work’s greatest strength.

The total experience of watching and listening to this extraordinary yet ponderous meditation on love, community and the senselessness of war is like eating a chocolate chip cookie made of nothing but the chips. There’s so much to savor that you may start hankering for a clear, cool glass of water.

Shot in Berlin, in Athens and on the Greek island of Hydra, the movie is an avant-garde costume drama in five acts. Its story is a variation on the ancient myth of the Sabine women, who after being abducted, raped and forced into marriage by Roman warriors, wade into a pitched battle between their husbands and their Sabine relatives to secure peace and the future of Western civilization.

The movie’s heroics and pageantry are inspired by the Sabine paintings of Poussin, Rubens and David — especially David’s “Intervention of the Sabine Women” of 1799. But Ms. Sussman’s “Sabine Women” is set in the endlessly stylish, initially optimistic 1960s.

The Roman warriors are trim young men in shiny suits with narrow lapels; they evoke the secret-agent chic of James Bond but also the deadening conformity of Sloan Wilson’s novel “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.” The women wear French twists, richly patterned mod dresses and big dark glasses that recall those of Jacqueline Kennedy and Maria Callas, rivals in the late ’60s for the affections of Aristotle Onassis.

The story begins after Romulus and his warriors establish Rome and realize that they must find mates and procreate if this city on the Tiber is to endure. Diplomacy fails; abduction is the only option. A sports festival — to which the inhabitants of surrounding cities are invited — is the trap.

For womenless Rome, Ms. Sussman substitutes the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, shot in glamorous black and white to the sounds of walking, coughs and murmurs. It is as if we were in the Roman Forum when the Senate was in session. A few young men orbit a statue of an enthroned emperor and eye a stone Greek goddess. An old museum guard, played by Nesbitt Blaisdell, one of the founders of the Rufus Corporation, looks on; he appears as an onlooker in every act, like the stage manager in “Our Town.”

Next, larger numbers of young men muster at Berlin’s International Style airport, Tempelhof — pacing, smoking, sitting, sometimes unfolding their newspapers or crossing their legs in Pina Bauschian unison. They shift into action, leaving the building; in one of the movie’s most striking shots, a lone warrior glides out through the stillness on a moving escalator ramp.

The spaciousness and order of these black-and-white scenes is countered by the crowded picture plane and dense color of the abduction scene, which Ms. Sussman sets in the thronged meat market of Athens. Recast as the butchers’ daughters, the Sabine women hawk their fathers’ wares with fabulously shrill, rhythmic cries and are whisked away one by one. A demure rape scene is enacted in a decaying room hung with a string of dead hare and fowl — a Chardin-like still life to which the camera lovingly returns at least twice too often.

Married life is recast as a party in a ’60s beach house on Hydra, shot in scorching color and filled with the artificiality and posing of an extended fashion shoot. In another moment of eye-catching stillness, a woman floats across the pool in an inner tube, fully clothed. The gathering starts in the afternoon with numerous children and, stretching into the night, includes a beautifully acted lovers’ triangle. Tension mounts, and the house begins to feel like a fort under siege.

The final scene shows the Herodion Theater in Athens, a Greek amphitheater shot mostly from above as it fills with large groups of people. Some, led by conductors, seem to form choruses. Others sit, stand, walk to and fro. The action and the camera shift to the bottom of the amphitheater, where the young men gather and start slowly to struggle. The young women, familiar from the meat market and the beach house scenes, descend through the crowd and join in. Clothes are torn, bodies are bared. The dust rises.

Despite their utopian veneer, the 1960s were arguably the beginning of the situation in which the world now finds itself. So it is not surprising that in Ms. Sussman’s version of the Sabine myth, everyone simply fights to the death, albeit in a stagey, slow-motion, painterly way. Ms. Sussman has recast the birth of a society as destruction.

Artistically, the film is an intriguing summation of the worldliness that began to enrich art in the late 1970s. While using Classical, Neo-Classical and International Style elements, it also draws expertly on 30 years of avant-garde appropriation and formalist self-reference. Its scenes may recall the cosmopolitan performances of Robert Wilson and Ms. Bausch; the photo-based art of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons, Robert Longo and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia; and the historicizing lushness of Neo-Expressionist painters like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, as well as the filmmaker-sculptor Matthew Barney.

Ms. Sussman has come a long way from her solo debut at the Bronwyn Keenan Gallery in SoHo in 1997, where she showed funky, live-feed video broadcasts of pigeons roosting in the building’s airshaft. By 2004, she had replaced Discovery Channel Post-Minimalism with Masterpiece Theater grandeur in “89 Seconds at Alcazar,” a mesmerizing 10-minute video projection that wended its way through what appeared to be a modeling session for Velázquez’s elaborate painting “Las Meninas.”

Fraught with whispered exchanges, rustling silks and discreet gestures, this piece became the breakout hit of the 2004 Whitney Biennial. And it put Ms. Sussman on the map, along with her collaborators, the group of improv-savvy actors, musicians and dancers that is the Rufus Corporation.

While “89 Seconds at Alcazar” grew from a projected 89-second time frame to fill 10 minutes with fly-on-the-wall tension, the 80-minute “Sabine Women” stretches its beauty before us with overindulged, seductive, feline opulence.

Free screenings will be shown tomorrow through Tuesday at IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 924-7771 or ifccenter.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/ar...gn/21sabi.html





Recipe for Success: Take Mentos, Diet Coke. Mix.
Keith Schneider

IT’S easy to find Fritz Grobe’s house outside this wooded hamlet north of Portland. It’s the one with rows of empty two-liter Diet Coke bottles on the front stoop. Inside, there are more pallets of full Diet Coke bottles, stacked waist-high alongside cases of Mentos mints, a drill press, plastic caps and a pile of plastic cuttings.

Mr. Grobe, a 39-year-old juggler, performance artist and Internet video celebrity, has turned his large 19th-century house into a studio for EepyBird.com, an entertainment site distinguished by “Experiment 137,” one of the Web’s most-watched videos.

Mr. Grobe and Stephen Voltz, a 49-year-old lawyer and performer, turned the chemical reaction between Mentos mints (523, to be exact) and Diet Coke (101 bottles, to be precise) into a hilarious short film of geysers, which they posted on the Internet on June 3. The response, like mixing sugar with soda (doesn’t have to be diet, as it happens), was an online eruption that has not subsided.

The two comedians, who perform in white coats and goggles, have appeared on the “Late Show With David Letterman” and the “Today” show, as well as at fairs and exhibitions on two continents. In addition, they have signed video production contracts with the Coca-Cola Company and Perfetti Van Melle USA, the American unit of the European-based makers of Mentos.

The two have also attracted 10 million to 20 million viewers on the Internet. Nobody is sure of the exact count.

Still, the creators of EepyBird, named after a character that a friend invented, know that their tale of entrepreneurial adventure on the Internet is just the first act of a larger media drama overtaking their lives, where little players are drawing the attention of big players. It is also making them important players in shaping the young business of selling entertainment on the Web.

The second act of the drama, turning EepyBird.com and other such sites into durable enterprises, is also happening, as video file-sharing Web sites, including YouTube and Revver.com, attract tens of millions of viewers and hundreds of millions of page views daily.

Advertisers spent $180 billion in the United States last year, $15 billion of it on click-through, display and classified advertising on the Internet, the fastest-growing sector in the industry, analysts say.

EepyBird.com is among the small but growing fraternity of entertainment sites — like Askaninja.com, Rocketboom.com, Jibjab.com and Roosterteeth.com — that are starting to reap a tiny part of that ad revenue, while benefiting from sponsorships, celebrity appearance fees and other sources.

“The Internet is a social space, a new town square,” said Mr. Voltz, who was raised in San Francisco, where he performed as a juggler and fire eater on street corners. “If you’re an entertainer or an advertiser, you need to be there.”

Judson Laipply, a motivational speaker and comedian from Cleveland, is already there. His “Evolution of Dance” video on YouTube has attracted 41 million viewers. Last month, he was in Florida working on promotional projects with the Walt Disney World Resort.

OK Go, the power-pop band that earned a Grammy nomination, has relied on choreographed homemade videos to stir strong music sales, including one that has soared to the top of the YouTube most-viewed list.

Askaninja.com, a two-man production company in Los Angeles that has been showing short weekly comedy episodes for about a year, said that it had just signed a “seven-figure” deal allowing Federated Media Publishing to sell ads for the episodes.

Analysts aren’t sure whether these business models represent more than a splash.

“Where there are eyeballs, there’s money,” said Jeremiah Owyang, the director of corporate media strategy for a media network in Palo Alto, Calif., PodTech.net. “Producers are putting interesting content on the Web that they’re getting paid for. It’s just the start.”

Shelly Palmer, a managing director for Advanced Media Ventures Group in New York, was more skeptical. For now, the online entertainment business is producing “digital snacks,” he said.

“Anybody can become famous for 15 megabytes,” Mr. Palmer added. “But to be a real business, they have to be able to promote themselves without a viral success.”

So far, EepyBird.com is performing better than Mr. Grobe or Mr. Voltz had imagined, although neither would say how much they had earned. “Online viral video is a form of word of mouth, which is the most powerful way to build an audience,” Mr. Grobe said. “There is a lot of room online for the guy with a great idea.”

In October, the company posted a second three-minute Diet Coke and Mentos video, “Experiment 214,” which was produced under sponsorship agreements, one with the Coca-Cola Company and the other with Perfetti Van Melle USA. Everybody seems satisfied. Mentos sales in the United States climbed nearly 20 percent last year, their highest such increase ever. “It is safe to say the whole EepyBird Mentos geyser craze was a big part of the increase,” said Pete Healy, the company’s vice president for marketing.

Coca-Cola is so enthusiastic about EepyBird’s use of its product that it ran “Experiment 214” for more than three months on its home page at coca-cola.com. It also promoted a competition this month to encourage people to submit their own videos.

Mr. Grobe and Mr. Voltz said they were talking to the Discovery Channel and the History Channel about making a television program on science.

Great adventures often begin small; with EepyBird, that occurred in November 2005, when Mr. Voltz and Mr. Grobe discovered the reaction made by mixing Mentos and Diet Coke. The next evening, they conducted their first experiment before a live audience. People went wild, Mr. Grobe said.

Six months later, after working to produce more interesting geysers, they finished “Experiment 137,” and submitted it to an E! Online competition. Hearing nothing, they created their Web site, and posted it there. Mr. Voltz e-mailed his brother in San Francisco to tell him about the video. His brother e-mailed a friend, who e-mailed another, who posted the link on Fark.com, an information and technology site. By day’s end, 14,000 people had viewed the video.

The next day, Slashdot.org, another technology site, posted a link to the video. By the third day, a television producer who had seen the video on a German technology site called from the David Letterman show.

“We told one person, one person!” Mr. Grobe said. “The thing just took off.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/bu...=smallbusiness





For Sale by Teenager: Lightly Used Gadget. Cheap.
Eve Tahmincioglu

MANY of today’s teenagers are sitting on a growing pile of consumer electronics — items like MP3 players and laptops. And as they acquire the latest models, more of them are realizing that they can turn their older gadgets into cold hard cash.

Consider Greg Stoft, 18, who lives with his parents in Fremont, Calif. He wanted to buy a $45 skateboard, but he doesn’t work and his parents recently decided to tighten the purse strings, he said. To get the money, he decided to sell his used iPod Nano on Craigslist, the free online bulletin board.

The ad said: “White ipod nano, 4GB, no bad scratches. I don’t need it anymore.” He posted it one evening early this month with a price of $90 and by the next morning he had sold it for $70. “It was easy,” he said.

Not a bad return on investment, considering that the Nano was a gift from his parents, who were fine with him selling it, he said. And he is not worried about going without: his parents bought him a new video iPod this last Christmas for around $300.

“It’s the first time I ever sold anything like that, but lots of kids I know sell their iPods and stuff,” he said. “I thought: Why shouldn’t I do it?”

Mr. Stoft is among a growing group of teenagers who are creating their own slice of capitalism, one sale at a time. Part of the reason is that households with teenagers typically have 35 consumer electronic products, on average, compared with 24 products at homes with no teenagers, said Joe Bates, director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association, based in Arlington, Va. In the 1980s, he said, the typical household had four or five such devices.

“We don’t have hard data on teens buying and selling these products, but it makes perfect sense,” Mr. Bates said. “Teens just own more electronics today and because they do, they have technology that’s still working and they want to redistribute it. We see a shift in how people are using their tech. Teens like to get something newer before the old product is no longer unusable.”

And the demand is there, from lower-income youths without deep-pocketed parents, said Lance Ulanoff, a technology columnist and reviews editor at PC Magazine. It’s like a “digital flea market for teens,” he said. “It’s a tiered system of teens. There are those that can get the latest and greatest and those that can’t.” He added: “It might be used, but if it still looks cool they’re willing to go with that.”

A review of listings on Web sites like Craigslist, eBay and MySpace, the social networking site, points to a secondary market of teenagers involved in tech gadget commerce. And sales are not limited to the Web. Many teenagers said they were also selling their old electronics to classmates, in the hallways of high schools and colleges.

Helping to spur the trend is a desire by some teenagers to own the hippest gadgets, as they come to see technology as an extension of themselves.

“It is part of this generation’s DNA,” said Gary Rudman, president of GTR Consulting, a youth-culture market research firm in San Francisco. “This generation is forced to adapt, adopt and advance when it comes to technology. Basically what’s happening is, unlike previous generations that had the luxury of understanding a piece of technology and slowly adopting it, this generation is on a treadmill.”

Henrik Cotran, a 17-year-old high school student from Lexington, Mass., feels the pressure. “People definitely notice if you have old stuff,” he said. “People laugh at you if you have a first-generation iPod. They call it a Ghetto iPod.”

Recently, he found himself with an extra video iPod because his grandmother bought him one for his birthday. So he sold his old one to his best friend for $230, a discount from the $300 retail price at the time. “My friend didn’t have one because he was reluctant to spend the money and he didn’t want to ask his parents,” he said.

Because this teenage-oriented flea market is fairly new, there are a few things that teenagers and their parents need to keep in mind.

If teenagers sell their MP3 players or computers with hundreds of songs they downloaded from the Internet, they may be treading on copyright laws, especially if they keep another copy.

There are also privacy issues when people sell a laptop or any computer that includes personal information. “Whether it’s a cellphone or laptop, your personal information needs to be sanitized or destroyed before it’s passed on because it could potentially come back to harm you or someone you know,” said Robert Johnson, executive director of the National Association for Information Destruction in Phoenix.

Above all, the fact that teenagers may be interacting with strangers in these transactions could be dangerous, so parental supervision is important.

There are several ways that money can be exchanged. Teenagers can meet the buyers and get cash on delivery, or take a check. Sellers can also be paid electronically by using services like PayPal and then ship the item. But users of PayPal must be 18 or older, so parents must be willing to provide a credit card number in most cases.

Because some children will probably not want to pay for shipping, they may be inclined to meet up with strangers who offer them a good price online, Mr. Ulanoff of PC Magazine warned.

GREG STOFT, the 18-year-old who sold his iPod to buy a skateboard, met the buyer at a bakery. “I wouldn’t recommend anyone under age 15 doing that, but I’m a big person,” he said. “No one tries to mess with me.”

Mr. Ulanoff said parents should make sure that their teenagers are not including personal contact information along with their online ads.

A recent search of ads for consumer electronic products on Craigslist from an array of teenagers found a handful that listed their personal phone numbers; one young girl from Missouri included her photograph and her personal e-mail address along with her ad on MySpace.com selling her iPod Nano.

Brittany Rich, a 16-year-old high school student in Boca Raton, Fla., knew better than to put any of her personal information online when she put an ad on eBay last year to sell her broken laptop.

Brittany’s mother, Nancy Rich, said she was aware of her daughter’s intentions to sell the laptop and kept on top of the transaction through the whole process.

“Brittany took the laptop to FedEx Kinko’s to ship it after she sold it online — there was no way she was going to meet anyone,” Ms. Rich said. “I’m involved in everything,” she added. “I don’t mind being nosy. It’s our job as parents.”

Brittany got $380 for the laptop and was able to put that, as well as some of her savings, toward a new laptop that cost $1,000.

Her decision to go into cyberspace for the extra cash was simple, she added. “My parents bought me my old laptop,” she said, “but after I broke it they said, ‘You’re on your own.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/bu...y/18teens.html





IPod’s Groovy Factor
Michel Marriott

WHAT do flying plastic pigs, dancing daisies and robotic Barbie dolls have in common? An iPod.

With more than 90 million players sold worldwide since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has spawned a lucrative accessories industry. At least 3,000 types of iPod extras have received Apple’s blessing — mostly no-nonsense options like cases, earbuds and amplified speaker systems, including the $300 SoundDock line made by Bose.

But another trend is developing, one more playful and not always with Apple’s approval or knowledge.

Call it iSilly, a growing number of products in which fun is emphasized over function, and cute or irreverent often trumps wow. All of these items, some costing as little as $10, have been created to plug into an iPod — or, in many cases, any audio source that has a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.

Last fall, KNG America released an animated robotic D.J. complete with spinning turntables and stereo speakers that flash with blue L.E.D. lights. Called FUNKit, the device, which costs about $100, is designed specifically for the iPod. When a player is attached, it becomes the head and upper body of the D.J. that rocks to the music, spouting phrases like “drop the beat,” as its right arm scratches a faux record.

“People looked and saw the popularity of the iPod and tried to figure out how to capitalize on it, like those scavenger fish that swim under sharks,” said Shelly Hirsch, a toy industry marketing specialist and chief executive of the Beacon Media Group.

Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod product marketing for Apple, said the growing number of products designed to plug into an iPod helps prove that the iPod has become “a cultural phenomenon.”

“If you look at it from the consumers’ standpoint, they have a consumer electronic product that becomes more valuable over time,” he said. “We’re adding these accessories, adding capabilities.”

Any speaker accessory that attaches to the iPod by way of the proprietary 30-pin connector in the player’s base must be licensed by Apple, he noted. Those that do, including the FUNKit, can usually also permit full control of the iPod through the speaker systems and charge iPods’ batteries.

Those that do not, and are not counted as official iPod accessories, are “less interesting,” Mr. Joswiak said. That judgment has not dissuaded toymakers like Lee Schneider, president of the Commonwealth Toy & Novelty Company, a major maker of plush animals and dolls.

“We look at not only the toy business, but what’s happening in the world, and the trends in the marketplace, from a fashion standpoint, from a technological standpoint,” said Mr. Schneider, surrounded by shelves of battery-powered flora and fauna in his company’s Manhattan showroom. “We then take and see how we can interpret these trends into fun trends that children and young adults would love to have.”

Last year, he said, “iPods were becoming the rave of the world.” Mr. Schneider said that he and his executives had asked themselves a single question: “What can we do to make something that could be utilized with iPod?”

First, he said, the company came up with a name that would tie its prospective line of products to iPod. The result was iPals, which Commonwealth quickly registered and trademarked. Next, the company moved to define the personality of an iPal.

The first iPal, released last year, was a shaggy, plush creature resembling a teardrop-shaped extraterrestrial with stereo speakers for eyes positioned on long, flexible stalks. The shaggy iPal plugs into any audio player with a standard headphone jack, avoiding the need for an Apple license.

Mr. Schneider said the original iPal, which cost about $25, was intended for “tween girls who want to have something cool and fun in their room.”

Then came the Movin’ and Groovin’ line of potted plants, also $25, “probably the best introduction in the history of my company,” Mr. Schneider said. The plants, some wearing sunglasses and others a pink purse over a leafy limb, gyrate to music played through a speaker hidden in the plant’s pot.

There is also a line of dancing snakes (soon to be joined by dancing dragons), both $25, as well as plush speaker systems for children called Smonsters and Plumplers, about $15, and Mini iPals that will cost $10. In the works is a dancing plant as tall as a third grader (“a room décor piece”) for $80.

“I look at this almost like the Lava Lite of the 2000s,” Mr. Schneider said of his creations.

Sharper Image, the retail chain, is featuring a line of fanciful iPod speaker systems. One is a scale model of a lemon-yellow, convertible Volkswagen Beetle. Its speakers are hidden in its wheels, and iPods are intended to “ride” in its back seat. At $100, the Beetle is also a digital alarm clock and FM-AM radio with a wireless remote control and working headlights.

Sharper Image is also offering a $40 teddy bear that flashes tiny lights embedded in its paws and feet when digital music is played through its speaker. A pocket on its belly is strategically positioned to nestle an iPod.

Sharper Image also sells an iPod docking station that creates a rainbow of colored L.E.D. lights that pulsate to the rhythm of music played through it. The stereo systems come in two versions, one for $100 and a similar one with a subwoofer for $150.

Mr. Hirsch, the toy industry marketing expert, said iPods have become such a part of everyday life that — as with a wristwatch — its underlying technology was taken for granted. “It’s almost like magic,” he said.

Among the first to tap into that magic, many in the industry say, was Hasbro’s I-DOG Interactive Music Companion, introduced in fall 2005. At $30, it is a palm-size robotic pooch with an embedded speaker that moves to music played through it when attached to a digital music player. Hasbro also makes a menagerie of I-animals, including pups, cats and fish. This month it added a $20 penguin, called I-CY, that flaps its flippers as its belly glows to music.

Not to be outdone, Mattel, continually updating Barbie, is introducing interactive Chat Divas Barbie dolls for $30. The doll can talk on its cellphone in one hand and sing karaoke with a microphone in the other. The battery-powered karaoke machine doubles as a speaker for a music player, and Barbie moves her head and lips to the music.

MGA Entertainment has taken a different direction. The company has created the i-Bratz i-Petz Piggy, a touch-sensitive plastic piglet ($25) that dances to music played through it. It lights up, turns its head and even flaps its if-pigs-could-fly wings.

And while it may not qualify as a toy, Atech Flash Technology has come up with an accessory that may still provide a smile. It is the Stereo Dock for iPod with Bath Tissue Holder, a toilet-paper dispenser with an iPod dock and speakers. Selling for $100 ($130 with built-in rechargeable battery), it can also be detached from the wall and used as a portable speaker system.

George Yang, the marketing director of Atech, which has offices in Taiwan and Fremont, Calif., said the Apple-licensed product had been well-received at trade shows. “All get a good laugh out of it,” he said. As for Apple, he added, “it’s good P.R. for them.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ess/ptipod.php





Settlement Lets Apple Use ‘iPhone’
Brad Stone

Apple and Cisco Systems have decided that a name is not worth fighting over.

On Wednesday, the companies settled their dispute over the iPhone trademark. Six weeks ago, Cisco filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco over Apple’s planned use of the name for its much anticipated multimedia device, which combines the features of a mobile phone, an iPod and a BlackBerry.

Cisco claimed that it had owned the trademark since 2000 and was using it for a line of Internet-connected phones.

Wednesday night, in a short, ambiguously worded statement, the companies said they would dismiss all legal action against each other regarding the trademark and that Apple could use the name for its device, which it plans to start selling in June.

In addition, the companies said they would explore ways to make their identically named iPhone products work together “in the areas of security and consumer and enterprise communication.”

Representatives for Apple and Cisco said other terms of the deal would remain confidential. It is not known if Apple made a cash payment to Cisco, but intellectual property lawyers say some sort of payment is typical in these cases. It is also unclear whether Cisco had sold Apple the name iPhone outright and had then secured permission to use it itself.

But the deal appears to give a partial victory to both sides. Apple can begin selling its phone with the name that its strong-willed chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, seemed to prefer.

Cisco can also continue to use the name, and with the promise of interoperability, it might have some of the hype and magic surrounding Apple’s products rub off on its own less prominent offerings.

Hostilities broke out between the two companies last month, when Mr. Jobs announced the music phone at the annual Macworld convention in San Francisco.

Cisco, the networking company based in San Jose, Calif., was using the name to sell phones that can plug into a PC or connect with a wireless hot spot and make free calls over the Internet.

The two companies negotiated intensely over the trademark in early January. Executives had planned to make announcements concurrently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and at Macworld, proclaiming the links between their iPhone products.

After talks broke down and Mr. Jobs announced his iPhone anyway, Cisco filed a lawsuit, saying that Apple’s use of the iPhone name constituted a “willful and malicious” violation of Cisco’s intellectual property. In response, Apple called the lawsuit “silly” and noted publicly that several companies besides Cisco were using the iPhone name.

Cisco’s lawsuit described covert Apple attempts to obtain the rights to the iPhone name. In September 2006, a corporation calling itself Ocean Telecom Services filed an application for the trademark based on earlier filings in Trinidad and Tobago. In its complaint, Cisco asserted that Apple was behind the efforts.

But while they flung legal accusations at each other, both companies faced significant pressure to settle. Apple’s iPhone will be released in June and will be available to customers of the AT&T wireless network, which was formerly known as Cingular Wireless. If Apple had failed to settle with Cisco and subsequently lost the battle in court, it could have been liable for financial penalties for each unit that it sold.

But Cisco also faced a strong incentive to reach a deal.

“Cisco had to provide access to the trademark to Apple if it wanted to achieve the highest value for the name. There was no potential second buyer who would have equaled Apple’s desire for the iPhone mark,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual-property lawyer at Kaye Scholer in Washington.

He added that Cisco also faced the reality that consumers associated the name more with Apple.

“The iPhone name has been informally synonymous with an anticipated Apple phone for years prior to the product’s formal announcement,” he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...-0222apple.php





Cisco-Apple Truce Murky on Details

Cisco-Apple truce over 'iPhone' murky on details of collaboration
Jordan Robertson

The short-lived legal battle between Cisco Systems Inc. and Apple Inc. over the "iPhone" name was only on the surface a trademark-infringement dispute involving identically named multimedia telephones.

Cisco has maintained since the start of the squabble six weeks ago that the dispute was not about money, even though it stood to profit handsomely from any settlement.

Instead, the networking gear maker said it was trying to pressure Apple to break its attachment to closed, proprietary systems and begin collaborating with Cisco on imaginative future products that can communicate with each other.

But industry analysts said Thursday the settlement between the Silicon Valley tech giants does not mean that Apple will suddenly open up its most lucrative technologies, particularly the iTunes library that has helped catapult Apple into the top ranks of music retailers worldwide.

The more likely scenario, they said, is that Cisco and Apple could partner in the near-term on lower-profile projects that leverage the respective strengths of the world's largest networking equipment company and the new darling of digital entertainment.

Some of those efforts, they said, could include integrating Cisco's Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, technology into Apple's iPhones, which are currently designed to operate only over the cellular network; improving the ability of Apple computers to work securely with wireless home routers from Cisco's Linksys division; or generally developing ways for both companies' products to work seamlessly with each other.

Analysts cautioned against expecting any type of major concessions from Apple concerning its proprietary technology, citing the vague joint settlement statement from the companies that raised more questions than it answered.

"As far as concessions go, from Apple's point of view, is there a downside to making their products work better with Cisco's networking gear? I don't see a downside for them," said Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research Inc. "If anything it makes their products that much more attractive."

Gene Munster, senior research analyst with investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co., said talk of collaboration is "noble language" but he is not expecting any blockbuster joint products to emerge from the partnership.

"Apple wanted that to be the impression because they get a lot of pressure for being closed," he said, adding that he suspects money played a more crucial role in the negotiations than either company let on. He estimated that Apple paid Cisco between $25 million and $50 million for rights to the name.

Both companies have refused to comment on terms of the deal and are staying tightlipped about what future products might come from the settlement, which allows Cisco and Apple to both use the iPhone name worldwide to sell their phones.

They would only say they are going to explore opportunities for "interoperability" in the areas of security, consumer and business communications.

Cisco sued Apple last month in San Francisco federal court claiming that Apple's use of the iPhone name violated a trademark Cisco has held since 2000 and is using on a line of Linksys phones that make free long-distance calls over the Internet using VoIP technology.

Apple had argued it was entitled to use the name because its sleek new iPhone operates over the cellular network.

The two sides said late Wednesday that have agreed to drop any pending litigation against each other over the trademark as part of the deal.

Analysts said Thursday the truce was likely part of a longer-term strategy by both companies to bolster their competitive positions in the fight to deliver digital content _ particularly video _ directly into consumers' homes.

Cisco, which makes the routers and switches that direct data over computer networks, is profiting from the demand for video as service providers spend lavishly on equipment upgrades to accommodate the need for more bandwidth.

Analysts said the deal highlights Cisco's desire to partner with companies such as Apple that are pumping more video into the home and driving up the need for more networking gear.

Last month, Apple unveiled its new Apple TV video box, which allows users to watch downloaded movies stored on their computers on their home television sets. Industry observers suspect Apple could eventually play a much larger role in the delivery of television and movies to the home.

"This is more a strategic move by Cisco to continue to strengthen its core business _ and it was good for them to have the moxie or the wherewithal to have the iPhone name to use as a negotiating tool," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with market research firm Parks Associates.

The dustup over Apple's willingness to work with outside companies comes amid intense criticism, particularly in Europe, over the inability of its iTunes software to work with other portable media devices besides the ubiquitous iPod.

Earlier this month, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs urged the world's major music companies to abolish the digital rights management, or DRM, protections that he said were preventing Apple from selling music that would play on any device.

Danielle Levitas, a senior analyst at market researcher IDC, said she doesn't expect Apple to open up iTunes any time soon. She said the company's partnership with Cisco is more about Apple preparing to tackle the so-called "connected home" market where digital entertainment is delivered through a variety of devices.

"I don't think they're opening up the kimono, but they're hedging their bets for what they need to do for video and the connected home," she said. "They had to do this to keep the name. They had to do this to not drag out the lawsuit so they could use the name from day one. Eventually Apple will have to open up a little bit, and Cisco would definitely be the first to benefit. But it ain't going to happen in the next 12 to 18 months."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...8NF3B6O1.shtml





Quantum to Sue Apple Over The iPhone?
Priyanka Pradhan

Close on the heels of the trademark settlement with Cisco, Apple may soon find itself in more trouble, over the iPhone. UK based touch-sensor manufacturer, Quantum Research, has threatened to sue Apple if it finds that the company has infringed on its touch screen patent. Quantum is currently examining the phone for the same.

According to reports, Duncan Bryan, licensing director at Quantum Research said that the description of the iPhone suggests it uses a rear-surface touch screen, and has proximity sensing which can tell if it is held to the ear, which is a Quantum Research capability. He added that if Apple has used the charge transfer technology to give the iPhone that capability, then Apple could be infringing the firm's patent.

This is the second attempt by Quantum, to warn Apple about infringing on its patent. The company had filed a case against Apple, for applying its patented charge transfer technology in the wheel control in iPod Nano. The first patent-infringement lawsuit, filed in December 2005 is still under process. Apple has denied those charges and has filed counterclaims against Quantum.
http://www.tech2.com/india/news/mobi...-iphone/4380/0





Cisco Faces iPhone Trademark Challenge in Canada
Dawn Kawamoto

A Canadian telecommunications company has sent Cisco Systems a letter of warning alleging the networking giant is stepping on its use of the iPhone brand.

The issue could be particularly sticky for Cisco because earlier this month it filed its own iPhone trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple in U.S. federal court. In the Canadian dispute with Comwave Telecom, Cisco is more circumspect.

"We recently became aware of Comwave and we're investigating the issue thoroughly," said Cisco spokesman John Noh.

Comwave, the second largest VoIP service in Canada, has been using the iPhone name for the service since 2004.

"Our legal department has put Cisco on notice," said Yuval Barzakay, president of Toronto-based Comwave. "We will see how they react and then gauge our next action."

Comwave does not hold a registered trademark for iPhone, but has filed an application for one. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office bases its trademark awards on such issues as who was first in using the brand name in Canada or in applying to register the name, say experts in the trademark registration field.

"There has been a Comwave iPhone for years, and, (according to) Canadian law on first use, iPhone is ours," Barzakay said.

Cisco began shipping iPhone VoIP devices worldwide last year and accelerated its global marketing campaign when it introduced two new iPhone products last month, Noh said. Previously, iPhone was sold by Infogear, which Cisco acquired in 2000. It is not clear whether the Cisco's iPhone products were only sold in the U.S., or in Canada, as well.

According to records with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Cisco, via Infogear, had filed an application to obtain a trademark for the iPhone name in 1998, but abandoned those efforts in mid-2003.

In 2004, Apple filed an application for use of the name iPhone with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. And within several months, Comwave filed a motion to oppose that application, Barzakay said.

Comwave, which filed its own application to register the trademark in 2005, alleges it has had the longest use of the name--over Apple and Cisco.

Canadian trademark experts note it will likely take another two to three years before the Canadian Intellectual Property Office awards the trademark.

"I find it peculiar that Apple would launch a flagship product without securing its own trademark first," Barzakay said. "They certainly could have used a lot of other names."

In its U.S. lawsuit, Cisco alleges Apple debuted its iPhone mobile device, even though it had warned the computer maker it would infringe on Cisco's trademark for its VoIP phones. Apple is planning to ship the iPhones in June.

Apple was not immediately available for comment.
http://news.com.com/Cisco+faces+iPho...3-6153865.html





MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict
Saul Hansell

Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury yesterday to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom. If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.

The ruling, in Federal District Court in San Diego, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the big networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.

At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.

Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved, along with the French electronics company Thomson and Bell Labs, in the format’s development.

The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3.

“Intellectual property is a core asset of the company,” said Joan Campion, a spokeswoman for Alcatel-Lucent. “We will continue to protect and defend that asset.”

Thomas W. Burt, the deputy general counsel of Microsoft, said the company would most likely petition the judge in the San Diego case, Rudi M. Brewster, to set aside or reduce the judgment. If she does not, Microsoft will probably take the case to the federal appeals court in Washington, which hears patent cases.

Microsoft argued that one patent in question did not apply to its MP3 software and that the other was included in the Fraunhofer software that it paid to license.

Moreover, it argued that the damages sought by Alcatel were unreasonably high, pointing out that it paid Thomson, which represented the consortium in its dealings over the patent, a flat $16 million fee for the rights to the MP3 software.

“We think this is just plain wrong,” Mr. Burt said. “They told the jury to measure damages, not on the value to Microsoft of one of the 10,000 features in Windows, but on the value of the entire computer.”

Alcatel argued that the damages should be based on a royalty of 0.5 percent of the total value of Windows computers sold.

John M. Desmarais, a partner with Kirkland & Ellis who represented Alcatel, said the proposed damages were consistent with patent law. He said it was not appropriate to compare them with the $16 million Microsoft paid Thomson because the rights to the Bell Labs patents were far more valuable.

“It’s like going to the supermarket and paying $1 for a bar of soap,” he said. “That lets you use the soap. We were offering the equivalent of the right to make soap any way they wanted.”

The jury supported Alcatel’s arguments on every count except one. It deadlocked on the question of whether Microsoft willfully infringed on the Bell Labs patents. If the jury had found that it did, Microsoft would have had to pay triple damages.

“Microsoft has been and to some degree continues to be at a competitive disadvantage, as it did not file for patents for many, many, many years,” said Jack Russo, a patent lawyer with Russo & Hale in Palo Alto, Calif.

That makes it harder, he said, to work out deals with other large companies in which they exchange the rights to each other’s patents.

Large companies like AT&T and I.B.M. “have huge patent portfolios and that represents large and unpredictable risks for companies like Microsoft,” he said.

The judgment is part of litigation by Alcatel to enforce claims related to Bell Labs patents. The case was initially brought against Dell and Gateway, which make computers using Microsoft software. Other trials are pending for technology related to speech recognition, user interfaces and video processing.

Microsoft has countered with a claim, filed with the International Trade Commission, that Alcatel is violating its patents related to messaging technology.

The largest award for a patent infringement case to date was the $909 million that Kodak was ordered to pay in 1990 to Polaroid for violating patents related to instant cameras. That case also forced Kodak to exit the instant photography market and recall its cameras.

Mr. Burt said the appeals process might take another year or two. He said he did not expect that the courts would force Microsoft to remove the MP3 functions from Windows.

Ms. Campion of Alcatel declined to comment on whether that company would pursue similar claims against makers of MP3 players, like Apple.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment. A Thomson spokesman did not return calls or e-mail messages requesting comment.

If the judgment is affirmed, the damages payment would make only a modest dent in Microsoft’s cash hoard, which totaled almost $29 billion at the end of last year.

News of the ruling surfaced just before the regular close. Microsoft’s shares closed at $29.39, up 4 cents, and fell 11 cents after hours.

Alcatel-Lucent American depository receipts, each representing one ordinary share, rose 7 cents, to $13.14, in regular trading, and 34 cents after hours.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/te.../23patent.html





Linus Fires Latest Shot in GNOME Wars
Linux.com staff

Some bad blood between Linus Torvalds and GNOME developers is flaring up again. Previously, Torvalds has said that Linux users should switch to KDE instead of GNOME because of the GNOME team's "users are idiots" mentality. Now he has "put his money where his mouth is" by submitting patches to GNOME in order to have it behave as he likes.

This week, on the Linux Foundation's (formerly OSDL) Desktop Architects mailing list, the two sides are going mano a mano. On Monday, Marcos Pérez López replied in Spanish to an earlier message from Torvalds in which Torvalds lashed out at the GNOME crew, claiming GNOME developers believed their users were idiots. López's reply defending GNOME was in Spanish, and he closed it by saying:

¿Quién es el NAZI?
Who is the Nazi?

Nada más, esto para LINUS para que piense. Nothing more, this is for Linus to think about.

LINUS, NO SABES LEER ESPAÑOL, ¿A VER SI VAS A SER IDIOTA TU TAMBIÉN? Linus, you don't know how to read Spanish, so are you an idiot too?

Godwin's Law was quickly invoked by Fernando Herrera, but that didn't stop the debate. Torvalds took the Spanish in stride, and continued the argument by saying it was good for GNOME to be easy to use, but that "'ONLY being easy to use' is bad." He also noted that "GNOME people seem to think that once you 'got into it,' you never want to do anything more. Not true."

Christian F.K. Schaller then threw down the gauntlet, urging Torvalds to action with:

If you are up for a challenge, why don't you use GNOME for a month then come and do a talk about your experience at this years GUADEC in England? Could maybe be a good way to start a constructive dialog instead of this useless mudslinging?

This morning, Torvalds responded to the challenge, though not in the manner Schaller suggested. He submitted patches to GNOME to make it behave as he wants, then told the mailing list:

I've sent out patches. The code is actually _cleaner_ after my patches, and the end result is more capable. We'll see what happens.

THAT is constructive.

What I find unconstructive is how the GNOME people always make *excuses*. It took me a few hours to actually do the patches. It wasn't that hard. So why didn't I do it years ago?

I'll tell you why: because GNOME apologists don't say "please send us patches". No. They basically make it clear that they aren't even *interested* in fixing things, because their dear old Mum isn't interested in the feature.

Do you think that's "constructive"?

So let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code (not just add a feature). I also guarantee that they actually make things *more* logical rather than less (with my patches, double-clicking on the title bar isn't a special event: it's configurable along with right- and middle-clicking, and with the exact same syntax for all).

But why, oh, why, have GNOME people not just said "please fix it then"?

Instead, I _still_ (now after I sent out the patch) hear more of your kvetching about how you actually do everything right, and it's somehow *my* fault that I find things limiting.

Here's a damn big clue: the reason I find GNOME limiting is BECAUSE IT IS.

Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.

Welcome to wonderful, wacky, never-dull world of free and open source software, where in spite of all the posturing and debate, the answer is always best couched in code.
http://applications.linux.com/articl.../02/16/1937237





In a Supreme Court Case, Microsoft is Getting Support from its Rivals

U.S. software makers and Web site operators find themselves in an unusual position this week: rooting for Microsoft.

Companies that normally focus on thwarting the world's largest software company stand to benefit if it defeats AT&T in a U.S. Supreme Court case that may give software makers new protections from patent lawsuits on exported products.

The case may provide an opportunity for the court to elaborate on its emerging view under Chief Justice John Roberts that patent holders have too much power to bar use of their inventions and extract damages from infringers.

A lower court specializing in patent cases sided with AT&T, the largest U.S. phone company; Microsoft's appeal will be argued Wednesday.

"For the software industry, it's a hugely important case because it effectively doubles or triples the liability of developers who write software in the United States, like Microsoft," says John Duffy, a professor of patent law at George Washington University in Washington. The court will rule by July.

