History > 2007 > USA > Internet, Media (I)

New Scrutiny

for Facebook Over Predators

July 30, 2007
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, July 29 — Facebook, the online social network, has stolen some of MySpace’s momentum with users and the news media. Now, it is being subjected to the same accusations that it does not do enough to keep sexual predators off its site.

Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, said that investigators in his state were looking into “three or more” cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook and had “also found inappropriate images and content” on the service. The inquiry continues, he said, and state officials have contacted Facebook and asked it to remove the profiles.

“There is no question that Facebook is encountering some of the same problems that MySpace has posed,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “They should be held accountable, and we intend to do so.”

MySpace has been implicated in dozens of cases around the country in which predators used the service to contact and arrange improper meetings with minors. Some of these encounters have led to criminal charges against the offenders, and civil suits against MySpace.

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said he was not familiar with the Connecticut investigation but that the company has received “a number” of such reports and usually takes down such profiles within 72 hours.

“We want to be a good partner to the states in attempting to address this societal problem,” Mr. Kelly said. “We’ve worked with them for quite some time now, and we look forward to continuing our fruitful partnership.”

Facebook, founded in 2004 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., has positioned itself as the safe social-networking alternative. It has generally gone to greater lengths than rivals to keep adults and under-age users apart, at first allowing only college and high school students to join the service, and then largely restricting online communication to users at the same school.

Last year, the site opened to the general public, but it still maintains various restrictions. For example, a user’s full profile is not accessible to the general online public, and the full profile of an under-18 Facebook member is not viewable by a user who is over 18, unless the two are confirmed friends on the service. But in some cases, Facebook’s younger users are vulnerable to sexual solicitations from older users, as was demonstrated last week to The New York Times by an anonymous person who described himself or herself in an e-mail message as “a concerned parent.” The evidence of this person’s activities on Facebook may give state investigators further cause for concern.

In early July, this person opened a fake account on the site, posing as a 15-year-old girl named Jerri Gelson from North Carolina. The photograph on the fake profile page is of an under-age girl whose hair conceals her face. On the profile page, Ms. Gelson — whom the “concerned parent” said was not a real person — is described as looking for “random play” and “whatever I can get.”

This person then signed up for three dozen sexually themed groups — forums of users organized around a particular topic. In the directory of groups on Facebook, under the “sexuality” category, there are now dozens of groups with sexually explicit topics, even though Facebook prohibits “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” material in its Content Code of Conduct policy.

The groups that were signed up for include “addicted to masturbation ... and you know if you are!”, “Facebook Swingers” and “I’m Curious About Incest.”

When the Jerri Gelson profile was linked to these groups, her name and profile photo became visible to the group’s other users, and adult men began sexually propositioning her with e-mail messages over Facebook. “I saw your profile pic and thought I should get in touch with this hot girl!” wrote one bald, goateed man from Toronto. “Like what u see?” wrote another man from Mississippi, whose profile picture featured him sitting naked on his couch.

Several other men and women who sent e-mail messages to the Jerri Gelson account also had nude pictures of themselves on their profiles.

Mr. Kelly of Facebook said the company strictly prohibits depictions of nudity on the site and groups that encourage pornography and online sexual activity. “Those people aren’t welcome on our service, and they never have been,” he said.

He also said that such images are quickly removed from Facebook, since customer service representatives monitor the site and other users are encouraged to flag inappropriate content. However, some of the explicit images sent to the Jerri Gelson account were three weeks old and are still on the site.

The person who created the Jerri Gelson page had actively joined the sex-themed groups and added some of the adults who e-mailed her to her list of confirmed friends. Mr. Kelly said, “We want to, by default, protect people, but if there’s a situation where younger users are reaching out, there’s only so much we can do.”

MySpace, a division of News Corporation, has reacted to concerns about sexual predators on its site by hiring Sentinel Tech Holding a Miami company that maintains a database of the sex-offender registries from all 50 states. State attorneys general recently announced that MySpace had deleted 29,000 profiles set up by convicted sex-offenders through such screening.

Mr. Kelly said that Facebook, which is a privately held company, was proposing a different way to identify convicted sex offenders on the service. Instead of working through Sentinel, the company has proposed building a database of names and e-mail addresses for convicted sexual offenders that could be compared to the membership rolls of Internet sites. For that approach to work, however, Facebook would have to wait until all 50 states had passed legislation requiring sex-offenders to register their e-mail addresses. Currently such legislation is signed or pending in 13 states.

