News Common PC Linux Mac CUCUG
The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, September 20th, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes, of course, 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.
The September 20 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. All SIGs are open for any topic anyone wants to bring in.
ToC
By Greg Kline of the News-Gazette
and Matthew Richardson of the Daily Illini
A new, free downtown wireless system in Champaign, connected to the Internet, was officially up and running Friday (8/10/07).
Champaign-based Pavlov Media, which is providing the system as a community service with Go Networks and the city of Champaign, has been testing the network, the sign-on Web site and other details for most of this week.
Crews from the city, the California-based wireless equipment provider Go Networks, and Pavlov began installing the wireless access points, or nodes, on city light and traffic light poles in the downtown area Aug. 2.
To use the system, you need a wireless laptop or other mobile device capable of making a standard Wi-Fi connection.
Once connected, you open your Web browser, which takes you to a sign-in page. You have to provided your name, address, an email address and phone number, which Pavlov collects for legal liability purposed, under the federal Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, among other things.
Dorothy Kallmayer, Pavlov's business development manager, said the information is stored in a database. But Pavlov doesn't use it except in the case of legal action.
"That information is not sold," she said. "We are not in that business."
You end up at a page thanking you for registering, with links to community-oriented Web sites like the city's, the University of Illinois' and the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District's.
Once connected, the system functions like an unfettered wireless Internet access point at any number of coffee shops, libraries and other public places. Technically speaking, web traffic, ICMP [(Internet Control Message Protocol) a TCP/IP protocol used to send error and control messages], and DNS [(Domain Name System) a system for converting host names and domain names into IP addresses] are what are allowed through, everything else is blocked. Initially speeds have been capped at 400kbps up / 400kbps down.
Users can be connected for up to three hours before having to go through the sign-on process again. You have to go through the process each time you sign on; the system doesn't remember you.
The wireless access points have been placed at 10 locations downtown in an area roughly bounded by State Street, Church and Main streets, Walnut Street and University Avenue, including West Side Park. The nodes work together to create a wireless "mesh" network that basically covers the whole downtown.
The Champaign City Council cleared the way for the project in June by approving an agreement to allow the wireless access points to be placed on traffic signal and light poles. The city allowed the installations at no charge as long as the service remains free, which is Pavlov's intention. The bill for the initial purchase of the equipment for the wireless broadband connection is a gift from Pavlov Media. The continual operating expenses, such as maintenance and the actual broadband connection, are also being paid for by the company.
Go Network's Yaniv Sazman said the wireless nodes have been tested with a range as far as 13 miles in unobstructed terrain. In town, they will broadcast a signal for about a half mile, he said.
Currently the wireless is accessible in a 10 to 12 block area, extending as far as West Side Park. However, the wireless is designed to be accessible only on the outside, and not from the inside of any of the stores and shops in downtown Champaign, although a signal is obtainable in buildings with enough windows and near a node or nodes. Coverage depends on buildings, leafy trees and other obstructions between a user and a node.
"The goal is to make the cafe spaces up and down the streets of downtown (Champaign) free Wi-Fi enabled," said TJ Blakeman, city planner.
Pavlov, headquartered in Church Street Square downtown, provides voice and data communications and digital video entertainment services for apartment communities and other, generally "bulk," customers in 29 states. The company employs 86 people and operates a 24-hour call center.
Pavlov has a lot of customers in the Champaign-Urbana area but isn't well-known locally in general. Company officials hope the wireless system heightens its profile, and also see the system as a community asset that could draw even more people downtown.
"Mostly we did it because our corporate headquarters is right here in the downtown area, and we've watched the area grow," said Kallmayer.
"Pavlov always wanted to see a wireless network (in Champaign)," Kallmayer said. "We wanted people to know we were here, and the best way to do that was to give a gift to the city."
Kallmayer said the response that Pavlov Media has gotten from the community thus far has been positive.
"We have gotten a lot of feedback from the merchants in the area that are just really excited about having the service," Kallmayer said. "There's been a lot of gratitude expressed."
Many of the businesses in downtown Champaign already had free wireless broadband for their customers before the wireless system was put into action. Paul West, owner of Cafe Kopi, 109 N. Walnut St. in downtown Champaign, one of the cafes that previously had free wireless, still approves of the addition to the area.
"It's a nice idea, especially for Champaign," West said.
[Source: This story was edited together from one by Greg Kline, former CUCUG member, in the The News-Gazette, page A-3 Saturday, August 11, 2007 and one by Matthew Richardson in the Daily Illini Friday, September 7, 2007. Additional information gathered elsewhere.]
ToC
Posted by Stephen Shankland
September 14, 2007 12:51 PM PDT
URL: <http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9778778-39.html>
(This posting has been updated with comment from legal foes and with SCO financial information.)
Three and a half years after launching a high-profile legal attack on Linux, The SCO Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The Lindon, Utah-based company long has maintained that it had enough money to fight its costly lawsuits against IBM, Novell, Red Hat (which sued SCO proactively), AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. But on Friday, a month after losing on a crucial legal ruling, the company admitted a grimmer picture.
"The Board of Directors of The SCO Group have unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders and employees," the company said in a statement. Added Chief Executive Darl McBride, "We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business-critical operations."
Chapter 11 protects a company's assets from creditors during a reorganization.
IBM didn't comment, but Novell said it is evaluating its options. "U.S. bankruptcy law automatically stays the court case. We're assessing our options for how to pursue our interests," Novell said. A court case was scheduled to begin Monday to determine how much SCO owed Novell as a result of last month's ruling, according to Groklaw, a site that's closely monitored the case.
All of SCO's court cases now are on hold, a company representative said. SCO has a complicated history. It went public as Linux seller Caldera Systems, then acquired the Unix business from the Santa Cruz Operation and renamed itself The SCO Group. It then scrapped its Linux business and sued IBM and others, alleging that Big Blue violated its Unix contract by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux.
However, the company's legal case was dealt a crushing blow in August, when the federal judge overseeing its case, Dale Kimball, concluded "that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights."
In the meantime, SCO has been trying to enliven its ever-shrinking business, selling its UnixWare software, and to expand into the mobile-device software market.
In June, SCO reported a loss of $1.1 million for the quarter ended April 30 on revenue of $6 million, a decline from $7.1 million in the year-earlier quarter. Legal costs that quarter totaled $1.1 million, a major decrease from $3.8 million the year before.
Related link:
<http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070914/laf040.html?.v=101>
ToC
A European court found Microsoft guilty of breaking competition law and not ensuring software compatibility. But Stephen Beard reports that the ruling might not have a major effect on the company's market dominance.
Monday, September 17, 2007
URL: <http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/09/17/ruling_wont_dethrone_microsoft/>
Doug Krizner: Microsoft was defeated in a European courtroom this morning. A major anti-trust ruling was upheld -- one saying Microsoft abused its dominant market position. We have more from Stephen Beard in London.
Stephen Beard: The European Court of First Instance has ruled that Microsoft must pay the more than $600 million fine.
The court agreed the company had broken competition law by refusing to ensure its operating system works with rival software. The case concerned server software and media players.
Microsoft's been ordered to cooperate with competitors. The company has two months to mount an appeal. The European Commission welcomed the verdict.
But technology writer Barry Fox said it won't make much difference to Microsoft's dominant position:
Barry Fox: Microsoft software works better with Microsoft Windows operating system. And it's absolutely true sometimes it's just easier to give up and say, "OK Bill, OK Microsoft, you win -- I'm gonna use Microsoft software."
Fox says the ruling may prevent other near monopolies forming in Europe, but Microsoft will remain largely unscathed.
In London, this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.
ToC
By Steve Gorman
Sun Sep 16, 2007 11:30 PM EDT
URL: <http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-09-17T033041Z_01_N13417635_RTRIDST_0_TECH-EMMYS-GORE-SUNDAY-COL.XML>
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Six months after grabbing Oscar glory for his eco-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore collected an Emmy Award on Sunday for his fledgling youth-oriented cable network, Current TV.
The network, which launched in 2005 with video clips and other short programs made by viewers, received the "interactive television services" Emmy, a noncompetitive award picked by a panel of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
"We are trying to open up the television medium so viewers can help to make television ... and reclaim democracy," Gore said in accepting the award, given Sunday for the first time during the Primetime Emmys telecast.