Microsoft is seeking to limit what it must pay to use AT&T's patented technology in the Windows computer operating system. The key issue is whether U.S. patent law, which covers Windows on domestic computers, extends to copies of the software made abroad and installed on computers there.

Oracle, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are among a group of 60 companies including Microsoft that are lobbying Congress for an overhaul of patent law that would include new limits on potential damages for overseas sales of infringing products.

Meanwhile, Yahoo, Intel and Amazon.com have joined Microsoft in asking the Supreme Court to overturn the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

The companies argue that the appellate ruling encourages companies to insulate themselves from liability by shifting their software-writing teams overseas. Yahoo, owner of the most visited U.S. Web site, warns that the lower- court ruling might prompt foreign countries to retaliate by extending the scope of their own patent laws to cover U.S. activity.

"This court should be careful to avoid any ruling that could launch such a process of escalation," Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, said in a filing.

AT&T, backed by patent-holders including Royal Philips Electronics and the University of California system, says Microsoft's position would shield software makers to a far greater extent than Congress intended.

Both Microsoft and AT&T have hired high-powered lawyers for their fight. Ted Olson, 66, a former U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush, is representing Microsoft, and a former Clinton administration solicitor general, Seth Waxman, 55, will represent AT&T.

The Roberts court has previously expressed skepticism about patent rights in a series of cases that cut across ideological lines. In a November argument in a case involving adjustable gas pedals, the justices repeatedly slammed a test used by the appellate court to limit patent challenges.

Justice Antonin Scalia called the test "gobbledygook," while Roberts said it was "worse than meaningless." Justice Stephen Breyer said he had read the briefs in the case "15 or 20 times" and still did not understand one aspect of the test.

Then last month, the court ruled 8-1 in a case involving Genentech and MedImmune that rivals could challenge a patent even if they were paying royalties to sell their version of the invention.

"The way they've been trending the last few years is removing the power from the patents," said a patent lawyer, Erik Puknys of Finnegan Henderson in Palo Alto, California.

A decision issued in June hinted at divisions among the justices on how far to restrict patent rights. Ruling in a case involving eBay, the court said that companies found to have infringed a rival's patent did not necessarily have to change their products.

Although the core of that ruling was unanimous, Roberts and two other justices said in a concurring opinion that judges historically had barred use of a disputed invention "in the vast majority of cases."

Four other justices led by Anthony Kennedy took a different tack, writing separately to say that often a product ban was not necessary and damages were sufficient. Kennedy also wrote that an increasing number of companies were seeking patents as a means of extracting "exorbitant" licensing fees rather than to sell products.

Roberts will not participate in the case, because he owns Microsoft stock. The rest of the justices will scrutinize a 1984 law aimed at preventing companies from circumventing U.S. patent rights by shipping components overseas.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...money/msft.php





A Software Maker Goes Up Against Microsoft
Steve Lohr

VMware, a young Silicon Valley company, is the early leader in a fast-growing market for what is called virtual-machine software. And that puts it on a collision course with Microsoft, the industry’s Goliath.

A virtual machine essentially mimics a computer so that several copies of an operating system — say, Windows or Linux or both — can run on one physical machine. It allows computing chores to be done on fewer computers, using less electricity and taking up less space, promising a way to control costs at corporate data centers straining to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the Internet age.

It is also a product that occupies strategic ground in computing, as a layer of code that resides between a computer’s hardware and the operating system, usurping some tasks, and potentially undermining the importance of the operating system.

In a meeting with corporate customers in New York last month, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said, “Everybody in the operating system business wants to be the guy on the bottom,” the software that controls the hardware. And he vowed that Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems are the main source of its corporate wealth and market power, would “compete very aggressively with VMware.”

When quizzed on Microsoft’s plans, Mr. Ballmer replied, “Our view is that virtualization is something that should be built into the operating system.”

Bundling new technology into Windows has long been the Microsoft game plan. The most storied case came a decade ago when Microsoft overcame the challenge posed by another Silicon Valley highflier, Netscape, offering another crucial layer of software, the Internet browser. Microsoft feared a competitor’s Web browser, running on top of the operating system, could reduce the power of Windows.

“There are certainly some analogies here to what Microsoft did with Netscape,” said Mendel Rosenblum, a founder of VMware and its chief scientist.

The tactics Microsoft used in the browser battle, of course, led to a host of antitrust troubles for the big software maker in the United States and Europe.

This time, in the market for virtual-machine software, Microsoft is more restrained. Bowing to customer requests, Microsoft began more than a year ago to change its software licenses so its products could run in virtual machines like VMware offerings.

But in recent months, according to VMware, Microsoft has introduced new restrictions on how Microsoft products can be used in virtual machines in new ways, beyond simply dividing a single physical computer into several virtual ones.

This next wave of virtual technology, analysts say, includes software that lets virtual machines move freely across many physical machines, juggling computing chores, so that applications do not crash and Web response times are faster. Another promising new ability is running desktop personal computers as virtual-machine software, hosted and managed securely from a data center.

VMware, however, points to license changes on Microsoft software that it says limit the ability to move virtual-machine software around data centers to automate the management of computing work. A white paper detailing VMware’s concerns will be posted Monday on its Web site (www.vmware.com), the company said.

“Microsoft is looking for any way it can to gain the upper hand,” said Diane Greene, the president of VMware.

Yet VMware is making no antitrust claims against Microsoft, and legal experts question whether the friction between the companies is anything more than two rivals taking different paths to an emerging market.

“This seems to be a far more subtle, informed and polished form of competitive aggression than we’ve seen from Microsoft in the past,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. “And Microsoft has no obligation to facilitate a competitor.”

In the past, said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, customers paid a license fee when Windows was installed on a physical machine. But he said virtual-machine software breaks the tight link between the operating system and the hardware, raising the possibility that customers could be using Windows more but not paying for it. So now, he said, the license fee is based on when a copy of Windows is used, whether in a virtual or physical machine.

The license changes, Mr. Neil added, were not designed as a competitive tool. And he sees no evidence of any anticompetitive impact. “Look at VMware’s financial success and you have to ask, How disadvantaged are they really?” he observed.

VMware is certainly thriving these days. Its sales reached $709 million in 2006, nearly double the previous year’s figure. In the fourth quarter, revenue was $232 million, growing 100 percent from the year-earlier quarter.

VMware was founded in 1998 by Mr. Rosenblum, an operating-systems expert and an associate professor at Stanford University; Ms. Greene, a veteran of Silicon Graphics, Tandem, Sybase and a couple of start-ups, who is also Mr. Rosenblum’s wife; and three other computer scientists, Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Edward Wang.

Virtual-machine software dates to the 1960s, when I.B.M. used the technology to coax greater performance from costly mainframes. The achievement of Mr. Rosenblum and his team of Stanford-trained researchers was to develop virtual-machine software that worked, fast and reliably, on today’s lower-cost machines powered by microchips made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

By late 2003, VMware was profitable and growing strongly, and its payroll was approaching 400 people. Its future would depend on keeping its talented team of computer scientists in place, and Google and others were dangling offers. So VMware agreed to sell itself for $635 million in cash to EMC, a leader in data storage systems that was expanding into software. VMware had talked to other companies including I.B.M. and Microsoft. But EMC, not being a major software company, offered VMware more independence.

This month, EMC said it would give VMware an added measure of independence with a separate stock listing and its own shares to help retain its current work force of more than 2,500, and lure new talent. EMC will sell 10 percent of VMware in an initial public offering in the summer that analysts say is likely to value the company at 10 times what EMC paid for it just three years ago.

VMware’s growth is explained by the experience of customers like the International Truck and Engine Corporation, a producer of diesel engines, trucks and school buses. A few years ago, Barry Naber, a technology manager at International Truck, the operating company of Navistar International, began looking for ways to curb the growth of server computers in its data center.

Mr. Naber opted for VMware virtual-machine software, and today the company runs 230 applications, including expense, accounting, training and Web programs on 18 computers in its computer center in suburban Chicago. He estimates the savings for each virtual machine at $7,500 in hardware and maintenance costs avoided, or about $1.7 million.

Mr. Naber also looked at Microsoft’s virtualization offering, but in tests found it was far slower and less reliable than VMware. “We’re entrenched with VMware for now,” he said.

One thing that Microsoft has lacked is a hypervisor, the lowest level of software that rests on the hardware and partitions the computer so it can cleanly and efficiently run several virtual machines. Microsoft is developing a Windows hypervisor code-named Viridian. It will be tailored for the next version of the Windows server operating system, called Longhorn, scheduled to ship by the end of 2007. Viridian will be ready shortly after that. “Virtualization, frankly, is a feature,” Mr. Neil, the Microsoft manager, said. “It’s a great operating system feature.”

Microsoft has built up its virtual-machine team in the last few years with internal hiring and a couple of small acquisitions. And having identified virtual software technology as a core ingredient to its operating system, Microsoft promises to become a daunting competitor eventually.

Yet today, VMware holds an estimated 80 percent of the market for virtual-machine software that runs on computers powered by industry-standard Intel and A.M.D. microprocessors. “The market could change depending on what Microsoft does down the road, but VMware is the 800-pound gorilla of virtualization,” said John Humphreys, an analyst at IDC, a research firm.

In the long term, VMware will also face competition from start-ups in the virtual-machine software market like Virtual Iron and XenSource. The start-ups note that only 5 to 7 percent of computers in data centers use virtual software. They see a market that is just beginning to take off with plenty of opportunity, if they can match VMware’s technology and charge less.

Virtual Iron and XenSource take opposing views on Microsoft’s recent moves. “Microsoft sees VMware coming between them and their customers,” said John Thibault, president of Virtual Iron. “So Microsoft is manipulating its license terms to see if it can freeze the market and slow down the trend.”

For its part, XenSource signed a deal last year with Microsoft to collaborate so that XenSource’s software will work well with the virtualization technology Microsoft is developing for the Windows Longhorn server. “We set out to partner with Microsoft,” said Peter Levine, president of XenSource, “and VMware chose to compete with Microsoft.”

VMware, according to Microsoft, should see the wisdom of the path XenSource chose. In his meeting with corporate customers recently, Mr. Ballmer sketched out a future in which Microsoft would put fundamental virtual-machine software in its operating systems, and “VMware builds on top.”

VMware is leery of such an accommodation, fearing it would prove to be a one-sided bargain. “We will not sign agreements that give Microsoft control of this layer,” Ms. Greene said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/te...gy/24soft.html





Microsoft's Amusing Standards Stance
Håkon Wium Lie

When Microsoft talks standards, I listen. Last week was good for listening.

Two of the company's general managers published an open letter on document formats titled Interoperability, Choice and Open XML. In the letter, they argue that Microsoft is doing all the right things with standards and that IBM is not playing by the rules.

The letter is about an ongoing battle between two Extensible Markup Language-based document formats. IBM and others have supported the OpenDocument format, or ODF, from its inception in OpenOffice to its current International Organization for Standardization-accepted status.

Microsoft is trying to give its own Office Open XML (OOXML) the same stamp of approval by taking a shortcut through the "fast track" offered by the European standards body Ecma International into the ISO.

The conflict has provided prime entertainment for document geeks, and the letter adds to the amusement.

Jean Paoli and Tom Robertson share a tear-jerking story on how Microsoft has "stepped up efforts" and "listened to customers." Microsoft "congratulates Ecma" for producing a 6,000-page specification that will "spark an explosion of innovation." The enemy, on the other hand, is using the "standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives." Microsoft has the nerve to criticize competitors for having commercial motives?
While it's healthy to have competition between different standards, it's rarely productive to have competing standards within an organization.

Further, the letter claims that "ODF is closely tied to OpenOffice and related products" (bad!) while OOXML "reflects the rich set of capabilities in Office 2007" (good!). A more even-handed sentence might read: ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office.

"Choice" is a prominent word in the letter. The authors argue that consumers want several standards from which to choose. I don't think so. Consumers never wanted the choice between VHS and Beta, and mobile telephony in the United States was hindered by customers having to choose between competing standards.

Choice soon turns to frustration when your rented video doesn't fit in the slot, or your phone doesn't connect. People want to choose products based on price and performance, not on underlying equivalent standards.

According to the letter, governments have also been asking Ecma to "establish choice." Which countries? Is it Kazakhstan, by any chance? Kazakhstan recently joined the relevant ISO group. In the past, consultants paid by Microsoft have joined standardization groups and have become sympathetic voices. Are they buying countries this time?

In this conflict, ISO must answer a difficult question: is there room for both ODF and OOXML inside ISO? I'm not a fan of either format, but ISO should be concerned about the closeness of the two formats. They are similar in function, solving the same problems and using XML as the syntactic foundation. While it's healthy to have competition between different standards, it's rarely productive to have competing standards within an organization.

It can be argued that, by introducing a competing standard, one risks jeopardizing both standards. Around 1990, the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and ODA (Open Document Architecture) standards were competitors. Both of them were ISO standards, and I believe this was counterproductive for everyone involved. For example, SGML added useless features just to compete with ODA. Microsoft is not to blame for this, as they were not interested in standards in 1990. In 1997, however, they were.

Less than a year after CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) became a W3C Recommendation, Microsoft co-submitted the competing XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) to the World Wide Web Consortium. (One of the authors of that submission was Jean Paoli. It is unlikely that he did much of the technical work on XSL, and he was probably listed for political reasons. Similarly, he was listed as an editor of the XML specification after Microsoft made some phone calls.)

As a result of being in the same organization at the same time, both CSS and XSL suffered. One can speculate that if both CSS and XSL had failed, Microsoft would have offered a proprietary style sheet language, perhaps based on its own patents.

In 2006, a year or so after ODF entered the fray, Microsoft submitted OOXML to the standardization process. Are we seeing a pattern here? Is Microsoft undermining standards by submitting them? Could it be that it wants both ODF and OOXML to fail?

If both specifications fail, the most likely result is that the world continues to use Microsoft's proprietary "doc," "xls" and "ppt" formats. This is consistent with Microsoft's attitude in other areas in which the company is pushing closed formats. For example, the MSN Messenger protocol is not public.

As mentioned above, I'm no fan of either specification. Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML). But I think there is a better way.

It is possible to build a new format on top of the universally understood HTML and CSS. Additional semantics (say, formulas in spreadsheets) can be encoded as attributes, as do microformats, and CSS 3 offers advanced features for printing (e.g., footnotes and header and footers).

To show that it's possible, Bert Bos and I published a book using HTML and CSS. One significant benefit of this approach is that documents can be viewed in common Web browsers. There's a billion of them out there.

One fun thing to do in Web browsers is to check how well documents conform to standards. For example, you can pass the URL of Microsoft's letter to W3C's validator. Doing so reveals that the letter is not written according to the HTML specification. The validator finds 33 errors in the most lenient mode. (One of the errors is the use of the "layer" element. (The "layer" element?!)

Microsoft--please--if you think standards are so important, why not start using them?
http://news.com.com/Microsofts+amusi...3-6161285.html





Mad as hell

“Oh Dell, Why Must You Disappoint Me So?” or “Why I Won’t Buy Dell Right Now”
Derek Buranen

Even though Dell Digg is full of Linux requests, Dell utterly disappoints me in its Linux support.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. With all these Linux cries from customers, maybe Dell is finally changing their tune to us who use open source software on a day to day basis. First things first, lets take the new n-series D420 and lets compare that with a windows-loaded D420. Enter doubt. Upon first opening these systems, we see that the n-series is $1252 and the windows-loaded laptop comes in at $1199. Again, let’s keep a cool head. Maybe they had to give you an upgraded video card or better wireless that has some superb Linux driver. Scroll down. This is where you start to get frustrated.

Dell’s computer with no operating system is $53 more expensive than one loaded with Vista!

This is crap! This is where anyone commenting on Dell’s Desktop Linux offering at the moment should be in outraged and call them out on this. I can see Microsoft using this to say that no one buys Linux PCs when they’re available. Again, crap! I’m going to go out on a limb and say that anyone looking to get Linux on a PC is smart enough to know that you can erase windows. And at $53 dollars more, where is the advantage of buying a PC without it?

I read this on Dell’s Linux Blog which is syndicated on Planet Fedora?! Please Dell Blog, don’t tell us about your smashing Linux deals when you know we can buy a Windows PC from you for cheaper. Why would you want to rip off the community. Furthermore, I’m buying system76.com until these practices change and would urge anyone else looking for a Linux PC to do the same. Dell could win me back. I’m a sucker for cheap prices and don’t care about support.

To sum, if you buy Dell, you support Microsoft. Even if you don’t want to. (Unless you’re a moron who wants to spend $53 for nothing on n-series) Can you really return it? That’s not good enough. I don’t want to buy it. I don’t want to support them.
http://buranen.info/?p=77





Skype Asks FCC to Open up Cellular Networks
Nate Anderson

Skype yesterday petitioned the FCC to lay the smack down on wireless phone carriers who "limit subscribers' right to run software communications applications of their choosing" (read: Skype software). Skype wants the agency to more stringently apply the famous 1968 Carterfone decision that allowed consumers to hook any device up to the phone network, so long as it did not harm the network. In Skype's eyes, that means allowing any software or applications to run on any devices that access the network.

The reason for Skype's interest in the issue is obvious: they want to force network operators to allow Skype-enabled calling across their networks, something currently prohibited on wireless data plans. In its filing, Skype argues that this capability would offer "tremendous new sources of price competition provided by entities such as Skype," and that's exactly why wireless operators will fight the plan tooth and nail.

Something similar has happened before. In the early days of the wired telephone network, the phone company provided not only network service, but also the equipment, and routinely took firms to court if they sold products meant to be attached to consumer telephones (which were still owned by the phone company). In 1956, a court ruled that a device called the Hush-a-Phone was allowed to be fitted onto the telephone so long as it was "privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental."

In 1968, the FCC endorsed this principle in the Carterfone case. The Carterfone was an early attempt at building a wireless phone. It used a two-way radio and an acoustic coupler to patch a person's voice into the telephone network, and the FCC again ruled that this was allowed so long as the network itself was not harmed. The principle is still in place today, and wired phone networks now stop at a small termination box usually located on the outside of homes; anything past that point is the homeowner's responsibility, but phones, modems, and faxes can all be hooked up to the network without requiring phone company permission.

This principle currently affects the wired telephone network, the cable TV network (any set-top box can be hooked up to any cable system, at least in theory, once the "integration ban" goes into effect later this year), and the data networks offered by both services (DSL and cable, which can be hooked up to any device inside the home). Wireless phone networks are a different story. Defenders of the status quo argue that this isn't a problem, since plenty of competition already exists in the market, and the invisible hand of the market will inevitably provide that which consumers want better than any government regulation can do.

Unfortunately, the "invisible hand" has been a little too invisble here, and no operator actually offers a wide-open network. Skype thinks a smidgen of government regulation could actually help out quite a bit, and they cite Dr. Tim Wu's recent paper on wireless network neutrality for support. Skype (and Wu's paper) point out the various ways that the wireless phone companies block consumer choice: crippling features on phones, locking handsets to operators, limiting consumers' ability to install third-party applications, and limiting the terms of service with bandwidth caps and restrictions on what content can be accessed through the network (Skype calls are forbidden, for instance).

Skype essentially wants to turn the wireless phone companies into just another network of the kind currently operated on the ground. This would require carriers to allow any phone to be used on their networks, and for any application. Users would simply purchase a voice or data plan (though these could easily converge into a data plan if VoIP calling is used) and then use the device of their choice to access the network of their choice. Verizon, Cingular, et al. hate this and would love to keep crippling WiFi and Bluetooth access on their phones in order to keep traffic flowing through their network, using their (high-priced) services.

Recognizing that its proposal would pose some thorny technical problems, Skype "approaches these issues with humility, recognizing that application-layer competition depends in part upon the 3G deployment efforts of wireless carriers." They suggest the creation of an FCC-guided forum to handle technical specifications, one that would operate transparently and would involve all stakeholders in the issue. The forum, in Skype's view, would ensure that "no entity can enforce techniques such as blocking, locking, or certification requirements that have the intention of preventing consumers from modifying or installing software unless it is reasonably proven that such software harms the network."

The wireless operators don't have any intention of being reduced to mere commodity providers of network services if they can help it, and this recent filing certainly won't raise Skype's reputation within the industry. Of course, since that industry already restricts Skype from running on its network, this is no big loss.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070221-8895.html





With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar
Julie Bosman

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and re-opened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including upstate New York; Missoula, Mont.; Portland, Ore.; and Central Pennsylvania weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.”

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship.

“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order two or more copies of each year’s winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

“The Higher Power of Lucky” was first published in November by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, accompanied by a modest print run of 10,000. After the announcement of the Newbery on Jan. 22, the publisher quickly ordered another 100,000 copies, which arrived in bookstores, schools and libraries around Feb. 5.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

“The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of “The Higher Power of Lucky” is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

In the case of “Lucky,” some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson’s posting on LM_Net said only: “Sad to say, I didn’t order it for either of my schools, based on ‘the word.’ ”

Booksellers, too, are watchful for racy content in books they endorse to customers. Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with “The Adventures of Blue Avenger” by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. “I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it,” she said. “There’s a chapter in there that’s very funny and the word ‘condom’ comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said ‘condom.’ ”

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book’s content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/books/18newb.html





He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead
Dan Barry

Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can’t get out of his head.

He couldn’t shake this case even if he wanted to, what with all the videotapes, the DVDs, the television broadcasts replaying the gruesome aftermath over and over, in vivid Technicolor. Those striped socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers. ...

The coroner’s name is Meinhardt Raabe, and he lives in a retirement community tucked between here and there. He can’t see or hear too well, and his short legs need the assistance of a three-wheeled walker with hand brakes. But none of this means that at 91 he has forgotten much, because he hasn’t — especially about that case.

Sitting on his small bed, his coroner’s outfit stored in a closet, Mr. Raabe recalls a rich and varied life but makes clear that he accepts, even embraces, how his obituary will read: Munchkin City coroner, handled case of woman killed by house that fell from the sky.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the freak accident was just one of many wacky events in a wacky, politically charged time, a time when monkeys could fly and trees could talk and life could change on a witch’s whim.

With enchantment — or was it poppies? — infusing the air, a coroner’s role was not so much to determine a cause of death as it was to determine whether death had indeed occurred. The victim’s identity only complicated matters: as luck would have it, she was a witch, a bad one, from the east.

That is why curious residents in curious garb, led by a mayor whose shoes sprouted flowers, surrounded Mr. Raabe as he unfurled his scroll. With cameras rolling, he announced his findings:

“As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

If his words seem mannered, one should remember they were delivered in the singsong language indigenous to the region. And if his ruling caused some problems for the Kansas-based driver of the house and some grief for the victim’s green-skinned sister, it was good news for Munchkinland, Oz — and Mr. Raabe, whose name rhymes with “hobby.”

“I’m still getting mail,” he says, pointing to stacked milk crates packed with letters yet to be answered. He just cannot get to them all.

As Mr. Raabe recalls in his autobiography, “Memories of a Munchkin” (Back Stage Books, 2005), he did not follow a coroner’s typical career path. The son of Wisconsin dairy farmers, he endured years of schoolyard teasing about what he calls his “abnormal lack of height” before wandering one day into the Midget Village attraction at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

Walking its streets, meeting its inhabitants eye to eye, he realized that smallness was no impediment to happiness. “It was a new world,” he says.

For the next three years, Mr. Raabe worked summers with other little people at expositions around the country, often as a pitchman. He eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, only to learn that no firm would hire him.

“You don’t belong here,” he remembers being told. “You belong in a carnival.”

Mr. Raabe eventually got a job as Little Oscar for the Oscar Mayer meat company. Then, in 1938, came word through the grapevine of a demand for little people in Hollywood. Sensing opportunity, he boarded a train due west.

In a place where people came and went so quickly, the casting director first chose the Mayor, the three Lullaby League dancers and the three members of the Lollipop Guild. Then he lined up Mr. Raabe and several other little men and asked them to say the fateful line: “As coroner, I must aver. ...”

“I read that line and I let go,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘O.K., you’re the coroner.’ ”

Mr. Raabe’s pronouncement lasted only 13 seconds, and his lines were dubbed over. But he had made his mark.

After filming ended, he returned to Oscar Mayer and to real life. He learned to fly airplanes. He joined the Civil Air Patrol during World War II. He earned a master’s degree in business administration. He married a cigarette girl who was about his height; her name was Marie, and her beauty stole his breath. Fifty years they had, until her death in a car accident a decade ago.

Now Mr. Raabe lives alone at the Penney Retirement Community, behind a door with a sign that says “No Place Like Home.” Above his bed hangs a portrait of that girl from Kansas and her unusual pals; they’ve all passed on. So has the Wizard, who liked his drink, and the Good Witch, who was a bit of a prima donna, and the Wicked Witch of the West, who was the kindest of them all.

Every once in a while, though, his presence is requested at some Oz-related function; he is, after all, the oldest living resident of that faraway world. He dons his outfit, poses for photographs and catches up with some of the half-dozen or so Munchkin City residents still around: the last of the Lollipop Guild trio, one of the Sleepyheads, a soldier.

Despite that unfortunate house-on-woman matter, Mr. Raabe says his days in Oz were among the happiest of his life. And for anyone who asks, he will say that as coroner, he must aver, which means to assert with confidence.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/us/18land.html





A Creepy Stash of Movie Magic, Lovingly Amassed
Dave Kehr

HOLLYWOOD is notorious for abandoning its past, but luckily there are people like Bob Burns around to pick it up, put it in a cardboard box and take it home. Mr. Burns, who lives on a tranquil, tree-lined street here, has a fair share of Hollywood’s institutional memory stashed in the crowded back room of the tidy white bungalow he shares with Kathy, his understanding wife of 50 years.

Bob’s Basement, as the collection has come to be known to horror and science-fiction fans (though it has never actually been stored in an underground room) may well be the premier film museum in the Los Angeles area, though it is not open to the public and has no regular hours. People phone and just drop in, drawn from around the world by the glorious clutter of Mr. Burns’s heaped-up holdings.

In Bob’s Basement, for example, you can meet the biggest movie star in the world: the original King Kong, or at least the only surviving 18-inch armature that the sculptor Marcel Delgado created for the special effects wizard Willis O’Brien, whose painstaking, frame-by-frame animation brought Kong to life in the 1933 film. Kong is a bit slimmer these days, having lost the foam rubber padding and rabbit-fur coat he wore when he climbed the Empire State Building. Today he stands as a marvelously intricate metal skeleton, fashioned out of nuts, bolts and forged steel. His soulful eyes are empty sockets now, but somehow Kong’s personality still clings to this totemic object.

“When you have in your hand a prop from a movie that’s in your psyche, there’s a strange emotional connection that is made,” said the director Joe Dante, some of whose most famous creations now live in Bob’s Basement, including a few versions of the cuddly Gizmo character from “Gremlins” (1984). “Somebody who’s into books might have the same feeling in the presence of a manuscript by Charles Dickens.”

A supremely affable man with a mischievous smile and a Captain Kangaroo mustache, Mr. Burns, 71, is now retired from a series of jobs, from film editor to gorilla impersonator. He does not guide his visitors through the collection as much as turn them loose among the mounds of props and costumes and models and matte paintings that he has amassed since he was a boy and became fascinated by the mechanics of movie magic. “Have a look around,” he says.

Here are the embroidered tunics worn by some of the most famous superheroes of the Republic serials of the 1940s, including Captain America, the Spy Smasher and, suspended in a swooping pose from the ceiling, a dummy wearing the leather flying suit worn by the legendary stuntman Dave Sharpe in “King of the Rocket Men” (1949). Here are the giant black clodhoppers worn by Glenn Strange when he played Frankenstein’s monster in “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

There, on the floor, is a melting pink mass with Jeff Goldblum’s face, a transitional effect from David Cronenberg’s 1986 film “The Fly.” A lineup of space helmets includes everything from the ridiculous headgear worn by George Barrows in the endearingly awful 1953 “Robot Monster” (which resembles a rabbit-ear TV antenna glued to a fishbowl) to the convincingly high-tech plastic helmet worn by Sigourney Weaver in “Alien.”

And almost everything is hands on, ready to be poked and prodded to reveal its secrets. For young special effects buffs hanging out at Bob’s has been a way of learning a craft that was not taught in schools. Dennis Muren, now the senior visual effects supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic, got his start helping build and run the neighborhood Halloween shows Mr. Burns began in 1969.

Rick Baker, who has won six Oscars as a makeup artist, was a shy 13-year-old from Covina, obsessed with makeup and a faithful reader of Mr. Burns’s magazine Fantastic Monsters of the Films, when he asked his father to call Mr. Burns to see if he might come pay a visit.

“Bob and Kathy were incredibly gracious,” Mr. Baker recalled recently. “He showed me how to do a gash out of mortician’s wax and how to color it with pancake makeup. And I showed him some masks I had made that he was very impressed by. It was an unforgettable experience.”

When Mr. Baker won the first Academy Award given for makeup, for John Landis’s “American Werewolf in London” in 1982, he offered some of the used props to Mr. Burns; the huge wolf puppet he created, along with an artificial arm that grows werewolf fingernails when a rod is pressed, retain pride of place in Mr. Burns’s collection along with three of the alien masks Mr. Baker created for the canteen sequence in “Star Wars” and other bits of Mr. Baker’s work, including the Bela Lugosi mask Martin Landau wore in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood.”

Mr. Burns was a boy from Muskogee, Okla., when his father moved the family to Burbank, where he worked at a Lockheed defense plant. As it turned out, Burbank was also home to many technicians and office workers who labored at the nearby movie studios: Warner Brothers, Universal and the vanished Republic.

“I lived next door to a gal who was Roy Barcroft’s secretary,” Mr. Burns recalled, referring to the character actor who played countless roles, mostly villainous, in westerns and serials in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. The secretary arranged an introduction, and Mr. Barcroft invited the 10-year-old Bob Burns to visit Republic, where Mr. Barcroft was playing the title role in “The Purple Monster Strikes.”

“That day changed my life,” said Mr. Burns, who now counts Mr. Barcroft’s Purple Monster costume among his treasures. Later a friend’s father turned out to be Ellis Berman, a special effects technician at Universal. He had kept the silver wolf’s head cane ornament that Claude Rains used to kill his lycanthropic son, Lon Chaney Jr., in “The Wolf Man” in 1941. Seeing how fascinated the boy was by the prop — which was made of rubber and painted to look like silver — Mr. Berman offered it to him. The piece is still in Mr. Burns’ collection, and is one he handles with a special affection.

That “silver” ornament is exactly the sort of material manifestation of the special effects artist’s work that is rapidly disappearing, as the mechanical effects of yesterday are gradually replaced by digital effects. Dennis Muren’s computer-based work for George Lucas helped to transform the field, and Mr. Baker, who once kept a machine shop busy turning out costumes and props, now does much of his work in the virtual world.

“The best approach is still a combination of the two methods,” Mr. Baker said. “But the big machine shop is kind of useless now.”

Mr. Dante agreed that the digital revolution has largely transformed the field, though he added that “there are still uses for that kind of mechanical stuff, usually in connection with doing close-ups of actors.”

“They keep asking me if I’m going to make another ‘Gremlins’ ’’ he said. “But it won’t be anything like the movies we made, because that technology is obsolete, and those movies were defined by the limitations of the technology. Now the sky’s the limit. Anything you can think of, you can do if you’ve got the money.”

Today’s special effects will be stored on discs and tapes, not here. But maybe that’s just as well. Bob’s Basement is filling up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/movies/18kehr.html





And for My Acting Oscar, I Thank the Special Effects
Ben Hoyle

From a welling tear to a wounded stare, the ability to project convincing emotions in close-up is the test of a cinema actor. But now it appears that there is more to some star turns than meets the audience’s eye.

Directors have started to manipulate actors’ performances in postproduction.

Modern visual effects technology allows them to go beyond traditional cosmetic changes, such as removing wrinkles and unsightly hairs, and adjust actors facial expressions and subtly alter the mood of a scene.

At the Visual Effects Society’s recent conference, Jeff Okun, the organisation’s chairman, showed before and after versions of one of the climactic shots in the Oscar-nominated film Blood Diamond.

In the “before” shot Jennifer Connolly, the leading lady, was shown talking on her mobile phone. The digitally manipulated “after” shot showed her talking on her mobile phone with a tear rolling down her cheek. Such alterations are becoming increasingly common, but practitioners are discouraged from discussing this work.

“Acting is all about honesty, but something like this makes what you see on screen a dishonest moment,” said a leading technician. “Everyone feels a bit dirty about it.”

Visual effects experts privately admit to changing actors’ expressions: opening or closing eyes; making a limp more convincing; removing breathing signs; eradicating blinking eyelids from a lingering gaze; or splicing together different takes of an unsuccessful love scene to produce one in which both parties look like they are enjoying themselves.

Mr Okun told The Times: “What used to cost £40,000 is now only going to cost you £6,000. It’s cheaper than reshooting a scene. We are put in a difficult moral position when directors ask us to change an actor’s performance. The performance is sacrosanct and to alter it is creepy. But we don’t get hired by actors. We get hired by directors.”

One veteran effects man said: “Most of the time, the changes are asked for by directors who don’t know what they are doing. The sort who in post production go, ‘Oh, now I see what I should have done.’ ” Actors are understandably concerned. According to Variety, the leading industry publication, a proposal to give actors approval of digital alterations was first put forward in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in 1998. Tom Le Grua, of the Screen Actors Guild, told the magazine: “The proposal said no part of a performance may be altered digitally or otherwise without the performer’s consent.” It was rejected and has languished since in committee discussions.

Some actors such as Tom Cruise have begun to write clauses into their contracts granting them full control of their own digital assets, Mr Okun said. “They are saying: if you make me look better, then it’s fine. But if you are dealing with the subtleties of a dramatic performance it’s not fine.”

However, Matt Johnson, a visual effects supervisor at Cinesite in Soho, London, who worked on King Arthur and V for Vendetta, said: “Actors have always known that directors would manipulate their performances [by clever editing in postproduction]. Now they are realising that visual effects can give directors even more choice. But I think it would be quite challenging to take a performance that wasn’t working at all and completely revolutionise it digitally. Audiences would be able to spot that.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle1403516.ece





Old Media Partying With Oscar Online
Katharine Q. Seelye

Here are two numbers to think about next Sunday night when you are rolling your eyes at the length of time it takes an Oscar winner to say thank you.

In January, the Golden Globes drew 20 million television viewers. And within a day of the ceremony, people.com, the Web site of People magazine, drew 39.6 million page views.

Page views and television viewers, of course, are not the same thing. Page views refer to the number of clicks on a Web page, and the same person could be clicking many pages.

Still, 39.6 million page views is a lot — and that was just for the Golden Globes. Imagine what traffic will be like for the Oscars, traditionally the second-biggest television event of the year after the Super Bowl.

The pre-Oscar drumbeat seems particularly intense this year as Web sites of the old media have jumped on the bandwagon and begun aggressively courting all those multitaskers who watch television and surf the Web at the same time.

People magazine, Vanity Fair (vanityfair.com), The Los Angeles Times (theenvelope.com), Entertainment Weekly (ew.com), E! (www.eonline.com) and many others have dedicated sections of their Web sites to all things Oscar. Many are counting down to an Oscar night with promises of more video, more blogs, more polls for fans, more predictions from experts and more sweepstakes than ever before. ABC, which is broadcasting the awards ceremony and promoting specials with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, has given the official Oscar Web site (oscar.com) a complete makeover.

Harnessing themselves to such blockbuster events marks yet another step in the integration of old media like magazines, newspapers and television into the online world.

The Oscars can help cement the brand loyalty of millions of Web surfers, who, at least in the case of print, are often moved to subscribe to the print product while visiting its companion Web site.

“Our first goal is to build traffic and get people hooked on people.com,” said Martha Nelson, editor of Time Inc.’s People Group. “Any time you have more traffic, you’re going to sell more subscriptions.”

At stake is millions of dollars as the Oscars — and the surrounding hype — drive page views higher, and Web sites can sell ad space for their Oscar sections at premium prices. Oscar-related sites are popular not only with studios promoting their movies but with major advertisers. L’Oréal, for example, is sponsoring Vanity Fair’s Oscar night coverage both online and in the magazine for the third year in a row.

“One reason people chase these big events on the Web is the big burst in traffic, and the ability to sell a sponsorship becomes more profitable the bigger you get,” said Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the online division of Condé Nast, which publishes Vanity Fair. Unlike print products, she noted, Web sites do not cost any more to produce whether they are viewed by 30 people or 30 million.

Magazines, in particular, may have been slow to the Internet party. But the Oscars are a natural vehicle for showcasing themselves online. While many will offer blogs and snapshots from the red carpet, there is intense competition to offer material that readers cannot find anywhere else.

Vanity Fair, for example, has been the host of an exclusive after-party at the Oscars since 1994. This year, for the first time, it will post photographs and blogs from the party while it is still in full swing.

“We feel like the Oscars are such a big part of what Vanity Fair is, and now we have more capability to cover it in a more immediate way than in the past,” said Andrew Hearst, Vanity Fair’s online editor. “We’re almost covering it in real time.”

Vanity Fair will also have video from the party, which will appear on the Web site a week later, a time frame that stretches out the experience and gives readers a reason to return to the site long after Oscar has gone home.

This is the first year that People magazine has dedicated a special section on its Web site to the Oscars. The magazine has its own “After Midnight” party at a private home, and it also plans to post photographs and, possibly, video from the event.

Innovations this year include having people.com answer questions live during the broadcast about the goings-on. Its “Red Carpet Confidential” will have reporters transmitting items from behind the scenes. And as part of the buildup to the show, the staff will bring in the swag bags they collect around Hollywood through the week. “We’ll photograph this growing pile of goodies several times a day,” Ms. Nelson said.

Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, faced with drooping ratings on Oscar night, has become aware that it can build excitement for the show through its official Web site, oscar.com, produced in conjunction with ABC.

Ratings have fluctuated with the popularity of the movies nominated for best picture. In 2003, when “Chicago” won, only 33 million watched; two years later, “Million Dollar Baby” pushed viewership to 42.1 million.

The audience fell again last year, to 38.9 million, with “Crash.” But all of these pale against 1998, when “Titanic” won and 55 million people watched. (The Super Bowl traditionally draws about 90 million.)

Among the offerings on the official Web site are a presidential-campaign-style “Road to the Oscars” video; a regularly updated video diary from the host, Ellen DeGeneres; and a cellphone link that will alert fans to red carpet arrivals and let them see instant replays of her quips. During the broadcast, she is to direct viewers early and often to the Web site.

The site will also serve as a repository for things that could otherwise bog down the live proceedings. It will have a “Thank You Cam,” for example, where winners can deliver all the thanks that they are unable to squeeze into the 45 seconds they are allotted on stage.

For magazines, the subscriptions obtained online can produce a cascading series of benefits.

It is much cheaper for a magazine to get subscribers through a Web site than through direct mail, for example. And people who subscribe online are eager consumers.

Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, said readers of his company’s magazines are renewing their subscriptions through the Web at twice the rate of those solicited by mail. Moreover, he said, they are on average six years younger, “so they’ll be with us longer.”

“Since they were acquired digitally, they’ll renew digitally,” he said, “and we expect significant downstream savings through that renewal process.” He said one Condé Nast magazine had already increased its print circulation enough through its Web site that it had been able to raise its rates for advertisers.

So far, the Oscar-crazed Web activity by old media seems to be a boon to the smaller independent Web sites that have been covering the Oscars for years. Sasha Stone, who started oscarwatch.com in 1999, said she was initially worried about the competition. “I was an amateur, and I knew if the pros got involved, that would obliterate my site,” she said.

But Oscar-mania apparently only feeds more mania. “Newspapers are more concerned about me because I have the freedom to do whatever I want,” she said. “They’re creaming me traffic-wise, but they don’t take away my audience. People have their bookmarks and they hit one site and then another. What’s good for one site is good for them all.”

Who knows? With all the Web traffic on Oscar night, there may be more page viewers this year than television viewers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/bu.../19oscars.html





Major Media Trying to Improve the Methods by Which They Measure Audiences
Stuart Elliott

If the 20th century was known in marketing circles as the advertising century, the 21st may be the advertising measurement century.