Asked about that approach, Mr. Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said, “I think there are more efficient and effective ways to do the screening.”

Mr. Blumenthal said he was taking a particular interest in Facebook because his children use the service. He said of its recent opening to a more general audience, “I have observed its mutation into a somewhat different kind of site. There are now some troubling aspects to its features and culture that were absent before.”

    New Scrutiny for Facebook Over Predators, NYT, 30.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/business/media/30facebook.html

Virtual Graveyard

Holds Dead of MySpace

July 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:48 p.m. ET
The New York Times

Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts.

They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.

Allison Bauer left rainbows: Reds, yellows and blues, festooned across her MySpace profile in a collage of color. Before her corpse was pulled from the depths of an Oregon gorge on May 9, where police say she leapt to her death, she unwittingly wrote her own epitaph.

''I love color, Pure Color in rainbow form, And I love My friends,'' the 20-year-old wrote under ''Interests'' on her profile. ''And I love to Love, I care about everyone so much you have no idea.''

Now her page fills a plot on www.MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members.

Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers' lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.

The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It's also a place where the living -- those who knew the deceased and those who didn't -- discuss this world and the next.

There's a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There's a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive -- frozen in time, for all the world to see.

------

Scrolling down a dead person's MySpace profile wall is like journeying into the past. The pages were abandoned hastily, without warning. Most telling is the date of each person's last log-in.

For 16-year-old Stephanie Wagner, it was Sept. 29, 2006 -- a month before she was strangled and stabbed on Halloween night. Her frivolous teenage profile pales against the terrible facts of her murder.

''This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness,'' says Bob Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. ''We see those kinds of things that we try not to think about, which is how we are all dancing on the edge -- how quickly mortality can come in and claim us.''

The human bits scattered carelessly across each profile form a vivid clip of life in motion. It's a final resting place for the various ''selves'' people project online: the ironic self, the joyful self, the bitter self, the courageous self.

''I do not fear what the future holds for me,'' Navy Hospitalman Geovani Padilla-Aleman, 20, blogged months before he was killed in Iraq. ''I will stand and fight. I am not afraid to die.''

Weeks before she stood in the path of a commuter train, Cheryl Lynn Duca pondered mortality in a poem: ''over my life i've watched people die in front of me. wondering why this happens.''

Many families of the deceased leave the profiles up as memorials. Each profile ''wall'' -- a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to each other -- becomes a conduit for one-way communications with the departed. Days are marked by post-mortem birthday wishes or life updates.

''I made that B in Statistics. and I certainly missed you sittin next to me during the final,'' a friend wrote to Casey Hastings, 19, a cheerleader who was killed in a traffic accident.

Some profiles are used as digital billboards to publicize a little-known atrocity. One profile is dedicated to a 3-year-old murder victim.

MyDeathSpace grew out of one person's morbid curiosity in December 2005, when two teenage daughters were slain by their father. Mike Patterson, 26, a paralegal from San Francisco, tracked down their MySpace pages one day when he was bored. His voyeurism grew into a live journal that later became MyDeathSpace.

''I'd come across these stories where teens would be ending up dead or killing themselves, or killing others,'' he says. ''And more often than not, when I looked them up on MySpace, they had profiles.''

Permission to use the profiles is not requested from MySpace, which is not affiliated with the site and did not respond to requests for comment on it. MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a ''case-by-case basis'' and does not ''allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile.'' Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members.

MyDeathSpace matter-of-factly catalogs each death in headline format: ''Belford Ramirez (19) died after being stabbed in the neck outside of a Burger King.'' Click on the link and you'll find a detailed description of the fatal attack -- an element usually pulled from a news article or blog -- his photograph, and a link to his MySpace profile.

The site even charts death geographically on a digital ''death map'' of the continental U.S., using black skulls to signify victims.

In a digital twist on vigilante justice, MyDeathSpace also posts the profiles of homicide victims alongside those of their alleged killers, whose faces loom on the screen like wanted posters.

A 23-year-old accused of pushing a homeless woman into a river appears as a muscular young man in a sleeveless gray shirt, staring coldly into the camera. A 16-year-old girl charged in the shooting death of a 9-year-old shows up striking a sexy bikini-clad pose in her MySpace photo.

Patterson says the alleged killers generate the most discussion threads on the site. ''If they're accused, we'll put accused,'' he says. ''We're not gonna label somebody a murderer who isn't one.''

But some death submissions slip through the cracks.