Gore, who is chairman of the venture, was joined on stage by Current's chief executive, his business partner Joel Hyatt.
Billed by Gore as a media innovation that encourages a "two-way conversation" with its audience, the 24-hour network airs a mix of professionally produced segments and viewer-produced videos from a few seconds to 15 minutes.
About 25 percent of Current's programming "pods" consist of homemade pieces dubbed "viewer-contributed content," or "VC Squared.
The rapid-paced format is targeted at Internet-savvy viewers 18 to 34 years-old, a generation Gore said "wants to be in control of its media." Programming subjects range from fashion and lifestyle trends to news and current events.
Current TV was converted from a defunct cable channel, Newsworld International, that a Gore-led investor group purchased in 2004 from Vivendi Universal for a reported $70 million.
With an estimated reach of 50 million homes in the United States and Britain, Current is carried to subscribers through satellite service DirecTV and various cable systems.
Gore, the Democratic nominee for president in 2000, last plied the Hollywood red carpet in February, when the big-screen version of his slide-show lecture and book about the threat of global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.
Related links:
Current TV // The TV Network Created By The People Who Watch It
- <http://www.current.tv/>
Current TV - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_TV>
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Rich Hall for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
Friday, September 14, 2007
URL: <http://www.idrewthis.org/>
[There's] a court case to keep an eye on.
A few months ago, Universal Music Group [UMG] filed suit in federal court against California resident Troy Augusto, who makes a living selling used CDs on eBay. [Some of] these CDs were originally promotional copies, and Universal Music Group filed a complaint alleging that he is violating their copyright by selling these items. Their position is that because these are labeled "promotional use only," they are licensed, not sold, and remain the property of UMG. The eBay merchant has filed a counterclaim, with the help of the EFF.
There's more to this case than meets the eye, because it targets the "First Sale Doctrine," a 100-year-old legal precedent that says that once you legally obtain an item, you have the right to resell it. If the First Sale Doctrine can be negated just by applying a sticker to an item, this could cause problems for everyone from used CD stores to libraries, not to mention individual consumers. On The Media has an interview with the EFF lawyer handling the case, Fred von Lohmann, that discusses these issues.
Related link:
<http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2007/09/07/segments/85228>
[Editor's Note: My thanks to David L. Stevens for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
by Paul Thurrott, <thurrott@windowsitpro.com>
Retailing giant Wal-Mart has begun selling digital music downloads in a high-quality but unprotected MP3 format, marking what's perhaps the most effective offensive yet against market leader Apple Computer. Wal-Mart says it's offering "thousands" of digital albums and individual tracks in the highly compatible MP3 format, which should work with virtually every portable digital media player currently available, including the iPod.
Wal-Mart's digital music offerings are now split between the original format used by the service, a version of Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) with Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection, and the more compatible and unprotected MP3 format. The MP3 downloads are encoded at 256Kbps, matching the encoding rate Apple recently chose for the small range of unprotected Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) tracks it's selling from its iTunes Store. However, AAC offers poorer compatibility with PC-based software and portable media devices than does MP3.
Thanks to the unrestricted nature and format of the new music offerings, Wal-Mart's new MP3 songs are also compatible with Apple's highly successful iPod line of portable media players, unlike the WMA versions. This, too, should make the service more interesting to consumers.
Wal-Mart is offering MP3 versions of albums and songs from artists on both Universal and EMI. Individual songs are 94 cents each; albums are $9.22. (A few albums are sold for far less.) Apple typically sells individual songs for 99 cents and albums for $9.99, and has fought efforts by the recording industry to offer consumers variable pricing, which could raise prices for newer recordings but dramatically lower prices for the labels' extensive back catalogs.
Although EMI and Universal are on board with DRM-free music, other major record labels such as Sony BMG and Warner Music Group are currently evaluating the move. Though they are the first, Wal-Mart isn't the only service allowed to sell unrestricted MP3 files: Other retailers, like Amazon.com, Best Buy, Google, and Rhapsody will soon announce similar offerings.
In related news, yesterday MTV announced that it will drop its high- profile but hugely unsuccessful URGE music service and will instead partner with Microsoft competitor RealNetworks and its Rhapsody service. This is a huge blow to Microsoft, as URGE was the centerpiece of the most recent release of its media player software, Windows Media Player (WMP) 11, and a showcase for what a good Windows-based music service could be like. MTV and Real will also partner with Verizon to provide a version of the service to mobile customers.
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Jon Bjerke for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
URL: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6975838.stm>
Electronics giant Sony has confirmed a recently discovered security flaw in some of its products that could leave PCs vulnerable to attack by hackers.
The firm said that the fault, which affected software packaged with memory sticks, was developed by a third-party.
Sony said it was conducting an internal investigation into the problem and would offer a fix "by mid-September".
The vulnerability, found by security firm F-secure, was similar to one found on CDs sold by Sony BMG in 2005.
ToC
By TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer/Fri Aug 17, 4:41 AM ET/
URL: <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070817/ap_on_hi_te/compact_disc_anniversary_8;_ylt=AkTj7PI8xfm4HSOE0CiHDxoE1vAI>
It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday Ñ and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.
The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it's hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.
Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips' labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
"When we started there was nothing in place," he told The Associated Press at Philips' corporate museum in Eindhoven.
The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.
In 1980, researchers published what became known as the "Red Book" containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.
Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.
The CD's design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser Ñ the equivalent of a record player's needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.
Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser's light doesn't wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.
Legends abound about how the size of the CD was chosen: Some said it matched a Dutch beer coaster; others believe a famous conductor or Sony executive wanted it just long enough for Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Kramer said the decision evolved from "long conversations around the table" about which play length made the most sense.
The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit U.S. markets the following spring.
Sony sold the first player in Japan on Oct. 1, with the CBS label supplying Billy Joel's "52nd Street" as its first album.
The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its "Discman" series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.
The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp. in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.
"The CD was in itself an easy product to market," said Philips' current marketing chief for consumer electronics, Lucas Covers. It wasn't just the sound quality Ñ discs looked like jewelry in comparison to LPs.
By 1986, CD players were outselling record players, and by 1988 CDs outsold records.
"It was a massive turnaround for the whole market," Covers said.
Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.
CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple's iPods and other digital players.
"The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets ... can replace it, absolutely," said Kramer, the retired engineer.
CDs won't disappear overnight, but its years may be numbered.
Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers.
The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.
Kramer said it has been satisfying to witness the CD's long run at the top and know he had a small hand in its creation.
"You never know how long a standard will last," he said. "But it was a solid, good standard and still is."
___Associated Press Business Writer Alex Veiga contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
URL: <http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.anniversary.ap/index.html?%20iref=werecommend>
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.
:-)
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes -- a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis -- as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.
To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.
Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.
Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.
"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile -- or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
Computer science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.
"I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea -- it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."
Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.
"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."
Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.
"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."
Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."
"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language -- to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.
In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."
Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication.
"I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have."
ToC
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
Friday, August 24, 2007 11:17:24 AM
URL: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20424880/>
A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple's iPhone to AT&T's wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.
George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.
While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.
"That's the big thing," said Hotz, in a phone interview from his home in Glen Rock.
The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the U.S.
Calls to AT&T and Apple for comment were not immediately returned.
The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.
"That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."
He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.
"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said.
The modification leaves the iPhone's many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks, intact. The only thing that won't work is the "visual voicemail" feature, which shows voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.
Hotz collaborated online with four other people, two of them in Russia, to develop the unlocking process.
"Then there are two guys who I think are somewhere U.S.-side," Hotz said. He knows them only by their online handles.
---
by Jonathan Liss
<http://seekingalpha.com/article/41883-iphone-hack-allows-attackers-complete-control>
Computer security testing company, Independent Security Evaluators [ISE], says it has found a flaw in the iPhone which gives a hacker full control over the device. By redirecting a user's browser page to a web page containing malicious code, through a standard WiFi connection, ISE was able to gain full operational control over the iPhone in question and, downloading private text messages and even recording conversations occurring in the room. According to ISE's principal security analyst, former NSA employee Charles A. Miller, "Once you did manage to find a hole, you were in complete control... We can get any file we want." There is as of yet no evidence the hack has been exploited in a working iPhone. Apple responded to ISE's report: "Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users. We're looking into the report submitted by I.S.E. and always welcome feedback on how to improve our security."