Marketers are increasingly focused on the effectiveness of their pitches, trying to figure out the return on investment for ad spending. That is spurring most of the major media along with many large research companies like Arbitron, Nielsen and Taylor Nelson Sofres to improve the methods by which they measure audiences.

The ability of newer digital media to provide more precise data has also led traditional media like television, radio, magazines and newspapers to try upgrading the ways they count consumers.

"There's a little something called the Internet, something that all other media are trying to get as accountable as," said Jon Mandel, chief executive at Nielsen's NielsenConnect unit in New York, which brings together data from various Nielsen divisions.

Take, for instance, the outdoor advertising industry, which has for years been trying to better quantify not only the number of people who pass by posters, billboards and other signs but also the number who notice and remember them.

Now, the industry's official auditing organization, the Traffic Audit Bureau, is accelerating plans to deliver improved information to advertisers and agencies. The bureau has set a target date of October 2008 to introduce a comprehensive measurement system for more than 200 markets nationwide.

"Sooner is better than later," said Joseph Philport, president and chief executive at the bureau in New York.

"The absence of better numbers has always been a barrier to entry," Philport added, referring to the reluctance of many marketers to increase spending for ads that appear outside the home.

A recent report from Wachovia Capital Markets about outdoor advertising estimated that introducing the improved measurement system would cost the industry $25 million over the next five years.

But it has the potential to double, to 4.4 percent, the share of American ad spending devoted to signs, posters and billboards, the report estimated. The Universal McCann media agency said marketers would spend $7.2 billion on outdoor ads this year, compared with $6.7 billion in 2006.

That growth rate is the second fastest among all media, after the Internet. That reflects the increasing appeal of outdoor advertising — one of the oldest of the old media — as advertisers explore tactics that consumers cannot avoid by changing the channel or turning the page.

"The out-of-home medium provides a broad-reach platform to showcase our products in a cost-effective way," said Mark Kaline, global media manager at Ford Motor in Dearborn, Michigan.

The medium should become more attractive as more digital signs become available, Kaline added. The digital signs, which can be changed continuously, offer "the ability for marketers to tailor copy to a given market, at a given time of day, to specific market conditions," he said.

Such improvements, however, would require more accurate methods to measure audiences. The current system is based on traffic — estimating the number of passers-by, with no idea of whether they actually look at a sign or recall the product being peddled.

It is "somewhat admittedly a crude system, counting the people who pass our signs," said Paul Meyer, president and chief operating officer at Clear Channel Outdoor in Phoenix, Arizona, one of the three largest outdoor-media companies, with CBS and Lamar Advertising.

"The industry has been perceived to be slow and overly methodical" in considering changes, Meyer added. "If we could provide good rich demographic data, in a form compatible with what advertisers are accustomed to seeing from other media, they will start spending dollars in our medium or spend more."

The Traffic Audit Bureau has hired three research companies — the GfK Group, the Telmar Group and Transearch — to compile various kinds of data including traffic counts and travel patterns, and even to track eye movements of people as they pass outdoor signs.

"What the research measures is 'eye- dwell,'," said Erwin Ephron, a principal at Ephron Papazian & Ephron in New York, who is working with the bureau on the project. "If the eye fixes on it, you've noticed it.

"Like newspapers saying all sales are local, what outdoor has been saying is that you can't avoid that kind of advertising," Ephron added. After someone notices a sign, he said, the rest is a question of how creative the ad is and how relevant the product.

The growing popularity of digital signs brings a new urgency to the bureau's efforts, Ephron said, because a sign that can be shared by several advertisers "lowers the price of entry."

Advertisers would no longer have to commit to a sign for 30 days, and the effect, he said, would be like the upheaval decades ago when the standard TV commercial "went from the 60-second spot to the 30."

This month, the Mediamark Research unit of GfK began conducting 4,200 traffic surveys for the bureau in five major markets: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Plans call for Mediamark to conduct 45,000 additional surveys in a total of 15 large cities, Philport said.

The bureau intends to brief media and agency executives about its progress at a meeting in New York scheduled for March 27, he added.

As the bureau moves forward, so, too, does Nielsen, which in 2005 announced that Nielsen Outdoor intended to improve the data it reported about outdoor ads. The Nielsen efforts are centered on a global positioning system it calls Npod, while the bureau is using various methods that include diaries.

Nielsen released data from its first market, Chicago, in December 2005. Information from the second market, Los Angeles, is to come out in late spring, said Lorraine Hadfield, managing director for international audience measurement at Nielsen, and the company is "targeting a roll-out to the top 10 markets in the U.S., where the most interest is from potential subscribers."

Hadfield added that Nielsen intended to brief agencies and advertisers about its plans at the 2007 media conference and trade show of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, scheduled for next week in Las Vegas.

There is some elbows-out competition, reminiscent of the cola wars, between Nielsen and the bureau over their dueling measurement systems.

As for competing sets of figures, "it depends on how cost-effective each application is," Kaline, of Ford, said. "The industry will address that issue."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...iness/adco.php





Commercial Pitched at Teenagers Worked for Movie
Maria Aspan

If you can't hear the advertising, then maybe the movie isn't for you.

That was the implicit message in a television commercial for "The Messengers," a horror film from Sony's Screen Gems division that opened in American theaters this month. In addition to the usual ominous music, slow- motion images and deep-voiced narration, the commercial featured a high- pitched noise that most adults are unable to hear.

The film's plot involves supernatural phenomena that can be observed by children and teenagers, but not the adults around them. In an effort to emphasize this plot and to attract more teenagers to movie theaters, Screen Gems developed a commercial that contained the high-frequency noise and asked viewers if they could hear it.

"If children can hear this," the narrator declared, over quick shots of creepy hallways and ghostly figures, "imagine what they are seeing."

The sound was initially used in the Mosquito security devices in Britain to discourage teenagers from loitering around convenience stores. But teenagers quickly adopted the sound as a cellphone ring tone that allows them to hear their phones without alerting adults.

At a pitch of 17 kilohertz, the noise is well above the normal range of adult hearing. (Most adults are unable to hear sounds above a frequency of 8,000 hertz.)

Mark Weinstock, the executive vice president for marketing at Screen Gems, said the idea for the commercial was developed during a planning session on ways to appeal to a teenage audience and reflect the plot.

Weinstock said that the company did not formally test the high-pitched noise, but that "when we would play it in meetings, some of the senior staff couldn't hear it," while younger staff and interns could.

The television commercial is no longer being shown, but it appears to have been effective; the movie led the box office on its opening weekend and with a budget of $16 million is projected to take in about $35 million. According to Weinstock, the commercial alone was a success.

"The spots were really effective because people really remembered them," Weinstock said, adding that he was especially pleased at the commercial's success with the desired teenage audience. "I think they're looking for something they can adopt as their own," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...iness/adco.php





Drug Maker Produces Documentary on Chronic Illness
Stephanie Saul

"Innerstate," a documentary about three people coping with disabling chronic illness, may be coming to a theater near you.

If so, admission will be free, courtesy of the drug maker that produced the film.

The 58-minute film, which was to have its premiere Wednesday in New York, is an unusual form of soft-pedal marketing of a blockbuster drug, Remicade.

The documentary never specifically mentions Remicade, or the product's maker, Centocor, a unit of Johnson & Johnson. Instead, it focuses on several of the autoimmune diseases Remicade is approved to treat: rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and Crohn's disease.

Although drug companies have previously helped finance documentaries about certain diseases, with the films sometimes produced by patients themselves, industry experts said they could remember no other documentary conceived of and financed start-to-finish by a drug maker. That includes Michael Parks, a Centocor spokesman.

"We're trying to educate people with these diseases," Parks said. "They're not alone out there."

The film, directed by Chris Valentino and produced by the Creative Group, is the latest twist on a business trend toward blending advertising and entertainment. Last month, for example, Toyota and the Speed Channel rolled out "Two Roads to Baja," an hourlong special featuring two teams in an automotive endurance race. Each drove an FJ Cruiser, a Toyota sport utility.

"Innerstate" is scheduled for special screenings in 14 American cities from now to June. Many of those in the audience are expected to be patients with the diseases or members of their families, who have been invited to attend.

After watching the film, audiences in each city will have a chance to quiz panels of doctors specializing in the three diseases. Through a cooperative arrangement, several foundations plan to distribute the documentary in video form for members who ask for it.

Parks said there would also be a Web site associated with the film, myInnerstate.com.

The National Psoriasis Foundation approved the film after a preview.

"It's a great way to get the word out about the disease," said a spokeswoman, Paula Fasano. "We looked at the film to make sure it was fair and balanced. The purpose of the film is not so much about treatment as emotional burden. It doesn't talk about the drugs."

Fasano said her organization was posting information about the screenings on its Web site, www.psoriasis.org.

The foundation helped distribute another film, "My Skin's on Fire" by Fred Finkelstein, a man with psoriasis, an inflammatory skin condition. Finkelstein received some financing for the project from the drug company Genentech, Fasano said. She described that film as more of a grass-roots effort than the Centocor project.

"Innerstate" uses travel imagery to evoke a journey from symptoms to diagnosis to coping. It tells the story of three patients, through interviews with them, their families and their doctors.

Jason Knott, a Texas man diagnosed with psoriasis, tells of the mental anguish he felt as a child.

"I remember getting in the pool and I remember parents pulling their kids out of the pool," said Knott, who is 33. "The memory of almost like a leper getting in the pool. I never went back to that pool again. It wasn't a happy place I could return to."

Later, he said, he returned to the site to rejoice as the pool was being destroyed.

A Maryland man, Ray Ciccarelli, 36, tells how his career as an aspiring Nascar driver was sidelined by Crohn's disease, an inflammatory condition of the digestive tract, and how he struggled for a diagnosis for his chronic diarrhea and weight loss.

And Janie Feliz, a 20-year-old singer from Texas, tells of the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. "My whole body felt like someone was stabbing me," she said.

None of the participants in the film were paid, according to Parks, who declined to disclose the budget for the project.

According to the film, each of the patients got relief from a "biologic," and Ciccarelli is shown receiving an intravenous infusion, but the product is never identified. Remicade is a biologic drug, meaning it is manufactured in cultures of living cells, rather than being made of chemical compounds as are many drugs taken in pill form.

The film also discusses potential side effects of such biologics, which include increased risk of infections like tuberculosis.

Last year, Remicade had sales of $3 billion worldwide and $2.3 billion in the United States. But Remicade's movie debut comes as the company is facing stiff competition.

Available only through injections delivered by a medical professional, Remicade already has competition from three products that patients can administer through self-injection: Humira by Abbott, and Kineret and Enbrel by Amgen.

Two more infusion products that might compete with Remicade have entered the market in the last year, Orencia by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Rituxan by Genentech.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...iness/adco.php





Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)
Samantha M. Shapiro

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, a charge often used to lock up people who make a business of selling drugs or breaking people’s arms to extort money. The officers confiscated recording equipment, cars, computers and bank statements along with more than 25,000 music CDs. Two of the three owners of the studio, Tyree Simmons, who is 28, and Donald Cannon, who is 27, were arrested and held overnight in the Fulton County jail. Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, were briefly detained as well.

Later that night, a reporter for the local Fox TV station, Stacey Elgin, delivered a report on the raid from the darkened street in front of the studio. She announced that the owners of the studio, known professionally as DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, were arrested for making “illegal CDs.” The report cut to an interview with Matthew Kilgo, an official with the Recording Industry Association of America, who was involved in the raid. The R.I.A.A., a trade and lobbying group that represents the major American record labels, works closely with the Department of Justice and local police departments to crack down on illegal downloading and music piracy, which most record-company executives see as a dire threat to their business.

Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.

If anyone involved with the raid knew that the men they had arrested were two of the most famous D.J.’s in the country, they didn’t let on while the cameras were rolling. For local law enforcement, the raid on Drama and Cannon’s studio was no different from a raid they executed in October on an Atlanta factory where a team of illegal immigrants was found making thousands of copies of popular DVDs and CDs to sell on the street. Along with the bootlegged CDs, the police found weapons and a stash of drugs in the factory. (The Fox report on the DJ Drama raid included a shot of a grave-looking police officer saying, “In this case we didn’t find drugs or weapons, but it’s not uncommon for us to find other contraband.”)

But Drama and Cannon’s studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

The CDs made in the Aphilliates’ studio are called mixtapes — album-length compilations of 20 or so songs, often connected by a theme; they are produced and mixed by a D.J. and usually “hosted” by a rapper, well known or up-and-coming, who peppers the disc with short boasts, shout-outs or promotions for an upcoming album. Some mixtapes are part of an ongoing series — in the last few years, the Aphilliates have produced 16 numbered installments of “Gangsta Grillz,” an award-winning series that focuses on Southern hip-hop; others represent a one-time deal, a quick way for a rapper to respond to an insult or to remind fans he exists between album releases. The CDs are packaged in thin plastic jewel cases with low-quality covers and are sold at flea markets and independent record stores and through online clearinghouses like mixtapekingz.com. A mixtape can consist of remixes of hit songs — for instance, the Aphilliates offered a CD of classic Michael Jackson songs doctored by a Detroit D.J. Or it can feature a rapper “freestyling,” or improvising raps, over the beat from another artist’s song; so, on one mixtape, LL Cool J’s “Love You Better” became 50 Cent’s “After My Cheddar.” In most cases, the D.J. modifies the original song without acquiring the rights to it, and if he wants to throw in a sample of Ray Charles singing or a line from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, he doesn’t worry about copyright. The language on mixtapes is raw and uncensored; rappers sometimes devote a whole CD to insulting another rapper by name. Mixtapes also feature unreleased songs, often “leaked” to the D.J. by a record label that wants to test an artist’s popularity or build hype for a coming album release. Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.’s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn’t officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist’s songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.

In December, not long before the bust, I spent a week with DJ Drama and the Aphilliates in Atlanta. The D.J.’s are true celebrities in the city’s vibrant hip-hop community. They were seated at the V.I.P. tables at nightclubs and parties and surrounded by fans at strip clubs, which in Atlanta are considered crucial venues for new hip-hop; tracks are often given their first spins while strippers frantically shake their behinds.

Although the music that the Aphilliates promote glorifies violence and drug dealing — one of their trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects is a few shots fired by a gun with a silencer, followed by the thud of a body dropping — they did not live a gangster lifestyle. (Drama often rose at 8 a.m. to take his oldest daughter to kindergarten at a private school.) Instead, they seemed to be aspiring young music executives with a long-term business plan who had figured out a faster and more lucrative way to make it big than an internship at a record label.

The success of “Gangsta Grillz” had secured for the Aphilliates their own radio shows and record contracts, as well as endorsement deals with Pepsi and clothing companies. When I visited, the Aphilliates were working on an “official” Gangsta Grillz release, to be distributed by Grand Hustle, part of Atlantic Records; Drama said it would use only licensed songs and cleared samples. In September, the Aphilliates signed a partnership deal with Asylum Records, part of Warner Music Group, to distribute albums that Drama and Cannon would produce.

DJ Drama knew that aspects of his business were in what he described to me as “a legal gray area,” and he was secretive about even the most basic facts of how the Aphilliates ran their business. He allowed that he had “got rich” because of his reputation as a mixtape D.J., though he would not even admit to me that he actually sold mixtapes. The line between self-promotion and secrecy was sometimes an awkward one for him to walk, especially as his underground CDs moved further into the mainstream. Several small distributors had begun selling Drama’s CDs, repackaged with scannable barcodes, to major retailers like Best Buy.

One of the CDs confiscated by R.I.A.A. investigators during the Atlanta raid was “Dedication 2,” a mixtape that DJ Drama made with Lil Wayne, a New Orleans rapper; it appeared on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts and was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. (Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times chose “Dedication 2” as one of the 10 best recordings of 2006.) As the R.I.A.A. agents boxed up Drama’s stash of “Dedication 2,” the CD continued to sell well at major retailers like Best Buy and FYE (a national chain of record stores) and also at the iTunes Store online.

The local Fox report of the bust was posted on the Internet and widely viewed. The spectacle of men who were known to every hip-hop fan as players in the mainstream music industry being arrested with the aid of the enforcement arm of that same industry was so bizarre and unexpected that a handful of conspiracy theories quickly arose to explain what had happened. Some fans speculated on message boards that the D.J.’s must have been running other illegal businesses on the side. There were others who thought that the bust was payback from a small distributor who had recently sued DJ Drama for violating a contract. But most fans simply thought the men were victims of a music industry that didn’t understand hip-hop. The day after Drama’s arrest, fans circulated on the Internet a stylized image of Drama’s face over a caption that said “Free Drama and Cannon.” Mixunit.com, the biggest Web distributor of mixtapes, removed its entire stock from the site and posted pictures of Drama and Cannon on its main page with the message, “Free the D.J.’s.” A member of the Diplomats, a Harlem hip-hop group, told MTV News that Jan. 16 was “D-day in hip-hop.” Some fans said that in protest they’d never buy another label release; a New York City radio D.J. called record labels the ultimate “snitches.”

Lil Wayne, who made “Dedication 2” with Drama, said in an interview that Drama would have to “play the game fair,” adding that he thought it was unfortunate that sometimes mixtapes outsell an artist’s official label releases, cutting into the artist’s royalties. Soon after, Rapmullet.com, one of the most prominent mixtape Web sites, posted an image of Wayne on its home page over the words: “Is Wayne a traitor? Did he side with the suits? We didn’t abandon Drama — will you? Who’s next to jump ship?”

Drama is the public face of the Aphilliates, but he, Cannon and their third partner, DJ Sense (a k a Brandon Douglas, 26) function as a team; all three are the hosts of a weekly radio show broadcast on WHTA, an Atlanta hip-hop and R&B station, and another Gangsta Grillz show on Sirius satellite radio, and they jointly own the Aphilliates Music Group. The men have been friends since they met at college a decade ago, and they have an easy rhythm with one another, like teammates who play pickup basketball every week and can pass or negotiate a pick without making eye contact. All three wear the collective’s signature neck chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant in the shape of the letter A.

Drama, whose mother is a white education professor and whose father is a black civil rights activist, has expressive brown eyes and a closely trimmed beard. He usually wears a baseball cap backward or propped loosely atop his light brown hair, cocked to the side. Although his workday rarely starts before noon, he comes across as a savvy businessman. Most of the time he doesn’t say much, but it’s clear he is always paying close attention to what is going on around him. When he is in the studio, about to lay down a Gangsta Grillz “drop” (a phrase that is repeated throughout a mixtape), or when he has to tell a bouncer that no, he won’t stand behind that velvet rope, he rocks back and forth, building his energy, then barks out a torrent of speech, after which he seems to retreat back into himself again. He has a quiet, focused energy that can seem gruff; around Sense and Cannon, though, he gets goofy.

Cannon is a huge guy — 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds — with a lumbering gait and a sweet, unguarded smile. He sometimes spends 24 hours at a stretch in the studio, hunched over a mixing board and a computer running Pro Tools, taking breaks to play video games. He loves to shop, and he especially likes to visit high-end Atlanta malls to buy Prada cologne and examine the jewelry. His enormous sneaker collection takes up the bulk of his apartment’s walk-in closet, as well as the trunk of his Chevy Tahoe S.U.V. and most of a storage space he rents by the month.

Sense is known as the visionary with the business ideas, the one who operates mostly behind the scenes. He is short and just a little bit nerdy. Once when we were in the studio at WHTA, a D.J. named Mami Chula wandered in while a song was playing. She gave Sense a look, shook her head and mused aloud, “I just never saw someone with such a small head.” Sense didn’t say anything, just gave her an indignant look. It seemed as if he was accustomed to being teased.

The day after the raid, when Drama and Cannon were each released from jail on $100,000 bonds, they drove straight to the WHTA studios, went on the air and promoted their coming label releases. There’s a video on YouTube that shows the scene: Drama swaggers into the studio in a white T-shirt and a gray zip-up track-suit jacket, his diamond “A” chain swinging across his chest.

The D.J.’s on air were known as the Durrty Boyz, and one of them announced that they had an “exclusive interview to find out what the hell is going on with Gangsta Grillz.” He asked the accused felons to get close to the microphone.

Cannon murmured: “It’s Don Cannon. Holla at me.”

DJ Sense, who also goes by the name Trendsetter, said: “Yeah, yeah, you know what it is. The boy T-t-t-t-t-t-trendsetta! Holla at your boy!”

Drama, who sometimes calls himself “Mr. Thanksgiving” because, he says, he “feeds the whole industry,” said: “Thanksgiving is every year, man. It doesn’t go nowhere. Do you understand what that means? It’s a holiday, it’s every year. . . . It’s not going nowhere. DJ Drama! I am in full effect.”

After the Durrty Boyz spun a Ying Yang Twins song, Drama took calls at a rapid clip, and he responded to nearly every question or message of support with a reminder of the Aphilliates’ coming Gangsta Grillz release on Atlantic.

One female caller, particularly incensed, demanded, “Can I speak to Drama?”

“What’s up?” Drama asked. “What’s good?”

“Drama, what happened? . . . I mean, come on now, you went to jail?”

“I mean, for a quick minute,” Drama replied. “I am home, though.”

“Uh-uh! We ain’t having that. Don Cannon, Trendsetter, do I need to fight somebody?”

“We’re gonna need you,” Drama said. “We’re gonna start a whole campaign. . . . You know the Gangsta Grillz album is coming out, right?”

“Oh, for real?”

In 1996, Sense and Drama, then both freshmen majoring in mass communications, met in Brawley Hall, their dorm at Clark Atlanta University. C.A.U. is part of the country’s largest consortium of historically black colleges, directly abutting Morehouse and Spelman. Drama and Sense were both aspiring D.J.’s, and they were both from Philadelphia. After they met, they competed in a local D.J. battle and became friends. The following year they met Cannon, also a D.J. from Philadelphia (“Aphilliates” combines the Phil of Philadelphia with an A for Atlanta), and the three became inseparable. Each D.J. found his own niche: Sense interned at WHTA, Cannon spun records at college parties and Drama started selling his own mixtapes. Every night in his apartment, Drama made 10 copies of his latest cassette, and the next day he brought them to campus. Between classes, he would set up a cheap yellow boom box on a major promenade at C.A.U. known as the Strip and offer tapes for sale. He also sold tapes at Georgia State, where he would tell customers that the identity of DJ Drama was a mystery. “I’d tell them I never met Drama, I don’t know the guy, I just work for him,” he told me.

In his junior year, in 1998, Drama put together a compilation of Southern hip-hop, which was beginning to emerge nationally as a distinct sound and style. Often called dirty South, it was more dance-oriented and melodic and raunchier than hip-hop from either coast. That mixtape, “Jim Crow Laws,” sold well, and Drama decided to start a Southern series, which he named Gangsta Grillz. Amateur mistakes were made early on — “we actually spelled ‘Grillz’ with an S,” Drama recalled — but the series quickly took off. Through Sense, Drama met a young local rapper named Lil Jon, who had helped invent a frenetic new style of hip-hop known as crunk. Drama asked Lil Jon to be the host of a mixtape, and Jon did a manic series of drops throughout Gangsta Grillz No. 4. It was the first CD that Drama was able to get into stores.

Around the time Drama was hitting his stride, a young entrepreneur named Jason Geter was working as a manager for T.I., then a little-known artist from Atlanta’s Bankhead housing projects signed to an imprint of Arista. Geter wasn’t happy with the label’s marketing of T.I.’s first album, so he undertook his own promotions, independently shooting a video and printing up T-shirts. Geter said that he started seeing Drama’s mixtapes everywhere — in barbershops and record stores. (“Drama was the most consistent guy doing mixtapes in Atlanta,” he told me. “Some of the other people didn’t even have covers for the CDs, but Drama stood out.”) One night Geter called Drama and asked if he could bring T.I. by Drama’s home studio to do some drops and freestyles on a mixtape.

Drama was ecstatic. “At that point, no one was really checking for me,” he told me. “I hadn’t had a call in three months.” After the impromptu recording session, Geter started giving Drama unreleased T.I. songs and eventually asked him to produce and release a whole CD of T.I.’s work. When T.I.’s mixtape “Down With the King” sold well, other managers started taking their artists to Drama’s studio. The first mixtape Drama was paid by a label to produce was “Tha Streetz Iz Watchin,” which Def Jam’s CTE label hired him to make with Young Jeezy in 2004, in order to build up hype for a coming CD. When Jeezy’s official release, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” came out in 2005, bearing a bonus track from the Drama mixtape, it sold two million copies.

At least once a week last fall, Jason Brown, the 30-year-old promotions director for the Aphilliates, could be found making a circuit of Atlanta with boxes of Drama’s new releases stacked in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. The trip often took as long as nine hours. The Thursday I rode with Brown, he was carrying copies of two mixtapes Drama had recently recorded in the studio with Lil Keke and Lil Boosie, who are popular in their home regions — Louisiana and South Texas, respectively — but have not yet broken out nationally. Brown drove down the parkways and roads of Atlanta’s low-income black suburbs, past a landscape of Waffle Houses, custom rim shops and halal meat stores, stopping in with his wares at flea markets and little mom-and-pop record shops.

At around 3 p.m., we pulled into the parking lot of Backstage Records, a small, tidy shop across the street from the Greenbriar Mall, a locale frequently mentioned in hip-hop lyrics. (Ludacris: “Any charges set against me, chunk it up and stand tall/Next year I’m lookin’ into buyin’ Greenbriar Mall.”) Brown tucked a stack of CDs under each arm and headed into the store. He greeted the owner, a short broad man in his late 20s named Vic XL.

“How many you want?” Brown asked XL, holding out the Keke and Boosie CDs.

“Whoa!” XL said, excited. “Boosie is overdue for a mixtape.” XL told me that Boosie’s major-label release, “Bad Azz,” on Asylum Records, was not selling well, but, he explained, “he’s a hood artist,” so that wasn’t a big surprise.

XL inspected both discs and placed his order: “I’m gonna take five.” As Brown started to count CDs off his pile, XL looked again at the liner notes and reconsidered: “No, 10 each.”

A small record store like Backstage rarely orders more than 10 copies of any CD, and Drama’s distribution system meets XL’s needs better than the mainstream distribution system does. If XL wants just 10 copies of the new Lil Scrappy CD, he can’t buy them directly from the label’s distributors as chains like Best Buy do. Instead, he has to go through a middleman called a one-stop, which charges XL $10.75 for a CD that retails at Best Buy for $9.99.

The economics of mixtapes appeal to XL, and so do their politics; as he sees it, mixtapes undermine the power of major record labels and radio stations. “Most artists can’t afford to get their music on the radio, but an artist has the right to let his fan base hear what he’s done,” XL said. “Who is the label to dictate how to feed the fan base?”

Mixtapes have long played an important role in hip-hop. In the late 1970s, before rap music was ever recorded onto vinyl or played on a radio station, people found out about hip-hop acts through live recordings of D.J. sets from block parties or clubs. Those cassette recordings were duplicated by hand and sold on the street or in record stores, and given free to gypsy-cab drivers in the Bronx as promotional tools. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, mixtapes remained an important subculture. In the last five years, though, they have risen to a more prominent place in the industry and made the most successful D.J.’s rich.

Mixtapes fill a void left by the consolidation of record labels and radio stations. In the mid-1990s, sales of independent hip-hop albums exceeded those from major releases. But those smaller independent labels were bought out by major labels, and in the late ’90s, the last major independent distributor collapsed. This left few routes for unknown hip-hop artists to enter the market; it also made the stakes higher for major labels, which wanted a better return on their investment. As Jeff Chang, author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop, told me recently, “The whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and response to that.”

Mixtape D.J.’s came to be seen as the first tier of promotions for hip-hop artists, a stepping stone to radio play. Labels began aiding and abetting mixtape D.J.’s, sending them separate digital tracks of vocals and beats from songs so they could be easily remixed. They also started sending copies of an artist’s mixtape out to journalists and reviewers along with the official label release. DJ Chuck T, a mixtape D.J. in South Carolina, told me that when label employees send him tracks to include on his mixtapes, they request a copy of the mixtape so that they can show their bosses the track is “getting spin from the street.” He also said record-label promoters want sales figures for his mixtapes so they can chart sales patterns, which they use in marketing their own releases.

Mixtape D.J.’s have effectively absorbed many of the functions of an A&R department, the branch of a record label that traditionally discovers and develops new talent. Ron Stewart, a promotions coordinator at Jive Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music, told me he prefers to test new artists out on mixtapes. “Budget permitting,” he said, “we’d do a few mixtapes with a few D.J.’s, because they have different audiences in different regions.” Labels prefer to use established mixtape D.J.’s like Drama, rather than produce promotional CDs themselves, Stewart said, because “the best D.J.’s have a better brand than the average label does.”

Although the deals are informal and often secret, labels typically pay a prominent D.J. like Drama $10,000 to $15,000 to produce a mixtape for an artist. The label’s representatives, Stewart explained, adopt what amounts to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about the D.J.’s plans to sell the work; what the D.J. does with his copy of the master, Stewart said, “is his own business.” For successful D.J.’s, mixtape sales can bring considerable revenue. Mixtapes sell for anywhere from $5 to $10 on the street or on a Web site like Mixunit, and overhead is low, since the CDs cost only about 50 cents to manufacture and D.J.’s rarely pay royalties or licensing fees.

Although many hip-hop artists view mixtapes as an essential way to build their careers, some are critical of aspects of the system. One editor of a hip-hop magazine, who would comment only anonymously, told me: “In the aftermath of the raid, talking to artists, the stuff they say when Drama’s not around — there is a little bit of animosity, because he is clearly making money off these artists. They all saw his car being towed off on TV. What was it? A Maserati?”

Killer Mike, an Atlanta rapper who is signed to Sony and who has been featured on a number of DJ Drama’s mixtapes, told me he is not really a “supporter” of mixtapes. “That doesn’t mean I don’t play mixtapes in my car and listen to other peoples’ mixtapes, but as an artist, I feel the amount of rhymes you have to write to put out a mixtape is the same amount you have to for an album,” he said. “I’d rather put out albums over my own beats than use other people’s beats and have a problem later.”

Pimp C, a Texas rapper who is half of the popular underground hip-hop duo UGK, has repeatedly refused to participate in a UGK mixtape despite requests by his record label and, he said, from countless mixtape D.J.’s. Pimp C told me that because there is no paper trail, mixtape D.J.’s are able to invent sales figures, and they routinely claim that, after their overhead, they just break even. But based on his experience producing two of his own mixtapes, Pimp C suspects D.J.’s make plenty; they just don’t want to give artist a cut. “Every time I was approached by a mixtape D.J., they tried to sell me the dream there was no money in it, and it was something artists need to do to help their album sales,” he said. “But I know how much bread can be made. . . . If you’re making money, chop it up with me.”

Before DJ Drama went to jail, no mixtape D.J. had been the target of a major raid; busts had been directed at small retailers, like Mondo Kim’s in New York’s East Village. Jonathan Lamy, a spokesperson for the R.I.A.A., said the raid on Drama’s studio represented no official change in policy and had been undertaken only at the behest of Atlanta law enforcement. But for many in the industry, the focus on a single prominent figure seemed like no accident. “Arresting them criminally under RICO was firing a warning shot at anyone who has mixtapes,” said Walter McDonough, a copyright lawyer who has negotiated with the R.I.A.A. on behalf of Jay-Z.

Others pointed to the selective nature of the crackdown as evidence that the raid was a deliberate effort — major retailers like Best Buy were not raided, even though they carry many of the same CDs Drama was arrested for selling. The R.I.A.A. “would have to know nothing about the industry they are monitoring not to realize this stuff is all over Best Buy and FYE,” says Eric Steuer, the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit that works to develop more flexible copyright arrangements for artists and producers. “Maybe they leave them alone because the major chains have promotion deals with record labels.”

Ted Cohen, a former executive at EMI Records who now runs a music-consulting business, told me that the raid was typical of the music industry’s “schizophrenic” approach to promotions; a label’s marketing department wants to get its artists’ songs in front of as many people as possible, even if it means allowing or ignoring free downloads or unlicensed videos on YouTube. But the business department wants to collect royalties. “It is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Cohen said.

Drama’s arrest shook up mixtape D.J.’s and promoters across the country. But even in the days immediately following the raid, D.J.’s continued to release tapes — some with hastily added tracks on which rappers cursed the R.I.A.A. — and major labels continued to e-mail them new tracks. Some in the industry speculated that things would have to change, that mixtapes would either move further underground or become legitimate licensed products. But no one I spoke with thought the arrest would permanently damage Drama’s career. In fact, Julia Beverly, the editor of Ozone, a Southern hip-hop magazine, suggested that it was more likely to improve his image and album sales. “Really, this takes him to a gangsta level,” she said. “It gives him a little something extra. It’s messed up, but if someone goes to jail or dies, it elevates his status and just makes him more of a star than he was before. That’s the way the entertainment industry works in general. So, having cops at your door with M-16’s at your head, and MTV News reporting on the raid, calling you the biggest D.J. in the world? You can’t pay for that type of look.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/ma...djdrama.t.html





New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy
Brad Stone and Miguel Helft

As media companies struggle to reclaim control over their movies, television shows and music in a world of online file-sharing software, they have found an ally in software of another kind.

The new technological weapon is content-recognition software, which makes it possible to identify copyrighted material, even, for example, from blurry video clips.

The technology could address what the entertainment industry sees as one of its biggest problems — songs and videos being posted on the Web without permission.

Last week, Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic in Los Gatos, Calif., demonstrated the technology by downloading a two-minute clip from YouTube and feeding it into his company’s new video-recognition system.

The clip — drained of color, with dialogue dubbed in Chinese — appeared to have been recorded with a camcorder in a dark movie theater before it was uploaded to the Web, so the image quality was poor.

Still, Mr. Ikezoye’s filtering software quickly identified it as the sword-training scene that begins 49 minutes and 37 seconds into the Miramax film “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.”

The entertainment industry is clamoring for Internet companies to adopt the technology for music files as well as for video clips. The social networking site MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, said last week that it would use Audible Magic’s system to identify copyrighted material on its pages. But not every Internet company is rushing to go along. The video-sharing site YouTube, which Google bought last year, is the major holdout so far.

Though YouTube’s co-founders said publicly that they would start using filtering technology by the end of last year, the site has yet to do so. And they have further angered some media companies by saying they would only use such technology to detect clips owned by companies that agree to broader licensing deals with YouTube.

The pressure is on. Executives at media companies like NBC and Viacom have criticized Google for the delay. Earlier this month, Viacom asked YouTube to remove 100,000 clips of its shows, like music videos from MTV and excerpts from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

In a statement, YouTube said that identifying which video clips had been uploaded without permission was a complex problem that required the cooperation of the copyright owners. “On YouTube, identifying copyrighted material cannot be a single automated process,” it said in the statement.

The systems being developed by companies like Audible Magic and Gracenote make use of vast databases that store digital representations of copyrighted songs, TV shows and movies.

When new files are uploaded to a Web site that is using the system, it checks the database for matches using a technique known as digital fingerprinting. Copyrighted material can then be blocked or posted, depending on whether it is licensed for use on the site.

“This is capable of helping the film and TV studios comprehensively protect their works,” Mr. Ikezoye said. “This could put the genie back in the bottle.”

Audio fingerprinting technologies have been used successfully for some time to detect copyrighted music on file-sharing networks and, to a smaller degree, to identify music tracks on social-networking Web sites like MySpace.

Systems that can identify video files hold even greater promise to improve relations between traditional media companies and Internet companies like YouTube. But the technology is not quite ready.

“Video is much more complex to analyze, and more information needs to be captured in the fingerprint,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm based in New York. He noted that there were also more ways to fool the technology — for example, by cropping the image.

Screening for video is also more difficult because of the sheer volume of new material broadcast on television each day, all of which must be captured in the database.

And deploying any type of fingerprinting technology can carry a price. Users tend to leave filtered Web sites and migrate to more anything-goes online destinations.

Nevertheless, some file-sharing networks and smaller video sites like Guba.com and Grouper.com are already using more basic filters that monitor video soundtracks and music files, hoping to appease copyright holders and stay out of the courtroom.

Last week, they got some company: MySpace announced that it would expand on early filtering efforts and license Audible Magic’s audio and video fingerprinting technology. It will use the system to identify and obtain authorization for material from Universal Music, NBC Universal and Fox, three media companies that have wanted more control over their content on the site. The move ratchets up the pressure on YouTube, the largest video site on the Web.

Hollywood, long tormented by digital piracy, is growing excited about the possibilities of digital fingerprinting and filtering — in part because it is tired of having to ask YouTube and other sites to remove individual clips, only to find them posted again by other users.

“To the extent you can readily and easily identify one film or TV show from the next, it enables different licensing models and the opportunity to protect your content,” said Dean Garfield, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

For now, however, audio fingerprinting is all that is widely available, and it can fall short in some situations, like when someone pairs a song with an unrelated piece of video.

For example, last December, one YouTube user uploaded scenes from the Warner Brothers movie “Superman Returns,” matched to the song “Superman,” by Five for Fighting of Columbia Records, a unit of Sony BMG Music.

With acoustic fingerprinting, Sony could authorize the use of the song and get a slice of the advertising revenue the clip generates, but Warner Brothers could not because the filter does not scrutinize video images.

Hoping to nurture the development of more advanced video fingerprinting, the film association asked technology companies last fall to submit video filtering systems for testing. Mr. Garfield of the association said 13 companies responded; their systems are now being evaluated.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is now a flurry of interest in digital fingerprinting in Silicon Valley. Sean Varah, an electronic-music researcher who once worked for Sony music’s venture capital group, founded the start-up MotionDSP in 2005 to develop technology to improve the quality of video images. But he changed the company’s direction last year after seeing an opportunity in the filtering business.

“The television and movie producers have learned a lesson from Napster,” he said, referring to the music-sharing service that first got the attention of media companies. “They are not going to wait and see what happens.”

Attributor, another start-up based in Redwood City, Calif., is taking a different approach to filtering. It is developing automated software that will travel the Internet looking for copyrighted text, audio and video.

Setting up filters for each and every Web site and peer-to-peer network “is not a long-term solution,” said Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive and the chief executive of Attributor. Rights holders “need to have these kinds of solutions across the Internet,” he said.

Audible Magic, which is considered to be an early leader in the field, started out with a system to recognize songs played on the radio, so it could offer listeners an opportunity to buy the music online. The company later adapted that technology to create an audio fingerprinting system.

Mr. Ikezoye, a former Hewlett-Packard marketing executive, recently set out to expand into video recognition. Last year, he licensed an invention called Motional Media ID, created by David W. Stebbings, a former executive at the Recording Industry Association of America.

Neither Mr. Ikezoye nor Mr. Stebbings would offer details on Motional Media ID (which identified the “Kill Bill” clip), citing the newly competitive environment around digital fingerprinting. Mr. Ikezoye acknowledged that it did not work well for very short clips and said that he would probably have to buy or develop additional technology.

Deploying any type of fingerprinting filter can have both good and bad effects. Guba.com, a video-sharing site similar to YouTube, developed its own filtering system, which it calls Johnny. Having won the favor of the film industry, the company now has deals to sell Warner and Sony films on its site.

But when Guba began blocking many copyrighted clips last April, its popularity plunged.

“We took a huge hit,” said Eric Lambrecht, Guba’s chief technology officer. “We all know what people want to see, but we looked at it as a long-term business decision.”

Some experts believe wide adoption of the technology is inevitable.

“As technology companies mature, they are realizing that the rule of law is better than the anarchy in which they were formed,” said Paul Kocher, chief executive of Cryptography Research, a company that has studied the security of digital fingerprinting technology.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N5/webpiracywire.html





iTunes Versus Pirating

I’ve purchased a number of things from the iTunes Store. Music and TV shows primarily, and I’ve been pretty happy with the ease of use and quality of my purchases… The problem i have, though is that television shows such as Lost, which are broadcast in a 16×9 aspect ration HD, when purchased from the iTunes Store, are only 4×3. This apparently only applies to ABC shows.

As you can see in the above image, by purchasing the episode from iTunes rather than just pirating it, i actually get less of the show. …and to be honest, pirating this episode took maybe 2 to 3 minutes more work.

The downfall of pirating, though, is that iTunes (and therefore most likely AppleTV) doesn’t not play friendly with DIVX, but then on the plus side, there’s no DRM. I can convert my pirated copy to any format i want, burn it to DVD, extract clips, scrub through frame-by-frame, etc.