There was the case of Christine Hutchinson, a woman from Pittsburgh who was accused of hiding her miscarried fetus in her freezer. She happened to bear the same name as a high school student from Philadelphia -- and the latter's MySpace profile was mistakenly attached to the creepy news story on MyDeathSpace.

Ugly names began filling her inbox: Baby killer, they called her. Murderer. Then death threats.

''They were telling me they hope I die and get stuffed in a freezer, rot in jail, stuff like that,'' says the misidentified Hutchinson.

Patterson removed her profile when he was notified of the case of mistaken identity hours later.

But the damage was done. Hutchinson's face was already out there. She has no plans to sue Patterson, but says she rarely leaves her house alone now, afraid of being attacked.

''It's got legal liability written all over it, this type of a Web site,'' says Internet lawyer John Dozier. Patterson says he has a team to slog through the entries, but he did not elaborate on the process used to verify deaths.

He also refused to disclose profit figures. Ads pop up as you move through the site, and there are fees for certain extras, such as creating personal image galleries in the site's discussion forums.

In those, paying tribute to the deceased sometimes falls by the wayside, as self-described ''death hags'' swap whodunit theories, speculate on how victims' families might feel and muse about the mechanics of violence.

''I've never shot a shotgun before, so I don't understand the physics of it,'' writes a user named ''wickedly--curious'' about a teenage murder-suicide. ''Anyone with any insight tell me if it would be possible for 2 people to shoot each other in the heads at the same time?''

MyDeathSpace veers into the dark underbelly of memorializing, says Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, author of ''Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death.''

''Some people rejoice in steamy details,'' Cullen says. ''The unpleasant thing is that it's not fictional, it's not like watching CSI. These aren't concocted by some scriptwriters in Hollywood who wanted to get a thrill of seeing prostitutes get murdered on the strip.''

For some users, death is just a starting point for discussions of their own lives.

''I just enjoy talking with other members,'' Brittany Oliver, 18, of Tucson, Ariz., writes in an e-mail. ''I occasionally still read about the deaths, but more so, I enjoy chatting with fellow MDSers about life.''

A subset of newspaper readers who turn first to the obituary page has long existed, explains Thompson, but sites like MyDeathSpace allow such people to interact with each other.

The Internet hosts a garden of other morbid online families. On www.FindADeath.com, users can pore over the latest celebrities who've met their Maker. The mortality-conscious can calculate when they might die -- based on age and body fat -- thanks to www.deathclock.com.

As the traditionally private rites of death and grieving go public, what do families of the dead on sites like MyDeathSpace think?

Army Cpl. Matthew Creed was killed in Baghdad Oct. 22. His MySpace profile keeps watch without him, counting down the time -- days, hours, minutes -- until he would've returned home.

His father, Rick, visits the page from time to time, but he was unaware that it had been archived on MyDeathSpace.

''What MyDeathSpace is doing seems respectful, though at this time I'm not sure what I think about it,'' he wrote in an e-mail. What's most important, he believes, is that the link between his son and this world be preserved.

''We all say, you're never gone as long as you're remembered,'' Creed says. ''And he's still remembered by everybody.''

    Virtual Graveyard Holds Dead of MySpace, NYT, 29.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Dying-on-the-Web.html

Dow Jones Board Reaches Deal With Murdoch

July 18, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and RICHARD SIKLOS

It’s now down to the Bancrofts.

After months of back-and-forth negotiations, the board of Dow Jones voted last night in favor of recommending a tentative deal to sell the publisher of The Wall Street Journal for $5 billion to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

The final decision will be made by Dow Jones’s fractious controlling family, the Bancrofts, which could still seek to scuttle the sale, people who have spoken with family members said. That point was underscored by the fact that two of the four Bancroft family members on the board did not take part in the vote.

Several of the Bancrofts have expressed their disapproval of selling to Mr. Murdoch, fearing that he would bend news coverage to further his political or business interests. And two family members on the board, Christopher Bancroft and Leslie Hill, have been actively seeking alternative bids. According to an adviser briefed on the meeting last night at which the offer was weighted, Mr. Bancroft left the meeting early, before the vote. Ms. Hill stayed but abstained from voting.

A third director, Dieter von Holtzbrinck, who attended the meeting by conference call from Europe, did not stay on the line long enough to vote, the adviser said. The company’s 13 other directors, including two other Bancroft representatives and the chief executive, Richard F. Zannino, voted in favor.