The details are here:
Finding JTAG on the iPhone
- <http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/>
PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
August 30, 2007 at 9:19 AM EDT
URL: <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wgtiphone0830/BNStory/Technology/home>
NEW YORK Ñ Hackers have figured out how to unleash Apple's iPhone from AT&T's cellular network, but people hoping to make money from the procedure could face legal problems.
At least one of the companies hoping to make money by unlocking iPhones said it is hesitating after calls from lawyers representing the phone company.
[more]
---
From: "Adam C. Engst" <ace@tidbits.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:50:36 -0700
Hey folks,
It appears that there's a hack application - INdependence - that activates an iPhone without requiring you to sign up for a two-year contract or a prepaid plan. In other words, it lets you use an iPhone for everything an iPhone can do that's unrelated to cellular access.
<http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/INdependence>
But here's the question - is doing such a thing ethical, given that Apple and AT&T have priced the iPhone and its plans with the assumption that everyone will activate using them? Obviously, at the individual level there's no significant harm to either company, but if such an approach were to become commonplace, both companies would suffer for real, and unreasonably so.
Is hacktivating an iPhone ethical?
cheers... -Adam
--
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Publisher <http://www.tidbits.com/adam/>
Symmetric bandwidth is the right way to do things
By Fernando Cassia in Argentina: Tuesday 28 August 2007, 09:59
URL: <http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41961>
THE CO-FATHER of the TCP/IP protocol and so-called "father of the Internet" as well told a packed auditorium at the University of Buenos Aires last week that all internet links should be symmetric.
Internet pioneer Vinton G. Cerf - now turned Google's Internet Evangelist - visited the land of Tango and gave an interesting and amusing talk about the past, present, and future of the Net. He's been doing so for quite some time, and let me tell you that he's really good at it. [But is he any good at the Tango, Fernando? Ed.]
One of Cerf's points was that one of the pros of the widespread adoption of the Net was the democratisation of access to information and that people are incresingly becoming content producers, sending information back to the Web and not just being 'passive consumers' of pre-packaged bits. He mentioned the Wikipedia and people who upload their own creations to Youtube as examples of that shift. [Speaking of the latter, I asked the UBA hosts for any links to Cerf's videotaped speech, but I was told yesterday that it'd be uploaded to Youtube "soon", and that they'll let me know].
So, when it was time for questions from the audience, this correspondent INQuired: "with regards to your point about users becoming content creators, don't you think that it's very important that the broadband providers, the ISPs, provide symmetric connections, so that the upload (upstream) speed matches the download speed?"
He surely got the point and to my surprise, agreed very emphatically. "Absolutely", he said, describing the lack of symmetric bandwidth as one of the current problems of the Net: "currently, the residential customers are the handicapped of the Net" said Cerf, adding that because of that, users who want symmetric internet links often have to purchase an expensive "business grade" internet connection, finally pointing out that symmetric internet connections are essential for the new wave of applications on the network, like video conferencing, running your own servers, TV time-shifting and place-shifting devices, and the like.
Cerf's call for symmetric bandwidth is specially important because it was made in a country like Argentina where upstream speeds for residential broadband border the ridiculous, often in the 128K to 256K range - even for 5Mbit downstream links -a 20 to one ratio-. So this scribbler obviously sympathised with Cerf's claims. But... what can be done about it? Cerf has a notion. In an earlier part of his talk, he gave his own personal approach for fighting the current state of affairs: "public embarrassment is my approach", he said, and by that he referred to doing and publishing comparisons of how expensive, slow, - or both - internet access is in the US compared to some of the World leaders in the area like Japan or Korea.
Cerf apparently believes this kind of public embarrassment of the coporations, the governments and its telecomms regulating authorities will make the politicians and the companies involved move to improve their collective act
ToC
Posted by Esme Vos at 12:59 AM on August 31, 2007
URL: <http://www.muniwireless.com/article/view/6367/>
Free, a subsidiary of Iliad, is offering 100 Mbps fiber broadband service to residents in Paris for 30 Euros per month. The price includes telephone service and IPTV (including high definition channels). The service will be available starting mid-September in the 15th and 20th arrondissements of Paris and rolled out to the rest of the city.
Free is competing with Neuf Cegetel's 30 EUR, 50 Mbps symmetrical service and France Telecom's 44.90 EUR, 100 Mbps service.
Details of Free's 30 EUR per month fiber broadband offer:
by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#892/13-Aug-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9112>
The developers of the KisMAC Wi-Fi sniffing and cracking software have removed their code from distribution and halted their efforts, due to a change in German law that came into effect on 11-Aug-07 (article in German). KisMAC could be used for good or evil, but it was primarily a tool for monitoring and evaluating the security of Wi-Fi networks.
<http://kismac.de/>
<http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/94190/from/atom10>
System administrators who used Macs were particularly fond of KisMAC. It was also a good way to demonstrate the utter failure of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption for Wi-Fi when trying to convince people to upgrade to WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), which actually works (see "Step on a WEP Crack, Break Your Network's Back," 2007-04-09).
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8942>
KisMAC's developers reacted to a small set of changes to section 202 in the German Penal Code. These changes broadened the definition of unauthorized access, and, in section 202c, criminalized both the possession of passwords to such networks and any tools that facilitate extraction of passwords and such. Section 202b says either unauthorized access to a private network or obtaining the data or the wireless transmissions of a computer is illegal, unless the data is intended for you. The penalty is two years imprisonment - the lovely phrase Freiheitsstrafe or "freedom penalty" - or a monetary fine. (Unauthorized access and "data not specifically for you" are two overlapping parts - the one being access or interception, the other being the data itself.)
<http://www.bmj.de/files/-/1317/RegE%20Computerkriminalit%E4t.pdf>
Section 202c describes punishment of a year in jail or fines if password or security codes to such networks are involved. It likens trafficking in passwords - selling, giving, receiving, etc. - to creating software that allows the extraction of passwords. There's no exemption in the law, as I read it with my rusty German, that allows for research or other mitigating factors.
Thus, KisMAC's ability to exist in Germany is legally invalidated, whether for the developers or those who use the software for any but very limited purposes. Because you give yourself permission to sniff your own network, you might be okay to use KisMAC in Germany, but the law seems to indicate that because infringing purposes are available, the software would be thoroughly outlawed even for in-house testing. If you inadvertently sniffed another network, too, you'd be in trouble even if in-house use were permitted.
These laws are part of a class of law found worldwide in which certain behavior is de facto illegal, regardless of any circumstances. The possession of child pornography, for instance, is so illegal in most of the world that even if you can prove you didn't obtain or view the pornography, you may have no defense against imprisonment. This law provides the same level of indefensibility. The KisMAC developers note that in Germany, possession of child pornography carries twice the jail penalty of this new law.
There's a further, broader set of changes to German law coming in 2008, too, which don't specifically deal with hacking, but which raise similar concerns. The potential new policy covering Vorratsdatenspeicherung - loosely: the retention of stored data - includes all mobile and fixed telephony and data transfers. It has an incredibly overarching effect in requiring firms to retain records about the origin, destination, and location of parties involved in calling, emailing, text messaging, and other activities. A demonstration against the law is scheduled for 22-Sep-07 in Berlin.
<http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/>
As of 06-Aug-07, according to Wikipedia's timeline of the matter, the developers say that a site in the Netherlands should be available "soon." The KisMAC site notes, "KisMAC will live on. Different people. Different country. Same 'threat' to national security." Wikipedia may be the best place to follow developments in KisMAC's future, as the article continues to be updated.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KisMAC>
ToC
As noted last month, the Chicago Tribune reported the AT&T snipping of Pearl Jam's performance at Chicago's Lollapalooza music festival, Sunday August 5th, during a live Internet broadcast.
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-thu_jam_0809aug09,1,6237615.story>
The Chicago Sun-Times has since reported that AT&T's Blue Room Webcast had also silenced comments during two performances at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee last June, cutting remarks by the John Butler Trio bemoaning the lack of federal response to Hurricane Katrina and comments about Bush and the war in Iraq by singer Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. The article says it's not the first time AT&T has done these edits. AT&T did confirm that other unspecified political comments had been cut from its webcasts.