Sounds to me like legality, and even the convenience of auto-downloads, are having a hard time competing with pirating.

But what it really comes down to for me is this: If i get LESS INFORMATION from my legal purchase, if i cant even get widescreen (much less HD) then why should i be purchasing instead of pirating?

I’ve sent Apple an email letting them know that i am dissatisfied with my purchase, that i believed it to be misrepresented product, that no where on the iTS does it tell me that my purchased copy of the season is a stripped down, cut off version of the show. I’ve asked for a refund.

I’d much rather legally purchase the season, i’d much rather they just give me an alternate download link for the 16×9 version, but we’ll see how they respond.

It doesn’t seem like a stretch for Apple to start selling at least 720p versions of their video offerings. It should happen soon, but until then, i do not want to pay full price for only 4/5ths of the show.
http://the-ish.com/blog/?p=18





Music Labels Offer Teasers to Download
Jeff Leeds

For all the disquiet the Internet has fostered in the music business, almost every rock star and record executive is intrigued with the prospect of marketing to music fans directly instead of wrangling for exposure with radio programmers or retailers.

But the expansion of the online marketplace, coupled with ever-worsening CD sales, is now all but forcing the music companies to tread on ground they once viewed as off limits.

Starting this week, Suretone Records, a label distributed by the Universal Music Group, plans to distribute video files featuring popular acts like Weezer and new bands like Drop Dead Gorgeous on file-sharing networks that the industry has long viewed as illicit bazaars for pirates.

Unlike the music audio and video files that major labels sell at services like iTunes, the video files will not be wrapped in protective software to limit copying, executives say. But they will also be incomplete: users who download them will see perhaps half the video and will be directed to the label’s own Web site to watch the complete version — and the advertising planned to run alongside.

The plan represents one of the latest signs that, after years of suing individual users and file-swapping services, the recording industry is recognizing that it might have to loosen its control to attract the giant audience found in largely unregulated corners of the Internet.

And there is new reason for urgency. The music business has been buckling beneath the pressure of widespread piracy and plunging sales. Album sales declined 5 percent last year, and the scarcity of hits after the holidays has put the industry on a course to fall behind even last year’s lackluster performance.

Sales for the year so far are down more than 15 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. That has brought a profit warning from one music corporation, the EMI Group, and prompted dire forecasts industrywide.

Digital sales are increasing, but not nearly enough to offset the drop. As a result, many executives are searching for other ways to reach the people who are trafficking in music and other media files in free file-sharing networks and on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But how far the industry should go to appeal to them is now the subject of intense debate.

One big issue is whether the four music conglomerates that dominate the industry should drop copy protection software, known as digital rights management, from the music files they license for sale online.

The industry has already been dabbling in unprotected content, allowing the sale of songs from artists like Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson and Jesse McCartney on Yahoo and other sites.

An array of online music retailers has called for doing away with the software completely. Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, whose iTunes music store is the most powerful of the those retailers, recently added his voice to the chorus, arguing that digital rights management has not halted piracy and that the industry’s main format, the compact disc, carries unprotected files.

EMI has discussed the idea of distributing unprotected music files with certain retailers, but there is little indication that the four companies, which control more than 70 percent of the world’s music sales, will be willing to offer much of their catalogs without such software anytime soon.

Still, there are indications that the record labels are re-examining their practices. RCA Records, for example, plans to advance its promotional campaign for Avril Lavigne’s new album with the first in a series of short manga — Japanese comic-book episodes — in a storyline featuring the singer.

The video clips, which run two to three minutes each, are expected to be released in unprotected form as free podcasts on iTunes, among other outlets. Fans will also be able to use special software, probably offered on a label’s Web site, to take snippets of the episodes and rearrange them, executives said.

Terry McBride, a longtime talent manager who represents Ms. Lavigne and other performers, said the campaign was a rare instance of a major label’s agreeing to an uncontrolled release, and that he fully expected fans to post the clips on file-sharing networks. “This becomes public property,” he said. “We’re not going to tell the consumer how to consume.”

But Mr. McBride predicted that sharing the files would promote the album and set the stage for other ventures, including the sale of higher-quality versions of the video clips, or possibly advertising to go along with them. In any event, he added, the more CD sales suffer, the more pressure will build on record labels to rethink the rules of distribution and to drop limits on copying digital music.

“At the end of the day the whole object should be, let’s fix the problem,” said Jordan Schur, who set up the Suretone label last year as a joint venture with Universal after leaving another Universal label, Geffen Records. “We know people are stealing music. We’re not going to sit in judgment of them and say, ‘Well, they’re bad.’ ”

The label’s files are being distributed online in an arrangement with ArtistDirect’s MediaDefender unit, which is better known as a contractor hired by labels to place fake, or decoy, versions of songs or other media files on file-sharing networks to thwart would-be pirates.

Before the Suretone video deal, the company had also begun planting fake files containing promotional messages for advertisers like Coca-Cola. ArtistDirect separately runs one of the most popular music Web sites on the Internet, ArtistDirect.com, and plans to have a channel there devoted to Suretone’s video clips.

Record labels are not shifting their view toward file-sharing across the board. Executives at Geffen recently found themselves at odds with the rap star Snoop Dogg, for example, after he started selling songs in unprotected form on his MySpace page, in a partnership with a San Francisco-area rap entrepreneur. Snoop Dogg also offered to sell other performers’ songs on his page for a fee, a complete “push and promote” package costing $1,500.

The offer was removed last week after The New York Times inquired whether it conformed to MySpace’s terms and conditions, which generally prohibit users from selling space on their pages to outsiders.

A number of independent artists offer their songs on MySpace. The reggae act Shaggy charges 99 cents a song, for example, and the band Barenaked Ladies charges 83 cents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/te...y/19music.html





Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period

Getting back to my series of posts on understanding economics when scarcity is removed from some goods, I wanted to address the ridiculousness of the "can't compete with free" statements that people love to throw out. If we break down the statement carefully, anyone who says that is really saying that they can't compete at all. The free part is actually meaningless -- but the zero is blinding everyone.

To explain this, it helps to go back to your basic economics class and recognize that, in a competitive market, the price of a good is always going to get pushed towards its marginal cost. That actually makes a lot of sense. As competition continues, it puts pressure on profits, but producers aren't willing (or can't for very long) keep selling goods at a direct loss. Sunk (or fixed) costs don't matter, because they've already been paid -- so everything gets pushed to marginal cost. That's pretty well accepted by most folks -- but it's still misinterpreted by many. They tend to look at it and say that if price equals marginal cost, then no one would ever produce anything. That's a misconception that is at the heart of this whole debate. The problem is that they don't add in the element of time, and the idea that what drives innovation is the constant efforts by the producers in the space to add fleeting competitive advantages (what some economists have annoyingly called "monopolistic competition," a name that I think is misleading). In other words, companies look to add some value to the goods that makes their goods better than the competition in some way -- and that unique value helps them command a profit. But, the nature of the competitive market is that it's always shifting, so that everyone needs to keep on innovating, or any innovation will be matched (and usually surpassed) by competitors. That's good for everyone. It keeps a market dynamic and growing and helps out everyone.

So, let's go back to the "can't compete with free" statement. Anyone who says that is effectively saying that they can't figure out a way to add value that will make someone buy something above marginal cost -- but it's no different if the good is free or at a cost. Let's take a simple example. Say I own a factory that cost me $100 million to build (fixed cost) and it produces cars that each cost $20,000 to build (marginal cost). If the market is perfectly competitive, then eventually I'm going to be forced to sell those cars at $20,000 -- leaving no profit. Now, let's look at a different situation. Let's say that I want to make a movie. It costs me $100 million to make the movie (fixed cost) and copies of that movie each cost me $0 (marginal cost -- assuming digital distribution and that bandwidth and computing power are also fixed costs). Now, again, if the market is competitive and I'm forced to price at marginal cost, then the scenario is identical to the automobile factory. My net outlay is $100 million. My profit is zero. Every new item I make brings back in cash exactly what it costs to make the copy -- so the net result is the same. It's no different that the good is priced at $0 or $20,000 -- so long as the market is competitive.

So why aren't the same people who insist that you can't compete with free whining about any other competitive market situation? Because they know that, left unfettered, the market adjusts. The makers of automobiles keep trying to adjust and differentiate their cars through real and perceived benefits (such as brand) -- and that lets them add value in a way that they can make money and not have to worry about having products priced at marginal cost. If a company can't do that, it goes out of business -- and most people consider that a good thing. If you can't compete, you should go out of business. But, when it comes to goods with a $0 marginal cost, even though the net result is identical to goods with a higher marginal cost, suddenly people think that you can't compete? The $0 price makes no difference. All that matters is the difference in price you can charge to the marginal cost. Everyone else learns to differentiate -- why can't those who produce infinite goods do the same?

The answer is that they already do -- even if they don't realize it. Why do movies still cost more than $0? Because there's additional value bundled with the movie itself. People don't buy "a movie." They buy the experience of going to the theater. People like to go out to the movies. They like the experience. Or people buy the convenience of a DVD (which is another feature bundled with the movie). They like to buy DVDs (or rent them) in order to get the more convenient delivery mechanism and the extra features that come with DVDs. In other words, they like the differentiated value they can get from bundled goods and services that helps justify a price that's more than $0. Just as people are willing to pay more than the marginal cost (in some cases a lot more) to get that car they want, they're willing to pay more for a bundled good or service with content -- if only the makers of that content would realize it.

So the next time someone says "you can't compete with free" ask them why? Every company that's in business today competes with those who aim to undercut the price of their product -- and the situation is absolutely no different when it's free. It's just that people get blinded by the zero and forget that the absolute price is meaningless compared to the marginal cost.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml





Do They Still Want Their MTV?
David Carr

MTV prospered for decades because it looked like what a network might look like if a 16-year-old were doing the programming. But now the music channel is trying to make its way in a multidevice, multiplatform, multichannel world, most of which is being programmed by a 16-year-old.

The velocity of change has left MTV occasionally looking as if were being programmed by an 83-year-old — namely Sumner M. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns MTV. The network, itself a stately 25 years old, has suffered a decline in ratings and cultural cachet.

Last week, MTV Networks, an umbrella which includes MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, laid off 250 employees, including some executives. The idea was to trim bodies in the television ranks and ramp up hiring on the Internet side of the business, investing the savings to make sure that its various channels don’t end up like the dad in the basement at the teen party.

As a brand, MTV has been beyond durable, managing to reinvent itself continuously and in doing so presenting a fast-moving target that left many would-be rivals in its wake. Shows like MTV’s “Real World” deserve much of the credit, or blame, for demonstrating that reality can make for compelling viewing.

But finding the edge was simpler before competition for its core demographic started coming from all fronts, from video games and social-networking Web sites to amateur clips on YouTube. And consumers can use the Web to come up with their own reality narratives — the current transformation of Britney Spears from pop superstar to bald alien is pretty tough for anyone to compete with.

Being the coolest thing on television is a feat, but not one with a lot of future when most of the coolest things no longer live there.

MTV has been madly programming screens of all sizes and looking to engage consumers on whatever device they choose, but it has been slow going. Rising above the clutter was a lot easier when we were all staring into the same campfire.

“It’s true that our viewers are telling us that they want an experience beyond linear television,” said Christina Norman, MTV’s president. “MTV has a history of surrounding the consumer with both long-form and interstitial content, and I think we can deliver on a two-way relationship with our audience.”

She suggested that there were few media brands better-suited to coming up with content for cellphones and added that the virtual communities around shows like “Laguna Beach” have created opportunities for both viewers and advertisers.

The so-called music channel left music behind as a sole platform some time ago, instead relying on reality and lifestyle shows to draw in young audiences. But it nonetheless remains in the business of zeitgeist.

In a sense, the change in the musical ecosystem reflects broader challenges. Not that long ago, a band fought its way to a major label contract, benefited from commercial radio play and then, finally, a video on MTV. But this system has been disrupted by entertainment’s new iterations, and now most bands no longer ride a vertical axis to the top. There are various workarounds to the popular music monolith — online file-sharing, viral marketing, niche sites and social networks help bands market their music from one person to another.

It is all well and good that OK Go, the band-as-music-video-sensation, chose to premiere its video “Do What You Want” on “Total Request Live,” MTV’s once-dominant afternoon show, but it is worth remembering that OK Go emerged to begin with from YouTube, where its goofy treadmill video became a cult classic.

In a sense, MTV, which once decided what was worthy, is responding to a more powerful consumer algorithm. (Ms. Norman points out that OK Go did not start selling a significant amount of music until the band began appearing on MTV.)

The disintegration of mass has made for difficult times at MTV Networks, although there are bright spots. VH1 continues to hum with a heady mix of “celeb reality” like “Flavor of Love” and shows like “Best Week Ever” that annotate the present with the ease of a well-written blog. VH1 does not bear MTV’s burden of serving as a generational touchstone, so it can program whatever happens to be working.

The organizational changes at the network signal that even MTV can learn some best practices from other members of the corporate family. Marketers I spoke to said that it was the once-dowdy VH1 that seemed to have the fresher ideas. And Comedy Central, which lacks both the legacy and the baggage that MTV carries, is very much of the moment, lead by a skeptic-in-chief, Jon Stewart.

“MTV has come in and out of vogue, like most cutting-edge brands,” said Tim Spengler, chief activation officer of Initiative, a media buying firm. “But they have done a great job of being in vogue more often than not. The changes that they announced seem a lot more like the redeploying of assets to digital platforms that are growing faster.”

MTV is hardly the only media company in a wrestling match with a fast-advancing future. NBC and Disney both underwent painful changes, although it seemed like there was a bit more strategy to go along with the displacement.

MTV Networks brought in Michael J. Wolf, the former McKinsey consultant, to lead it to that happy new place, but he lasted little more than a year as president, in part because the formerly cutting-edge outfit was hidebound enough to reject the attempted transplant of outside ideas.

In general, Viacom has been attempting to dance to the fickle tune of Wall Street, first bifurcating into two businesses as a way of juicing the stock, and then, when that did not work, dumping much-beloved executive Tom Freston. This worked a little, although Viacom’s stock closed Friday at $40.53, off more than $3 from its presplit price.

Like all publicly traded media companies, Viacom faces the perplexing math of repositioning for a disrupted future while trying to meet current shareholder demands for growth.

Solving the multiplatform math will take a long-term slog and will not help meet Mr. Redstone’s demand for high margins in the short run. Instead, the investment in Internet is being financed in part by the cutbacks that were announced last week.

One example of how MTV has obviously lost a step is the Video Music Awards, an alternative to the Grammys that was once a big pop culture moment and is now an artistic and a ratings flop.

The show was down 30 percent in the 18-to-49 demographic last year, and the company announced last month that Mark Burnett, the creator of “Survivor,” will bring some reality magic to its movie awards show.

Mr. Burnett has had his share of successes, but the idea that MTV would have to turn to an outsider to bring some sizzle to one of its signature events suggests that its stranglehold on youth consciousness is not what it once was.

Even the most robust media brands can come and go. Dennis Publishing, which produced Maxim and Stuff, the so-called lad magazines that were once hugely popular, announced last week that it was looking for a buyer.

MTV is hardly a fad, but some cycles are more serious than others. It is a change in habits — consumers pulling in what they want as opposed to consuming what is pushed toward them — that makes the way forward more difficult to discern.

“MTV has a lot of programming development that sounds interesting,” said Chris Boothe, president of Starcom USA, an advertising agency. “They have a brand that is still very viable in the market” and have been trying to make the most of it with acquisitions like iFilm, a Web video site, and Xfire, a gaming site, Mr. Boothe said.

Of course, clanging the death knell on MTV has been a hobby for media observers as long as the music channel has existed, but when the smoke cleared, those three letters were still there.

“I think that something that has managed to win for 25 years will continue to do so, ” said Mr. Spengler. “If they just had five years behind them, that would be different, because the challenges they face are ferocious. But they have been finding a way to win for a lot longer than that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/bu...ia/19carr.html





FCC Report: TV Violence Should be Regulated

• FCC draft report suggests TV violence be regulated
• Not red state or blue state issue, says commissioner
• Idea raises First Amendment questions

Television networks are free to sprinkle their programs with shootings, slashings, torture and other gore because the government has no regulatory authority over violent programming.

But a draft report being circulated at the Federal Communications Commission says Congress can change that, without violating the First Amendment.

The long-overdue report suggests Congress could craft a law that would let the agency regulate violent programming much like it regulates sexual content and profanity -- by barring it from being aired during hours when children may be watching, for example. (Watch why people are concerned about torture on "24")

"In general, what the commission's report says is that there is strong evidence that shows violent media can have an impact on children's behavior and there are some things that can be done about it," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Thursday.

The issue is bipartisan. Martin, a Republican, gave a joint interview to The Associated Press with Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps.

"The pressure to do something on this is building right now," Copps said, noting that TV violence comes up regularly during media ownership hearings he conducts across the country. "People really feel strongly about this issue all across this land. This is not a red state or a blue state issue."

The report also suggests that cable and satellite TV could be subjected to an "a la carte" regime that would let viewers choose their channels, a measure long supported by Martin.

"We can't just deal with the three or four broadcast channels -- we have to be looking at what's on cable as well" Martin said.

The report cites studies that suggest violent programming can lead to "short-term aggressive behavior in children," according to an agency source who described the report and asked not to be named because it has not yet been approved.

The recommendations are sure to alarm executives in the broadcast and cable industries, members of the creative community and First Amendment advocates.

"Will it count on the news?" asked Jonathan Rintels, executive director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media. "Will it count on news magazines like '60 Minutes' and 'Dateline'? What about hockey games when the gloves come off and people start punching each other?"

Rintels said such rules would create "huge gray areas of censored content."

"The fact that it's difficult should not take this issue off the table," Copps said, when asked about the potential difficulty.

A bipartisan group of 39 House members nearly three years ago requested a report by Jan. 1, 2005, discussing whether the FCC could define "exceedingly violent programming that is harmful to children." It also asked whether the agency could regulate such programming "in a constitutional manner."

Broadcasters are expected to object strenuously to any anti-violence regulatory regime, but have been skittish in going on the record.

Generally, broadcasters and cable companies say parents should take responsibility for what their children watch and take advantage of blocking technology, like the V-chip. Broadcasters also claim their shows are becoming edgier to keep up with increasingly violent fare on cable networks.

Dan Isett, director of corporate and government affairs for the Parents Television Council, said the industry's campaign to make parents the violence police is "purely designed to convince the Congress that they (programmers) are being responsible."

The parental blocking technologies are insufficient due to a flawed television rating system, he said. As for the argument that cable is pressuring broadcasters to be edgier, Isett believes that's nonsense.

"Virtually all content is owned by six major media conglomerates," he said. "They own what's on cable."

The commission could vote on the report at any time. Martin, Copps and Republican Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate are expected to vote in favor. Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was not immediately available for comment. Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell is the potential wild card.

McDowell, a father of young children, issued a statement saying he is "deeply concerned about the effects of television violence" but added the "first line of defense rests with parents."
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/0....ap/index.html





Record Fine Expected for Univision
Stephen LaBaton

When Univision began broadcasting a show three years ago about the misadventures of 11-year-old identical twin girls who swapped identities after discovering they had been separated at birth, it characterized the episodes as educational programming for children.

That decision is expected to cost Univision, the nation’s largest Hispanic network, $24 million in what would be the largest fine the Federal Communications Commission has ever imposed against any company. The penalty is also expected to send a strong signal to broadcasters that they will be expected to meet their required quota of shows that educate and inform children, after years of permissive oversight in this area.

The commission has decided to impose the heavy fine — disclosed by Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the commission, in an interview — as a tough rebuke to Univision for claiming to meet its obligations to broadcast educational children’s programs by showing the Latino soap opera “Complices al Rescate” (“Friends to the Rescue”) and other so-called telenovelas.

The penalty, part of a settlement that will allow the company to proceed with a buyout deal, is nearly three times the previous record fine of $9 million, imposed against Qwest Communications for violating telephone interconnection rules in 2004, and significantly more than the largest indecency penalty, $3.5 million, levied against Viacom that same year for remarks by Howard Stern and other so-called shock jocks on the radio.

It also represents an unusually aggressive enforcement of the 1996 regulations that interpreted the Children’s Television Act. Those regulations, adopted after some broadcasters characterized cartoons like “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” to be educational programs, imposed more substantive requirements on the networks as they comply with the mandate to broadcast at least three hours a week of programs of intellectual value to young people.

Although some television critics say it is common for stations not to comply, only a handful of complaints have been filed. An even smaller number have resulted in modest penalties of several thousand dollars for stations found to have violated the rules.

Reflecting the views of many policy leaders in Washington who were appointed by President Bush, Mr. Martin said that he was committed to deregulation “and an environment where companies can be investing and competing and driving innovation.” But he also said that he was not driven simply by ideology, and that there remain important areas where thorough regulation plays a valuable social role.

“I generally think consumers are better served by less regulation, not more,” he said in an interview. “But I also think the commission has a key role to play in some areas, such as children’s television, and I take those obligations seriously.”

The agency under Mr. Martin adopted new rules last year to make the children’s television programming requirements apply to new digital television stations.

The $24 million fine, along with a plan to show more programming that would comply with the rules, are part of a consent decree that Univision has tentatively agreed to that would resolve complaints by viewers. It covers violations at 24 Univision stations over a 116-week period from 2004 to early last year.

Mr. Martin has already signed onto the decree. Once the full commission approves it, as expected, Univision will be able to complete its $12 billion sale to a consortium of private equity firms. Those investors include Providence Equity Partners, where a senior executive is Michael K. Powell, the former F.C.C. chairman, and Haim Saban, a wealthy investor who built a major business on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers action figures.

Lawyers representing Univision before the commission declined to comment about the case.

The fine was applauded by some Democrats in Congress who have long been dissatisfied with the agency for failing to press broadcasters to provide higher- quality programming for children.

“As the prime House author of the Children’s Television Act, I am pleased the commission is pursuing serious and vigorous enforcement of violations,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet. “This is a particularly egregious case and the level of the proposed fine reflects it. Rather than giving kids programming that is educationally nourishing, Univision elected to give them the Spanish-language equivalent of a soap opera..”

The case dates to the summer of 2005, when the United Church of Christ raised concerns about Univision’s programming lineup, complaining that it was failing to provide adequate children’s programs. The network claimed it was meeting its obligation by repeatedly rebroadcasting the same episodes of the telenovela. The commission’s staff found that 24 stations had violated the programming guidelines over a two-year period.

Angela J. Campbell, a telecommunications expert at Georgetown University Law Center who represents the church, appeared stunned by the decision.

“Assuming it’s true, I’m pleased to see the commission finally taking action and I hope they will take action soon on other petitions we have filed in this area,” Professor Campbell said. “Broadcasters need to know that they have to take these obligations to children seriously.”

Univision had maintained that it satisfied its programming obligations for children by broadcasting several telenovelas, including “Complices al Rescate”

“A significant purpose and key educational objective of this program is to illustrate how friendship, love and kindness can help overcome life’s adversities,” the network’s lawyers said in their brief before the commission. “ ‘Complices al Rescate’ follows the lives of two 11-year-old girls, Silvana and Mariana, who have both experienced sadness, loss and injustice in their lives. Throughout the shows, the girls learn to appreciate that happiness is not found in popularity and money, but in true friendship, good will towards others and love.”

But Mr. Martin said the commission found little merit to that argument, and critics said the show, with complex subplots and occasional adult themes, had little value for young children.

In an affidavit accompanying the United Church’s complaint, Federico Subervi, a media consultant to such shows as “Dora the Explorer” and “The Misadventures of Maya and Miguel” said that “Complices” contained many adult plots and complex themes that were hardly suitable for young children.

As further evidence that the program did not comply with the rules, Mr. Subervi noted that 80 percent of the advertising during the show was geared toward adults.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/bu.../24fcc.html?hp





'Content' is King Again — This Time, on the Cellphone
Eric Sylvers

Hundreds of executives from San Francisco to Mumbai are descending on Barcelona this week to promote new ways to watch, listen to and share content over a mobile phone. The irony is that they may sound a lot like the new ways that people are watching, listening and sharing over their personal computers.

User-generated content, typified by the video- sharing Internet site YouTube, is now invading the mobile phone. Vodafone, for instance, struck deals last week to bring YouTube, the social-networking site MySpace and the online auction site eBay to the cellphones of its subscribers.

CBS, the U.S. television broadcaster, last week began selling television clips, games, ring tones and other content linked to the company's programs, designed just for cellphones.

For executives and many industry experts gathering at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, the question is no longer whether cellphone users will use their phones to download music, video, games and adult content, or to watch broadcast television and made-for-mobile movies, or to search for a local restaurant, gamble and update their blogs. The question is how soon.

"What people take for granted on the computer, they'll soon start embracing on the mobile phone," said Daniel Winterbottom, a senior analyst with Informa Telecoms and Media, a London- based consultancy.

Those out on the road taking photos and videos no longer have to wait until they reach a computer to update a blog, send a snapshot to a photo site like Flickr or fine-tune a profile on MySpace. With a few clicks, or sometimes in just one click, a video or photo can be sent from a mobile phone to dozens of Internet sites, where they can be viewed by both cellphone users and the deskbound masses at their computers.

The market for mobile content and services will be worth $150 billion in 2011 compared with $89 billion last year, according to a forecast by Informa. Of the total figure, $13.2 billion is expected to come from user-generated content — like the videos found on YouTube — and the services surrounding it. That compares with $3.5 billion in 2006.

M1, a mobile phone company with a 30 percent market share of Singapore's four million cellphone users, last month introduced a service that allows clients to upload or download videos for 21 Singapore cents, or 14 U.S. cents.

Customers are paid 5 cents in phone credit every time somebody downloads their video and, much like on YouTube, four or five recent postings are shown on the phone along with four or five of the most viewed.

"People have these advanced handsets, but they aren't taking very many videos or sending them to people, so we wanted to encourage them to do that," said Neil Montefiore, the chief executive of M1.

As cameras capable of taking photos and videos become almost standard on mobile phones, the number of people sending videos to sites like YouTube is forecast by Informa to jump four times by 2011 to 198 million.

But with mobile content still in its nascent phase, questions abound on the most basic issues — whether there should be advertising, how the content should be delivered technologically, and how revenue should be split among the carriers, the content producers and the companies between them.

The field of companies seeking a slice of the market for user-generated content includes ShoZu, a London-based company that lets users send their content as files from the phone to the Web in one click; and Yospace, a British mobile blogging pioneer that uses multimedia messaging to upload content from cellphones.

ShoZu and similar products can be downloaded only onto certain kinds of phones at present, but the number of compatible handsets is increasing, and in some cases the software is being loaded onto phones before they leave the factory. This and the increasing familiarity of subscribers with the services will give a lift to the market for user-generated content, according to industry experts.

"We have already seen a rapid evolution of the market," said Jen Grenz, co-director of marketing for ShoZu. "First people were really into photos and they couldn't quite get their head around sending video to the Web from their phone, and now people are posting their videos directly from the phone to YouTube."

User-generated content is expected to increase along with faster mobile phone networks, in an evolution similar to what happened with the advent of broadband fixed-line Internet access.

Industry executives played down concerns that the slow upload speeds of even the faster mobile networks will hinder the pickup of user-generated content; while photos and videos are being sent to the Internet, they say, the phone will be available for all of its other functions.

But there are pitfalls that could delay the expected explosion of non-voice "content" on mobile phones, chief among them the high cost of data traffic. Content producers and many analysts emphasize the need for flat-rate plans and clear pricing, both of which they say will encourage usage.

"The real problem slowing down the diffusion of user-generated content and other types of content is overly expensive and hard to understand data tariffs," said David Springall, co-founder and chief technical officer of Yospace. "Some operators do provide bucket plans for data, but for many carriers it's cost prohibitive to send a lot of data."

Despite the rise of user-generated content, the prominent role of professionally produced content will remain. That part of the business is highlighted by the release this week by the Sundance Institute and the GSM Association of five made- for-mobile short films. In a similar bid to drum up interest in the video potential of mobile phones, several films by a well-known Bollywood filmmaker will also be presented in Barcelona.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/.../btcontent.php





Drops DRM

Puretracks Takes Lead in Rights Fight
Peter Nowak

Canadian download store Puretracks is turning up the volume on the free-the-music movement by selling songs online without copy protection.

Toronto-based Puretracks Inc. yesterday announced it was selling MP3 files from independent labels, including Nettwerk Music Group, Independent Online Distribution Alliance and England's Beggar's Banquet, without digital rights management (DRM), or the technology that restricts how a song can be copied and transferred.

The site's unprotected catalog, which includes artists such as The Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan, will initially feature only 50,000 of its 1.3 million tracks, but will grow weekly, said Alistair Mitchell, president and chief executive. The songs will also be playable on devices they previously did not work on, such as Apple Inc.'s iPods, and the offering will grow to include tracks from major record labels.

"There's no religion here, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Different content owners and different artists have different perspectives on how they want to get their music into the marketplace," Mr. Mitchell said. "We wouldn't be offering this if we didn't think it would grow our revenues. We're going to help those label partners we're working with sell more of their music; that's the bottom line."

Puretracks' move comes on the heels of an open letter by Apple CEO Steve Jobs to major record labels two weeks ago in which he urged the dropping of DRM to fight piracy and spur sales of legal online music.

Apple's iTunes music store, which commands more than 90% of the legal market with more than two billion tracks sold in 2006, is facing slowing sales -- a fact Mr. Jobs blamed on the value inequality between downloaded tracks and those bought on CDs. Consumers can copy and transfer songs from CDs as they see fit, but are faced with restrictions on downloaded tracks, which is a disincentive to purchase music online, he wrote.

Mr. Jobs' letter prompted different reactions from the major labels, with Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman saying the argument for removing DRM was "completely without logic or merit." London-based EMI Group, however, is reportedly exploring the lifting of DRM restrictions on its music. Warner this week annouced a new bid to acquire EMI.

Although Puretracks is a relative minnow compared to iTunes, its move is the tip of the iceberg and will put pressure on the major labels to drop DRM, analysts said.

"Consumers do not want to buy anything with DRM on it unless it provides them with some additional value," said California-based technology consultant Rob Enderle. "It is fundamentally not working and it's just taking a long time for the industry to admit it."

Most music DRM is likely to disappear within the next three years and protections on video downloads are sure to follow, he said.

Nettwerk Music president Ric Arboit agreed and said his label has always wanted to sell unprotected music, but the majors dictated the way online stores such as iTunes and Puretracks were initially set up.

"We would have done it from day one if it was available to us, but when it came to the indies, that's what they had in place."

Mr. Arboit said Puretracks is Nettwerk's third-largest online seller, behind iTunes and U.S.- based e Music, which sells only unprotected music from indie labels. Puretracks' move will significantly boost Nettwerk's online sales within 45 days, Mr. Arboit said.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/f...f-54991a0587be

[JackSpratts]

How to Explain DRM to Your Dad
Eliot Van Buskirk and Sean Michaels

My friend John was trying to think of a way to explain the problem with digital rights management to his dad and friend of ours who don't see what's wrong with it. He compiled a list of examples of DRM-related problems to help people understand what the big deal is with DRM.

-----------------

"1. I want to watch an Egyptian movie for my Middle Eastern studies class. But it is region coded not to play on my DVD player, in an effort to stop piracy. Now I have to hack my DVD player and break the law to get it to play. The movie isn't released in the U.S. This is the only version that was ever published. Since it isn't published in the US, and it's for academic purposes, I can rip it make copies for my classmates. That's fair use. But since I have to break the DRM to copy it -- I've broken the law anyway.

"2. My mom bought a phone that was a "music player" from Verizon. The manufacturer (LG) created a great phone to play all sorts of music. Verizon crippled the phone to only play music bought from the Verizon music store. If I hack my mom's phone, that she bought legally, to play music that she legally owns because she bought it on CD, I could be breaking the law my modifying a DRM scheme.

"3. In the Comcast situation, the MPAA and RIAA are leaning so hard on ISPs that they are afraid of legal action. This fear is causing ISPs to do a coast benefit analysis and adopt policies that are halting the development of the Internet. They are turning peoples access off without good reason. I can't sue them because of all the fine print in the service agreement., and if I could it would probably have to be in Delaware. People are using bandwidth to distribute perfectly legal creative commons software. (In this case, Linux.) It's necessary for people to exchange files to develop that software. Comcast infrastructure probably relies heavily on this software. Yet they are blocking it's development because they don't bother filtering out illegal from suspicious. The ISP start blocking "suspicious behavior" and makes life difficult for people like me.... Granted, Comcast is the party at fault in this situation, but I cansend you 100 other links of similar stories. Comcast is terrified of the copyright holders, and the draconian laws that are being rammed through congress and being copied by other nations are insanely unfair to the consumer...

"4. Democracy has been nurtured by the open source community for a while now. It's a combination Video player / RSS reader / torrent downloader. The concept is: I release a weekly/daily video-cast from my server. the first 10 people download from my server -- then the next 1000 people "swarm" download it torrent style. This way, as I get popular, I'm not put out of commission by the cost of bandwidth from one location. It distributes the bandwidth load to the network, where it is easily absorbed. ISPs are trying to block torrents because the MPAA is leaning on them to stop copyright violation. But Democracy isn't about pirating movies- It's about eliminating the costs of distribution. If you can choose from 500 movies available for free via Creative Commons, why watch the blockbuster feature? They are hindering new tech in the name of copyright. It's insane. And all this stuff flies under the radar for the most part.

"5. Microsoft sells a Zune. The Zune shares music, but you can only play that shared music for 3 days because when it's shared, it's wrapped up in a DRM scheme. If I'm in a band, and I release my songs for free under creative commons, and you download it and put it on a Zune -- you are breaking that creative commons licenses. There is no way to tell the Zune "don't protect this one". I don't want to sue my fans for locking up the music in DRM, and I don't have the resources to sue Microsoft for breaking the CC license. But the RIAA can sue 10 year olds."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/02/..._explain_.html





U.K. Government Rejects Calls for DRM Ban
Graeme Wearden

The U.K. government has rejected a call for digital rights management to be banned in the U.K., but has acknowledged that the technology could undermine consumer rights.

A total of 1,414 people signed an online petition calling for digital rights management (DRM)--which places restrictions on how people can use media such as software or music--to be outlawed. The petition, hosted on the U.K. government's e-petitions Web site, warned that DRM removes the freedom of choice between competing products offered for digital download or on CDs.

The petition, created by blogger Neil Holmes, also cited an investigation into DRM last year by the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group, an independent Parliamentary organization. The group demanded safeguards for consumers against invasive technologies such as the rootkit-like program used by Sony on some music CDs in 2005.

The government published its response to the petition on Monday and claimed that DRM could bring value to consumers.

"DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay," said the government, in its response.

"It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied," the government added.

The DRM debate in the U.K. coincides with arguments against use of the technology from another sector--Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who earlier this month advocated licensing music without DRM. Jobs contends that eliminating DRM will encourage interoperability between music services and boost sales of downloadable recordings.

Sony's use of rootkit-like technology on its music CDs caused a storm of protest. The DRM technology was secretly installed and hid itself from the operating systems on people's PCs when they played Sony CDs on their computers. Users complained that this violated their rights to full disclosure about the products they bought from Sony, whose problems escalated after virus writers used the technology to hide malicious software.

In the U.K., the Open Rights Group campaigns against technologies such as DRM, which it believes can undermine the rights of users.

Becky Hogge, executive director at the Open Rights Group, believes that public awareness of the issues surrounding DRM is growing. "DRM had been seen in the past as a niche technology issue, but there is now rising consumer awareness about it," she told ZDNet UK.

Hogge added that some DRM technologies put restrictions on users that run counter to their rights under U.K. copyright law. For example, a blanket ban on copying prevents an individual from taking a sample for review or illustrative purposes, as they are allowed to under the "fair use" provisions within copyright law.

"DRM attempts to enforce copyright, but it does it badly," Hogge said.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+government+...3-6160760.html





Time to Face the Music on File Sharing
Rob Pegoraro

Customers might not like the idea of technology that allows some uses of music (like copying iTunes downloads to their iPods) but forbids others (like copying the same song to another kind of music player). But until recently, it didn't seem to bother the executives behind these anti-piracy systems.

They all agreed that anybody selling downloadable music and movies needed to police what customers did with their purchases.

Last week, however, the person responsible for the most successful copy-control software in the music market, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, ruffled feathers with the question: Do we need any of this in the first place?

In an essay called "Thoughts on Digital Music" on Apple's site, Jobs wrote that his company's iTunes Store used copy-control software called FairPlay only because major record labels insisted on it. Those same labels' demands made it impossible for Apple to share its technology, he said. So his proposed solution to the "this download will only play on my iPod" problem is to abolish copy-control software altogether.

Since that remarkably blunt piece of writing hit the Web, the debate over whether technology can curb illegal file sharing has come back to life. That's good. But in the process, a lot of old myths are resurfacing -- and believing them will stop you from understand the deeper problems with the digital-media market. The myths include:

· "Apple can't share FairPlay with other companies, because the technology could get leaked and eventually prompt the labels to pull their catalogues from the iTunes store."

That's not necessarily so.

You can't completely dismiss Apple's contention; only Apple knows the fine print of its deals with the record labels. We don't. But the simple way Apple's copy-control system works should make it relatively easy for outsiders to join the FairPlay game.

FairPlay assigns the police work to the iTunes program on your Mac or PC, not the iPod. As a result, you can plug a friend's iPod into your computer and copy your iTunes purchases to it, even if that iPod is already loaded with your pal's iTunes downloads.

Plus, Apple has already taken a baby step toward putting FairPlay in other companies' hardware, in the form of Motorola cellphones that include a miniaturized version of iTunes. If the iTunes Store survived that experiment, it should be able to live through the addition of FairPlay compatibility to other playback-only devices, such as handheld organizers or car stereos.

It would be different if Apple were to let somebody design a competitor to iTunes. A lot more would be at stake in that case.

· "Microsoft solved the compatibility problem years ago when it created its PlaysForSure standard."

That depends on how you define "solved."

Microsoft can point to dozens of PlaysForSure devices from various companies, not including its own incompatible Zune. Even users of Palm organizers and smartphones can join the fun, by using NormSoft's Pocket Tunes. But when it comes to anything more complex than a handheld gadget, Microsoft takes a different stance.

Although the company allows other people to develop Window Media-compatible programs for other operating systems, such as Telestream's Flip4Mac for Mac OS X, it won't let them add PlaysForSure support.

When asked why PlaysForSure should be confined to Windows, Microsoft says it would be too difficult to keep that software secure on another operating system. That's almost the same excuse Jobs used in his online essay, except that Apple still managed to ship a Windows version of iTunes.

Either Microsoft needs to upgrade its understanding of competing operating systems, or it should admit that promoting Windows outweighs living up to its own talking points.

· "This is the price we have to pay to stop illegal file sharing."

Just try to prove that.

First, as Jobs noted in his essay, the vast majority of music sold today comes on audio CDs that impose no copying restrictions. DVDs include copying controls, but they were breached years ago.

Even if you abolished these old formats in favor of media locked up with technologies like FairPlay or PlaysForSure, you'd still have no bar to music file sharing. Both Apple and Microsoft's systems allow buyers of a song to burn it to an audio CD that can then be copied back to a computer in an unrestricted format.

The side effect: It only took a few minutes with a file-sharing program to find MP3 copies of songs sold only on iTunes. And even without the audio-CD workaround, hackers have repeatedly dismantled the defenses of FairPlay and PlaysForSure.

Either way, all you need is one unprotected copy loose in the wild; that copy can then be duplicated endlessly. And no existing anti-piracy system can stop people from downloading and playing those copies.

The technology can still serve a role in online music or movie rental services, which have drawn far fewer customers than stores like iTunes, but for purchases it does too little to justify its costs. In practice, it only stops copying by the unmotivated, the over-scheduled or the inexperienced -- the people most likely to buy a song or movie online as long as they can do so quickly, easily and cheaply.

In the music industry, a growing number of outlets beyond the big-name companies, from tiny indie-rock operations to the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Smithsonian Institution's Folkways label, have realized the futility of copy-restriction software and now sell digital downloads in open, unrestricted formats.

At this point, this all amounts to little more than expensive psychotherapy for Hollywood executives. It's the height of arrogance for them to keep sending us the bill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021401759.html





Off I say!