<http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/derogatis/505989,10att.article#>
ToC
Producer - Stevie Converse
Asst. Producer - Candace Clement
Media Minutes, August 31, 2007
Audio: <http://freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/MM_8_31_07.mp3>
Text: <http://freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/mm_8_31_07.doc>
The Bush administration has acknowledged that U.S. telecommunications companies helped the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program.
During an interview with the El Paso Times, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell publicly confirmed the phone companies' role in the spying for the first time.
AT&T and several other carriers are being sued for permitting wiretapping on international communications and violating the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.
The government has argued the cases should be thrown out because the subject matter is a "state secret," and any disclosures would jeopardize national security.
McConnell's admission could help get the case into court.
Cindy Cohn is the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is heading up the case against AT&T.
Cindy Cohn: I think it will make it very difficult for the government to argue that the case needs to be dismissed at the outset. But it doesn't change the court case in and of itself.
McConnell claimed that reporting on the program or debating the wiretapping bill in Congress would quote "mean that some Americans are going to die."
Cindy Cohn: Obviously there are important national security issues that shouldn't be discussed, but this plainly isn't one of them. And to do this kind of scaremongering, it undermines their credibility. I think an informed citizenry is our best protection against people who try to change fundamentally our way of life.
The Bush administration has urged Congress to pass a law granting more powers to the NSA and immunity to the telecom companies.
Cindy Cohn: People need to watch because, sometimes it's called immunity, sometimes, I think, they're starting to present a second option as if it was different, called substitution. Both of these situations would allow the phone companies to be off the hook for the last six years of violating our privacy. But more important, would grant them immunity moving forward. It would mean that the phone companies no longer have any obligation to protect our privacy.
Cohn says that corporate consolidation has helped the administration in their quest for our private information. And the implications for what is becoming our most common method of communication - the Internet - couldn't be more important.
Cindy Cohn: You want to have a robust competition for all levels of our communications infrastructure and very strong regulatory limits on what folks can do. I think it demonstrates the risks that when you get too much of our communications infrastructure in the hands of too few people and no competition, then you begin to see all sorts of areas where things can go terribly wrong terribly quickly. It's definitely troubling. You have these companies that become a one-stop shop for illegal government surveillance, and a one-stop shop for other sorts of problems and limits on our access to information.
Related Links:
Electronic Freedom Foundation - <http://www.eff.org/>
Role of Telecom Firms in Wiretaps Is Confirmed - <http://www.freepress.net/news/25710>
Telecom Firms Helped with GovernmentÕs Warrantless Wiretaps - <http://www.freepress.net/news/25711>
Debate on FISA - <http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_6685679?source=most_viewed>
By Ryan Singel - Email <http://www.wired.com//services/feedback/letterstoeditor>
08.29.07 |2:00 AM
URL: <http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/08/wiretap>
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.
Slideshow - Snapshots of the FBI Spy Docs
<http://www.wired.com/politics/security/multimedia/2007/08/gallery_wiretaps>
DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.
Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents <http://www.eff.org/flag/061708CKK/> acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.
The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)
DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.
A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.
Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.
FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf.
The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.
The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.
FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches.
Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them.
The numerical scope of DCSNet surveillance is still guarded. But we do know that as telecoms have become more wiretap-friendly, the number of criminal wiretaps alone has climbed from 1,150 in 1996 to 1,839 in 2006. That's a 60 percent jump. And in 2005, 92 percent of those criminal wiretaps targeted cell phones, according to a report published last year.
These figures include both state and federal wiretaps, and do not include antiterrorism wiretaps, which dramatically expanded after 9/11. They also don't count the DCS-3000's collection of incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed. Far more common than full-blown wiretaps, this level of surveillance requires only that investigators certify that the phone numbers are relevant to an investigation.
The Justice Department reports the number of pen registers to Congress annually, but those numbers aren't public. According to the last figures leaked to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, judges signed 4,886 pen register orders in 1998, along with 4,621 time extensions.
The law that makes the FBI's surveillance network possible had its genesis in the Clinton administration. In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.
CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system.
With new CALEA-compliant digital switches, the FBI now logs directly into the telecom's network. Once a court order has been sent to a carrier and the carrier turns on the wiretap, the communications data on a surveillance target streams into the FBI's computers in real time.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation requested documents on the system under the Freedom of Information Act, and successfully sued the Justice Department in October 2006.
In May, a federal judge ordered the FBI to provide relevant documents to the EFF every month until it has satisfied the FOIA request.
"So little has been known up until now about how DCS works," says EFF attorney Marcia Hofmann. "This is why it's so important for FOIA requesters to file lawsuits for information they really want."
Special Agent Anthony DiClemente, chief of the Data Acquisition and Intercept Section of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, said the DCS was originally intended in 1997 to be a temporary solution, but has grown into a full-featured CALEA-collection software suite.
"CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information," DiClemente told Wired News. "Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell."
Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn't stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law's reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.
Meanwhile, the FBI's efforts to keep up with the current communications explosion is never-ending, according to DiClemente.
The released documents suggest that the FBI's wiretapping engineers are struggling with peer-to-peer telephony provider Skype, which offers no central location to wiretap, and with innovations like caller-ID spoofing and phone-number portability.
But DCSNet seems to have kept pace with at least some new technologies, such as cell-phone push-to-talk features and most VOIP internet telephony.
"It is fair to say we can do push-to-talk," DiClemente says. "All of the carriers are living up to their responsibilities under CALEA."
Matt Blaze, a security researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who helped assess the FBI's now-retired Carnivore internet-wiretapping application in 2000, was surprised to see that DCSNet seems equipped to handle such modern communications tools. The FBI has been complaining for years that it couldn't tap these services.
The redacted documentation left Blaze with many questions, however. In particular, he said it's unclear what role the carriers have in opening up a tap, and how that process is secured.
"The real question is the switch architecture on cell networks," said Blaze. "What's the carrier side look like?"
Randy Cadenhead, the privacy counsel for Cox Communications, which offers VOIP phone service and internet access, says the FBI has no independent access to his company's switches.
"Nothing ever gets connected or disconnected until I say so, based upon a court order in our hands," Cadenhead says. "We run the interception process off of my desk, and we track them coming in. We give instructions to relevant field people who allow for interconnection and to make verbal connections with technical representatives at the FBI."
The nation's largest cell-phone providers -- whose customers are targeted in the majority of wiretaps -- were less forthcoming. AT&T politely declined to comment, while Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon simply ignored requests for comment.
Agent DiClemente, however, seconded Cadenhead's description.
"The carriers have complete control. That's consistent with CALEA," DiClemente said. "The carriers have legal teams to read the order, and they have procedures in place to review the court orders, and they also verify the information and that the target is one of their subscribers."
Despite its ease of use, the new technology is proving more expensive than a traditional wiretap. Telecoms charge the government an average of $2,200 for a 30-day CALEA wiretap, while a traditional intercept costs only $250, according to the Justice Department inspector general. A federal wiretap order in 2006 cost taxpayers $67,000 on average, according to the most recent U.S. Court wiretap report.
What's more, under CALEA, the government had to pay to make pre-1995 phone switches wiretap-friendly. The FBI has spent almost $500 million on that effort, but many traditional wire-line switches still aren't compliant.
Processing all the phone calls sucked in by DCSNet is also costly. At the backend of the data collection, the conversations and phone numbers are transferred to the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Data Management System, an Oracle SQL database that's seen a 62 percent growth in wiretap volume over the last three years -- and more than 3,000 percent growth in digital files like e-mail. Through 2007, the FBI has spent $39 million on the system, which indexes and analyzes data for agents, translators and intelligence analysts.
To security experts, though, the biggest concern over DCSNet isn't the cost: It's the possibility that push-button wiretapping opens new security holes in the telecommunications network.
More than 100 government officials in Greece learned in 2005 that their cell phones had been bugged, after an unknown hacker exploited CALEA-like functionality in wireless-carrier Vodafone's network. The infiltrator used the switches' wiretap-management software to send copies of officials' phone calls and text messages to other phones, while simultaneously hiding the taps from auditing software.
The FBI's DiClemente says DCSNet has never suffered a similar breach, so far as he knows.
"I know of no issue of compromise, internal or external," DiClemente says. He says the system's security is more than adequate, in part because the wiretaps still "require the assistance of a provider." The FBI also uses physical-security measures to control access to DCSNet end points, and has erected firewalls and other measures to render them "sufficiently isolated," according to DiClemente.