OLPC's XO Laptop Comes with Anti-Theft Kill-Switch in Select Countries
Ken Fisher

While the One Laptop Per Child Project has yet to decide on whether or not they will sell the $150 XO laptop to the public, they already know their biggest customers: governments. Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay have all committed to buying the laptops for their citizenry, but as it turns out, some of these countries have worries that the laptops could end up in the hands of people other than those whom they're intended for. As a result, OLPC has built a remote kill-switch into XO laptops so they can be remotely deactivated in the event that they are used without authorization.

In a technical document published earlier this month, Ivan Krstić writes that "The OLPC project has received very strong requests from certain countries considering joining the program to provide a powerful anti-theft service that would act as a theft deterrent against most thieves."

OLPC has responded to such concerns by developing an anti-theft daemon that the project claims cannot be disabled, even by a user with root access. Participating countries can then provide identifying information such as a serial number to a given country's OLPC program oversight entity, which can then disable the devices in certain scenarios. Disabled devices are not wiped of all data, but the user environment will cease to function.

Here's how it works: the system allows countries to optionally establish a "license" period for the laptops, such as 21 days. When laptops are connected to the Internet, they will synchronize with an NTP server to obtain the correct time and date, and then obtain a license which must be renewed in the time specified. Laptops which are not renewed within the timeframe will lock. If the laptops are connected to the Internet after being reported stolen, the license-issuing server can deactivate the laptops immediately, as well. Locked laptops can be reauthorized and returned to normal use by the oversight entity.

The one thing this approach cannot stop is the gutting of a machine. However, since the majority of parts in the system are soldered to the motherboard, OLPC feels as though this kind of thievery will not be common.

The biggest methodological concern with this approach is its need for Internet access. Countries may opt for very long license periods in areas where Internet usage would be less common, or Internet uplink problems are frequent. According to the documentation, specific schools could be provided with tools that would enable them to weather an Internet outage. It would also be the countries' responsibility to determine what license period, if any, provides the greatest protection without creating unnecessary hassles.

It remains to be seen what countries will use the anti-theft service. Clearly there are worries here that the inexpensive laptops could become hot items on the black market, perhaps even in the United States and Europe where the laptops have become objects of geek fantasy. Whether it be geeks or thieves (or a combination of both), you can bet that people will be poking and prodding this anti-theft system with the hope of cracking it. Just ask Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070218-8872.html





Half of all US Households Will Have Broadband This Year
Nate Anderson

US broadband growth, though slower than that in some other countries, is expected to hit a significant milestone at some point in 2007. Consultancy Parks Associates has just released its annual report on US broadband, and it concludes that more than 50 percent of US households will have a high-speed connection by the end of the year.

The FCC recently released data of its own showing that broadband use shot up by 52 percent between June 2005 and June 2006, but the Parks report takes issue with those numbers. It claims only a 20 percent increase during 2006 (which is still significant growth) and says that at the end of last year, 47 percent of US households had broadband. That number is expected to continue upwards in 2007 and break the 50 percent barrier at some point this year.

The market's growth has certainly been astonishing. Who remembers the bad old days of one-month waits for DSL installations or the outrageous price that early adopters had to cough up for the privilege of 512Kbps speeds? 80 percent of US households that can get local phone service can now get DSL, while 93 percent of those households that can receive cable can pick up a cable modem, according to the FCC. That's great to hear.

But the US still lags behind 11 other advanced countries in broadband penetration percentage (though the total number of subscribers is the highest in the world). According to OECD statistics from June 2006, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Korea, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, the UK, and Belgium all have a higher number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants.

When it comes to fiber rollouts, too, countries like Korea, Japan, and Denmark are doing exceptionally well. Japan, for instance, has more than 6 million fiber connections. In the US, the largest fiber to the home network is being installed by Verizon. Though FiOS is popular, it had only half a million subscribers late in 2006.

The growing ubiquity of high-speed connections isn't just changing the frequency with which people check their e-mail, though; according to Parks, it's changing the way companies do business. "The foundations of digital lifestyle applications and products are built on access services, including broadband Internet and television," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with Parks Associates. "With the penetration of high-speed Internet exceeding 50 percent in 2007, we're also witnessing shifts in the way companies are positioning their communications, entertainment, and information services as home technology solutions."

One has to look no further than the battle surrounding YouTube content to see how true this is. It's not affecting the country equally, though. FCC data shows exactly what we would expect: higher-density areas have better broadband availability than rural ones. That has led some in Congress to call for government intervention to boost broadband connections in rural areas, though it's not clear the proposal has any legs. Of course, for the masochists, there's always satellite.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8874.html





AT&T Could Buy a Satellite Broadcaster—But Should It?
Anders Bylund

CBS MarketWatch just published some speculation about whether AT&T might want to buy one of the two North American satellite TV providers. The idea makes sense on some levels, so let's dig a bit deeper in the pros and cons, and then into each prospective partner.

Can they do it?

The new AT&T is what used to be known as SBC Communications, a Baby Bell based in San Antonio, Texas and equipped with deep pockets. That cash has been working hard of late. SBC has bought out fellow regional Bells from coast to coast over the past ten years, culminating in two blockbuster deals. The company acquired AT&T for $16 billion in 2005 (and then took its name), and then paid $67 billion for BellSouth and full control over Cingular Wireless.

That spending spree has landed AT&T, née SBC, in heavy debt. The company has about $2.4 billion of cash-equivalents on hand, versus $51 billion of long-term debt. On the other hand, the telecom business is still a cash machine, and free cash flow amounted to $8.1 billion last year alone. AT&T is clearly capable of servicing its debt, oppressive though it may be. And that's after spending $7.5 billion to maintain and upgrade its massive infrastructure.

Two brides, one groom

So which satellite TV operator makes the better catch? Either one would be another Brobdignagian acquisition for AT&T—DirecTV comes with a $30 billion price tag today, excluding the traditional 15 to 20 percent buyout premium, and DISH Network parent EchoStar would cost more than $23 billion, net of cash and debts.

For EchoStar, this is a historically low valuation of about 2.4 times annual sales. DirecTV hasn't commanded such a premium per dollar of sales in the last five years, and its price now stands at 2.2 times revenues. In return for that cash, AT&T would get a larger installed customer base from DirecTV, and do less damage to its net income margins. DISH isn't as picky about customer acquisition as its larger rival, so DirecTV ends up with a higher proportion of fat-margin premium packages and the like.

Win-win-win

No matter which way the phone giant throws its stone, it would kill a whole flock of birds. In the race to sell triple-play solutions across the nation, cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable have a leg up with their robust, high-speed networks, and several viable upgrade paths for filling future needs. Rival telco Verizon is pushing hard on its roll of fiber-optic cabling so it can provide cable-grade services, but AT&T's position has always been that the old last-mile copper connections are good enough.

If AT&T runs into any more roadblocks rolling out its fiber-to-the-curb network, buying a satellite operator could be a great way to enter the bandwidth-intensive video market. The telco covers some vast expanses of thinly populated Midwestern outback, where satellite communications make perfect economic sense, too. AT&T already has some ties to EchoStar, including a small ownership stake and a longstanding co-branding partnership. But EchoStar insiders own more than 55 percent of the company, so that buyout would come with some tough negotiations. DirecTV doesn't have a majority owner, though Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. just arranged to sell its 38 percent stake in the company to Liberty Media—where cable industry veteran John Malone is chairman of the board.

If AT&T feels up to taking on another $30 billion to $40 billion of debt, or diluting its stock to pull off a deal, such a hookup would make sense for that company. For each of the TV broadcasters, it's a chance to get a competitive advantage over its rival, with bundled voice and data services that don't play too well over laggy satellites. Finally, the FCC may not even object, given the emergence of online entertainment options and the newfangled video-over-phone-networks trend. But it's not a given outcome, and AT&T might decide to accelerate Project Lightspeed instead, or to pull some other trick out of its sleeve.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8875.html





Neutrality On the Net Gets High '08 Profile

Tech issue gains traction in election
Charles Babington

Bloggers and other Internet activists made their marks in the past two presidential elections chiefly by building networks of political enthusiasts and raising money for candidates. Now, they are pushing aggressively into policymaking -- and not just over high-profile issues such as Iraq.

They are pressing candidates to back a handful of issues that are obscure to many Americans but vital to those who base their livelihoods on the Internet and track its development.

Armed with massive e-mail lists and high-speed networks, these activists are bypassing the familiar campaign tactics of door-knocking and phone-banking. They are also using their new-age technologies for an old-fashioned purpose: making politicians take note of their legislative priorities.

One of those is "net neutrality." Hardly a household term, it has no overtly partisan or ideological dimensions. Yet it is shaping up as a Democratic issue this year, largely because its most fervid advocates are liberal bloggers and other Internet activists who play a big role in the early stages of choosing a Democratic presidential nominee.

Unlike their Republican counterparts, every major Democratic presidential candidate has endorsed net neutrality. The move keeps them in good standing with powerful grass-roots groups, such as MoveOn.org, and costs them little in return -- perhaps a bit of space on campaign Web sites to promote a matter that comparatively few voters might explore.

Net neutrality is a principle that bars Internet providers, primarily phone and cable companies, from charging higher rates to Web-based firms in return for giving their content priority treatment on the pathways to consumers. Without such restrictions, proponents say, a user might find it time-consuming, or even impossible, to call up a favorite site that carriers have relegated to slower lanes for economic or even philosophical reasons.

"It's an issue that really captures the attention of one of their core constituencies, especially the bloggers and 'netroots,' " said Craig Aaron of Free Press, a group that champions net neutrality. "For candidates looking to appeal to those folks, it was important to take a stand," he said, even though "nobody was talking about it a year ago."

A veteran Democratic consultant who spoke on condition of anonymity was more blunt. Among Democratic candidates, she said, "if you're not for net neutrality, then the blogs will kick your" rear. The grass-roots groups that strongly favor it are relatively small but very noisy, she said, "and you just don't want to have to deal with that."

Opposing net neutrality are the telephone and cable companies that control the "pipes" that transport Internet content from producers to users. The companies say they need flexibility to manage Internet traffic, even if it eventually means charging higher rates for priority service.

For several years, the issue has been debated mainly in legal and telecom circles. Recent telecom mergers have raised its profile, however, as regulators considered the possible ramifications of consolidating control over the Internet's major pathways.

Net neutrality restrictions "could prevent broadband providers from offering enhanced levels of service for specialized applications such a telemedicine, or to offer their own branded or co-branded products or services," said Christopher Wolf, co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group sponsored by phone and cable companies . Such arrangements, he said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop, "will help pay for the build-out of the next generation of Internet pipes."

Moreover, Wolf said, his industry's critics cannot cite an example in which any U.S. user has been blocked.

But some groups that rely heavily on their Web sites to share information, raise money or promote causes say they fear it's only a matter of time. They cite, for example, a 2005 comment by William L. Smith, then chief technology officer for BellSouth, which has merged with AT&T, that Internet service providers should be able to charge a firm such as Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than Google's site.

Last spring, the debate over net neutrality barely scratched the consciousness of Congress, let alone the general public, after a House subcommittee defeated an effort to add net-neutrality restrictions to a multi-faceted telecommunications bill. The 23 to 8 vote goaded more than 850 interest groups, many, but not all, politically left of center, to form a coalition called SavetheInternet.com.

Members included organizations such as Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union, but the name that really grabbed the attention of Democratic officials was MoveOn.org. The group, founded in 1998 to oppose the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, rocked the political establishment in 2003 and 2004 with its ability to rally supporters and raise money for causes such as opposing the Iraq war.

With MoveOn.org urging its 3 million members to sign and deliver pro-net-neutrality petitions to senators last spring, congressional support began to grow. The net-neutrality language died in an 11 to 11 Senate committee vote, but its backers claimed a moral victory after a wide-ranging telecom bill, which lacked their amendment, eventually collapsed.

The debate's partisan nature has surprised and disappointed some advocates, who note that conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition of America and the Gun Owners of America are part of the SavetheInternet coalition. The Christian Coalition of America, in its policy statement, said net neutrality is "extremely important to America's grassroots organizations and those Americans who want to ensure the cable and phone companies controlling access to the Internet will not discriminate against groups like Christian Coalition of America." Michele Combs, a spokeswoman for the Christian Coalition of America, said that net neutrality is a nonpartisan matter and that "the conservative side has not been educated on the issue."

MoveOn.org officials agree that net neutrality should transcend political lines. "There's a growing online people-powered movement that has increasing relevance in our politics," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org. "An issue like net neutrality, which directly taps into Internet issues, . . . could have a special energy in the political season," he said. "Every Republican and Democrat who uses the Internet is threatened by corporations that want to control which Web sites people can access."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021900934.html





Videos Have Net Bursting at the Seams

As Web's capacity nears its limits, debate rages over what to do next Advertisement
Jon Van

Those amusing YouTube video clips that Internet users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the Net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn.

It's an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.

But no one disagrees that the Web's capacity is being pushed to its limits.

"We don't see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading towards," said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network's center.

The problem, Poll said, is that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands.

A recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Worldwide, more users every day join the 1 billion people who now use the Internet. Popularity of bandwidth-hungry video makes far greater demands on the network than more basic applications like e-mail, Web browsing or even voice over the Internet.

"For some service providers," the Deloitte report said, "video-chat traffic already exceeds voice volumes, and given that a minute of video requires 10 times the bandwidth as voice, the threat to bandwidth becomes clear."

David Tansley, a London-based Deloitte partner, said that "so many business models assume Internet capacity to be ubiquitous and inexpensive that capacity isn't seen as a limiting factor in applications.

"Yet little thought is given to how infrastructure providers may be [enticed] to keep investing."

While the network was famously overbuilt during enthusiasm of the 1990s Internet bubble, much of that capacity is being used now or soon will be, Tansley said, and network operators are faced with making significant investment to expand capacity further to meet growing demands fueled largely by video applications.

"2007 may be the year of the tipping point where growth in capacity cannot cope with use," Tansley said.

The Deloitte report, along with comments earlier this month by a Google executive at a technology conference in Amsterdam about Web capacity problems, have been cited as examples why telecom companies shouldn't face new regulations.

Walter McCormick Jr., chief of US Telecom, the trade group representing dominant phone companies, wrote to lawmakers arguing that the need to manage capacity would be impeded if "network neutrality" legislation passes.

Backed by several consumer groups as well as large Internet enterprises such as Google, network neutrality legislation forbids phone companies from managing the network to favor one Internet user's content over another's.

Network managers need flexibility in order to provide needed capacity as demand grows, McCormick contends.

That logic is tortured at best, said Andrew Odlyzko, director of the University of Minnesota's digital technology center.

"It's posturing for political reasons," said Odlyzko. "The telecom industry opposes network neutrality and uses any pretext to fight it."

Having monitored Internet growth for a decade, Odlyzko said he sees parallels now to earlier ploys from telecom executives. Nearly five years ago, when computer users started to hold voice conversations using Internet telephony, industry insiders fretted that bandwidth demands would exceed capacity, he said.

"Local phone companies started fighting Internet calling," he said. "They tried to get regulators to impose access charges on those calls. In a certain sense, what the industry said was plausible because the Internet was small at that time, compared to the voice network.

"If all calling had shifted to the Internet, it would've crashed the network. But that didn't happen. The shift took place more slowly. Today the giants like AT&T and Verizon carry most of their voice traffic as Internet protocol, and it's just a fraction of total traffic."

Telecom executives focus on possible broadband capacity shortfalls because of their heritage, said David Isenberg, an independent industry analyst who once worked for the Bell System.

"They want to manage the Internet as a scarce resource," Isenberg said. "Internet executives want to manage it as an abundant resource. It's a basic philosophical difference."

A major obstacle for telecom managers in planning future capacity needs is that much of the Web's video traffic is generated by individuals who send clips to friends.

This contrasts to the broadcast model, where one source sends the same program to many recipients, said Bill Kleinebecker, a senior consultant with Austin-based Technology Futures Inc.

"People's changing habits drive demand instead of just sending out TV channels," Kleinebecker said. "It's much less predictable."

A growing appetite for high-definition video is certain to keep broadband demand rising, he said, noting that even inexpensive digital cameras available to consumers increasingly have high-definition video capability.

While keeping ahead of bandwidth demand is challenging and expensive, it's not impossible, said John Ryan, a senior vice-president at Level3 Communications, which operates part of the Internet backbone.

"With appropriate continuing investment, the Internet is capable of handling any applications," Ryan said. "What we're starting to see is a distinction between those operators who have the capital to fund expansion and those that don't."

Any service degradation will be spotty and transient, predicted Ryan, who said that underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...i-bizfront-hed





State AGs Break Beer Bottle on Bar, Threaten Bud.tv Over Age Verification
Nate Anderson

Anheuser-Busch (A-B) has come under fire from 21 state attorneys general (the AP says 23) over its Bud.tv video streaming site. Advertising Age, which secured a copy of their letter to the brewer, says that it asks A-B to use a better age-checking tool; the worry is that underage youngsters might somehow see the streaming goodness of Bud.tv and be tempted by the demon alcohol.

Bud.tv, launched at the Super Bowl, is A-B's attempt to stake out a media presence on the Internet, and the site offers video clips and original programming to those discerning drinkers who enjoy a cold Bud.

It's not as though Bud.tv is simply letting people waltz on in after they supply fake birth years, though. The site's sign-up process is deeply annoying, requiring the creation of an account and the surrender of name, e-mail, ZIP code, and date of birth, which is apparently checked against public records to verify the information. The state AGs want more; anyone could, they say, get access to an adult's information and easily sign up for the site.

Of course, it's not like signing up for Bud.tv is in any way equivalent to sneaking into the local tavern, downing five or six frosty ones, then climbing behind the wheel of a Hummer. You can't even order beer there.

That's not good enough, say the states, led by the attorneys general from Maine and Louisiana. "We feel strongly that since you are creating the programming and controlling the internet-based network, not just advertising on it, you have a higher responsibility to ensure that youth are not exposed to the marketing on your site," says the letter. "We fail to see how your use of age verification on the Bud.tv site is a genuine attempt to keep youth from accessing the site's content."

Real age verification is a difficult problem for Internet applications. MySpace is dealing with the same issue, but if faces the problem of verifying kids' ages who don't yet have state IDs or credit cards and who routinely lie. Bud.tv only needs to vet adults, but even that is difficult when all that's needed is some information. Tracking down mom and dad's credit card would not be much more of a challenge for many kids, either, so what's a company to do? The RIAA has even learned about this problem first-hand in court cases that illustrate how tough it is to say exactly who is sitting on the other side of the monitor, even when you have an IP address.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8873.html





Fired Worker Claims Internet Addiction Led to Workplace Sex Chat, Dismissal
Eric Bangeman

A former IBM employee fired for accessing an adult chat room from work is suing the company for $5 million. In his lawsuit, James Pacenza claims that he is an Internet addict and sex addict, and that IBM should have allowed him to seek treatment after he was caught in the chat room rather than firing him.

Pacenza is a decorated Vietnam veteran and says that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service there. The PTSD then led him to become a sex addict, he claims. Once he discovered the Internet, Pacenza then added an Internet addiction to his other psychological problems.

IBM—like most companies—has strict corporate policies against accessing adult web sites from work. Despite that, Pacenza logged on an adult chat room on ChatAvenue while at work in 2003. When he stepped away from his PC, another worker saw that he was logged into the chat and reported it to his supervisor. Pacenza was fired the following day.

Pacenza's complaint contains a whole slew of accusations against IBM. Given his age at the time of the dismissal (55 and just one year away from retirement), Pacenza believes that IBM's decision to terminate him constitutes age discrimination. He also accuses IBM of improperly accessing his medical records—which included details of his psychiatric treatment—before firing him and also violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. Perhaps most interestingly, Pacenza says that IBM should have allowed him to seek treatment for his "Internet addiction" instead of firing him.

"It is also discriminatory (not to mention manifestly unfair) that Plaintiff has been shown no 'mercy' by IBM, when people with other more severe psychological disabilities (alcoholism or drug addiction) or behavioral problems are routinely offered help and/or shown mercy," reads Pacenza's complaint.

In response, IBM has filed for a summary judgment, arguing that Pacenza's conduct violated the company's long-standing prohibition against accessing sexual web sites from work. IBM also says that Pacenza had previously been warned for similar behavior, a charge Pacenza denies. The company says that even if Pacenza does have a sexual behavior disorder, such disorders are specifically excluded from the ADA.
The matter of Internet addiction

Internet addiction has been a popular topic of discussion in recent years, with a 2006 study calling it a "serious problem," and one that affects between 5 and 10 percent of all web surfers. Researchers include "cybersexual addictions" and "net compulsions" among the components of Internet addiction, both of which it appears that Pacenza manifests.

Whether Internet addiction is a distinct malady deserving of its own diagnosis or just another manifestation of an addictive personality remains a subject of vigorous debate. Critics of the diagnosis are quick to point out that problematic online behaviors are almost always manifestations of "real-world" problems transported to the Internet. It appears that this describes Pacenza's case, in which a "real-world" sexual addiction became a cybersexual addiction, leading him to access an adult chat room from an IBM workstation.

The trial is scheduled for later this year.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070218-8870.html





In Brazil, Plumpness is No Longer Pleasing
Larry Rohter

As king of carnival, the corpulent Rei Momo is supposed to embody all the jollity, carnality and excess associated with that most Brazilian of bacchanals. So when the event's reigning monarch has gastric bypass surgery, sheds 68 kilograms and starts an exercise program, you begin to wonder what's going on.

And when six young women die of anorexia in quick succession — two in the last two weeks — the wonder turns to bewilderment. Brazil may well be the most body-conscious society in the world, but that body has always been Brazil's confident own — not a North American or European one.

For women here that has meant having a little more flesh, distributed differently to emphasize the bottom over the top, the contours of a guitar rather than an hourglass, and most certainly not a twig. Anorexia, though long associated with wealthier industrialized countries, was an affliction all but unheard-of in Brazil.

But that was before the incursions of the Barbie aesthetic, celebrity models, satellite television and medical makeovers made it clear how far some imported notions of beauty, desirability and health had encroached on Brazilian ideals once considered inviolate.

By "'upgrading' to international standards of beauty," said Mary del Priore, a historian and co-author of "The History of Private Life in Brazil," the country is abandoning its traditional belief that "plumpness is a sign of beauty and thinness is to be dreaded." The contradictory result, she added, is that "today it's the rich in Brazil who are thin and the poor who are fat."

A generation ago, the ideal type here was Martha Rocha, a Miss Brazil from the mid-1950s. She finished second in the Miss Universe competition supposedly because her body was a bit too generous in the hips, buttocks and thighs, but since those characteristics were so highly valued in Brazil, as suggested by cartoons and the popularity of the semi-pornographic drawings of Carlos Zéfiro, it was the rest of the world whose taste was questioned.

Even the famous "girl from Ipanema," immortalized in the bossa nova song written in 1962, illustrated the cultural differences that prevailed then: Only in the English lyrics is she "tall and tan and young and lovely." In the original Portuguese version, the emphasis is on "the sweet swing" of her hips and backside as she walks, a sway described as "more than a poem, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Today, in sharp contrast, the epitome of beauty is Gisele Bündchen, the top model whose enormous international success has inspired the thousands of Brazilian girls who dream of emulating her to enroll in modeling schools and competitions. But very little about Bündchen's body — tall and blond, rangy yet busty — connects her to her homeland and its traditional self-image.

"Hers is a globalized beauty that has nothing to do with the Brazilian biotype," said Joana de Vilhena Novaes, author of "The Intolerable Weight of Ugliness: On Women and Their Bodies" and a psychologist here. "She has very little in the way of hips, thighs or fanny. She's a Barbie," one whose parents are of German descent.

Novaes and others have noted that during the 1960s and '70s, Brazilian girls played with a locally made doll named Susi, who, reflecting the national aesthetic, was darker and fleshier than her counterparts abroad. But in the 1970s, Barbie arrived, and by the mid- 1980s, production of Susi dolls had ceased, though it has resumed in recent years in a sort of backlash.

Yet until recently no one here would ever have talked with admiration about having an hourglass figure like Barbie's, let alone the coat-hanger physiques of the international runways. Instead, the ideal was what is known as "um corpo de violão," or "guitar-shaped body"; that is, like Susi's, thicker in the waist, hips and fanny.

One indication of how rapidly values are changing can be gleaned from a government study released in November, just after the first in the cluster of anorexia deaths, that of Ana Carolina Reston, a 21-year-old model. According to the survey, the percentage of the population taking appetite suppressants more than doubled between 2001 and 2005, making Brazil the world champion in the consumption of diet pills.

"The reasons are purely aesthetic, not medical, especially for women," who account for at least 80 percent of the market, said Elisaldo de Araujo Carlini, a professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo who is the author of the study. "They want to get thin no matter what, all because of images from north of the Equator. It is a cruel cultural imposition on the Brazilian woman."

Women in countries around the world are subject to such pressures, of course. But Brazilians argue that the situation here is more extreme: this is, after all, a tropical country in which, much more than the United States, Europe or Japan, people live their lives outdoors, often, for comfort's sake, in skimpy clothes showcasing the body's glories or defects.

A result is a culture of vanity that seems to know no boundaries.

This summer, the newest rage, according to local news reports, is liposuction on the toes, and there have also been accounts of a boom in plastic surgery among women 80 and older.

Men are not immune. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is reported to have recently had cosmetic work done on his teeth, and even the chief of an Indian tribe in the Amazon had plastic surgery because, as he guilelessly put it, "I was finding myself ugly and I wanted to be good-looking again."

But most of the complaints about the tyranny of the culture of beauty here come from women. Each year follows the same pattern: Enrollment at gyms, here called "academies," declines as cool weather arrives, and then rises in the final quarter of the year, as women try to prepare their bodies to look good on the beaches during the Southern Hemisphere summer vacation season, which runs from just before Christmas until carnival, about two months later.

The new paradigm has been slower to penetrate poorer regions like the Amazon and the northeast, where hunger is still widespread and the idea of "fartura," or cornucopian abundance, is especially valued. There, men in particular are proud to show off wives and children whose bodies are more rounded, as a sign that they are good providers.

"To be fat used to be considered wonderful in Brazil, because it showed that you eat very well, which is important to Brazilians," said Roberto da Matta, an anthropologist and newspaper columnist who is a leading social commentator. "That you have three meals a day and eat meat and beans, calmly, at a table with friends and relatives, means that someone is taking good care of you."

Experts also agree that Brazilian men, whatever their class or race, have been much slower to accept slenderness as a gauge of feminine beauty. When they are looking for a sexual partner, Brazilian men are consistent and clear in saying that they prefer women who are fleshy in the rear — "popozuda" is the wonderfully euphonious slang term used here — and have pronounced curves.

In the past, that standard was so firmly established that some Brazilian women resorted to breast reduction or buttock augmentation surgery, sometimes even transferring their own tissue from top to bottom.

But as the international standard has taken hold, tastes are changing.

"Those huge breasts you see in the United States, like in Playboy, were always considered ridiculous in Brazil," said Ivo Pitanguy, a top plastic surgeon. "But there is now more of a tendency than before to want breasts that are a bit larger — not to make them huge, mind you, but more proportional as part of a body that is more svelte and more athletic."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/14/news/rio.php





Goodbye to Girlhood

As Pop Culture Targets Ever Younger Girls, Psychologists Worry About a Premature Focus on Sex and Appearance
Stacy Weiner

Ten-year-old girls can slide their low-cut jeans over "eye-candy" panties. French maid costumes, garter belt included, are available in preteen sizes. Barbie now comes in a "bling-bling" style, replete with halter top and go-go boots. And it's not unusual for girls under 12 to sing, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?"

American girls, say experts, are increasingly being fed a cultural catnip of products and images that promote looking and acting sexy.

"Throughout U.S. culture, and particularly in mainstream media, women and girls are depicted in a sexualizing manner," declares the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, in a report issued Monday. The report authors, who reviewed dozens of studies, say such images are found in virtually every medium, from TV shows to magazines and from music videos to the Internet.

While little research to date has documented the effect of sexualized images specifically on young girls, the APA authors argue it is reasonable to infer harm similar to that shown for those 18 and older; for them, sexualization has been linked to "three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression."

Said report contributor and psychologist Sharon Lamb: "I don't think because we don't have the research yet on the younger girls that we can ignore that [sexualization is] of harm to them. Common sense would say that, and part of the reason we wrote the report is so we can get funding to prove that."

Boys, too, face sexualization, the authors acknowledge. Pubescent-looking males have posed provocatively in Calvin Klein ads, for example, and boys with impossibly sculpted abs hawk teen fashion lines. But the authors say they focused on girls because females are objectified more often. According to a 1997 study in the journal Sexual Abuse, 85 percent of ads that sexualized children depicted girls.

Even influences that are less explicitly erotic often tell girls that who they are equals how they look and that beauty commands power and attention, contends Lamb, co-author of "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes" (St. Martin's, 2006). One indicator that these influences are reaching girls earlier, she and others say: The average age for adoring the impossibly proportioned Barbie has slid from preteen to preschool.

When do little girls start wanting to look good for others? "A few years ago, it was 6 or 7," says Deborah Roffman, a Baltimore-based sex educator. "I think it begins by 4 now."

While some might argue that today's belly-baring tops are no more risque than hip huggers were in the '70s, Roffman disagrees. "Kids have always emulated adult things," she says. "But [years ago] it was, 'That's who I'm supposed to be as an adult.' It's very different today. The message to children is, 'You're already like an adult. It's okay for you to be interested in sex. It's okay for you to dress and act sexy, right now.' That's an entirely different frame of reference."

It's not just kids' exposure to sexuality that worries some experts; it's the kind of sexuality they're seeing. "The issue is that the way marketers and media present sexuality is in a very narrow way," says Lamb. "Being a sexual person isn't about being a pole dancer," she chides. "This is a sort of sex education girls are getting, and it's a misleading one."

Clothes Encounters

Liz Guay says she has trouble finding clothes she considers appropriate for her daughter Tanya, age 8. Often, they're too body-hugging. Or too low-cut. Or too short. Or too spangly.

Then there are the shoes: Guay says last time she visited six stores before finding a practical, basic flat. And don't get her started on earrings.

"Tanya would love to wear dangly earrings. She sees them on TV, she sees other girls at school wearing them, she sees them in the stores all the time. . . . I just say, 'You're too young.' "

"It's not so much a feminist thing," explains Guay, a Gaithersburg medical transcriptionist. "It's more that I want her to be comfortable with who she is and to make decisions based on what's right for her, not what everybody else is doing. I want her to develop the strength that when she gets to a point where kids are offering her alcohol or drugs, that she's got enough self-esteem to say, 'I don't want that.' "

Some stats back up Guay's sense of fashion's shrinking modesty. For example, in 2003, tweens -- that highly coveted marketing segment ranging from 7 to 12 -- spent $1.6 million on thong underwear, Time magazine reported. But even more-innocent-seeming togs, toys and activities -- like tiny "Beauty Queen" T-shirts, Hello Kitty press-on nails or preteen makeovers at Club Libby Lu -- can be problematic, claim psychologists. The reason: They may lure young girls into an unhealthy focus on appearance.

Studies suggest that female college students distracted by concerns about their appearance score less well on tests than do others. Plus, some experts say, "looking good" is almost culturally inseparable for girls from looking sexy: Once a girl's bought in, she's hopped onto a consumer conveyor belt in which marketers move females from pastel tiaras to hot-pink push-up bras.

Where did this girly-girl consumerism start? Diane Levin, an education professor at Wheelock College in Boston who is writing an upcoming book, "So Sexy So Soon," traces much of it to the deregulation of children's television in the mid-1980s. With the rules loosened, kids' shows suddenly could feature characters who moonlighted as products (think Power Rangers, Care Bears, My Little Pony). "There became a real awareness," says Levin, "of how to use gender and appearance and, increasingly, sex to market to children."

Kids are more vulnerable than adults to such messages, she argues.

The APA report echoes Levin's concern. It points to a 2004 study of adolescent girls in rural Fiji, linking their budding concerns about body image and weight control to the introduction of television there.

In the United States, TV's influence is incontestable. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, for example, nearly half of American kids age 4 to 6 have a TV in their bedroom. Nearly a quarter of teens say televised sexual content affects their own behavior.

And that content is growing: In 2005, 77 percent of prime-time shows on the major broadcast networks included sexual material, according to Kaiser, up from 67 percent in 1998. In a separate Kaiser study of shows popular with teenage girls, women and girls were twice as likely as men and boys to have their appearance discussed. They also were three times more likely to appear in sleepwear or underwear than their male counterparts.

Preteen Preening

It can be tough for a parent to stanch the flood of media influences.

Ellen Goldstein calls her daughter Maya, a Rockville fifth-grader, a teen-mag maniac. "She has a year's worth" of Girls' Life magazine, says Goldstein. "When her friends come over, they pore over this magazine." What's Maya reading? There's "Get Gorgeous Skin by Tonight," "Crush Confidential: Seal the Deal with the Guy You Dig," and one of her mom's least faves: "Get a Fierce Body Fast."

"Why do you want to tell a kid to get a fierce body fast when they're 10? They're just developing," complains Goldstein. She also bemoans the magazines' photos, which Maya has plastered on her ceiling.

"These are very glamorous-looking teenagers. They're wearing lots of makeup. They all have very glossy lips," she says. "They're generally wearing very slinky outfits. . . . I don't think those are the best role models," Goldstein says. "When so much emphasis is placed on the outside, it minimizes the importance of the person inside."

So why not just say no?

"She loves fashion," explains Goldstein. "I don't want to take away her joy from these magazines. It enhances her creative spirit. [Fashion] comes naturally to her. I want her to feel good about that. We just have to find a balance."

Experts say her concern is warranted. Pre-adolescents' propensity to try on different identities can make them particularly susceptible to media messages, notes the APA report. And for some girls, thinking about how one's body stacks up can be a real downer.

In a 2002 study, for example, seventh-grade girls who viewed idealized magazine images of women reported a drop in body satisfaction and a rise in depression.

Such results are disturbing, say observers, since eating disorders seem to strike younger today. A decade ago, new eating disorder patients at Children's National Medical Center tended to be around age 15, says Adelaide Robb, director of inpatient psychiatry. Today kids come in as young as 5 or 6.

Mirror Images

Not everyone is convinced of the uglier side of beauty messages.

Eight-year-old Maya Williams owns four bracelets, eight necklaces, about 20 pairs of earrings and six rings, an assortment of which she sprinkles on every day. "Sometimes, she'll stand in front of the mirror and ask, "Are these pretty, Mommy?"

Her mom, Gaithersburg tutor Leah Haworth, is fine with Maya's budding interest in beauty. In fact, when Maya "wasn't sure" about getting her ears pierced, says Haworth,"I talked her into it by showing her all the pretty earrings she could wear."

What about all these sexualization allegations? "I don't equate looking good with attracting the opposite sex," Haworth says. Besides, "Maya knows her worth is based on her personality. She knows we love her for who she is."

"Looking good just shows that you care about yourself, care about how you present yourself to the world. People are judged by their appearance. People get better service and are treated better when they look better. That's just the way it is," she says. "I think discouraging children from paying attention to their appearance does them a disservice."

Magazine editor Karen Bokram also adheres to the beauty school of thought. "Research has shown that having skin issues at [her readers'] age is traumatic for girls' self-esteem," says Bokram, founder of Girls' Life. "Do we think girls need to be gorgeous in order to be worthy? No. Do we think girls' feeling good about how they look has positive effects in other areas of their lives, meaning that they make positive choices academically, socially and in romantic relationships? Absolutely."

Some skeptics of the sexualization notion also argue that kids today are hardier and savvier than critics think. Isaac Larian, whose company makes the large-eyed, pouty-lipped Bratz dolls, says, "Kids are very smart and know right from wrong." What's more, his testing indicates that girls want Bratz "because they are fun, beautiful and inspirational," he wrote in an e-mail. "Not once have we ever heard one of our consumers call Bratz 'sexy.' " Some adults "have a twisted sense of what they see in the product," Larian says.

"It is the parents' responsibility to educate their children," he adds. "If you don't like something, don't buy it."

But Genevieve McGahey, 16, isn't buying marketers' messages. The National Cathedral School junior recalls that her first real focus on appearance began in fourth grade. That's when classmates taught her: To be cool, you needed ribbons. To be cool, you needed lip gloss.

Starting around sixth grade, though, "it took on a more sinister character," she says. "People would start wearing really short skirts and lower tops and putting on more makeup. There's a strong pressure to grow up at this point."

"It's a little scary being a young girl," McGahey says. "The image of sexuality has been a lot more trumpeted in this era. . . . If you're not interested in [sexuality] in middle school, it seems a little intimidating." And unrealistic body ideals pile on extra pressure, McGahey says. At a time when their bodies and their body images are still developing, "girls are not really seeing people [in the media] who are beautiful but aren't stick-thin," she notes. "That really has an effect."

Today, though, McGahey feels good about her body and her style.

For this, she credits her mom, who is "very secure with herself and with being smart and being a woman." She also points to a wellness course at school that made her conscious of how women were depicted. "Seeing a culture of degrading women really influenced me to look at things in a new way and to think how we as high school girls react to that," she says.

"A lot of girls still hold onto that media ideal. I think I've gotten past it. As I've gotten more comfortable with myself and my body, I'm happy not to be trashy," McGahey says. "But most girls are still not completely or even semi-comfortable with themselves physically. You definitely still feel the pressure of those images."

To read the APA report of the Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, go to http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021602263.html





States Seek Laws to Curb Online Bullying
Justin M. Norton

Ryan Patrick Halligan was bullied for months online. Classmates sent the 13-year-old Essex Junction, Vt., boy instant messages calling him gay. He was threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly by so-called cyberbullies.

In 2003, Ryan killed himself.

"He just went into a deep spiral in eighth grade. He couldn't shake this rumor," said Ryan's father, John Halligan, who became a key proponent of a state law that forced Vermont schools to put anti-bullying rules in place. He's now pushing for a broader law to punish cyberbullying - often done at home after school - and wants every other state to enact laws expressly prohibiting it.

States from Oregon to Rhode Island are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior in which kids taunt or insult peers on social Web sites like MySpace or via instant messages. Still, there is some disagreement over how effective crackdowns will be and how to do it.

"The kids are forcing our hands to do something legislatively," said Rhode Island state Sen. John Tassoni, who introduced a bill to study cyberbullying and hopes to pass a cyberbullying law by late 2007.

But others argue that legislation would be ineffective. George McDonough, an education coordinator with Rhode Island's Department of Education, concedes that the Internet has become an "instant slam book" but questions whether laws can stem bad behavior.

"You can't legislate norms, you can only teach norms," he said. "Just because it's a law they don't necessarily follow it. I mean, look at the speed limit."

The Internet allows students to insult others in relative anonymity, and experts who study cyberbullying say it can be more damaging to victims than traditional bullying like fist fights and classroom taunts.

Legislators and educators say there's a need for guidelines outlining how to punish cyberbullying. They say the behavior has gone unchecked for years, with few laws or policies on the books explaining how to treat it.

Cyberbullying is often limited to online insults about someone's physical appearance, friends, clothing or sexuality. But some cyberbullies are more creative. In Washington state, a bully stole a girl's instant message username and used it to send out insulting messages.

In New York, two high school boys were accused of operating an Internet site that listed girls' "sexual secrets." Prosecutors decided not to charge the boys because of free-speech concerns.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it will be difficult to draft a cyberbullying law that doesn't infringe on free-speech rights.

"The fact that two teenagers say nasty things about each other is a part of growing up," he said. "How much authority does a school have to monitor, regulate and punish activities occurring inside a student's home?"

In Arkansas, the state Senate this month passed a bill calling on school districts to set up policies to address cyberbullying only after it was amended to settle concerns about students' free-speech rights.

States are taking different approaches to the problem.

A South Carolina law that took effect this year requires school districts to define bullying and outline policies and repercussions for the behavior, including cyberbullying. One school district there has proposed punishments from warnings up to expulsion for both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.

Some of Oregon's most powerful lawmakers have lined up behind a proposed bill that would require all of the state's 198 school districts to adopt policies that prohibit cyberbullying.

Some local school districts aren't waiting for the state to take action: The Sisters school district in Central Oregon adopted rules that allow it to revoke cyberbullies' school Internet privileges, or even expel a student in egregious cases.