But the documents show that an internal 2003 audit uncovered numerous security vulnerabilities in DCSNet -- many of which mirror problems unearthed in the bureau's Carnivore application years earlier.
In particular, the DCS-3000 machines lacked adequate logging, had insufficient password management, were missing antivirus software, allowed unlimited numbers of incorrect passwords without locking the machine, and used shared logins rather than individual accounts.
The system also required that DCS-3000's user accounts have administrative privileges in Windows, which would allow a hacker who got into the machine to gain complete control.
Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.
"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."
Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.
"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"
See Also:
Wired Blog: Threat Level
- <http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/>
FBI's Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats
<http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/07/fbi_spyware>
Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball -
<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/71022>
The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool -
<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914>
Critics Slam Net Wiretapping Rule -
<http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/08/68483>
Posted by RangerLG on 09 September 2007 - 11:47
URL: <http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=42444>
The rapid growth of online videos, music and games has created a new Internet sin: using it too much. Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits.
"You have no way of knowing how much is too much," said Sandra Spalletta of Rockville, whose Internet service was suspended in March after Comcast sent her a letter warning that she and her teenage son were using too much bandwidth. They cut back on downloads but were still disconnected. She said the company would not tell her how to monitor their bandwidth use in order to comply with the limits. "You want to think you can rely on your home Internet service and not wake up one morning to find it turned off," said Spalletta, who filed a complaint with the Montgomery County Office of Cable and Communication Services. "I thought it was unlimited service."
As Internet service providers try to keep up with the demand for increasingly sophisticated online entertainment such as high-definition movies, streaming TV shows and interactive games, such caps could become more common, some analysts said. It's unclear how many customers have lost Internet service because of overuse. So far, only Comcast customers have reported being affected. Comcast said only a small fraction of its customers use enough bandwidth to warrant pulling the plug on their service.
News source: MSNBC
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Jon Bjerke for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
COMMENTARY
By John W. Schoen
Senior Producer, MSNBC
URL: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16327401/>
This week, Erik in Washington state is steamed about increases in his cable TV bill. Turns out he may be getting some help from the FCC. Over in the other Washington (D.C.).
Why can Comcast cable basic rate increase 3-4 percent every year for the last four years?
/-- Erik, Buckley, Wash./
If your cable TV rates have gone up by 4 percent a year, you're getting off relatively easy, according to a report last week form the Federal Communications Commission. Since 1996, the average monthly cable bill is up 93 percent, the commission reported last week.
Deregulation was supposed to help bring down the price of many telecommunications services, and it most cases it has. Over the past decade, for example, telephone rates are down 40 percent and wireless rates down 80 percent, according to the FCC.
But it hasn't worked out that way with cable TV rates. The average cable bill rose 5.6 percent in 2005 Ñ to $43.04. Basic cable was up 3.3 percent to $14.30 and "expanded" basic Ñ the package 84 percent of cable subscribers chose Ñ was up 6.2 percent to $28.74.
In theory, cable companies aren't supposed to be able to just raise their rates as much as they want. The cable television industry is regulated by thousands of individual local franchise authorities Ñ city or county commissions set up by the states Ñ which grant cable operators the right to sell their service. Apart from reviewing rates, these commissions collect franchise fees from the cable company and are supposed to make sure customers get good service. (It looks like your local franchise authority is the Rainier Communications Commission, so if you've got a complaint about Comcast, you should give them a call.)
Local Franchise Authorities Ñ usually Ñ regulate basic cable rates, though there are certain situations when these basic rates go unregulated. And rates for all other service tiers are unregulated.
Which means cable companies can effectively charge whatever they want. And unlike, say, the wireless phone industry, there's a lot less competition among cable television companies in a given service area. Though the cable operators have recently begun offering local and long distance phone services, telephone companies complain they've hit roadblocks when they try to offer digital television service over their newly installed fiber optic cables.
All of which could be about to change. Last week, the FCC voted to streamline the approval process for telephone companies that want to sell you television services. The new rules set deadlines for local regulators to review applications from phone companies that want to offer you digital TV service. And the FCC voted to restrict the demands local franchise authorities on phone companies in exchange for approval Ñ everything from picking up the cost of televising city council hearings to paying for streetlights.
More competition would help lower cable rates, said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. But the new rules are already under attack Ñ from, among others, local regulators. County and city government officials say the FCC went too far with the new rules, taking regulatory authority away from them.
Cable companies also say the new rules give telephone companies an advantage because they eliminate the kind of negotiation with local officials that cable companies had to go through when they got started. The commission split along party lines Ñ with the Republicans favoring the new rules and the Democrats opposing them.
So don't expect to your local telephone company to be allowed to compete with your cable operator any time soon. It looks like the new rules are going end up in court, where a judge will likely have to rule on the new rules. And don't be surprised if the new Congress decides to weigh in as well.
ToC
broadcast August 24, 2007
Watch & Listen: <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08242007/watch.html>
Text: <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08242007/transcript1.html>
*BILL MOYERS: * Low-power radio is one piece of the media landscape - a small piece - an alternative, as you've just heard, to the handful of corporate giants that have gobbled up practically every media outlet in sight. Those media titans control most of what we hear, see and read and they still want more.
The very important but little covered Federal Communications Commission is once again considering whether to revise media ownership rules - and there's pressure to let media conglomerates get even bigger.The next two months are the period of public comment during which you can let the commissioners know what you think about these rules.
One of those five FCC commissioners is my next guest. Michael Copps has been out at public hearings around the country listening to what citizens think and say about media ownership.
MICHAEL J COPPS: Now we're back at square one. It's all up for grabs. And if we are going to do better this time around, it's going to be because of input from folks like you.
MIKE MILLLS: We must ask the question, is American radio better today than it was 10 years ago. That was the answer.
BERNIE ALAN: How do you expect these corporations to give us a diversity of opinion if they can't even give the marketplace a diversity of programs.
SUMMER REESE: You have the keys to communications in your hands. You are responsible for whether we hear what's going in this country right now!
**
*BILL MOYERS: * Commissioner Copps is one of the few voices to speak out over the years about the dangers of too few people having too much media power.
Welcome to THE JOURNAL.
MICHAEL COPPS: Thanks for having me back.
**
*BILL MOYERS: * You said in a recent speech that-- that America's playing Russian roulette with all of our media. Broadband, internet, television, radio, newspapers. How so?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, we're going at it without a policy. We're going at it without a vision. We're going at it without realizing what these things mean to the future of our country. Whether it's broadcast or broadband.The public airwaves are to be used for serving the public interest. Expanding our cultural horizon, covering community news, enabling the democratic dialogue. Increasingly, we have moved away from that vision and they're being used for corporate profitability.
BILL MOYERS: And some people will say, that's the market, Michael Copps. That's the way business and capitalism work.
MICHAEL COPPS: But the market is a little bit different than the public airwaves. This is our most precious resource I think in the United States of America and probably the most influential businesses we have is media, is communications.
So it's different than just the usual business transaction. Because we tell these companies particularly to go back to broadcasters, you have the right to use these airwaves. But you've got to be stewards of these airwaves.
Yes, you can make a good living. Nobody's trying to get in your way of that, and most of them continue to make a pretty good living, as you know from watching what a lot of the commercial broadcasters are doing these days.
But in return for that privilege, you need to be stewards of the public airwaves and serve the public interest. A lot of people say, oh, that's so amorphous. What does that mean?
BILL MOYERS: And who's gonna determine that.
MICHAEL COPPS: Yeah. It appears 112 times in the Telecommunications Act. The term public interest convenience and necessity. So I know darn well Congress was serious about it.
BILL MOYERS: You're talking about the 1934 Act.
MICHAEL COPPS: Right.
BILL MOYERS: That established the commission and our telecommunications policy for a long time to come.
MICHAEL COPPS: Right. Right.
BILL MOYERS: And it talked about the public interest. But always, there's been a problem defining the public interest.
MICHAEL COPPS: Yeah. But it's not as difficult as some of the big corporate lawyers would have you believe. It's always been defined as encouraging localism and diversity of viewpoint. Diversity of ownership too I think. And competition. Localism, diversity, competition. We're going in exactly the opposite direction with all this consolidation we've had for the last-- last twenty years.