Ted Thonstad, superintendent of the rural school district of 1,475 students, said it was important to clarify by policy how to treat cyberbullying - now prohibited under strict school hazing rules. Previously, the district had guidelines for what types of Internet sites students could visit, he said, but no policy specifically dealt with cyberbullying.

Thonstad said no case prompted the policy, although there were some minor incidents of cyberbullying before it went into place at the beginning of the school year. Nothing has been reported since then.

"It's difficult to monitor if you don't have the right software," he said. "So you rely on students to let you know when it's going on."

Other schools are also being proactive. Rhode Island's McDonough sent both public and private school superintendents information and resources on cyberbullying. One school is designing lesson plans to help stop cyberbullying and protect children from Internet predators.

"I think it would be a good idea if there was a law, but I really believe it has to start at home," said Patricia McCormick, assistant principal of the private St. Philip School in Smithfield, R.I.

McCormick said all the teachers in the school have been trained on Internet safety, and students now receive at least 15 classes on the subject, which includes cyberbullying. But she said stopping the problem will require parental participation.

"Cyberbullying isn't going on in school," she said. "It is going on at home, and I think there needs to be more programs to educate parents about the dangers."

News Corp.'s social-networking site MySpace prohibits cyberbullying and tells users to report abuse - to the company as well as parents and law enforcement, according to a statement issued by Hemanshu Nigam, the company's chief security officer.

John Halligan, whose son's suicide has turned him into an advocate for broader cyberbullying laws that would allow victims and their families to pursue civil penalties against bullies, said something must be done to stop the problem.

"I didn't simply want it to be Ryan's school that agreed to do something," he said. "At the end of the day this wasn't just a problem in Ryan's school."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...erbullying.htm





For Fox’s Rivals, ‘American Idol’ Remains a ‘Schoolyard Bully’
Bill Carter

Listening to the Fox network’s competitors describe what “American Idol” has done to the television landscape is not unlike listening to a group of quavering readers offer a synopsis of a Stephen King novel:

Once a year an unrelenting monster invades a town, and all the townspeople, cowed by years of being crushed under its massive claws, have to pay it fealty or run off and hide until it goes back into a six-month hibernation.

Kelly Kahl, the chief scheduler for CBS, summed up the “Idol” factor this way: “This is a big monolith sitting out there. It’s the ultimate schoolyard bully.”

If any of Fox’s rivals had hopes that this year might signal some hint that the monster — NBC favors the term Death Star — would finally betray some sign of weakness, those hopes were dispelled in just a week. Most television shows, no matter how successful, fall off sometime after their second or third season, but against all expectations, and most of the historic record of network television, “American Idol” has come back for its sixth season bigger and stronger than ever.

Last year at this time, five weeks into its season, “American Idol” was roaring along as television’s most-watched show, with an average of 31.7 million viewers (up substantially from its fourth season, when it averaged 28.3 million viewers over the same five weeks).

Improbably, this season the show has done even better, averaging 33.5 million viewers over its first five weeks. For perspective, at this point “Idol” could lose half its audience and still rank among the top 10 shows on television. And no one dares predict when this phenomenon will fade.

“Idol” is creating ever more powerful shock waves. A growing number of television executives have begun to regard “American Idol” as a programming force unlike any seen before. Jeff Zucker, the new chief executive of NBC Universal, said, “I think ‘Idol’ is the most impactful show in the history of television.”

That takes in a lot of time and territory, but there is ample justification for the assessment, beginning with those raw numbers. Bringing in well over 30 million viewers for each installment in a television universe filled with hundreds of channels is an undeniable feat. Just about everything else in television loses viewers every year; not “Idol.”

Other top-rated shows have demonstrated similar dominance in the past. “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s, for example, regularly attracted about half of the available audience.

Still, that show accounted for just one half-hour of one night every week. “American Idol” has filled up to four hours on two nights for Fox so far this season. And starting tonight, it will occupy three nights a week for three weeks, expanding its reach beyond its regular Tuesday and Wednesday nights to a Thursday hour as well. There it will presumably take a serious bite out of “Survivor,” “Ugly Betty,” “My Name Is Earl” and “The Office.”

That is the last thing CBS, NBC and ABC want to see happen. One fallout from the overpowering performances of “Idol” on Tuesday and Wednesday nights has been a circling of the programming wagons on Monday and Thursday nights. A collection of the strongest shows the other networks program has been piling up on those two nights, out of fear that they would be chewed up by “American Idol.”

The most notable recent example of a show’s being rescheduled out of danger was ABC’s decision to protect its own reality series “Dancing With the Stars” from having to compete directly with “Idol.”

“Dancing” was a runaway hit last fall, when it played for 90 minutes on Tuesdays and an hour on Wednesdays. When it returns next month, it will be seen at 8 on Mondays, a night with no episodes of “Idol,” and at 9 on Tuesdays — just as “Idol” goes off the air.

ABC executives declined to comment on the influence “Idol” has had on their scheduling. But executives at two of the other networks noted that ABC probably had the best programming counter to “Idol” in “Dancing,” yet clearly wanted no part of that showdown.

Similarly, last winter NBC moved its promising comedies “Earl” and “The Office” from Tuesday nights, where they had thrived, to Thursday, partly to escape the annual January “Idol” invasion. ABC and NBC have mostly backed off from any serious challenge to “Idol,” relying on repeats, low-rated comedies and news magazines as cannon fodder in the hours “Idol” is on the air.

Only CBS has managed to eke out respectable ratings numbers versus “American Idol,” relying on a couple of its steady crime dramas: “NCIS” on Tuesday and “Criminal Minds” on Wednesday.

“In a way we feel a little bit lucky to have two shows that basically hit our average ratings against it,” Mr. Kahl, CBS’s chief scheduler, said. “We don’t feel quite the doom and gloom that the other guys feel. We’re lucky. We don’t get nuked.”

ABC, on the other hand, went into retreat this month with one of its signature hit series, “Lost,” moving it from 9 p.m. on Wednesdays to 10 p.m., when it no longer has to face “Idol.”

One senior network executive said the shadow “American Idol” casts was so formidable that “we have ‘Idol’ strategy sessions.” The executive asked not to be identified because the network did not want to acknowledge openly the impact “Idol” was having. “We realize we’ve got to be very, very practical” in dealing with the threat that “Idol” poses to new and promising shows, the executive said.

This has proved especially true, the executive noted, with comedy, a genre that has become especially fragile on television. The prospect that “American Idol” will arrive every January on Tuesday and Wednesday nights means that any show introduced on those nights in September is living on borrowed time — and ratings.

That makes things especially hard for ABC, which has no half-hour comedy shows on any other night.

At Fox, executives are doing no boasting at all, perhaps realizing that this kind of phenomenon cannot be planned. And, indeed, the story of Fox’s initial reluctance to put “American Idol” on the air is now well known. Far from beating their chests, Fox executives seem in awe of what the show has wrought.

“When you have it, you don’t quite grasp it when you come in in the morning and see those ratings,” said Preston Beckman, the chief scheduler for Fox.

The show’s impact on Fox has been disproportionate, even with all the hours that it fills between January and May every year. Fox is a network with only 15 prime-time hours, as opposed to the 22 that ABC, NBC and CBS program each week. (Fox’s nightly schedule ends an hour earlier than theirs.) Adding the enormous “Idol” ratings raises its network average much more quickly.

Fox has ranked fourth and last for much of this season. Now it wins most weeks, and it probably will for most of the rest of the television season.

The show has also begun to extend its sphere of influence. Fox is using “American Idol” to enhance other shows around it. The already strong drama “House” has recently grown into the highest-rated scripted show on television, thanks in large part to its post-“Idol” slot on Tuesdays.

A newer drama, “Bones,” has seen its ratings rise in the past month because it gets some early tune-in on Wednesday nights, when it plays at 8 p.m., just before “Idol.” And Fox has plans to build a new game show, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?,” into a hit by placing it behind “Idol” many times in the coming weeks.

A new show could hardly get a better opportunity to find viewers quickly. One competing executive noted that the numbers Fox has been getting weekly from “Idol” almost amount to the equivalent of having the Super Bowl on every week.

Fox executives look at it much the same way. “It really is an event every year,” Mr. Beckman said. “Really, it doesn’t feel like a TV show sometimes. It’s like the Super Bowl. It’s like a big sporting event. Sometimes it almost feels like it’s bigger than Fox. At some point in the year, it’s just time for ‘Idol.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/ar...on/20idol.html





User generated content

Bomb Squad Called After CD Players Blast 'Pornographic Messages' at Ash Wednesday Mass in New Mexico

Three CD players hidden under a cathedral's pews blared sexually explicit language in the middle of an Ash Wednesday Mass, leading a bomb squad to detonate two of the devices.

Authorities determined the music players were not dangerous and kept the third one to check it for clues, said police Capt. Gary Johnson.

The CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of the pews, were set to turn on in the middle of noon Mass on Wednesday at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.

The recordings, made on store-bought blank discs, featured people using foul language and "pornographic messages," Johnson said. He would not elaborate because of the ongoing investigation.

Church staff members took the CD players to the basement and called police, who sent the bomb squad, Johnson said.

The bomb squad blew up two players outside and kept the third one to test for fingerprints or DNA and trace its components, he said.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, which marks a 40-day period of fasting and penitence before Easter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...l-Language.php





MySpace Faces Stiff Competition in Japan
Yuri Kageyama

Visit Japan's top social-networking site, the 8-million-strong "Mixi," and you'll see prim, organized columns and boxes of stamp-size photos _ not the flashy text and teen-magazine-like layout of its American counterpart, MySpace.com. The difference in appearance between the two online hangouts reflects a broader clash of cultures _ and illustrates the challenge News Corp.'s MySpace faces as it jumps into the Japanese market.

Mixi knows how to thrive off the nation's cliquish culture so different from the aggressive me-orientation prevalent in American culture.

"MySpace is about me, me, me, and look at me and look at me and look at me," said Tony Elison, senior vice president at Viacom International Japan, which is offering its own Japanese-language social networking service here. "In Mixi, it's not all about me. It's all about us."

Mixi Inc. President Kenji Kasahara, 31, and others say the services merely reflect the cultural differences.

While self-assertion is quick and direct on MySpace, with posted profiles upfront about personal views, Japanese tend to be more reserved and prefer to gradually get to know each other.

The messages on Mixi are surprisingly positive: You look great. It's so nice seeing you. I feel the same way. Kasahara calls it a "friendly mood that values harmony."

"I feel people speak their minds on MySpace," he said. "Japanese tend to like peaceful communication. We're often told how heartwarming Mixi is."

That doesn't mean MySpace won't try to compete. Analysts say MySpace, which arrived in Japan in November, has a chance for success because of its 50-50 partnership with Japanese Internet company Softbank Corp., which owns a part of Yahoo Japan and took over Vodafone's mobile business in Japan last year.

"The key is having a viable mobile strategy for MySpace in Japan," Ko Orita, a Seattle-based advertising consultant who gives advice on U.S.-Japan partnerships in the online media industry. "MySpace's openness has a very good application if you are a musician or a filmmaker and promote your content."

MySpace allows anyone with a valid e-mail address to sign up for free accounts. By contrast, Mixi requires an introduction from someone who is already a Mixi member, a bit like winning entry to an old-style club in this society long reputed as guarded against outsiders.

That feature, designed to give a sense of security and in-group feeling, has been critical in Mixi's success among shy and conformity-driven Japanese. Mixi soundly defeats domestic social networking rivals as well as all other sites except Yahoo and Google.

Understanding Mixi's appeal is easy when you watch Jun Yamagishi, a 27-year-old salesman, during his lunch break. He connects with old friends casually and less obtrusively than with e-mail or telephone calls, which are better for more direct communication.

"It's been really easy to be able to keep in touch with all my friends," said Yamagishi, who checks Mixi every other day to see what everyone is saying. "I find Mixi really helpful, really useful for life."

Meeting friends of friends is just a click away on Mixi. Simply send a message and the person will either accept or reject it. Acceptance means Yamagishi has another friend.

The replies get forwarded to Yamagishi's cell phone through Mixi's mobile service that started in December. Yamagishi has also joined about 100 "communities," or clusters of Mixi members who gather around common interests, from orchid-growing to snowboarding.

Mixi has evolved to be first and foremost a communication tool for people who are already friends, rather than an opportunity to meet new people or to express yourself _ both widespread goals on MySpace. (Smaller U.S. services such as Facebook also encourage in-group networking. Facebook has no Japanese-language version.)

Launched in 2004, Mixi arrived early and used that advantage to grow into a successful service used by one in every three Japanese in their 20s.

Kasahara dismisses MySpace's arrival with a nonchalant shrug.

"It's not going to be easy for them to increase market share in Japan," the Mixi president said in a recent interview. "This tends to be a winner-take-all market, and also-rans have a hard time. No one is going to want to join (a social-networking site) that their friends aren't in."

Kasahara says Mixi is even considering challenging MySpace's turf abroad, although he said there are now no specific plans. South Korea's Cyworld Inc. launched a U.S. version of the site in August, though its millions of users are still mostly in Asia.

Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.

Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.

"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."

Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.

Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.

MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii. Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.

The look and mood of MySpace's Japanese site, however, will not differ from the American original.

MySpace claims it has drawn more than a 100 million people worldwide, including thousands of Japanese who already used MySpace in English, according to the company. Softbank declines to say how many have subscribed to the Japanese version of the site

Michiko Yoshida, who studies social networking at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, thinks MySpace's emphasis on self-assertion will have only niche appeal in Japan, but she also believes people may be slowly outgrowing Mixi.

"There may be a lot of information," said Yoshida. "But people are starting to realize that much of it is simply garbage."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021600034.html





Google Challenges Microsoft With New Business Package
Miguel Helft

Google is taking aim at one of Microsoft's most lucrative franchises.

On Thursday, Google, the Internet search giant, unveiled a package of communications and productivity software aimed at businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft products for those functions.

The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One includes programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, includes programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise.

Unlike Microsoft's products, which reside on PCs and corporate networks, Google's will be delivered as services accessible over the Internet, with Google storing the data. That will allow businesses to offload some of the cost of managing computers and productivity software.

For corporate technology staffs, "we think that will be a very refreshing change," said Dave Girouard, Google's vice president and general manager for enterprise.

The e-mail and messaging package, which is based on products like Gmail, Google's e-mail service, has been available in a free trial since August and is supported by advertising. It has been used by thousands of businesses, educational institutions and other organizations, Google said.

Google will continue to provide the extended bundle of software free to businesses and educational institutions. But it will also offer businesses additional e-mail storage and customer support for an annual fee of $50 a user.

By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Google said initial customers of Google Apps would include a unit of Procter & Gamble and SalesForce.com, a pioneer in the business of delivering software as an Internet service.

Google Apps comes at a time of increased competition between Microsoft and Google in a number of areas, including Internet search and advertising and mobile services. And it comes just as corporations are considering whether to upgrade to recently released versions of Microsoft Windows and Office.

While most analysts say that businesses will increasingly use software delivered over the Internet and supported by advertising — a formula that Google has mastered — they are split over the threat that Google's offering represents to Microsoft in the near term.

"I think Microsoft should be very concerned about this," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research.

Wettemann noted that a business may spend about $80,000 on a systems administrator to manage e-mail and desktop office software.

For the same amount of money, Google Apps allows a business to support 1,600 users, she noted. Simply in terms of staffing, "this may be a better proposition even if Microsoft were free," Wettemann said.

Mark Anderson, an analyst at Strategic News Service, a technology consulting firm, said Microsoft should worry about Google's inroads into one of its core businesses but would not see an immediate impact.

"These things take years to happen," Anderson said. "Google will have to prove itself in terms of security and in terms of quality."

Girouard said Google's products were not replacements for Excel or Word, which he admits are more powerful. But he added that for smaller businesses and for certain groups of employees within larger companies, Google Apps could be a substitute for Microsoft's products.

Microsoft has taken steps to embrace the trend toward Internet services with products like Office Live, a package of functions to help small businesses set up Web sites.

"We have a bunch of hosted services that we offer to our customers," said Chris Capossela, vice president for Office at Microsoft. "Our belief is that the future of computing is a combination of software and services."

Capossela said he welcomed the competition. But he said he expected that many customers would continue to want to have their data stored in-house because of security, legal and compliance reasons.

For now, Google's share of the business software market is a tiny fraction of Microsoft's.

Google said more than 100,000 small businesses had been using Google Apps for Your Domain, as the earlier package of e-mail and messaging programs was known. Docs and Spreadsheets had 432,000 users in December, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Microsoft says Office has 450 million to 500 million users.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ess/google.php





Microsoft CEO Dampens Vista Sales Forecast

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said sales forecasts for its new Vista operating system may be "overly aggressive"
Robert Mullins

Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer believes that sales forecasts for its new Vista operating system may be "overly aggressive."

In a conference call Thursday with financial analysts Ballmer said lower selling prices, limited new corporate sales, and software piracy may combine to temper Vista sales forecasts.

"I'm really excited about how enthusiastic everybody is about Vista," he said. "But people have to understand that some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year 2008 are overly aggressive."

Microsoft's 2008 fiscal year begins this July 1.

Ballmer did not provide specific sales numbers.

Sales of Microsoft's Windows operating systems are driven by the growth in sales of personal computers (PCs), Ballmer explained. But PC sales growth tends to come more from the consumer market these days than the business market.

Also, while Ballmer expects Vista to see greater sales growth in emerging markets such as in China, India and Brazil, that growth will be on a smaller base than in developed countries. Also, those emerging markets are also high-piracy markets. Even though Microsoft has added features to Vista to thwart piracy, it is still a problem in some countries, he said.

And while Microsoft sold a lot of Vista upgrades to corporate customers, they have already been accounted for in previously signed contracts, so forecasts of additional corporate sales "may be a little more bullish" than is warranted, he said.

Vista is the first totally new desktop operating system from Microsoft since the introduction of Windows XP in 2001. Vista has been much-delayed in coming to market as the company tried to avoid releasing a product with defects and security flaws that plagued previous Windows versions.

Although Ballmer reported a strong early surge in Vista sales, which began for corporate customers in November 2006 and for consumers in late January, the surge may be limited to what's left of fiscal 2007 and "will not recur in fiscal year 2008."
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/i...54;fp;2;fpid;1





World’s Oldest Newspaper Now Online Only

The world’s oldest newspaper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition, and exists now only in cyberspace.

Sweden’s “Post och Inrikes Tidningar” was founded in 1645 by Queen Kristina to keep her subjects informed of the affairs of state. The first editions, which were more like pamphlets, were carried by courier and posted on notice boards in cities and towns throughout the kingdom.

Today the newspaper carries around 1500 official legal announcements a day by corporations, courts, and some government agencies. The paper edition had a circulation of only around 1000, but the web-based version is expected to attract more readers.

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers says an online newspaper is still a newspaper, so the Swedish publication officially remains the world’s oldest.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Internation...ikel=11 86678





Surveillance

Europe’s Plan to Track Phone and Net Use
Victoria Shannon

European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.

But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies handling Europe’s communications networks.

European Union countries have until 2009 to put the Data Retention Directive into law, so the proposals seen now are early interpretations. But some people involved in the issue are concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals’ privacy rights.

Under the proposals in Germany, consumers theoretically could not create fictitious e-mail accounts, to disguise themselves in online auctions, for example. Nor could they use a made-up account to use for receiving commercial junk mail. While e-mail aliases would not be banned, they would have to be traceable to the actual account holder.

“This is an incredibly bad thing in terms of privacy, since people have grown up with the idea that you ought to be able to have an anonymous e-mail account,” Mr. Fleischer said. “Moreover, it’s totally unenforceable and would never work.”

Mr. Fleischer said the law would have to require some kind of identity verification, “like you may have to register for an e-mail address with your national ID card.”

Jörg Hladjk, a privacy lawyer at Hunton & Williams, a Brussels law firm, said that might also mean that it could become illegal to pay cash for prepaid cellphone accounts. The billing information for regular cellphone subscriptions is already verified.

Mr. Fleischer said: “It’s ironic, because Germany is one of the countries in Europe where people talk the most about privacy. In terms of consciousness of privacy in general, I would put Germany at the extreme end.”

He said it was not clear that any European law would apply to e-mail providers based in the United States, like Google, so anyone who needed an unverified e-mail address — for political, commercial or philosophical reasons — could still use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

Mr. Hladjk said, “It’s going to be difficult to know which law applies.” Google requires only two pieces of information to open a Gmail account — a name and a password — and the company does not try to determine whether the name is authentic.

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company records to all mobile location data “implies surveillance of the movement of large amounts of innocent citizens,” the Dutch Data Protection Agency has said. The agency concluded in January that the draft disregarded privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Similarly, the German technology trade association Bitkom said the draft there violated the German Constitution.

Internet and telecommunications industry associations raised objections when the directive was being debated, but at that time their concerns were for the length of time the data would have to be stored and how the companies would be compensated for the cost of gathering and keeping the information. The directive ended up leaving both decisions in the hands of national governments, setting a range of six months to two years. The German draft settled on six months, while in Spain the proposal is for a year, and in the Netherlands it is 18 months.

“There are not a lot of people in Germany who support this draft entirely,” said Christian Spahr, a spokesman for Bitkom. “But there are others who are more critical of it than we are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/bu...20privacy.html





Privacy Row as Checks on Phones and e-Mails Hit 439,000

Home Office reveals figures for first time Watchdog condemns high number of errors
Michael Evans, Defence Editor and Philip Webster, Political Editor

Almost 450,000 requests were made to monitor people’s telephone calls, e-mails and post by secret agencies and other authorised bodies in just over a year, the spying watchdog said yesterday.

In the first report of its kind from the Interceptions of Communications Commissioner, it was also revealed that nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern “lower-level data” such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.

Sir Swinton Thomas, the report’s author, described the figure as “unacceptably high”.

The disclosures came as Tony Blair admitted that the fingerprints of everyone obtaining identity cards could be checked against nearly a million unsolved crimes.

Human-rights campaigners described the twin revelations yesterday as signs of a “creeping contempt for our personal privacy”.

For its report the spy watchdog monitored 795 bodies, all of which were empowered to seek out communications data. These included MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the signals intelligence centre in Cheltenham, as well as 52 police forces, 475 local authorities and 108 other organisations such as the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority. Between them they made 439,000 requests for communications information over the 15-month period.

The Home Office said that the total number of such requests, which includes information on e-mail addresses and lists of phone numbers, had not been published before. It was unable to say if this represented a huge increase in data collection.

Warrants for serious crime intercepts last three months and warrants for national security cases last for six months.

In response to Sir Swinton’s criticism of the number of errors, the Home Office said that only “intercepts” of communications involved “sensitive” material and required a warrant from a secretary of state. Most of the errors, it said, involved requests for data such as individuals’ e-mail addresses and lists of telephone calls, and did not include intercepting the contents of messages and phone conversations.

The Prime Minister sparked further controversy over ID cards after replying to 28,000 people who had signed an e-petition calling on him to scrap the scheme. He said that the register would help the police to bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. “They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register.”

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said of Mr Blair’s response to the petitioners: “This is a massive move away from the presumption in Britain that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Tony Blair has admitted that the authorities will go on a fishing expedition through the files of innocent people to try to match them up to unsolved crimes.

“This is completely contrary to undertakings given throughout the course of the Bill in the Houses of Parliament and would be a major invasion of privacy. Mr Blair clearly does not realise that fingerprint technology is not infallible. With the vast number of crimes involved it is virtually guaranteed there will be errors and massive miscarriages of justice in a number of cases."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the Liberty civil rights campaign group, said: “Public confidence in the Government’s respect for our personal privacy has never been lower. There is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. The Prime Minister’s ambitions for ID cards seems to grow as public confidence in the scheme diminishes. This will become a national suspects database.”

On the 450,000 data requests, she said: “There is a creeping contempt for our personal privacy.”

Sir Swinton said that the intelligence and law enforcement agencies had been under extreme pressure, and that crucial evidence had been uncovered from intercepts in the case of the July 7 suicide bombers.

He said it was time to lift a ban on tapping the phones of MPs and peers, which has been in place for the past 40 years. Ministers and MPs had failed to give a good reason why politicians should be immune.

The nonbugging policy for MPs and peers was introduced by the Government of Harold Wilson 40 years ago, and is known as the Wilson Doctrine. Successive prime ministers have upheld the doctrine.

But Sir Swinton rejected the suggestion of allowing intercept material on terrorists and organised criminals to be used in evidence in trials. “If terrorists and criminals, most particularly those high up in the chain of command, know that interception would be used in evidence against them, they will do everything possible to stop providing the material which is so very valuable as intelligence.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1409395.ece





U.S. Relaxing New Passport Rules for Children
Ron Vample

Children will be exempt from new rules that will require travelers to show passports when entering the U.S. at land or sea borders, a move the Bush administration said Thursday is aimed at helping families and school groups.

The new passport requirements will take effect as soon as January 2008. In a change from earlier plans, children aged 15 or younger with parental consent will be allowed to cross the borders at land and sea entry points with certified copies of their birth certificates rather than passports.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff discussed the relaxation in rules at a speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club before touring the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, a link with Windsor, Ontario under the Detroit River.

"This is going to make it a lot easier for kids to cross the border without having to get passports and passcards," Chertoff said. "By the way, it's specifically designed to make it cheaper for families."

Children aged 16 through 18 traveling with school, religious, cultural or athletic groups and under adult supervision will also be allowed to travel with only their birth certificates.

The rule is designed, for example, to allow hockey teams and other groups to go back and forth without disrupting their schedule, provided they are chaperoned, Chertoff said.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a longtime critic of the overall passport requirements because of the potential impact on the economy of border states, said he was pleased by the exemption for those under age 15.

"That's a great first step and now we're going to have to make sure they do it for everyone over 15 as well," Schumer said.

Schumer said he would introduce legislation that would delay implementation of the passport requirement until at least June 2009. The bill also would require studies on the economic impact of the initiative on each border state, and to test an enhanced driver's license program as an alternative to passports in at least one location.

Any alternative to passports would have to cost adults no more than $20 and be free for children, under the bill.

Beginning last Jan. 23, nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. who are citizens of Canada, Mexico, Bermuda or the Caribbean - as well as returning American citizens - have been required to display passports. Children entering the United States by air will still be required to show passports.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the easing of rules for children entering by land or sea was in part the result of talks between the department and Canadians and interested state officials. Canada and U.S. border states have been concerned that the passport requirements would hurt legitimate travel and commerce.

When the new requirements for travelers crossing land and sea borders take effect, it will bring residents of Western Hemisphere nations under the same rules as travelers from the rest of the world.

The rules were mandated by Congress in 2004 as a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the recommendations by the Sept. 11 commission that border security be tightened.

Last October, Congress passed an amendment sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, that would postpone the day the land and sea rules take effect for as long as 17 months, till June 2009, if certain conditions have not been met.

One of those conditions was to develop an alternative procedure for groups of children traveling across the border under adult supervision and with parental consent.

Chertoff met with local officials in Detroit and planned to travel to Ottawa, Canada, for meetings Friday with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts.

In Detroit, Chertoff met with Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, who has offered a proposal where state driver's licenses and identification cards, which are being revamped to meet federal standards, also could serve as a passport. She said the plan would be simple and cut costs.

"It eases the burden of these new laws on our citizens with a commonsense, workable solution," she said. "It also protects our economy while achieving everyone's goal of combating terrorism."

---

Associated Press Writers Beverley Lumpkin in Washington and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases
Ian Austen

Canada’s highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely using secret evidence and without charges while their deportations are being reviewed.

The detention measure, the security certificate system, has been described by government lawyers as an important tool for combating international terrorism and maintaining Canada’s domestic security. Six men are now under threat of deportation without an open hearing under the certificates.

“The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the ruling.

The three men who brought the case are likely to remain jailed or under strict parole because the court suspended its decision for a year to allow Parliament to introduce a law consistent with the ruling.

The decision reflected striking differences from the current legal climate in the United States. In the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Congress stripped the federal courts of authority to hear challenges, through petitions for writs of habeas corpus, to the open-ended confinement of foreign terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A federal appeals court in Washington upheld the constitutionality of that law this week, dismissing 13 cases brought on behalf of 63 Guantánamo detainees. Their lawyers said they would file an appeal with the Supreme Court. In two earlier decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Guantánamo detainees on statutory grounds but did not address the deeper constitutional issues that this case appears to present.

At a news conference in Montreal, a defendant, Adil Charkaoui, praised the Canadian court’s decision.

“The Supreme Court, by 9 to 0, has said no to Guantánamo North in Canada,” said Mr. Charkaoui, who is under tightly controlled, electronically monitored house arrest.

Stockwell Day, the Canadian minister of public safety, said Friday, “It is our intention to follow the Supreme Court ruling.”

He added, “We are taking in stride what they did say and we will look at the changes that are necessary.”

The decision is also the latest in a series of events that has seen Canada reconsider some national security steps it took after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last September, a judicial inquiry rebuked the police for falsely accusing a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, of terrorist connections. Those accusations, in 2002, led United States officials to fly Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured. Earlier this year, the Canadian government reached a $9.75 million settlement with Mr. Arar and offered a formal apology. The commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also resigned for reasons related to the affair.

Canada’s Parliament is divided over whether to continue two antiterrorism measures introduced in 2001 that are set to expire on March 1. The opposition Liberal Party, which had brought in the law, does not want to continue its special preventive arrest powers or the secret court hearings it permits, which resemble grand jury hearings in the United States. Two other portions of that law have been struck down by courts in Ontario.

“We’ve started to see the rollback,” said Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada. “Today the Supreme Court of Canada has said, ‘Make sure you put human rights at the center of how you prevent terrorism.’ ”

The security certificate system was introduced in a 1978 immigration law and has been used 27 times, mostly before September 2001. It allows the government to detain people indefinitely if the minister of public safety and the minister of immigration conclude that they are a threat to national security. The certificates, once signed, are reviewed by a federal judge who can rule to keep any or all of the evidence secret.

While Amnesty International and other groups have long campaigned against the certificates, the issue attracted relatively little attention for many years. Historically the certificates were issued against people who were accused of spying in Canada and who were swiftly deported.

The current cases, however, have become more prominent because they generally involve people who have been jailed for years without charges, using secret evidence and, in many cases, without bail.

The sparseness of evidence makes it difficult to assess if there is any connection linking the men. The authorities say they have tied five of them in various ways to Al Qaeda. A sixth was arrested in 1995 and has been out on bail since 1998. He is charged with being a fund-raiser for the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Hassan Almrei, a Syrian arrested in Mississauga, Ontario, in 2001, is the only one directly involved in this case who remains in jail.

A document from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service charges that Mr. Almrei, who entered Canada on false papers in 1999, forged documents for the Sept. 11 attacks and is a member of “an international network of extremist groups and individuals who follow and support the Islamic extremist ideals espoused by Osama bin Laden.” He was also accused of sending money to Mr. bin Laden’s network through a honey and perfume business he ran in Saudi Arabia. The government said that a computer belonging to Mr. Almrei contained images of Mr. bin Laden, guns, a jet cockpit and a security badge.

Like most of the other suspects, Mr. Almrei remains under a certificate because the government’s efforts to deport him to Syria conflict with Canadian laws that ban sending people to places where they are likely to be tortured.

Based on the limited information available, other security certificate cases appear to be circumstantial. Mr. Charkaoui, a Moroccan who was arrested in 2002 and released on house arrest in 2005, is accused of having trained in Afghanistan.

“I am innocent,” he said Friday. “I was never charged, I was never accused of a crime. If the government has anything to accuse me of, well, there’s the criminal code.”

Much of the judgment provides a blueprint for Parliament on how to make security certificates fit with Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. As part of that, one of the court’s suggestions seems to be adopted from Britain, whose legal system provided the basis of Canada’s. After the House of Lords struck down a similar law in 2004, Britain adopted a system that allows security-cleared lawyers to attend the hearings, review the evidence and represent the accused.

A provision of the ruling that is effective immediately requires people held under certificates to receive a bail hearing within 48 hours.

For terrorism suspects in the United States, whose situation is most directly analogous to that of the men in Canada, the legal situation is cloudy at best. In the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, the government detained more than 5,000 foreign citizens.

Most were charged with offenses no more serious than overstaying a tourist visa, and many were held for months, awaiting clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after they had agreed to leave the country. Not one was convicted of a crime of terrorism.

Judge John Gleeson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled last June on a class-action lawsuit brought by eight detainees. All have left the country and are seeking damages for what they argued was an illegitimate incarceration. Judge Gleeson dismissed that portion of the lawsuit, ruling that the courts should not “encroach on the executive branch in a realm where it has particular expertise” and “legitimate foreign policy considerations.”

Even if the plaintiffs could demonstrate that their right to constitutional due process was violated, Judge Gleeson wrote, the officials they sued would be entitled to immunity because any right to “immediate or prompt removal” had not been “clearly established” at the time. The case, Turkmen v. Gonzales, is now on appeal.

Dalia Hashad, the United States program director for Amnesty International, said the Canadian decision should serve as “a wake-up call that reminds us that civilized people follow a simple and basic rule of law, that indefinite detention is under no circumstances acceptable.”

Linda Greenhouse contributed reporting from Washington, and Christopher Mason from Ottawa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/wo...ottawa.html?hp





Wi-Fi Turns Internet Into Hideout for Criminals

Authorities struggling with anonymity provided by unsecured networks
Jamie Stockwell

Detectives arrived last summer at a high-rise apartment building in Arlington County, warrant in hand, to nab a suspected pedophile who had traded child pornography online. It was to be a routine, mostly effortless arrest.

But when they pounded on the door, detectives found an elderly woman who, they quickly concluded, had nothing to do with the crime. The real problem was her computer's wireless router, a device sending a signal through her 10-story building and allowing savvy neighbors a free path to the Internet from the privacy of their homes.

Perhaps one of those neighbors, authorities said, was stealthily uploading photographs of nude children. Doing so essentially rendered him or her untraceable.

With nearly 46,000 public access points across the country -- many of them free -- hundreds of thousands of computer users are logging on every day to wireless networks at cafes, hotels, airports and even while sitting on park benches. And although the majority of those people are simply checking their e-mail and surfing the Web, authorities said an increasing number of criminals are taking advantage of the anonymity offered by the wireless signals to commit a raft of serious crimes -- from identity theft to the sexual solicitation of children.

"We're not sure yet how to combat that," said Kevin R. West, a federal agent who oversees the computer crimes unit in North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation. "Free wireless spots are everywhere, and it makes it easy for people . . . to sit there and do their nefarious acts. The fear is that if we talk about it, people will learn about it and say, 'I can go to a parking lot, and no one will catch me.' But we need to talk about it so that we can figure out how to solve it."

The way it works is simple: Anyone who has a wireless card installed in his or her computer -- and most new computers are equipped with one -- can access the Internet from any of the public WiFi "hotspots," as they're known. In an age of portability and instant gratification, getting online has never been easier -- for law-abiding folks and those with bad intentions.

And in especially dense areas such as the Washington region, some neighborhoods might offer users a dozen or more open wireless signals from which to choose.

"Unsecured networks are a treasure trove for neighbors," said John Sheehan, program manager of the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Those looking to access illegal content obviously feel they have anonymity" and can get away with it.

They most often do, authorities said.

"It's frustrating for officers," said Todd Shipley, director of training services at the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. "If a suspect is going from coffee shop to coffee shop and using free signals to commit crimes, the police probably aren't going to catch him. That's the reality."

Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day -- and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning.

One way to combat it is for people to secure their wireless networks by making them password-protected. But, authorities said, businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.

Locally, Alexandria recently announced plans to expand its wireless network. The Internet service provider EarthLink will build a citywide network for a 16-square-mile area, with free wireless connections available in more than two dozen public locations. The provider also has worked on municipal WiFi in cities including Philadelphia and New Orleans. Alexandria officials said EarthLink will decide whether to implement security measures on the network, which will be accessible to anyone passing through the city.

In one recent case, West said, a truck driver used free wireless signals at motels across the country to post and view pornographic images of children at a Web site. By pure luck, the man was caught, West said. When the suspect got online from his home computer, authorities were able to trace his computer's Internet Protocol address, or the unique set of numbers assigned to every computer that uses the Internet. That number, which serves as a virtual street address, often leads authorities to the offender's physical residence.

"Otherwise he would've slipped through the cracks," West said. "We wouldn't have been able to identify him."

These days, the Internet is as indispensable to an officer's arsenal as his gun and handcuffs. Indeed, a growing number of officers are being assigned to patrol cyberspace.

Across the nation, 46 multi-jurisdictional Internet Crimes Against Children task forces have been created to carry out online sting operations aimed at ensnaring sex offenders because a man tapping away on a computer in Rockville might very well be soliciting a child in California. Every week, federal and local authorities cast their nets.

And although most sex crimes against underage boys and girls involve victims and suspects who know each other, an increasing number involve online interactions between strangers. Online solicitations -- in which pedophiles cultivate relationships with children and then arrange to meet them in public places -- are becoming more common, federal authorities said.

And even in those cases in which the suspect is brought to police attention by a neighbor or friend or relative, computers are often rich sources of evidence, West said.

"Technology just makes the park no longer the only place where the pervert goes," West said.

The Northern Virginia-D.C. task force has officers from 23 local, state and federal agencies. It was established in November 2004 through a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Justice Department. Since its creation, dozens of cases have been opened and more than three dozen arrests have been made.

Those assigned to the task forces patrol the virtual streets for pedophiles and others who want to commit crimes against children. Using software and other tracking devices, the officers trace a suspect's IP address. But as technology improves, so too do the tactics of criminals. Closing cases is more difficult if the IP address originated from a wireless signal because it often leads back to the owner of the network instead of the criminal.

The problem is going to get worse, authorities said. Every day, more homes, businesses and entire jurisdictions are outfitted with wireless networks, creating an almost seamless patchwork of available Internet connections to anyone with a laptop and the desire to get online.

"This is part of the future . . . and we're working to catch up and educate the public," said Capt. Tommy Turner of the Virginia State Police.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021001457.html





GPS Tagging Is for Wild Animals, Not Truants
Courtland Milloy

Let's say your teenager is a habitual truant and there is nothing you can do about it. Maryland Del. Doyle L. Niemann (D-Prince George's) thinks he might have the solution: Fit the child with a Global Positioning System chip, then have police track him down.

"It allows them to get caught easier," said Niemann, who recently co-sponsored legislation in the House that would use electronic surveillance as part of a broader truancy-reduction plan. "It's going to be done unobtrusively. The chips are tiny and can be put into a hospital ID band or a necklace."

Excuse me. But that is obscene. Electronic monitoring is used by criminal court judges to keep track of felons. Researchers use them to track the movements of wild animals. Let parents use such devices if they must. But that's no way for government to treat a child.

Niemann's legislation mirrors a bill sponsored by Sen. Gwendolyn T. Britt (D-Prince George's). Both would provide truants and their parents with better access to social services, such as mental health evaluations and help with schoolwork. Electronic monitoring would be a last resort. Still, the prospect of tagging children and using them in some "catch and release" hunt by police casts a pall over everything that's good about the plan.

"Obviously, we don't want to do something to make the problem worse, like stigmatizing the student," Niemann told me. "On the other hand, you may want others to know there are consequences for truancy." Sounds stigmatizing to me.

All of this is because about 6,800 Prince George's students out of 134,000 missed between 20 and 35 days of school in 2005, and an additional 5,800 missed 36 days or more. A problem? Yes. Bad enough to use an Orwellian quick fix? No way. Besides, is there no end to this fiddling with mere symptoms?

Stephanie Joseph, a member of the board of ACLU of Maryland who testified against the bill at a recent Senate committee hearing, correctly observed that "it really doesn't address truancy and its root causes." Even as Niemann and other lawmakers seek to rustle up students and herd them back to school, school officials are kicking them out by the score. More than 4,300 county students were suspended at least twice during the 2005-06 school year; 480 of them, five or more times. You can imagine what all of that confusion might look like on a GPS monitor: satellite images of dots streaming in one school door and back out through another.

Perhaps most distressing is the number of students who stay in school only until age 16, when they can legally drop out. Enrollment figures show that, during any given year, there are roughly 14,000 students in ninth grade. By 12th grade, the number drops to 8,000.