BILL MOYERS: But can you take an Act of 1934 that was designed-- radio was the only-- the only medium we had then. And apply it to the internet which has no connection to the public airwaves.
MICHAEL COPPS: But we're not having this debate. Here, we have a whole changed landscape. We have the-- the new world of media, the new world of digital television, the new world of private equity financing which I think is-- is terribly important for us to analyze. We're not doing it.
And we're not-- we're not asking ourselves what more do we have to do or what, if anything, do we have to do to make sure that-- that all of these things are ushered in in such a way as to serve the public interest and to benefit the American people. We sit here with this mindless rhetoric about, oh, that's regulation or that's deregulation or some darn thing like that. And future be damned.
BILL MOYERS: What concerns you about private equity buying news outlets and-- and-- and other media?
MICHAEL COPPS: What concerns me is we have not asked the question of the FCC, is, does this transformation in -- in our capitalistic system inhibit somehow our ability to protect the public interest? Now, I'm not ready to say private equity is bad all the time or is good all the time. I think there are a lot of private equity deals that are probably good if you can get away from that quarterly bottom line.
On the other hand I don't know who owns who under private equity. And they don't have to tell me. But I'm supposed to be protecting what these companies do in so far as their obligation to serve the public interest.
So, can I still do my job as well? Do I know who to attribute ownership to? Do I know who to go to if there's a problem or a violation in the telecommunications act?
BILL MOYERS: Well, even as we speak, you and your other commissioners are reviewing media ownership rules as required by the court. Have you developed what you consider a fair and serious process for reviewing these ownership issues?
MICHAEL COPPS: I am always for doing much more in the way of a public process. You know, at the commission, we hear from so many of the same players day after day after day. And I-- I don't mind hearing from the-- the big media companies. They have a right to be heard. And we look at their submissions.
But I want to hear what the average America has to say. They're the real stakeholders in how the public airwaves are used. And they're the ones that know how the public airwaves are being used because they're listening to the radio and watching that television every day. So that's why I've said, let's go out. Let's have hearings all over the country and-- and really talk to people. And I--
BILL MOYERS: And you've been out there.
MICHAEL COPPS: I have.
BILL MOYERS: What have you learned?
MICHAEL COPPS: I have learned that there's a tremendous amount of concern. I've learned first of all that people understand this issue.
I went to a meeting one time, an ownership hearing. I think it was in-- it was in Arizona. And it was a town with a lot of consolidated media. Very-- I think nothing probably had been-- had been published that we were coming. 500 people showed up for the meeting.
BILL MOYERS: What concerns--
MICHAEL COPPS: So I went down. I went down and asked some of the people. I said, how did you find out about this meeting? You know what they said? One of them said, I heard about it on the BBC.
MICHAEL COPPS: You know, there's a lot of important issues in the United States of America right now. Everybody says well, Copps, why do you get so wound up on this media ownership? That's all you talk about, media ownership.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, Copps. Why do you get so wound up in this media ownership?
MICHAEL COPPS: All right. We've got issues of peace and war. We've got issues of how do we insure our kids and insure our families? How do we find jobs? How do we educate our kids? Those are all important. And one of those may be your number one issue.
All I'm saying is, if that's your number one issue, you better make this media consolidation issue your second most important issue. Because all those big issues get filtered and funneled through big media. That's how the people hear about it. That's what sets the parameters of the debate. And that's what maybe limits intelligent decision making for the future of our democracy.
BILL MOYERS: When you talk to or listen to or hear from or watch these big titans, like Viacom and Time Warner, do they have any sympathy for the argument you make about democracy and journalism and serving the public interest?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, with regard to the big - I don't see bad people. But I see people who are in a position where a lot of the policy choices they make lead-- lead to bad policy. And-- and let me-- let me make clear here that I'm not the anti-broadcaster commissioner. I think there are a lot of broadcasters in this country in whose breast the flame of the public interest still burns.
All I'm saying is that in this environment we live in, they are less and less captains of their own fate and more and more captive to the unforgiving expectations of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.
And they're losing their ability to run their stations like they did with maybe a little bit lower profit margins. And the market has to have, you know, if you do 20 percent, they want 25 percent next year. You do 25 percent, they want 30 percent.
How do you protect the public interest and safeguard it and really invest in investigative journalism? And cover community events and cover that local government, if you don't spend some money?
BILL MOYERS: But isn't it the nature of the capitalist ethos for the whale to swallow the minnow?
MICHAEL COPPS: Yes. I think it is. And I think we made the-- we made the decision a long time ago that our broadcast media would be operated within the parameters of that capitalist system. But there is that special difference that makes it a special industry.
And that's that the resource that these people are using belongs to you and me and has to be used in our interests. We're the stakeholders. The stakeholders are just as important as the stockholders. They're more important than the stockholders.
We have this corporate thing, a fiduciary responsibility. Stockholder, stockholder, stockholder. But we have to start thinking citizen, stakeholder, stakeholder, stakeholder.
BILL MOYERS: I understand that when you're talking about the radio frequency and the television signal. The use of public air space for commercial reasons. But this doesn't apply, does it? to the internet which is-- has nothing to do with any public space?
MICHAEL COPPS: But why aren't we looking at this change in the telecommunications environment and say, how much has it changed? And how do we guarantee some of these protections that we used to have and don't have anymore for this new technology that we're all depending upon as our-- as our basic tools in the-- in the 21st Century?
BILL MOYERS: What do you want--
MICHAEL COPPS: We have to tee up to these new questions, instead of just debating all these old ones all the time.
BILL MOYERS: What are the new questions?
MICHAEL COPPS: How do you keep the internet free? How do you keep it open? How do you keep it neutral? How do you reinvigorate in our traditional media some sense of the public interest responsibilities that they have?
And I'm a big believer that we-- the best thing we can do right now for openers would be for the FCC to go back to a real, honest to God license renewal system. It used to be years ago that every three years, a broadcaster had to come in and demonstrate to the commission that they were meeting a list of-- we had twelve or fourteen guidelines.
You didn't have to meet every one. It wasn't the Twelve Commandments or anything like that. But we would look at their performance when they came in for renewal every three years and say, yeah, we think you're doing-- they're making a good effort. Give them-- give them their license.
Fast forward. Now, every eight years, you say, send in a post card and we'll send your license back by return mail. Don't usually even look at the public file that we demand them to keep. And unless there's a-- a personal charge against the station owner, maybe a spouse abuse or child abuse or something like that, no chance we're gonna take it away on public interest grounds.
So, is there any wonder that there's, that, you know, there's-- there's no discipline to really do all these public interest things, do the local news. Nobody's watching. There's no repercussions for them if they fail to do this.
BILL MOYERS: But the free marketers will tell you-- will say that there are so many options today. That you don't have to worry about a television station in Houston, Texas not serving the public interest.
MICHAEL COPPS: I know. Someone said, lots of-- lots of puppets, but one ventriloquist. You can go on the internet, you know. And this is supposed to be the source of all this diversity. In many respects, it is. Go to the top twenty news sites on the internet.
Do you think they're run by bloggers or independent or Mike Copps out of his home in Alexandria, Virginia? They're owned by the same folks that own all the other properties in cable and broadcast.
That's what I'm saying. These ills that were visited by excessive consolidation in media are now being visited upon the internet.
This is the most potentially liberating and dynamic technology in history. Maybe more so than the printing press. It's our future and how we're going to communicate. And to let it just develop like it is without a national strategy, without a vision, without a goal and-- and aligning that goal with our culture and our democracy is just-- it's dereliction of duty. And the threat is not from government.
But I think a lot of the internet folks thought for a long time, just keep government out of here. Four years ago, when we did the media ownership debate, they weren't as interested because they still thought they were open, free and guaranteed livelihood of internet freedom in the future.
But about two years ago, I started going around to these ownership meetings again. And people stand up. And you know, folks especially uncoached and said, hey. All these ills that you're talking about that have been visited by consolidation on traditional media. I'm worried about that on my internet. I can see that here now. So, we have all these new allies I think that are alive to this debate. Now, that's why-- that's one of the reasons why I'm optimistic.
BILL MOYERS: Have you seen the studies that show more people still get their news and information from television than any other single source?
MICHAEL COPPS: Absolutely. Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: So does that-- doesn't that reduce the impact of the internet?
MICHAEL COPPS: Yeah. Well, you have to understand what it can do and what it can't do. I mean, you-- you can't expect a blogger sitting in house somewhere and he can contribute a lot to the democratic process and keep the dialogue alive and vital. But he can't go out usually and set up a bureau in Washington, a bureau in New York, a bureau in Hong Kong. He can't hire the investigative journalists that are gonna get down on that beat like you used to do and really ferret out the story.
That's hard work. And that's expensive work. And that's what corporate media has gotten away from. So they cover all-- they cover the polls. You cover the presidential race. And all you do is you look at the financial reports. Who raised how much money, that's your headline. What happened to the issues? What happens to the stances of the candidates?
BILL MOYERS: It is so interesting, as you indicated, that so much of what we read on the internet comes from traditional news sources. The Associated Press. The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times. Newspapers. Local newspapers around the country. And those, as you say, are owned by the same big media companies.
MICHAEL COPPS: Right. So anybody that's watching this show and thinks that you can really differentiate between the future of the internet and the broadband and-- and the new media and the traditional media ought to look again. Because the future is interconnected. And the traditional media is very, very important.
BILL MOYERS: And what's at stake?
MICHAEL COPPS: What's at stake is-- is the nourishment of our culture. Diversity and creativity within our culture, so we can get away from all this homogenization and standardization of programming.
And what's at stake, even more importantly than that, is the vitality of our democratic dialogue. All these important issues that I talked about before that we have to decide. The American people will make good decisions on those issues if they have the depth and breadth of information they need.
It doesn't mean 24/7 news or anything like that. But it means teeing up the issues, having some clash of opinion. And let the people decide. But we are skating perilously close to where we are denying our citizens that essential breadth and depth of information that they need for our democracy to survive.
BILL MOYERS: You see media issues all of a piece. From broadband and internet to radio, television.
MICHAEL COPPS: I do. It's how we communicate with each other as a-- as a country. Beyond-- going beyond this table where you and I can talk personally, how do we learn all this other stuff? How do we communicate as a nation? That's through our media. It is all of a piece. It's not one over here, one there, one regulated, one deregulated or any-- anything like that. We've got to get serious about the issue. Because it's so serious for the future of our country.
BILL MOYERS: In 2003, when Michael Powell, the commissioner, wanted to allow a single media company to own in one community up to three TV stations, eight radio stations, the cable system, the only daily newspaper. Even the internet service provider. What would have happened if those rule changes had not been challenged by citizens out across the country?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, you'd have a-- an even worse media environment than you have right now. You'd have-- you'd have more consolidation. You'd have fewer independent voices. You'd be combining newspapers and stations. You'd be shutting down newsrooms. You'd be firing journalists. All of these things that we've seen too much of already would have just been accelerated.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But since then, we've seen Knight Ridder disappear. We've seen the Tribune company sold. We've seen Rupert Murdoch buying Dow Jones.
MICHAEL COPPS: Yeah. I'm not saying the old rules were good rules. I'm saying let's not make them any worse. And then, let's go back and revisit the bad old rules that got us into this mess in the first place. It's not the new rules that Michael Powell proposed that got us into the mess we're in. It's the old rules that we were operating under.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that Rupert Murdoch owns 20th Century Fox-- and he could be a liberal and I'd still be asking this question. What does it say to you that Rupert Murdoch owns 20th Century Fox, Fox Home Entertainment, Fox Broadcasting, Fox Television Station, Star, Fox News Channel, Fox Sports Net, FX, National Geographic, BSkyB, Sky Italia, Direct TV, TV Guide, the Weekly Standard, News America Marketing, more than one hundred newspapers, Harper Collins, Myspace, Foxsports.com, AmericanIdol.com, on and on. What does that say to you?
MICHAEL COPPS: It means when you've got the conduit and you've got the control, you've got so much power in a-- in a democratic country. And it ought to be raising serious questions in every home across this-- in this country of ours.
BILL MOYERS: But should government have anything to say about that? Because government too has its own interests?
MICHAEL COPPS: The public has its own interests. And the public owns the airwaves. And the broadcasters are supposed to serve the public interests. And the government, the FCC and the Congress are supposed to make sure that that happens.
BILL MOYERS: Why hasn't the FCC done it? You've been out and voted consistently on the FCC?
MICHAEL COPPS: Well, that's why it hasn't done it because I was out voted.
MICHAEL COPPS: When we had this near disaster four years ago when then Chairman Powell tried to impose new rules and actually got them through the commission over Commissioner Edelstein and my objections, I think those folks thought this wasn't something that really concerned the American people. Two arcane signal contour over-- overlap. And how many outlets can a company own.
But we go out and tell the people, these are your airwaves we're talking about. And they remember that they-- they own those airwaves. And we've got this little agency on the shores of the Anacostia River mucking around with them in secret. Don't want to have a lot of hearings or anything like that.
They got mad. So three million people, three million people contacted the FCC back in 2003. When I went there in 2001, I didn't know three million people knew there was a place called the Federal Communications Commission. But they knew.
And about 99 percent of them, 99.9 percent were-- were adamantly opposed to what we were doing. And Congress, the Senate went on to disapprove Powell's rules. The court sent them back to the commission to redo.
Citizen action can still work. We all get kind of frustrated in the 21st century. And you know, the big guys rule everything. And to a large extent, they-- they have too much power. But concentrated citizen action can still work. When three million Americans speak up, Congress pays attention. The country pays attention. And things can happen. And they can still happen. And that's where my hope is right now.
I don't want to just defeat bad new rules at the Federal Communications Commission on media ownership. I want to get some positive rules for the new environment we live in that will reinvigorate our media with some sensibility, to the common interest of the public interest.
BILL MOYERS: Michael Copps, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. Thank you for being on the journal.
MICHAEL COPPS: Thank you for having me.
Related link:
Michael Copps interview on Media Matters with Bob McChesney
-<http://www.will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters070909.mp3>
By John Borland
08.14.07 | 2:00 AM
URL: <http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker>
CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner <http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr> -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623375>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623410>
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=13283596>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=13351938>
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=77017195>
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
ToC
It's been 10 years since IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess. A prominent philosopher asks what the match meant.
By Daniel C. Dennett
Technology Review - Published by MIT
September/October 2007
URL: <http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19179/>
In the popular imagination, chess isn't like a spelling bee or Trivial Pursuit, a competition to see who can hold the most facts in memory and consult them quickly. In chess, as in the arts and sciences, there is plenty of room for beauty, subtlety, and deep originality. Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be--forever--beyond the reach of any computer. But for a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits--the title of world chess champion--has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all?
The following years saw two other human-machine chess matches that stand out: a hard-fought draw between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep Fritz in Bahrain in 2002 and a draw between Kasparov and Deep Junior in New York in 2003, in a series of games that the New York City Sports Commission called "the first World Chess Championship sanctioned by both the FŽdŽration Internationale des ƒchecs (FIDE), the international governing body of chess, and the International Computer Game Association (ICGA)."
The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: "Yes, but machines don't play chess the way human beings play chess!" Or sometimes this: "What the machines do isn't really playing chess at all." Well, then, what would be really playing chess?
This is not a trivial question. The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don't know when to accept a draw. Computers--at least currently existing computers--can't be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors always have to contend with, and sometimes even exploit, in their games. Offering or accepting a draw, or resigning, is the one decision that opens the hermetically sealed world of chess to the real world, in which life is short and there are things more important than chess to think about. This boundary crossing can be simulated with an arbitrary rule, or by allowing the computer's handlers to step in. Human players often try to intimidate or embarrass their human opponents, but this is like the covert pushing and shoving that goes on in soccer matches. The imperviousness of computers to this sort of gamesmanship means that if you beat them at all, you have to beat them fair and square--and isn't that just what Kasparov and Kramnik were unable to do?
Yes, but so what? Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov's brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches.
True, there's no doubt that investment in research and development has a different profile in the two cases; Kasparov has methods of extracting good design principles from past games, so that he can recognize, and decide to ignore, huge portions of the branching tree of possible game continuations that Deep Blue had to canvass seriatim. Kasparov's reliance on this "insight" meant that the shape of his search trees--all the nodes explicitly evaluated--no doubt differed dramatically from the shape of Deep Blue's, but this did not constitute an entirely different means of choosing a move. Whenever Deep Blue's exhaustive searches closed off a type of avenue that it had some means of recognizing, it could reuse that research whenever appropriate, just like Kasparov. Much of this analytical work had been done for Deep Blue by its designers, but Kasparov had likewise benefited from hundreds of thousands of person-years of chess exploration transmitted to him by players, coaches, and books.