"We need to take a look at the whole system," Niemann said. "We want to know why students drop out and if we are preparing them for the world they live in. But there is a limit to what you can do."

Odd how billions and billions of dollars keep going to a war that almost nobody wants but there's never enough to fund the educational programs that nearly everybody says are needed. Aimed solely at students in Prince George's -- the only predominantly black county in the Washington area -- the truancy effort is called a "pilot program," a first-of-its-kind experiment. It would cost $400,000 to keep track of about 660 students a year.

Surely that money could be better spent. Take one example: In Montgomery County, Beall Elementary kindergarten teacher Kathleen Cohan noticed that 5-year-old children of affluent parents were entering school knowing about 13,000 English words, while children from poor and immigrant families knew as few as 500. So she and other teachers came up with a plan to close the gap. And it worked. Between 2002 and 2005, the percentage of low-income kindergartners reaching first grade soared from 44 percent in 2002 to 70 percent in 2005.

Now that's a pilot program. Invest in something like that and you might find more students becoming eager to attend school.

Niemann notes that the law requires students to attend school -- period -- and his proposal is aimed at getting as many as possible to go. "Where do you lodge responsibility for school attendance -- with the parent and child or society?" he asked. "If you say that the school system has to do blank this and blank that before holding parents and students accountable, that's a dead end. That's just making excuses for unacceptable behavior."

But maintaining a school system that is among the worst in the state ought to be unacceptable, too. Maybe county officials should be monitored to see why they aren't showing up for work.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021301270.html





Trio of Climbers Who Survived on Mount Hood Saved by Electronic Beacon and a 4-Year-Old Dog
AP

Thanks to a high-tech electronic gadget and a big warm dog named Velvet, three climbers rescued after a harrowing fall and a night in the wind and cold high on Mount Hood are expected to be fine.

They were found at about the 7,400-foot level on Monday and hiked down the mountain with their rescuers.

"I'm really glad they were there for us," Matty Bryant, one of the three climbers, said of the rescue teams. "They did an incredible job. They were amazing."

Searchers credited the group's rescue to two things _ Velvet, a black Labrador mix who provided warmth as the three climbers huddled under sleeping bags and a tarp, and the activation of an emergency radio beacon the size of a sunglasses case that guided them to the group.

"The most important part of this rescue is that they did everything right," said Lt. Nick Watt of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

The three climbers set out on Saturday with five other friends _ all in the 20s and 30s and from the Portland area _ to scale the 11,239-foot mountain, Oregon's tallest.

However, a storm moved in and on Sunday they started their descent in blowing snow.

"You had no visual reference around you to determine if you were going up or down," said one member of the group, Trevor Liston. "You could make out a climber at 30 feet at best."

Then he saw the group of three _ all roped together with Velvet _ disappear over an icy ledge.

Liston and the four others used a rope to lower one of their climbing party over the edge in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the trio.

Then they used a cell phone to call for help as the wind howled at up to 70 mph.

Liston, who described himself as a veteran of Mount Hood climbs, said all eight had experience at either rock climbing or mountaineering.

They'd known about the Mount Hood disaster in which three climbers died in December. But Liston said that wasn't the reason the group decided to take Mountain Locator Units, the small beacons that can send out radio signals to rescuers.

"We've been up on the mountain for many years," Liston said. "With the group we were going up with this time, we just wanted another extra level of security, just in case something happened, especially with winter conditions."

In addition to Bryant, 34, a teacher in the Portland suburb of Milwaukie, the rescued climbers included Kate Hanlon, 34, a teacher in the suburb of Wilsonville.

The other woman, whose name was not released, was being treated for a head injury in Portland, said Jim Strovink, spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office. "She's going to be fine," he said.

Velvet, owned by Bryant, had minor cuts and abrasions on her back paws and legs from prolonged exposure to the snow, but she was cleared to go home.

"The dog probably saved their lives" by lying across them during the cold night, said Erik Brom, a member of the Portland Mountain Rescue team.

Liston said he felt that he and his companions were well-equipped for climbing Mount Hood in the winter with cell phones, global positioning system gear and the locator beacons.

"We'd been in those conditions up on this mountain before," he said. "We've walked out in whiteouts before. We didn't know it was going to be that bad. But we were prepared that it might be snowing and blowing."

Liston said he understands critics who say people climbing Mount Hood during the winter are putting not only their own lives at risk, but also the lives of rescuers dispatched when something goes wrong.

"It's a kind of delicate balance," he said, "about doing winter climbing, and pushing some of those limits, and not doing it, and only climbing in the summer in shorts and T-shirts.

"It's kind of a point of pride you might say for a lot of climbers _ that you can take care of yourself out there."

Still, Liston said, "Things happen."
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1031930





Hail Freedonia!

Estonia Set for World First Internet Election

(This is the first in a series of stories in the run-up to Estonia's parliamentary election)
David Mardiste

The Baltic state of Estonia plans to become the world's first country to allow voting in a national parliamentary election via the Internet next month -- with a little help from the forest king.

E-voting will be introduced for a parliamentary election on March 4, for the first time after it was used in more limited local elections in 2005. It is a fresh sign of Estonia's strong embrace of technology since it quit the Soviet Union in 1991.

The e-voting system was tested earlier this week, including the chance to choose the "king of the forest". Voters could pick an animal from 10 candidates, including moose, deer and boars.

"It is hard to say how many people could vote (via the Internet), but 3,925 people used the system over the last week, when we used different testing scenarios to vote for the king of the forest," said Arne Koitmae of the electoral commission.

Estonia rushed to modernise after independence, and has become a major European base for Internet telephony group Skype: Estonians helped develop the service, owned by ebay Inc.

Just under 10,000 people voted via the Internet in local elections in October 2005. Computer specialists have estimated 20,000-40,000 of 940,000 registered voters will vote via the Internet from Feb. 26-28, ahead of the March 4 election day.

"I will be voting in these elections via Internet, it is a good system and I think my grandfather, who is over 80, will be doing the same as well, he already calls me on Skype," said Toomas Talts, a technology worker, as he tested the system.

The voting will take place by people putting their state-issued ID card, which has an electronic chip on it, into a reader attached to a computer and then entering two passwords.

Pollsters expect the current two main coalition parties, the centre-right Reform Party and left-leaning Centre Party, to win the vote, though it is not clear which will be the biggest.

Reform leader Andrus Ansip is current prime minister, though the Centre Party has 21 parliament seats, two more than Reform, in the 101-seat house. Third coalition member is the People's Union, with 12 seats.

Used To The Internet

The uptake of new information technology has come despite the fact Estonia, though with a strongly growing economy, is one of the poorest nations in the European Union. GDP per inhabitant in 2004 was at 57 percent of the bloc's average.

Its infrastructure was decrepit after independence. Even today, outside the glitzy new skyscrapers of Tallinn city centre, buildings looked battered, roads are potholed and Soviet-era trolley buses still whirr around town.

"One of the most common explanations as to why Estonians have taken to new IT technology is that everything had to be done new here," said Jaan Tallinn, a senior programmer involved in the development of Skype.

"There were no legacies to deal with, like with bank cheques, which were already obsolete. So companies could create new systems and people just used them," he added.

Despite modest economic means Estonian banks started to offer online banking services in 1997, and every move by the private sector has been matched with laws to support e-commerce and e-services such as access to government information.

As in the Nordic states, Estonians can also use mobile phones to pay for car parking, or buy bus tickets: scattered across the country are many wireless Internet points.

"We are a very small country in the EU, therefore we have to be very careful in spending our money on government infrastructure as it gives very little back," said computer systems and security specialist Jaan Murumets.

The security angle of voting via the Internet has not raised many worries. "E-voting is not so difficult to think about here. We are used to using the Internet for business and for almost 10 years we have been using the Internet for banking," he said.

But the winner of the "king of the forest" vote remained a mystery -- no count was done as it was one of several tests.

"In the end, only the animals in the forest know," said election committee official Koitmae.

Article





Working in France, in Style of Silicon Valley
John Tagliabue

Jacques Souquet had gone through several start-ups in Seattle, but he still was not entirely prepared for beginning a high-tech company in his native France.

Failure is still a no-no here, creating a challenge for any start-up. Not to mention the idea that difficulty here seems a contradiction in terms for, after all, the word “entrepreneur” is French.

And Mr. Souquet, 58, a compact man with a gentle manner, has a lot of rules to learn. When he once had to meet a deadline, he asked his colleagues to come in on a Sunday, which they did; but Mr. Souquet got a scolding from his lawyer, who lectured about the legal limits on the French workweek.

Now, Mr. Souquet’s company is up and running smoothly, and that is a testimony to recent changes in France and greater Europe: start-ups are no longer rare. Moreover, Europe’s new entrepreneurs are turning West to learn the start-up culture bred in Silicon Valley before coming back here to apply their learning.

After the Internet bust, the number of European start-ups in the computer and telecommunications sectors began growing again in 2003, according to the Center for European Economic Research, in Mannheim, Germany. And venture capital is pouring into start-ups, which last year attracted about $970 million, the highest level in a decade since the Internet boom ended in 2000.

Overall venture capital fund-raising in Europe is more than twice the levels of 2002. In France, the number of new businesses set up last year rose 4 percent, to 233,052, over 2005, according to the Agency for the Creation of Businesses, a government body. The number of small American businesses also grew that much, at 4.5 percent, but at 671,800, there are nearly three times as many such American companies, according to the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Souquet’s experience illustrates how far the Continent has to go if it hopes to match the United States. He was able to lure eight of his 27 employees back from the United States. And after two years, he is preparing to offer his product in 2008, a device that measures the elasticity of living tissue, to assist doctors in diagnosing and treating cancer.

Still, Aix is not Seattle. French attitudes are a bit rigid, compared with the American approach of if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed. And French law, which mandates a 35-hour week, still crimps entrepreneurial flair.

“In a start-up environment, you cannot work a 35-hour week,” Mr. Souquet said, referring to the time he asked his colleagues to work on a Sunday. “My lawyer was furious,” he said, fearing the company could be penalized.

Mr. Souquet also recounted that at Stanford University, where he got his Ph.D. in applied physics, one of his teachers, William Shockley, a pioneer in transistors who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, taught by discussing failed experiments.

“Then he would turn to another page, showing why the experiment failed,” Mr. Souquet said, recalling images of his professor’s Bell Labs notebooks. “He called them constructive failures.”

Mr. Souquet’s company began with a colleague’s fear that France was failing to retain its scientists. Georges Charpak, the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in physics, came to him.

“He told me, ‘It’s dramatic,’ ” Mr. Souquet said, describing how his French colleague begged him to help stanch a drain of French talent to the United States by promoting start-ups here. “He said his best laboratory talent was going to the United States, that he was about to lose 15 people who were being offered grants by U.C., San Diego.”

So two years ago, Mr. Souquet began gathering patents, including several from a Russian émigré, Armen Sarvazyan, whose own start-up, Artann Laboratories, in West Trenton, N.J., held key patents for working with shear waves crucial to Mr. Souquet’s device. A shear wave is so named because it moves through the body of an object, unlike a surface wave.

At his previous start-up, SonoSite, which is based in Seattle, Mr. Souquet helped develop hand-held ultrasound devices that were essentially conventional technology, drastically miniaturized.

Mr. Souquet’s latest device is “a new concept,” Mr. Sarvazyan said. “It opens an era, not only for elasticity, but for imitating the sense of touch, the feeling of a doctor,” which is now often crucial in diagnosing cancer.

Mr. Souquet had broad experience in ultrasound, having worked in the United States for Varian Semiconductor, before moving to ATL Ultrasound in Seattle. Together with a small group of ATL researchers, he founded SonoSite. When Mr. Charpak approached him, Mr. Souquet was the head of research in the medical division of Philips, the Dutch electrical giant.

Weary of the constant travel and the bureaucracy of a global giant like Philips, Mr. Souquet heeded Mr. Charpak’s cry for help. His idea, as outlined on the company’s Web site, is to develop a device that would use ultrasound to measure the elasticity of human tissue.

Since cancerous tissue loses much of its elasticity, such a device would be useful in helping diagnose and treat cancer in the breast, he said, but also the prostate gland, the thyroid and the liver.

SuperSonic Imagine, with headquarters in a glass-and-steel corporate park outside this southern French resort city, was floated with Mr. Souquet’s own savings, plus money from French government sources. Last March, a group of venture capital funds led by Crédit Agricole Private Equity pumped 10 million euros ($13 million), into the company.

Amounts of capital like this are still only a fraction of the money flowing into start-ups in the United States, but in Europe, their impact is widening. The European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, set up in 2001, has seen its membership grow to almost 950 members.

Representatives of the association tell of many technology success stories, like that of Xavier Niel, 39, a entrepreneur based in Paris who in 2002 started Free, now the No. 2 Internet access engine in France, after Orange, the France Telecom unit.

Vectrix began in Italy about a decade ago, but came into its own only in 2003 when Carlo Di Biagio, the former Ducati Motorcycle chief executive, became its boss. It is about to bring to market a novel electric-engine scooter, with a top speed of about 62 miles an hour, developed with help from about $50 million in venture capital.

“From the point of view of technology, this was a real innovation,” said Alexia Perouse, director of life science investments at Crédit Agricole, explaining why they gave the money to Mr. Souquet. Later this year, the venture capital funds will consider a second grant of 20 million euros, Mr. Souquet said.

In April, Mr. Souquet plans to talk with the Food and Drug Administration to have the devices certified. By next year, he hopes to begin delivering them.

SuperSonic is focusing primarily on breast cancer, and its device employs different types of ultrasound waves that produce better images than existing diagnostic methods — X-ray, ultrasound echography and magnetic resonance imaging.

Conventional ultrasound, said Dr. Stephen B. Corn, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is director of clinical innovation at Children’s Hospital Boston, “is not always sensitive and specific enough, particularly in cases of dense breast tissue.”

“It looks very intriguing,” he said of the company’s work, “very exciting.”

Mr. Souquet has hired a marketing director, opened an office in Seattle, and has chosen the tentative design for the first product. And his company has some of the Silicon Valley feel. People sit in open carrels, rather than closed offices; dress is casual. At lunch, employees sit around an open counter in the center of the building.

“It’s easy in the States,” Mr. Souquet said, still bemoaning the French hardships. “You know what to do; you go to Barnes & Noble, you buy a book, 20 tips to create a start-up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/bu...repreneur.html





Meet Kate, and Stick Around
Eric A. Taub

WITH what they claim to be the world’s largest selection of beads, company officials at Shipwreck Beads near Seattle were not used to seeing customers abandon their online store in droves.

Which is why Pat Simmons, the company’s information technology manager, was so perturbed when he noticed that 97 percent of visitors to one page of the Web site were consistently heading for the hills. “As soon as they came, they left,” he said.

After analyzing the site, Mr. Simmons realized that the page was not intuitive — the best products were at the bottom of the page, not the top. Once he reorganized it, people started to stick around.

Mr. Simmons could see how customers were using (or not using) his site by employing Google Analytics, one of several tools that allow even small businesses to analyze their Web traffic, learning not only how many people visit but also where they come from, where they go and how long they stay.

Thanks to online retail heavyweights, customers expect e-commerce Web sites to entertain, inform and make transactions a snap.

“The big story is that the little guys want to be like Amazon,” said David Thompson, the chief executive of Genius.com, which makes Web site analytic software. As a result, Mr. Thompson said, “customers assume they’ll get intelligent product recommendations whenever they visit a site.”

With so many companies selling so many products, retailers have to make their sites “sticky,” said Ramon Ray, the editor of a Web site, smallbiztechnology.com, that helps businesses use technology to grow.

Mr. Ray recommends that owners provide extensive information about their products or services throughout their Web sites. Links to case studies or white papers are “a good way to bring the story out,” he said.

Displaying relevant video clips from YouTube or other Web video services also helps. Short audio clips with a “play” button, placed next to a product’s logo, can add interest.

RSS feeds of appropriate material from other sources can lure customers back, too. A company selling windows, say, could include installation tips from another proprietor.

The owners of Goldfish Software, a company that sells accounting software, wanted to customize their site, but they did not anticipate that a feature would take on a life of its own.

Goldfish incorporated an avatar — an animated human — that speaks whenever someone visits the site, goldfishsoftware.com. The company used VHost, a product from Oddcast, to create the avatar, whose face, clothing and speech can be changed by customers.

“We called the character ‘Kate,’ but then our customers started calling it by the same name,” said Judy Thornell, the company’s customer-relations executive. “We didn’t realize that they would develop a personal relationship with it.”

After “Kate” started telling customers about the “hot deals” listed under a tab on the site, sales for that section went up 50 percent.

“Having the avatar on the site keeps customers there longer, as they listen to the character speaking,” Ms. Thornell said.

Patti Lucia and Desiree Ramos-Aponti, who own Les Beans Coffee, an online coffee retailer, thought a female avatar would complement their products, which have names like Ethiopia Sophie and Costa Rita.

This month, the character speaks with a cooing French accent for Valentine’s Day. “Customers say they look forward to the character of the month,” Ms. Lucia said. “It keeps the site fresh.”

Spicing up a site is worth the effort only if the results can be tracked. Analytic tools can determine not only the number of visitors, but also their state, city or country and type of computer and browser used.

Google Analytics, at google.com/analytics, is a free service that can tie in its tools to Google’s AdWords classified ads service, so businesses can learn which keywords drive the most sales.

Each ad word’s return on investment can be calculated. Users can learn if a keyword that appeared lower in a list of search results (and therefore cost less) may have actually brought in more money than a more costly one that appeared at the top of the search-results page.

Other Web analytic tools are available from AWStats (awstats.org), FreeStats (freestats.com) and SiteTracker (sitetracker.com).

SalesGenius, an online tool, can help gauge a customer’s interest in a product or service by using the person’s e-mail address. People on a mailing list are sent e-mail via the Genius.com server. The seller knows who opened the messages and, as long as the customers click on an embedded link, who visited the site, where they clicked and how long they stayed. Follow-up e-mails can be sent suggesting other products.

“Web sites are becoming like real stores,” said Mr. Thompson of Genius.com. “And people now expect the same level of service on a site as in a store.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/bu...=smallbusiness





Fewer Visit the Air and Space Museum
Brett Zongker

It's a mystery even for researchers at the Smithsonian Institution: What happened to the huge crowds at the National Air and Space Museum? The estimated number of visitors to the museum plunged to about 5 million in 2006 from a six-year high of 9.4 million in 2003, according to the latest attendance report from the museum complex. And the decline has been far sharper than that of the overall Smithsonian, which includes 18 museums and the National Zoo.

Last year, attendance at what has been one of the world's most-visited museums fell below that of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, which features ancient fossils and the Hope Diamond. (Museum officials say this is the only instance in recent memory in which the air and space museum trailed the history museum.)

Peter Golkin, a spokesman for the air and space museum, said officials are not worried. He noted that the museum is still the most popular overall.

One explanation for the downturn could be that the museum hasn't opened a major new gallery since 2003. Jason Hall, spokesman for the American Association of Museums, said a museum's "novelty factor" is important in attracting visitors, and it can help explain sudden increases and downturns in attendance.

For the air and space museum, 2003 happened to be a banner year. The museum - home to the Wright brothers' first airplane and relics from the space race and Apollo moon walks - had special events in 2003 about the 100th anniversary of powered flight and tragic fate of the space shuttle Columbia.

But the museum could use some freshening up, according to some visitors.

Allen Witt, an engineer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said many of the displays seemed to stop after the mid-1980s.

Still, he said, "I don't think this museum will ever lose its relevance. It will get more historic through time."

Construction near the museum may have also kept some visitors away, officials said.

"They've had extensive construction outside for a couple years ... which made it look as if the museum was closed," Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas said.

Another possible factor in the decline could be the museum's annex - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - which opened in Chantilly, Va., in 2003. The massive annex, built like an airplane hanger and located near Washington Dulles International Airport, houses the "Enola Gay" B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, the prototype space shuttle Enterprise and dozens of other planes.

The newer facility drew 1.6 million visitors in 2004, its first full year of operation, and about 1 million last year - visitors who might be ignoring the annex's sister museum in Washington.

"That's possible, although we'd like to think that you need to see both facilities to really get the whole sweeping history of flight that we present," Golkin said. "It's one collection that's in two locations."

The attendance slump comes amid flat attendance at museums nationwide and an overall, though less stunning, decline at the Smithsonian complex.

Overall Smithsonian attendance has fallen 27 percent since 2001, compared to the air and space museum's decline of 46 percent in the same period. But the air and space museum is still one of the most visited museums in the nation. Attendance at the Smithsonian declined after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the air and space museum also felt the impact of the decline in tourism. The numbers for both also plunged in 2004, rose the next year and then fell in 2006.

"Things have been skewed numbers wise since 2001," Golkin said. "I think we still haven't come fully out of that aftermath."

Another museum that has seen sharp declines since 2001 is the National Museum of American History. Attendance dropped 42 percent from 5.2 million in 2001 to 3 million in 2005, the last full year of operations before the museum closed in 2006 for renovations. The museum will remain closed until 2008.

But the American history museum's biggest problems were evident; they had been spelled out by a 2002 blue-ribbon commission. The commission called the museum's layout and presentation confusing and questioned why some subjects at the museum are underrepresented, such as religion, capitalism, immigration and slavery. The report is being used to guide the renovation and strengthen the museum, officials say.

The method of counting visitors isn't exactly scientific. Smithsonian officials said security guards use hand clickers to count people as they leave each of the 18 museums. And though the count may not be exact, it does indicate trends, they said. Between 2002 and 2003, the museums changed from counting people as they enter to counting as they exit. Golkin said museum entrances can be crowded at security checkpoints, but there's less crowding as visitors leave.

Museums across the country count visitors in many different ways or not at all. Many museums, unlike the Smithsonian, charge admission fees, making it easier to track attendance.

The Smithsonian is pursuing a number of initiatives to raise its profile this year.

This fall, for example, the air and space museum will open a renovated air transportation gallery called "America by Air," which will include the nose of a Boeing-747. Visitors will be able to walk through the cockpit of the jumbo jet and through earlier airliners. The project and other renovations have required ongoing construction in recent years.

The Smithsonian is also creating a controversial new TV unit with Showtime Networks Inc. and a new Web site to help tourists plan their visits. The Go-Smithsonian Web site was launched this month with links to hotels, transportation and dining options along with exhibition calendars. The Smithsonian's semi-exclusive deal with Showtime could mean potential restrictions for other filmmakers and historians.

Meanwhile, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small said private donations to the museums have rebounded since 2001. The Smithsonian's private endowment reached a record high of $894 million at the end of 2006.

Last year, the complex raised $132 million in private donations, including three $15 million gifts: two unannounced gifts for the natural history museum and one donation from Boeing for the air and space museum.

"We're quite a bit ahead of where we were last year," Small said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...s/16742648.htm





Winfrey Breaks Long Absence of Book Club with Sidney Poitier Book
Tara Burghart

If her goal was to erase the memory of the disgraced James Frey, then Oprah Winfrey couldn't have made a better pick for her book club than a memoir by Sidney Poitier. - Winfrey ended a year-long hiatus in her club by announcing Friday that she had chosen "The Measure of a Man," a "spiritual autobiography" by one of Hollywood's most admired actors -- for whom the word "dignified" could practically be copyrighted -- and a personal hero of Winfrey's.

Published in 2000, Poitier's book combines memories of such plays and films as "A Raisin in the Sun" and "The Defiant Ones" with observations about the Academy Award-winning actor's childhood, his religious faith, his thoughts on racism and the influence of such world leaders as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.

"He writes really candidly and passionately about his childhood, his family, relationships and his extraordinary career," Winfrey said on her show, which airs from Chicago. "It (the book) really is about what makes character, what makes you be who you are. He is the measure of one of the greatest men I think who has ever been on our planet."

Poitier did not appear on the telecast. But Winfrey said she will host "a once in a lifetime dinner party" with Poitier that will include members of her book club.

In a statement issued Friday by his publisher, HarperSanFrancisco, Poitier said he was "overwhelmed far beyond the point where words, alone, could fully express either my appreciation or my gratitude."

"Meanwhile, I proudly accept this honor on behalf of the forces that brought it about: the love of my parents, the ever-present kindness of strangers, and the hidden mysteries of the universe and, of course, Oprah Winfrey," he said.

"The Measure of a Man" spent several weeks on The New York Times' list of best sellers, and the audio edition, narrated by Poitier, won a Grammy Award for best spoken word album. Poitier wrote a previous memoir, "This Life," released in 1980.

Right before Winfrey announced her selection, the 56th for her book club, "The Measure of a Man" ranked 288,958 on Amazon.com, a number that quickly changed, soaring within hours to the top 5. Winfrey's picks almost inevitably top best seller lists.

Mark Tauber, vice president and deputy publisher of HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins, declined Friday to say how many books would be printed, but did say he expects to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Tauber also said that, unlike many celebrity memoirists, Poitier did not use a ghostwriter, although the actor did have editorial "help."

"I'm sure there'll be speculation about Winfrey picking yet another memoir," Tauber said. "But Poitier's life is filled with so much integrity."

Winfrey and Poitier have met in the past. During an interview in her own "O" magazine in 2000 -- around the time "Measure of a Man" was released -- Winfrey and Poitier discussed his life and career; the talk show host confided that she felt like a star-struck fan.

"Poitier and I are sitting across from each other at the Bel-Air hotel in Los Angeles -- and I'm admiring that, at 73, this man still personifies grace, ease, strength and courage," Winfrey wrote at the time. "He is a gentleman in every sense of the word. In my more than 25 years as an interviewer, I've talked to hundreds of people -- yet today, I'm giddy."

Poitier, who turns 80 on Feb. 20, became the first black performer to win the Oscar for best actor, cited in 1964 for "Lilies of the Field." His other films include "In the Heat of the Night," "To Sir, With Love" and "The Blackboard Jungle." In 2002, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

He should be a welcome break from the travesty of Frey, whose "A Million Little Pieces" was picked by Winfrey in the fall of 2005, only to have The Smoking Gun Web site reveal in January 2006 that the memoir was largely fabricated. Winfrey initially defended Frey, then changed her mind, brought him back to the show and chewed him out.

Winfrey's next pick, Elie Wiesel's "Night," was announced on Jan. 16, 2006, soon after the Frey scandal broke, but had already been decided upon weeks earlier. More than 1.5 million copies of Wiesel's Holocaust memoir were sold because of Winfrey's selection, according to publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Winfrey acknowledged on Friday's show that it had been a year since she had chosen a selection for her book club. But she didn't blame Frey. Instead, she said she was busy during that time researching curriculum for her school for disadvantaged girls in South Africa, which opened earlier this month.

"So I really did not have time to devote to reading other books," she said. "But now I do."

Winfrey indicated the idea to feature “The Measure of a Man” came to her over the holidays while she was dining with a group of people in Africa that included Poitier.

“We were all sitting around the table, and I was asking Sidney Poitier to tell some of the life stories from his book. And let me tell you, everybody at the table was weeping,” Winfrey said. “I was sitting there thinking, I wish everybody could hear this. And then I realized, everybody can! Everybody can. I love this book.”

AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16826335/





A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
Noam Cohen

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

With the move, Middlebury, in Vermont, jumped into a growing debate within journalism, the law and academia over what respect, if any, to give Wikipedia articles, written by hundreds of volunteers and subject to mistakes and sometimes deliberate falsehoods. Wikipedia itself has restricted the editing of some subjects, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said.

Although Middlebury’s history department has banned Wikipedia in citations, it has not banned its use. Don Wyatt, the chairman of the department, said a total ban on Wikipedia would have been impractical, not to mention close-minded, because Wikipedia is simply too handy to expect students never to consult it.

At Middlebury, a discussion about the new policy is scheduled on campus on Monday, with speakers poised to defend and criticize using the site in research.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, “I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.”

He continued: “Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.

“If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.”

Indeed, the English-language version of the site had an estimated 38 million users in the United States in December, and can be hard to avoid while on the Internet. Google searches on such diverse subjects as historical figures like Confucius and concepts like torture give the Wikipedia entry the first listing.

In some colleges, it has become common for professors to assign students to create work that appears on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia’s list of school and university projects, this spring the University of East Anglia in England and Oberlin College in Ohio will have students edit articles on topics being taught in courses on the Middle East and ancient Rome.

In December 2005, a Columbia professor, Henry Smith, had the graduate students in his seminar create a Japanese bibliography project, posted on Wikipedia, to describe and analyze resources like libraries, reference books and newspapers. With 16 contributors, including the professor, the project comprises dozens of articles, including 13 on different Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias.

In evaluations after the class, the students said that creating an encyclopedia taught them discipline in writing and put them in contact with experts who improved their work and whom, in some cases, they were later able to interview.

“Most were positive about the experience, especially the training in writing encyclopedia articles, which all of them came to realize is not an easy matter,” Professor Smith wrote in an e-mail message. “Many also retained their initial ambivalence about Wikipedia itself.”

The discussion raised by the Middlebury policy has been covered by student newspapers at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts, among others. The Middlebury Campus, the student weekly, included an opinion article last week by Chandler Koglmeier that accused the history department of introducing “the beginnings of censorship.”

Other students call the move unnecessary. Keith Williams, a senior majoring in economics, said students “understand that Wikipedia is not a responsible source, that it hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.” Yet he said, “I personally use it all the time.”

Jason Mittell, an assistant professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury, said he planned to take the pro-Wikipedia side in the campus debate. “The message that is being sent is that ultimately they see it as a threat to traditional knowledge,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity. What does that mean for traditional scholarship? Does traditional scholarship lose value?”

For his course “Media Technology and Cultural Change,” which began this month, Professor Mittell said he would require his students to create a Wikipedia entry as well as post a video on YouTube, create a podcast and produce a blog for the course.

Another Middlebury professor, Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said, “I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.”

And yes, back at Wikipedia, the Jesuits are still credited as supporting the Shimabara Rebellion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/ed...5&ei=508 7%0A





Single Bullet, Single Gunman
Gerald Posner

Advanced forensics and minuscule traces of DNA have created an ability to solve crimes, even cold cases decades old, has turned many people Americans into armchair sleuths seeking to "solve" the unexpected deaths of people like Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith. But sometimes old-fashioned evidence is as useful in solving puzzles as anything under a nuclear microscope.

Last weekend, a never-before-seen home movie was made public showing President John F. Kennedy's motorcade just before his assassination.

An amateur photographer, George Jefferies, took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years before casually mentioning it to his son-in-law, who persuaded him to donate it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.

The silent 8-millimeter color film was of interest to most people simply because it showed perhaps the clearest close-up of Jacqueline Kennedy taken that morning.

But to assassination researchers, the footage definitively resolves one of the case's enduring controversies: that the bullet wound on Kennedy's back, as documented and photographed during the autopsy, did not match up with the location of the bullet hole on the back of his suit jacket and shirt.

The discrepancy has given conspiracy theorists fodder to argue that the autopsy photos had been retouched and the report fabricated.

This is more than an academic debate among ballistics buffs. It is critical because if the bullet did enter where shown on the autopsy photos, the trajectory lines up correctly for the famous "single bullet" theory — the Warren Commission hypothesis that one bullet inflicted wounds to both Kennedy and Governor John Connally of Texas.

However, if the hole in the clothing was the accurate mark of where the bullet entered, it would have been too low for a single bullet to have inflicted all the wounds, and would provide ev idence of a second assassin.

For years, those of us who concluded that the single-bullet theory was sound still had to speculate that Kennedy's suit had bunched up during the ride, causing the hole to be lower in the fabric than one would expect. Because the holes in the shirt and jacket align perfectly, if the jacket was elevated when the shot struck, the shirt also had to have been raised.

Some previously published photos taken at the pivotal moment showed Kennedy's jacket slightly pushed up, but nothing was definitive. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have done everything to disprove that the jacket was bunched. Some used grainy photos or film clips to measure minute distances between Kennedy's hairline and his shirt, , what they dubbed the "hair-to-in-shoot distance."

The new film has finally resolved the issue. At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy's suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy's suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet's entry point.

While the film solves one mystery, it leaves another open. Estimates are that at least 150,000 people lined the Dallas motorcade route that fateful day, so there must be many other films and photographs out there that have never come to light.

Those who have them should bear in mind that even the most innocuous-seeming artifacts, like the Jefferies tape, can sometimes put enduring controversies to rest. As Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum said the other day, "The bottom line is, don't throw anything away."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...n/edposner.php





A Digital Life

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

Human memory can be maddeningly elusive. We stumble upon its limitations every day, when we forget a friend's telephone number, the name of a business contact or the title of a favorite book. People have developed a variety of strategies for combating forgetfulness--messages scribbled on Post-it notes, for example, or electronic address books carried in handheld devices--but important information continues to slip through the cracks. Recently, however, our team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure.

Digital memories can do more than simply assist the recollection of past events, conversations and projects. Portable sensors can take readings of things that are not even perceived by humans, such as oxygen levels in the blood or the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Computers can then scan these data to identify patterns: for instance, they might determine which environmental conditions worsen a child's asthma. Sensors can also log the three billion or so heartbeats in a person's lifetime, along with other physiological indicators, and warn of a possible heart attack. This information would allow doctors to spot irregularities early, providing warnings before an illness becomes serious. Your physician would have access to a detailed, ongoing health record, and you would no longer have to rack your brain to answer questions such as "When did you first feel this way?"

Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. We have found that digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes. Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. Your locations can be logged at regular intervals, producing animated maps that trace your peregrinations. Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.

A Web of Trails
The vision of machine-extended memory was first expounded at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, then director of the U.S. government office that controlled wartime research. Bush proposed a device called the Memex (short for "memory extender")--a microfilm-based machine that would store all of an individual's books, records and communications. The Memex was to be built into a desk and equipped with a keyboard, a microphone and several display surfaces. The person behind the desk could use a camera to make microfilm copies of photographs and papers or create new documents by writing on a touch-sensitive screen. The Memex user could also mount a camera on his or her forehead to capture pictures while away from the desk. One of the most prescient of Bush's ideas was the suggestion that the Memex should be designed to imitate the associative thinking of the human mind, which he described in lively terms: "With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

Over the next half a century intrepid computer science pioneers, including Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, developed some of Bush's ideas, and the inventors of the World Wide Web borrowed the concept of the "web of trails" to build their system of linking sites. But the Memex itself remained technologically out of reach. In recent years, however, rapid advances in storage, sensor and processor technologies have paved the way for new digital recording and retrieval systems that may ultimately go far beyond Bush's vision.

The growth of digital storage capacity has been staggering: today a $600 hard drive can hold a terabyte (one trillion bytes) of data, which is enough to store everything you read (including e-mails, Web pages, papers and books), all the music you purchase, eight hours of speech and 10 pictures a day for the next 60 years. If current trends continue, within a decade you will be able to carry the same amount of information in your cell phone's flash memory, while connecting wirelessly to a $100 four-terabyte drive on your PC. In 20 years $600 will buy 250 terabytes of storage--enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs. This capacity should be able to satisfy anyone's recording needs for more than 100 years.

At the same time, manufacturers are producing a new generation of inexpensive sensors that may soon become ubiquitous. Some of these devices can record a wealth of information about the user's health and physical movements. Others can gauge the temperature, humidity, air pressure and light level in the surrounding environment and even detect the presence of warm bodies nearby. Some monitors are meant to be worn, and others are designed to be placed in rooms or incorporated into appliances such as refrigerators. (A fridge sensor could keep track of your snacking habits by measuring the number of times the door is opened.) And microphones and cameras are now cheap enough to be installed virtually anywhere--particularly in cell phones, where camera inclusion is becoming the norm, with voice recording soon to follow.

Finally, the dramatic increase in computing power over the past decade has led to the introduction of processors that can efficiently retrieve, analyze and visualize vast amounts of information. An ordinary notebook PC can run a database that is more powerful and almost 100 times as large as that of a major bank of the 1980s. An inexpensive cell phone can surf the Web, play videos and even understand some speech.

As the hardware for digital recording has improved, more and more people have started to create electronic chronicles of their lives. The advent of cheap, high-quality digital cameras (including those incorporated into cell phones) has triggered a boom in photography. Blogs that incorporate photographs are now becoming more common than personal Web sites. Young people in particular are embracing blogging and the use of mobile devices. The fact that this proliferation of digital chronicling is taking place with only very rudimentary tools demonstrates how deep the desire must be. And the interest will surely grow once the process of digital recording becomes easier and more comprehensive.

One Man's Memories
Our own experience with digital memories began in 1998, when Bell decided to go paperless, doing away with a messy mountain of articles, books, cards, letters, memos, posters and photographs. To transfer this heap of memories to a digital record, Bell became obsessed with scanning all the documents and artifacts from his personal life and his long career in the computer business. (He even went so far as to scan the logos on coffee mugs and T-shirts.) He also began digitizing home movies, videotaped lectures and voice recordings. Bell is now paperless, but the cost was high: it took a personal assistant working for several years to complete the task. (Archiving more recent items has not required such strenuous effort, because the great majority of documents, images and videos are now created in digital formats, so capture is automatic.)

After scanning all this information, however, Bell became frustrated with his inability to make real use of it with the software available to him at the time. This frustration led to the MyLifeBits project. When we started the project in 2001, the search tools that had been developed for desktop computers were cumbersome. We set out to create a database that would give us the ability not only to do full-text searches of our PCs (a capability that is now commonplace) but also to quickly retrieve digital memories using attributes called metadata: for example, the date, place and subject of a photograph or written or spoken comments that the database appends to the file. Metadata are frequently a crucial part of recall; a person seeking a specific e-mail, for instance, may remember that it was sent at a certain time of year. By linking these metadata, much of which are obtained automatically, to digital memories, the database allows users to efficiently comb through even the largest archives.

MyLifeBits has also provided Bell with a new suite of tools for capturing his interactions with other people and machines. The system records his telephone calls and the programs playing on radio and television. When he is working at his PC, MyLifeBits automatically stores a copy of every Web page he visits and a transcript of every instant message he sends or receives. It also records the files he opens, the songs he plays and the searches he performs. The system even monitors which windows are in the foreground of his screen at any time and how much mouse and keyboard activity is going on. When Bell is on the go, MyLifeBits continually uploads his location from a portable Global Positioning System device, wirelessly transmitting the information to his archive. This geographic tracking allows the software to automatically assign locations to Bell's photographs, based on the time each is taken.

To obtain a visual record of his day, Bell wears the SenseCam, a camera developed by Microsoft Research that automatically takes pictures when its sensors indicate that the user might want a photograph. For example, if the SenseCam's passive infrared sensor detects a warm body nearby, it photographs the person. If the light level changes significantly--a sign that the user has probably moved in or out of a room and entered a new setting--the camera takes another snapshot. A recent study led by researchers at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, showed that a memory-impaired patient who reviewed SenseCam images every night was able to retain memories for more than two months. (In contrast, a nightly review of a written diary resulted in almost no improvement in memory retention.) Neuropsychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds in England speculates that the SenseCam could become "the first truly powerful 21st-century memory stimulant."

After six years, Bell has amassed a digital archive of more than 300,000 records, taking up about 150 gigabytes of memory. The information is stored on Bell's dual-disk notebook computer and his assistant's desktop PC, which are backed up locally and off-site. Video files grab the lion's share of the storage space--more than 60 gigabytes--whereas images take up 25 gigabytes and audio files (mostly music) occupy 18 gigabytes. The remainder is shared by 100,000 Web pages, 100,000 e-mails, 15,000 text files, 2,000 PowerPoint files, and so on. Bell has found the system particularly useful for contacting old acquaintances and finding other people with whom he needs to communicate. He has also employed MyLifeBits to retrieve Web sites for citations in his research papers, to provide doctors with records of a 25-year-old coronary bypass, and to obtain a photograph of a deceased friend for a newspaper obituary.

Some features of MyLifeBits, such as full-text search, have already been incorporated into commercial products. As a whole, though, the system requires more development to improve its ease of use and its management of the data. Better software for converting speech to text would greatly enhance the system by allowing users to search for words or phrases in phone conversations or other voice recordings. Similarly, automatic face recognition would solve the pesky problem of photograph labeling. And the retrieval of information could become easier if the system automatically identified the nature of each of the several hundred document types, perhaps by analyzing their form and content. But our research project has already dramatized the evolution of the PC from a word processor and number cruncher to a transaction processor that can log everything about the user's life in high-fidelity multimedia. Many experts have predicted the demise of the personal computer, but it is clear that the "P" in "PC" is not going away. If anything, PCs will become even more personal. What will change is the "C." Our machines will evolve into computing ecosystems that encompass not just computers but storage services on the Internet, new access devices (such as cell phones and entertainment centers), and ubiquitous sensors. Most likely our LifeBits will eventually be housed in a home server connected to various Web services.

Realizing the Vision
To illustrate the potential impact of digital memories, we have imagined a day in the life of a fictitious family making full use of this technology in the not so distant future. Various pieces of the family's digital memories are stored in their personal devices--their cell phones, laptops, home computers and so on--but all that information is also securely transmitted over the Internet to a host server run by a hypothetical company called LifeBits, Inc. This company manages the storage of the data, performs regular backups (so as to recover any inadvertently deleted material) and places copies of the archive in various locations to ensure that it is not destroyed in a natural or man-made disaster.

Because most of their information is available via secure Web access, the family members can retrieve it anywhere and at any time. Particularly sensitive information that might put someone in legal jeopardy can be kept in an offshore data storage account--a "Swiss data bank," if you will--to place it beyond the reach of U.S. courts. The children in the family can encrypt their recordings, but the LifeBits service will give the parents access to the data in case of an emergency. Likewise, some of the parents' digital memories may be covered by employment contracts that stipulate that the data related to their jobs belong to their employers. When such employees leave their jobs, they may have to perform a "partial lobotomy" on their copies of the memories, expunging everything deemed to be company property.

Some of the scenarios we have described are not all that futuristic. Wearable sensor platforms that collect health data and monitor vital signs such as heart rate, breathing and the number of calories burned are already being commercialized by companies such as VivoMetrics in Ventura, Calif., and BodyMedia in Pittsburgh. In the meantime, Dust Networks in Hayward, Calif., has developed a wireless hub for relaying signals among a network of sensors. The Human Speechome Project, led by Deb Roy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is engaged in recording nearly every waking hour of the first three years of a child's life--the child is Roy's son, now a one-year-old--to study how people acquire language. And Kiyoharu Aizawa and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo are working on wearable video camera systems that would identify interesting moments to capture for posterity by monitoring the alpha waves in the user's brain.

Microsoft Research is supporting 14 universities undertaking a variety of projects in the field of digital memories. One of them is MyHealthBits, led by Bambang Parmanto of the University of Pittsburgh; this effort is taking on the challenge of recording huge amounts of health data and managing the voluminous records that result. Recent studies at the University of Washington have shown the benefits of continuous health monitoring in diabetic patients and individuals with sleep disorders.

This early progress is encouraging, but the advent of the digital-memories era will not be trouble-free. Some countries and U.S. states currently impose restrictions on recording conversations or photographing people. Many individuals are equally concerned about recording information that could be used against them in court. Digital memories, unlike those in our brains, would be fair game in a legal proceeding. Richard Nixon famously advised his aides to say "I can't recall" when testifying before a grand jury, but tape recordings of his own conversations were his downfall. For those of us who view digital memories as an extension of our own minds, the use of such materials in court would feel like self-incrimination. New technologies, however, can help minimize the potential dangers. When recording others, for instance, it may be possible to obscure their images or speech to avoid illegal recording.

Guarding the privacy of digital memories will be critical. The prospect that identity thieves, gossipmongers or authoritarian states could gain access to such records is frightening. Most people, however, already have quite a lot of sensitive information on their PCs. Security is an important concern regardless of how far you go with the concept of digital memories (although storing a lifetime of personal data in a single archive does at least make the problem quantitatively worse, if not qualitatively). Furthermore, even if our computer systems can be made as secure as Fort Knox, users must be very careful when sharing their information; with a single errant keystroke, one's medical records might inadvertently be distributed to the entire world. To prevent such mistakes, the user interfaces for digital memories must be better than the ones we have now, and we will need intelligent software to provide warnings when sharing data looks risky.

Another technical challenge will be ensuring that users are able to open their digital files decades after storing them. We have already run into cases where we could not access documents because their formats were obsolete. Digital archivists will have to constantly convert their files to the latest formats, and in some cases they may need to run emulators of older machines to retrieve the data. A small industry will probably emerge just to keep people from losing information because of format evolution.

An even bigger challenge will be devising software that can enable computers to perform useful tasks by tapping into this gigantic store of collected knowledge. The ultimate goal is a machine that can act like a personal assistant, anticipating its user's needs. At a minimum, computers must do a better job of organizing the information. Search strategies that work well for a few shelves of books may not work at all for a collection the size of the Library of Congress. Most of us do not want to be the librarians of our digital archives--we want the computer to be the librarian!

Consequently, our research group is very interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to digital memories. Although many experts are skeptical about AI efforts, we believe that such software may yield practical results if it can draw on the tremendous stores of data in personal archives. An AI system designed to work with a wealth of information is bound to perform better than one that has to make a recommendation based on very few data points. We have begun work in this area, developing software that could organize files based on their content, but much remains to be done.

In a sense, the era of digital memories is inevitable. Even those who recoil at our vision will have vastly more storage on their computers in the coming years and will expect software to help them more and more in utilizing it. Although some may be frightened at the prospect of ubiquitous recording, for us the excitement far outweighs the fear. Digital memories will yield benefits in a wide spectrum of areas, providing treasure troves of information about how people think and feel. By constantly monitoring the health of their patients, future doctors may develop better treatments for heart disease, cancer and other illnesses. Scientists will be able to get a glimpse into the thought processes of their predecessors, and future historians will be able to examine the past in unprecedented detail. The opportunities are restricted only by our ability to imagine them.
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=...DA5FF0B0A22B50





Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them)

A new IT department is being born. You don't control it. You may not even be aware of it. But your users are, and figuring out how to work with it will be the key to your future and your company's success.
Ben Worthen

An April 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 45 percent of adults who use the Internet said it has improved their ability to do their jobs “a lot.”

These are your employees, and their message couldn’t be clearer: Technology, at least in their eyes, has made them significantly more productive. But CIOs shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back just yet. For this productivity boost the study credits the Internet, not enterprise IT, not the technology you provide, not, in short, you. And while Pew’s finding undoubtedly includes people who use the Internet to access your corporate applications, Lee Rainie, the Pew project director, says the research is not pointing to what a good job CIOs have been doing.

It tells a different tale.

“The big story is that the boundary that existed in people’s lives between the workplace and the home has broken down,” says Rainie. Almost unlimited storage and fast new communication tools allow people to use whatever information they choose, whenever they want to, from wherever is most convenient for them.

According to Pew, 42 percent of Internet users download programs, 37 percent use instant messaging, 27 percent have used the Internet to share files, and 25 percent access the Internet through a wireless device. (And these numbers are all one or two years old. Rainie “would bet the ranch” that the current numbers are higher.)

Does that sound like the tools you’ve provided your company’s employees? Do you encourage them to download programs and share files? Do you support IM? Have you outfitted a quarter of your company’s employees with wireless devices?

Really?

“A consequence of the blending of worlds is that people bring gadgets from their home life into the workplace and vice versa,” says Rainie. For example, a December 2006 survey by Searchsecurity.com found that only 29 percent of companies had a corporate instant messaging tool, a number that seems relatively small when compared with the percentage of people Pew says use IM in the office.

Users have a history of providing their own technology, but the capabilities of today’s consumer IT products and the ease with which users can find them is unprecedented. Thumb drives, often given away free at conferences, provide gigabytes of transportable storage. Google spreadsheets and other online documents let multiple people collaborate in one file. The Motorola Q, a phone that uses the cell network as an always-on high-speed Internet connection (and can be yours for just $125 on eBay) lets users forward their work e-mail to their phones without ever touching a mail server. And that’s only three examples. There’s a consumer technology out there for every task imaginable—and if there isn’t, there’s a tool that will let someone create it tomorrow.

The era in which IT comes only from your IT department is over.

So where does that leave you?

The Shadow IT Department

The consumer technology universe has evolved to a point where it is, in essence, a fully functioning, alternative IT department. Today, in effect, users can choose their technology provider. Your company’s employees may turn to you first, but an employee who’s given a tool by the corporate IT department that doesn’t meets his needs will find one that does on the Internet or at his neighborhood Best Buy.

The emergence of this second IT department—call it “the shadow IT department”—is a natural product of the disconnect that has always existed between those who provide IT and those who use it.

And that disconnect is fundamental. Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations. Consequently, when corporate IT designs and provides an IT system, manageability usually comes first, the user’s experience second. But the shadow IT department doesn’t give a hoot about manageability and provides its users with ways to end-run corporate IT when the interests of the two groups do not coincide.

“Employees are looking to enhance their efficiency,” says André Gold, director of information security at Continental Airlines. “People are saying, ‘I need this to do my job.’” But for all the reasons listed above, he says, corporate IT usually ends up saying no to what they want or, at best, promising to get to it...eventually. In the interim, users turn to the shadow IT department.

For many good and not-so-good reasons, the CIO’s first instinct frequently is to fight the shadow IT department whenever and wherever he detects it. But that approach, according to people who have thought long and hard about this potential war between IT departments, is a recipe for stalemate, if not outright defeat for CIOs.

The employees in your company are using consumer IT to work faster, more efficiently and, in many cases, longer hours. Some are even finding new and better ways to get work done. CIOs should be applauding this trend. But when you shut down consumer IT, says William Harmer III, assistant vice president of architecture and technology of financial services company Manulife, “You end up as a dissuader of innovation.”

Yes, the shadow IT department presents corporate IT with security and compliance challenges. Users could be opening holes in the corporate firewall (by downloading insecure programs), exposing company data irresponsibly (by scattering laptops, handhelds, and thumb drives hither and yon) and handling information in any number of ways that could violate any number of federal regulations. But CIOs need to deal with these problems strategically, not draconically.

“There’s a simple golden rule,” says David Smith, a vice president and research fellow at Gartner. “Never use security and compliance as an excuse for not doing the right thing. Never use these as sticks or excuses for controlling things. When you find that people have broken rules, the best thing to do is try to figure out why and to learn from it.”

Successful companies will learn how to strike a productive balance between consumer IT—and the innovative processes for which employees are using these tools—and the need to protect the enterprise. This will require CIOs to reexamine the way they relate to users, and to come to terms with the fact that their IT department will no longer be the exclusive provider of technology within an organization. This, says Smith, is the only way to stay relevant and responsive. CIOs who ignore the benefits of consumer IT, who wage war against the shadow IT department, will be viewed as obstructionist, not to mention out of touch. And once that happens, they will be ignored and any semblance of control will fly out the window.

And that won’t be good for anyone.

How the Shadow IT Department Works

Here’s an all-too-common response to the shadow IT department, courtesy of Bill Braun, vice president of information systems for the Texas Credit Union League: “What’s good for me is that it’s simple to say no [to consumer IT]. There goes most of the problem. Possibly some of the benefit, but certainly the problem.”

Passing over the fact that Braun admits that he’s willing to forgo the potential innovations consumer IT can provide, this approach also assumes that the shadow IT department has a similar structure to its corporate counterpart and can be managed in the same way.

It doesn’t and it can’t.

The shadow IT department is an entirely different beast.

Corporate IT is highly structured, with one individual or a small group controlling the nodes in a network and their relationships to one another. The shadow IT department, on the other hand, has no central authority and at best an ill-defined hierarchy; nodes join on their own and develop their own relationships. Marty Anderson, a professor at the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, calls corporate IT a command architecture and shadow IT an emergent architecture. Command architectures are set up to make them easy to manage and, as a result, they respond to top-down orders. Emergent architectures contain no dominant node and therefore provide no lever by which to manage them. That’s why it is impossible to kill the shadow IT department or keep it out of your company. It has no head to cut off or single channel to dam.

It’s natural for corporate IT to feel threatened by the shadow IT department, but the truth is that they already coexist everywhere. “The two have always been present,” says Anderson. “The management skill is noticing where they intersect and coming up with a strategy for dealing with it.”

For example, a similar dynamic has long played out in HR. A company’s employees have titles and reporting relationships that give their work a formal structure. But at the same time every company has an informal structure determined by expertise, interpersonal relationships, work ethic, overall effectiveness and so on. Companies suffer when HR is out of phase with the informal structure. Employees are demoralized when the formal architecture elevates someone at the bottom of the informal architecture, and people who occupy the top spots in the informal architecture leave when they aren’t recognized by the formal one. Good HR departments know where employees stand in both the formal and informal architectures and balance the two.

IT needs to learn how to strike a similar balance. Corporate IT isn’t going to go away, and neither are the systems that IT has put in place over the years. But a CIO who doesn’t develop a strategy to accommodate the shadow IT department will be employing an outdated and (more important) an inefficient business model. And, like the HR department that ignores the informal relationships in a company, the CIO might lose sight of how his users actually work. Corporate IT thereby loses its authority and, eventually, the CIO loses his job. It won’t happen quickly, but it will happen. As Anderson puts it, “It will be like getting nibbled to death by ducks.”

How to Make Peace With Shadow IT

Techniques will differ for each company depending upon its business, the degree of regulation to which it’s subject, its risk tolerance and so on, but some principles are universally applicable. Here are some starting points.

1. Find out how people really work.

Whether you know it or not, your company’s employees are using technology of their choosing, or using technology of your choosing in ways you never intended. Brian Flynn, senior VP of IT at BCD Travel, found this out when he deployed software that monitored the content moving across his network. Not only were employees using consumer IT tools (like IM) but they were using IT-provided applications to do things that were clearly security risks (such as sending sensitive information back and forth).

“I am convinced that most companies are flying blind,” says Flynn. “This is going on everywhere and IT just doesn’t know.”

Fight your instinct to discourage these behaviors by legislating against them. Yes, there may be security and compliance risks, but declaring open war on the shadow IT department will only turn it into an insurgency, driving it underground where it will be harder to monitor and harder to negotiate with. Instead, consider this an opportunity to find out where the IT you’ve provided is out of sync with your users’ needs.

2. Say yes to evolution.

CIOs need to make users feel comfortable about bringing their underground behavior into the light. The first step is a change in attitude.

“We tend to think of people who think out of the box as troublemakers,” says Flynn. “But we need to realize that maybe they know what they’re talking about and maybe we should try to meet them halfway if we can.”

Always try to help users figure out a safe and secure way to do whatever it is they’re trying to do. “People get used to [IT] telling them no, and after a while they stop telling you what they’re doing,” says Continental’s Gold. “So we try to say yes, dot dot dot.”

Rob Israel, CIO of the John C. Lincoln Health Network, has developed a policy that formalizes this mind-set.

“I’m the only person in IT allowed to say no,” he says. Conversely, his IT employees have only three options: approve a request, research it or pass it up to him. According to Gold and Israel, getting a reputation for saying yes will encourage users to come to you with ideas. That gives you the chance to learn what it is that the user is really trying to do and come up with a way to do it that won’t compromise security.

As irrelevant or irresponsible as some shadow IT projects seem on the surface, it’s important to accept the fact that users do things for reasons. If they are e-mailing critical files among themselves, it’s because they need to work on something from a different location and that’s the most direct solution that they can come up with. IT’s job shouldn’t be figuring out how to prevent the user from accessing and moving files, but rather to find a solution that lets him take that file home in a way that doesn’t make the company vulnerable and isn’t any more complex than the method that the user discovered on his own.

That last part is important. “No one,” says Flynn, “will jump through hoops.” They’ll go around them.

Gold says that most shadow IT projects are attempts to solve simple problems, and it’s easy for CIOs to mitigate the risks if they’re willing. For example, Gold found that people were taking files home on thumb drives. Instead of trying to outlaw the practice, he began distributing thumb drives with encryption software on them. The users’ experience never changed. “It was common sense to keep both security and how people work in mind,” he says.

3. Ask yourself if the threat is real.

The other part of developing a say-yes reputation is realizing which shadow IT projects really represent a security threat and which just threaten IT’s position as the sole god of technology provisioning. Maria Anzilotti, CIO of Camden Property Trust, a real estate developer, says that she has continued to allow IM even though most people use it for nonwork purposes. “We looked at the risk and decided it wasn’t worth [shutting it down],” she says. “A lot of people use it to communicate with their kids. It’s faster and less disruptive than phone calls.

“We keep an eye on it.”

Killing a shadow IT app without appreciating how thoroughly it’s been integrated into a company’s workflow can have unanticipated and unfortunate consequences. When Gold shut down IM at Continental, he got an angry call from an employee in the fuel management group who was using it (successfully) to negotiate jet fuel pricing for the airline.

Oops.

When a CIO prohibits people from using a technology that doesn’t pose a real security threat or doesn’t adversely affect his budget, he is setting himself up as a tin idol, a moral arbiter. That’s a guaranteed way to antagonize users. And that’s never a good idea.

4. Enforce rules, don’t make them.

There’s a fine line between providing access to data and determining who should have access to it. And Manulife’s Harmer says IT often crosses it.

“I own the infrastructure,” he says, “but the business owns the data.” IT creates artificial hurdles for employees when it makes blanket judgments about access that affect the entire company. “The key is not to paint all the users the same,” says Harmer.

Lincoln Health’s Israel deals with this challenge every day. It’s one thing, he says, for his nursing staff to search the Internet for the word breast; it’s another for someone in the accounting department. But if Israel installed a filter that prevented access to (apparently) pornographic websites, his nurses might not be able to find information that they need to treat a patient. The solution is for IT to provide tools that let an individual’s manager decide what information she needs to do the job.

“IT doesn’t know everything the business knows,” says Gold. “So it’s hard for me to make rules about who should have access to what.”

5. Be invisible.

Most companies have long lists of policies and regulations with which everyone must comply. But lists don’t enforce themselves.

“I wrote all the policies [here], and I only know two of them well,” says Israel. “So it’s unreasonable for an IT department to expect users to know them all. But we can put systems in place that put some automation behind our policies.”

Manulife’s Harmer says that the key is to develop an approach that secures data without depending upon how a user accesses it or what he does with it.

“The way I approach it is to bring the controls closer to the data,” he says. “That means not relying on a firewall but trying to figure out what I’m actually trying to protect and then dealing with it appropriately.”

At Continental, this type of approach has led to a change in the way the IT department designs systems. “Ninety percent of the applications we have that involve sensitive data are things we’ve written,” Gold explains. All that data was protected...as long as the user accessed it from the application IT built. But when a manager tried to compare revenue for different cities by copying the data into Excel (something Gold says happens routinely), the information was suddenly placed at risk. With this in mind, Gold encouraged the IT department to build encryption and other safeguards directly into the applications. That way, when a user pastes the revenue figures into a spreadsheet, the data, not the sanctity and integrity of the application (which are irrelevant), will still be protected.

Messy But Fertile Beats Neat But Sterile

IT has a natural tendency to think about technology in a system-centric way. Systems automate workflow and control access to information. And for a long time these systems made work and workers more efficient. “But there has always been a bright line between IT systems and what people really wanted to do,” says Babson’s Anderson.

“I used to have users come to me as if I was the almighty IT god,” says Israel, who recalls those as “the good old days.” But in that sense, god is dead, and IT’s authority and sense of purpose can no longer derive from controlling how people use technology.

“IT can’t insist on doling out IT,” says Gartner’s Smith. “The demographics of the workforce are changing. Younger people who are more familiar with technology are coming in, and they will not sit still while [CIOs] dole out corporate apps. If you want to retain the best and the brightest, you can’t lock down your environment.”

Smith advises CIOs to try to stop thinking about technology as something that must always be enterprise class. There are plenty of Web-based tools that can meet their users’ needs and not cost the company a dime. “Be open-minded and bring them in where appropriate,” he says.

Does that mean that the enterprise is going to become a messier place? Absolutely. That’s an inevitable consequence of user-centric IT. But messiness isn’t as bad as stagnation.

“Controlled chaos is always OK,” says Gold. “If you want to be an innovator and leverage IT to get a competitive advantage, there has to be some controlled chaos.”
http://www.cio.com/archive/021507/fe...mt.html?page=1





Vista Security Overview: Too Little Too Late
Thomas C. Greene

Review Microsoft has gone out on a limb to promote Vista not merely as "the most secure version of Windows ever" (every recent version is marketed with that tired slogan), but for the first time as an adequately secure version of Windows. "We've got the message and we've done our homework", the company says. So let's see if the reality lives up to the marketing hype.

As Billg likes to point out, Windows is the platform on which 90 per cent of the computing industry builds, and this naturally means that it's the platform on which 90 per cent of spyware, adware, virus, worm, and Trojan developers build. That translates into 90 per cent of botnet zombies, 90 per cent of spam relays, 90 per cent of spyware hosts, and 90 per cent of worm propagators. In a nutshell, Windows is single-handedly responsible for turning the internet into the toxic shithole of malware that it is today.

That's not going to change any time soon, no matter how good Vista's security might be, but a version of Windows with truly adequate security and privacy features would certainly be a step in the right direction.

And indeed, there have been improvements. For one thing, IE7, at least on Vista, is no longer such a dangerous web browser. It may still be the buggiest, the most easily exploited, and the most often exploited browser in internet history, and probably will be forever, but it has become safer to use, despite its many shortcomings. This is because MS has finally addressed IE's single worst and most persistent security blunder: its deep integration with the guts of the system.

Browser woes

At last, MS has, in a sense, sandboxed IE on Vista. In IE7's new protected mode (Vista only), which is enabled by default, IE is restricted from writing to locations outside the browser cache without the user's consent, even if the user has admin privileges. IE is essentially denied write access to the wider file system and to much of the registry. Hallelujah.

To oversimplify this, IE7 protected mode runs as a low-integrity process which is restricted to writing to corresponding low-integrity locations, where rights are minimal. A process started from such a location would have very low rights, as would each child process it spawns. This helps to reduce the impact of malware on the system overall. However, there is a brokering mechanism that enables users to download files to any location they have access to, or to install browser plugins and extensions, and the like. So users are still invited to make a mess of their systems, and no doubt many will, while Microsoft has a chance to shift blame away from itself.

However, IE7 on Vista does still write to parts of the registry in protected mode. And it appears to write to parts that MS says is won't (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ectedMode.asp). The company says that "a low integrity process, such as Internet Explorer in Protected Mode, can create and modify files in low integrity folders". We are assured that such low integrity processes "cannot gain write access to objects at higher integrity levels". And again, MS emphasises that a low integrity process "can only write to low integrity locations, such as the Temporary Internet Files\Low folder or the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\LowRegistry key".

So I tested this assurance. I ran IE in protected mode, typed a URL into the location bar and went there. Then I opened regedit, and searched for a string of text from that URL.

Sadly, IE7 is still stashing typed URLs in the registry, and not in the ...\LowRegistry location, either. I found them in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs (if you want to fix this, navigate to the key in the left-hand pane of regedit and right click, and choose permissions. Deny permission for each account. That ought to delete all the entries and take care of all related keys in one go).

No doubt one of those brokering mechanisms decided to write to that location, because a URL hardly carries the risk of causing malicious activity. So it's "safe", at least to some. But I wasn't asked if IE could write anything there. It was done automatically. And this behaviour does carry a security risk, if, like me, you think that user privacy and data hygiene are at all related to computer security. Surely, users should not have to hack their registry merely to purge their browser's data traces once and for all.

Next, there is IE7's anti-phishing filter gimmick. I disabled it almost immediately. It's very showy and it says, "Message: We Care", but I found it more irritating than actually helpful. I think a lot of users will disable it, and trust their instincts instead. Remember, if you put your mouse pointer over a link, the actual URL will be displayed in the status bar. The link may say Bank of America, but if the actual URL is http://123.231.123.231/bankofamerica.com/u/0wn3d/dummy/ then it should be pretty clear that it's a dodgy link.

IE7 also has a handy menu for deleting your history, cookies, cache, and so on. This is similar to the Mickey Mouse privacy utility in Firefox (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...ady_progress/). Remember that these data traces are not securely wiped, but merely deleted. They remain on your HDD until they happen to be overwritten. Firefox will let you delete all that stuff automatically each time you exit; IE won't: you have to do it manually. And remember, with IE your typed URLs are in the registry, where they definitely don't belong, and this utility won't purge them. Oh, and you have to enable User Account Control (UAC) for IE's protected mode to work. Not everyone is going to want to do that, as we will see later.

IE sorely needs cookie and image management like Mozilla's, allowing third-party or off-site images to be blocked, and allowing users to set all cookies to be deleted on exit. IE will allow you to block third-party cookies in the advanced section of the cookie management options, although the default is to allow them. There is no setting to block third-party images, unfortunately, which means that you can't avoid web bugs, or web "beacons" as marketing droids like to call them. IE also won't let you set cookies to be deleted on exit. IE7 will happily block cookies from websites that don't have a "compact privacy policy", a meaningless cookie policy statement (http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/s...vacypolicy.asp) that any malicious website could easily have. But this is something MS has been involved with, so they're all excited about it, even though it's rubbish. Unfortunately, they encourage users to depend on it, which is worse rubbish.

The default security settings for IE are basically sensible and I would change only a few, and this is the first time I've ever said that. I would tighten things up just a bit, disabling MetaRefresh, disabling "Launching programs and files in an IFRAME", disabling "websites in less privileged web content zone can navigate into this zone", and disabling Userdata Persistence. Otherwise, IE7 on Vista offers a decent compromise between security and usability. The privacy conscious are, as always, encouraged to use Mozilla for browsing instead, and leave IE in its default configuration, to be used solely for manual sessions with Windows Update.

Spambuster?

Next up, we have the successor to Outlook Express, called Windows Mail. I always considered Outlook Express to be hands down the worst email client ever devised. Windows Mail is a little better. There now are half-decent junk mail controls and, of course, the famous anti-phishing filter. Email memos are now stored as individual files instead of in a database file, which means they can be searched faster, and email contents will show up in the Windows main search, which is either very handy, or a privacy nightmare, depending on what you get up to with your email. This type of storage also makes it easier for you to nuke messages with a wipe utility, either by wiping free space after deleting, or wiping them manually if you have the patience.

However, junk mail controls are awkward. Flagging memos as spam is a hassle; you do this in a list above the preview pane with the right mouse button, and then select from a list of actions. This can be quite tedious if you get a lot of spam, because one can't select several emails for the same action. There really ought to be a junk button that one can use to mark memos as spam and delete them with a single click, as there is with Thunderbird. It would be nice if the default rule for such a junk button were to be blocking the sender, rather than the sender's domain. One can always block a troublesome domain manually if need be.

Interestingly, an email from Microsoft Press Pass - a mailing list of self-congratulatory press releases for tech journos - was automatically flagged as spam. I find it hard to disagree with that call.

Memos can be displayed as HTML with all the risky stuff, such as online images and scripts, blocked. And Windows Mail doesn't give you a hard time about displaying all memos as plain text, which I recommend. Or rather, it displays lightly formatted text; you don't get the raw text as you do with Kmail, so links show up as they would in HTML, with the actual URL hidden. Now, with IE7, such links show up in the status bar as the full URL when you mouse over them, but in Windows Mail they don't. This should be fixed, because otherwise one is stuck relying solely on Microsoft's anti-phishing filter gimmick.

While not security related, I will note briefly that there is no undelete button or Edit menu option to undo a deletion, for those of us who tend to delete first and ask questions later.

Click yes to continue

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a feature from XP SP2 that shuts down programs that handle memory oddly, and it is now set to full on by default. It works with address space layout randomisation, a new feature in Vista that loads some system code in unpredictable memory locations to defend against buffer overflow attacks. Both are very good ideas, and should help reduce the impact of malware to some extent.

However, DEP, when full on, may cause a number of applications to crash, or interfere with their installation. I'm betting that a majority of users will opt for the more conservative setting, and this of course means less defense for everyone.

User Account Control (UAC) is another good idea, because it finally, finally, finally allows the machine's owner to work from a standard user account, and still perform administrative tasks by supplying admin credentials as needed on a per-action basis. You know, the way Linux has been doing it forever.

This is one way of helping protect a multi-user system from being loaded with malware by users, and for ensuring that any malware on the system runs with reduced privileges. When you are in a user account, and you wish to perform an administrative task, you will be prompted for the required credentials. Aside from the prompt, the GUI shell will be disabled during this time, to help prevent certain kinds of privilege escalation attacks where the GUI shell or elements of it are spoofed by malicious software.

Of course, it only works if everyone stays out of the admin account as much as possible, and if everyone with an admin password knows better than to install a questionable program with admin privileges. And there's the catch: "Windows needs your permission to install this cleverly-disguised Trojan nifty program. Click Yes to get rooted continue."

So you see that, here again, MS's security strategy involves shifting responsibility to the user.

UAC is all well and good in theory, but here's the problem: it's never going to work. And the reason why it's never going to work is because MS still encourages the person who installs Vista (the owner presumably) to run their machine with admin privileges by default. I was delighted, when I set up Vista for the first time, to be presented with an opportunity to set up a "user" account. But moments later, when I saw that I was not invited also to create an admin account, I knew that the "user" account I had just set up was indeed an admin account. And so it was.

Until MS gets it through their thick skulls that a multi-user OS needs a separate admin account and a user account for the owner, and that the owner should be encouraged to work from a regular user account as much as possible, UAC will never work as intended.

In fact, UAC is the most complained-about new feature of Vista, and most people are disabling it as soon as possible. Why? Because MS still encourages the owner to set himself up as the admin, and work from that account. And when you're running in an admin account, UAC is nothing but a bother. Every time you try to take an action, and this could be as simple as opening something in Control Panel, UAC disables your screen and pops up a little dialog asking you if you really want to do what you just did. A pointless irritant that will cause the vast majority of Vista users to disable UAC, because the vast majority of Vista users will, unfortunately, be running as admins, thanks to MS's stubborn refusal to try to put everyone into a user account to the extent possible.

And once UAC is disabled, all of its security enhancements are lost. Yes, the basic idea is good, but the implementation has been completely bungled.

A few irritating details

The default folder view options could be improved for the security conscious user. One should definitely not hide file extensions, as the default file view has it, because it is possible to spoof icons and use bogus extensions that can make executables appear to be other than they are. Yes, UAC and DEP are supposed to help with this, but DEP will be set to its lower setting, and UAC will be turned off, on the vast majority of Vista boxes, for reasons we've already discussed. And since it's very likely that you will still be running your Windows box as an admin, if you're going to open a file with Windows Explorer, you'd better look to see whether or not it's an executable, because it will run with your privileges. So, at a minimum, the folder view should default to showing file extensions.

As usual, Windows enables far too many services by default. It would be a tremendous help if MS could somehow use its many wizards to enable only the services needed for each bit of hardware or software installed. That would take some effort on Microsoft's part, and on the part of device and software vendors, but the alternative so far has been to leave every single bell and whistle blaring. Unnecessary services waste RAM, and worse, those related to networking are a needless target for worms and other online attacks.

Data hygiene

The start menu now offers the option of not storing or displaying a list of recently-accessed files and programs. This used to be a real nightmare for data hygiene. Finally, it's fixed.

Oh wait; it's not fixed. In fact, things just got a lot worse. There is the new "Recently Changed" directory, which will show up as one of your "Favourite Links" in the left-hand column of your home or user directory, and in Windows Explorer. And guess what: all the files you've been fiddling with recently will show up in it. Its contents are identical to the "Recent Documents" folder that Microsoft let you think you had shut off.

But worse, the contents of your recently-changed directory will not show up in main search, even if you use advanced search, and search "everywhere". So you might not even know it's there. And still worse, you can't empty this directory without deleting all of the files it points to. You can empty your "Recent Documents" folder, and only the pointers or links will be gone; you don't lose the actual files. But with this new gimmick, you've got an archive of all the files you've looked at, regardless of where you've buried them in the file system hierarchy in hopes of keeping prying eyes off them, and you can't empty it unless you want to say goodbye to the files themselves.

The worst part of this is that by offering the option to disable the list of recent files, MS has given users a false sense of privacy and security. The reality is that privacy and data hygiene are even more difficult than before. What a blunder.

Child safety first

Now there is some good news, finally. Vista ships with parental controls that are reasonably easy to implement. You can set up accounts for the kiddies, and prevent them using all sorts of programs, like email, chat, and IM, or even deny them internet access altogether if they're too young. One thing that I like is the ability to prevent the little porn fiends from downloading files via IE7. But remember, if you have any other browsers loaded on the system, you must disable them all individually via the parental controls, because download blocking only works with IE.

The basic setup is sensible and allows for fine-tuning depending on each child's level of maturity and responsibility. And parents can schedule regular reports on their children's internet use.

Now, parental controls and filtering are all well and good, but we should beware of any false sense of security they might encourage. In a recent Today Show interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6TcxNjK7Kc) (video), Billg dilated glowingly about Vista's new parental control centre; but we should remember that it's merely a tool, not a solution. Parental controls are not a substitute for adult supervision. The internet is adult space, and so it should remain. Nothing sends my blood pressure into aneurysm territory faster than talk of legislation that would make the internet safe for children. The internet has been created by adults for adults, and children venturing online simply have got to be supervised, either by a parent or by a mature and responsible older sibling. Filtering is not a panacea.

Package deal

Now, for the Vista Security Centre. This has been controversial, involving MS in skirmishes with security software vendors who claim that Vista's built-in product is anti-competitive.

I'm not sure why anyone would worry. The Security Centre doesn't do very much except remind users, "Message: We Care". It's a little craplet with a stereotypical icon that looks like a shield, and it simply informs you of whether or not the firewall is on, whether or not you've got anti-virus software installed, and so on. It is integrated with an improved version of the malicious software removal tool, or anti-spyware tool, in the form of Windows Defender.

There's nothing much in Security Centre that XP SP2 doesn't have, except a warning that you've turned off UAC. It's something that one might wish to run or consult after installation, and maybe once a month thereafter. But it's on all the time, ready to harangue you, and it's rather difficult to make it go away.

It doesn't contain AV software, but a query for further information on virus issues will bring you to this web page (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...svistaav.mspx), where MS recommends the vendors it thinks are ready to handle Vista (McAfee is notably absent). Nor does it have a packet filter (firewall) with many features. It's not too bad to configure, but third-party packet filters offer many more options in terms of notification and controlling individual applications. I noticed one exception in the default firewall configuration that I didn't care for, for allowing remote assistance. I don't think that should be allowed unless you're actually using remote assistance.

Windows Defender is certainly better than nothing; it monitors files for changes that can indicate malicious activity, and searches for known spyware. It is also integrated with IE7 to some extent. However, what constitutes spyware is a judgment call, and it's never a bad idea to use more than one anti-spyware/anti-adware product, in hopes that one will pick up what another overlooks. (And WD does seem to miss (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...spyware_tests/) an awful lot of spyware.) I certainly wouldn't recommend depending solely on Windows Defender. But it's nice that it's there.

In a nutshell

So, what have we got here? An adequately secure version of Windows, finally? I think not. We have got, instead, a slightly more secure version than XP SP2. There are good features, and there are good ideas, but they've been implemented badly. The old problems never go away: too many networking services enabled by default; too many owners running their boxes as admins and downloading every bit of malware they can get their hands on. But MS has, in a sense, shifted the responsibility onto users: it has addressed numerous issues where too much was going on automatically and with too many privileges. But this simply means that the owner will be the one making a mess of their Windows box.

Data hygiene is still an absolute disaster on Windows. In fact, it's worse than it ever was in some ways, and that's very bad indeed. Browser traces still in the registry, heavy and complicated indexing to improve search, new locations where data is being stored. It all adds up to a privacy nightmare. Keeping a Vista box "clean" is going to be impossible for all but the most knowledgeable and fastidious users.

So don't rush out to buy Vista in hopes of getting much in return security-wise. I do like some of the changes, at least in theory, or as a decent platform on which to build an adequately secure version of Windows one day. But that day, if it ever comes, will be well in the future.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...rity_oversold/





British Royal Reporter Jailed for Hacking Into Palace Phone Systems
Tariq Panja

A British tabloid journalist who hacked into royal officials' voicemail was sentenced Friday to four months in prison, and his editor resigned. - The judge said he had no option but to hand a prison sentence to Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of the World, describing his crime as "reprehensible in the extreme."

Goodman's accomplice, the 36-year-old private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, was sentenced to six months in prison for hacking into the messages, including some from Princes William and Harry.

Shortly after the sentencing, The News of the World's editor Andy Coulson announced his resignation.

"I have decided that the time has come for me to take ultimate responsibility for the events around the Clive Goodman case," Coulson said.

Judge Peter Henry Gross said Mulcaire duped mobile phone network operators into passing him confidential pin numbers to access messages left on the cell phones. He passed those on to Goodman, and between them the pair made 609 separate calls to the voicemail systems of three senior members of the royal household.

"Neither journalist or private security consultant are above the law," the judge said, passing the sentence.

The calls to intercept the voicemail messages -- made between November 2005 and June 2006 -- targeted the telephones of the Prince of Wales's aide Helen Asprey, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the ex-SAS officer who is private secretary to Princes William and Harry, and Prince Charles' communications secretary Paddy Harverson.

Goodman, 49, acted after his once celebrated career began to founder, his lawyer Jon Kelsey-Fry said during the daylong sentencing hearing.

"Mr. Goodman's stories were no longer considered adequate by his superiors," he said. "He was demoted, sidelined and a younger reporter was assigned to cover the royal family. Under that pressure, he feared for his job.

"It was whilst under that pressure that he departed from these high standards with which he lived his life, a departure of which he will be ashamed for the rest of his life."

Gross acknowledged the reporter had acted in desperation, but said it could not reduce the "intrinsically serious and unattractive nature" of the crime.

Mulcaire, once a semiprofessional soccer player, had also pleaded guilty to five other charges of intercepting messages of well-known figures, including those of supermodel Elle Macpherson.

Goodman and Mulcaire had earlier apologized through their lawyers to the Prince of Wales, Princes William and Harry at a previous hearing, and the judge said their contrition had allowed them to have a more lenient sentence than the maximum two years they faced.

The judge said that although none of the stories produced using the intercepted messages were particularly noteworthy, the two men's conduct was a risk "to the very fabric of life in our country."

Eavesdropping is a sensitive issue for the royal family. Charles was the victim of an embarrassing intercept in 1989. The prince and his current wife, Camilla, were recorded having an explicit phone conversation while he was still married to Princess Diana.
http://www.metronews.ca/storyCP.aspx?pg=./X012607AU.xml





Airport ‘07

How to Crash an In-Flight Entertainment System
Hugh Thompson

One of the most interesting examples of a software "abuse case" came to me rather abruptly on an airplane flight from Las Vegas to Orlando in mid 2005.

Each seat in the airplane had a small touch screen monitor built into the head rest of the chair in front, and on this particular airline, passengers could watch a variety of television channels and play a few simple games. One such game looked remarkably similar to the classic strategy game Tetris, where players use their skills to manipulate falling blocks on a screen to try and form horizontal lines. I'm a big fan of Tetris; for a few months in 1998 I was borderline obsessed with it. I would start looking at everyday objects and start mentally fitting them together with other tings in the room to form weird line configurations. One of the options on this particular airborne version of Tetris was to alter the number of blocks one could see in advance on the screen before they started falling.

To give myself the biggest advantage in the game, I pressed the + control as many times as it would allow and got to the maximum value of 4. I then put on my "bad guy" hat on and asked: How *else* can I change the value in this field? Near my armrest was a small phone console; you know, the one where you can make very important calls for a mere $22 per minute. I noticed that the phone had a numeric keypad and that it also controlled this television monitor embedded in the seat in front of me.

I then touched the screen in front of me to highlight the number "4" in the options configuration shown in Figure 1. I tried to enter the number 10 into that field through the phone keypad with no luck: it first changed to the number "1" followed by the number "0". Frustrated, I then made the assumption that it would only accept single digit values. My next test case was the number "8"; no luck there either, the number didn't change at all. I then tried the number 5: success! '5' is an interesting test case, it's a "boundary value" just beyond the maximum allowed value of the field which was '4'. A classic programming mistake is to be off by 1 when coding constraints. For example, the programmer may have intended to code the statements:

0 < value < 5

When what actually got coded was


0 < value <= 5

I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the + button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like "if value = 4 do not increment." In this case, the value wasn't 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the + button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 + 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the + button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black.

Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black.

Screens in front of me and behind me go black.

The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!

After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played.
http://blogs.csoonline.com/node/151


















Until next week,

- js.



















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