It is interesting in this regard to contemplate the suggestion made by Bobby Fischer, who has proposed to restore the game of chess to its intended rational purity by requiring that the major pieces be randomly placed in the back row at the start of each game (randomly, but in mirror image for black and white, with a white-square bishop and a black-square bishop, and the king between the rooks). Fischer Random Chess would render the mountain of memorized openings almost entirely obsolete, for humans and machines alike, since they would come into play much less than 1 percent of the time. The chess player would be thrown back onto fundamental principles; one would have to do more of the hard design work in real time. It is far from clear whether this change in rules would benefit human beings or computers more. It depends on which type of chess player is relying most heavily on what is, in effect, rote memory.
The fact is that the search space for chess is too big for even Deep Blue to explore exhaustively in real time, so like Kasparov, it prunes its search trees by taking calculated risks, and like Kasparov, it often gets these risks precalculated. Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of "brute force" computation on their very different architectures. After all, what do neurons know about chess? Any work they do must use brute force of one sort or another.
It may seem that I am begging the question by describing the work done by Kasparov's brain in this way, but the work has to be done somehow, and no way of getting it done other than this computational approach has ever been articulated. It won't do to say that Kasparov uses "insight" or "intuition," since that just means that Kasparov himself has no understanding of how the good results come to him. So since nobody knows how Kasparov's brain does it--least of all Kasparov himself--there is not yet any evidence at all that Kasparov's means are so very unlike the means exploited by Deep Blue.
People should remember this when they are tempted to insist that "of course" Kasparov plays chess in a way entirely different from how a computer plays the game. What on earth could provoke someone to go out on a limb like that? Wishful thinking? Fear?
In an editorial written at the time of the Deep Blue match, "Mind over Matter" (May 10, 1997), the New York Times opined:
The real significance of this over-hyped chess match is that it is forcing us to ponder just what, if anything, is uniquely human. We prefer to believe that something sets us apart from the machines we devise. Perhaps it is found in such concepts as creativity, intuition, consciousness, esthetic or moral judgment, courage or even the ability to be intimidated by Deep Blue.
The ability to be intimidated? Is that really one of our prized qualities? Yes, according to the Times:
Nobody knows enough about such characteristics to know if they are truly beyond machines in the very long run, but it is nice to think that they are.
Why is it nice to think this? Why isn't it just as nice--or nicer--to think that we human beings might succeed in designing and building brain-children that are even more wonderful than our biologically begotten children? The match between Kasparov and Deep Blue didn't settle any great metaphysical issue, but it certainly exposed the weakness in some widespread opinions. Many people still cling, white-knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or--just as romantic--as the products of brains composed of wonder tissue engaged in irreducible non-computational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn't be responsible, lovable, valuable persons.
Finding that conclusion attractive doesn't show a deep understanding of responsibility, love, and value; it shows a shallow appreciation of the powers of machines with trillions of moving parts.
Daniel Dennett is the codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, where he is also a professor of philosophy.
ToC
"What this is is a sustained multipronged effort by Google to improve privacy practices...across the Internet," he said in his briefing. "People expect us to show some leadership."...
Google will take its message to the public through a virtual debate it plans to open on YouTube soon, and it will participate in meetings in Montreal on Sept. 24 with global privacy commissioners and in Washington, D.C. in October, Fleischer said.
Also, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt "will add his voice to this debate" in the next few days, Fleischer said, declining to elaborate. - Elinor Mills, CNET News
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Allen Byrne for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#892/13-Aug-07
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9114>
Google initiated the webmail storage wars some years ago by launching its beta of Gmail with 1 GB of mail storage. (It's still in beta, by the way.) Although it took a while, other services like Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, and even Apple's .Mac eventually caught up. These and other services generally offer 1 GB to 10 GB as basic storage options.
<https://mail.google.com/mail/>
But once you needed more storage than Google provided - currently set at 2.887 GB for Gmail (though rising constantly) and 1 GB for its Picasa photo service - you were out of luck. As Google expanded its online services, it was becoming tricky for people with needs beyond what the search behemoth had set.
The company recently announced that users can now purchase a higher pool of storage shared among some of the various services they offer, starting with Picasa's galleries and Gmail, but extending eventually to other products, according to a Google product blog.
<https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage>
<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way-to-get-more-storage.html>
Prices start at $20 per year for 6 GB of storage and range up to $500 per year for 200 GB of storage. Apple now charges $99.95 per year for 10 GB of storage at .Mac, ranging up to $200 for 30 GB of storage. With .Mac, that includes file storage, Web sites, email, and synchronization, among other services. Xdrive, an AOL company, provides 5 GB of file storage at no cost and 50 GB for $120 per year ($9.95 per month).
ToC
AdBlock tryst threatens web browser wedlock
By Cade Metz in San FranciscoComment - Yes, Firefox reached a major milestone this week, surpassing 400 million downloads worldwide. But that's just the good news. There's another story swirling around the famously open source web browser - and it's a little less sunny.
Last week, The New York York Times questioned whether the growing popularity of a Firefox extension called AdBlock Plus poses a threat to the ad-driven business models of entertainment, media, and search sites across the web. If enough people install the extension and other ad-killing browser gizmos, The Times asked, could they chip away at the bottom line of companies like CNN, Microsoft, and Google?
With roughly 2.5 million people using AdBlock Plus - and 300,000 to 400,000 more downloading the tool each month, according to its developer - this is certainly a valid question. But there's a second question worth asking, a question looming over the future of Firefox itself.
According to internet rumor, Google provides almost all of the revenue for the Mozilla Corp. - the commercial wing of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox. You know how it works: Google ponies up the dough, and Mozilla ties Firefox to certain Google tools. Most notably, Firefox uses a customized version of Google.com as its default home page.
The question is: As more and more people install AdBlock Plus, which is officially recommended by Mozilla, will Google continue to fund the browser?
When we asked Google for an answer, the company stayed quiet, as it did when The Times came calling. And we're still awaiting an email from Mozilla on the matter. But it isn't hard to connect the dots.
According to a March 2006 rumor trumpeted by Weblogs founder Jason Calacanis, Mozilla pulled in $72m in 2005, and most of that came from Google. In a subsequent blog post, Mozilla board member Chris Blizzard wouldn't verify the rumor, but he said these figures were "not off by an order of magnitude."
Meanwhile, AdBlock can be downloaded from the Mozilla website, where it's listed as one of the most popular Firefox extensions. And yes, it does a wonderful job of blocking ads on Google's AdSense network - not to mention banners served up by DoubleClick, the company Google's trying so very hard to purchase.
No, that doesn't mean Google is dead-set on pulling its Mozilla dollars. After all, it could simply crack down on the use of AdBlock, a free download developed by an independent German programmer named Wladimir Palant. As The Times discussed, there's already a mini-movement among ad-laden websites to, well, block AdBlock.
Oklahoma-based web developer Danny Carlton has succeeded in rejecting any user who visits his sites with AdBlock Plus installed, and he insists that each and every site owner has the right to do the same. Palant and his cohorts, Carlton says, shouldn't be allowed to block AdBlock blocking.
"It comes down to whether they're going to be like adults and support the concept of freedom, allowing site owners to block AdBlock users, or they're going to be like children screaming for more bread and circuses," Carlton told The Reg.
But if Google jumped on board with this sort of AdBlock crackdown, it would surely anger the masses, undermining the we're-in-it-for-the-little-guy attitude the company tries so hard to foster. "Google could step into this very easily. They could shut AdBlock down entirely," Carlton said. "But then they look like the big-bad meanie."
In the end, it might be easier for Google to break off its relationship with Mozilla, leaving the foundation struggling for revenue. Sure, Google would lose the traffic driven by those less than 400 million users, but there's nothing stopping the ridiculously-rich Mountain Viewers from building their own browser - or buying a Mozilla competitor that doesn't block quite so many ads. Opera comes to mind.
Then again, if Google dumped Mozilla, it would still look like a big-bad meanie. No wonder the company won't grant us an interview.
Sti