Dow Jones released a statement late last night saying that its board had determined that it would be prepared to approve “and recommend to the Dow Jones stockholders, including the Bancroft family stockholders” an agreement to sell all outstanding shares of Dow Jones for $60 per share in cash.

If the family ultimately decides to reject the offer, the Bancrofts could be facing a further erosion of revenue and, potentially, a sharp drop-off in the value of their shares. Executives at The Journal have acknowledged that advertising revenue at the paper is tens of millions of dollars behind projections.

The family is expected to begin meeting Monday to review the proposed transaction and could take up to a week.

Although Mr. Murdoch has not budged from his $60 offer since making it in April, it remains possible that he could raise his offer at the 11th hour.

Mr. Murdoch’s company released a statement last night saying its own board was “grateful to the board of Dow Jones & Company for its strong vote of support in favor of our offer.”

The provisional agreement sent to the board is another step in a series of often tumultuous and sometimes circuslike negotiations over the last two months.

The negotiations have been particularly complicated because of the varying fiduciary duties that members of the board and the family, as well as their advisers, owe to an assortment of constituencies. Four members of the board are either Bancrofts or are their representatives. As a result, those board members owe a duty both to regular shareholders as well as to the family. And yet it remains possible that family members on the board could vote for the deal on behalf of common shareholders and still turn around and vote their shares against the deal.

The board is being represented by one set of advisers, while the family is being advised by another set of Wall Street bankers and lawyers. In virtually every case, the advisers have incentives to make a deal as opposed to prevent one. And one board member, Mr. Bancroft, has his own set of advisers; he has been unsuccessfully seeking an alternative deal for the last three weeks.

Adding to the complexity, the Bancroft family asked the Dow Jones board to negotiate a preliminary deal with Mr. Murdoch on its behalf after failing to reach an agreement within the family about how to approach a sale.

But that decision put the Dow Jones board in a precarious position. Was it negotiating for all shareholders or the family? Will any preliminary deal be acceptable to the family? And if the family rejects the bid, could certain Dow Jones board members who represent the family be seen as trying to disenfranchise common shareholders? The conflicts could portend a series of shareholder lawsuits.

With no new suitors emerging, the Dow Jones board has had very little negotiating leverage to seek a higher price or other concessions from Mr. Murdoch.

The board was also hampered in its negotiations because the family required it to reach an agreement with Mr. Murdoch over issues of editorial independence before it would entertain discussions about price. Without the ability to intertwine the two issues, the board has struggled on both, people involved in the discussions said.

The company and its board have been under pressure to sell from shareholders, who have bid up Dow Jones stock as high as $61.76, no longer considering the fundamentals of its business. The board may have felt even more pressure to sell ahead of the company’s earnings announcement tomorrow, which is expected to report disappointing results. Dow Jones stock closed yesterday at $56.45.

Mr. Murdoch’s potential stewardship of The Journal gained an unlikely endorsement yesterday, given both his and The Journal’s traditionally conservative politics.

In an interview, former Vice President Al Gore defended Mr. Murdoch as someone who supports independent voices and keeps his word. Mr. Gore was referring to his own experience negotiating a contract to carry Current TV, a cable channel he helped found.

Mr. Gore, who has spoken out against media consolidation by conglomerates like the News Corporation in the past, said that he was mainly concerned with ownership of broadcast outlets. “That’s an issue — but on the question of his openness to independent points of view, I want you to know that my experience has been that when he gave his word, he kept his word.”

    Dow Jones Board Reaches Deal With Murdoch, NYT, 18.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/business/media/18dow.html?hp

Google Buys a Manager of E-Mail

July 10, 2007
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO, July 9 — Taking further aim at one of Microsoft’s core franchises, Google said Monday that it would acquire the e-mail security and management company Postini for $625 million in cash.

The deal underscores Google’s ambitions to become a serious player in the business of selling software to companies and organizations, in competition with Microsoft and others.

Google, which earns the vast majority of its profits from selling ads it places next to search results and on sites across the Web, has increasingly emphasized its small but rapidly growing software business.

This year, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the company’s strategy had three components: “search, ads and apps,” or applications, meaning software.

As part of that strategy, Google has been trying to persuade businesses to replace existing e-mail systems and other programs with the company’s own package of business software. That package, called Google Apps, includes the Gmail service, an online calendar and programs that can read and edit documents created with the Word and Excel programs from Microsoft.

But many businesses — especially large ones — remain leery of moving some critical functions like e-mail to Google’s programs, which, unlike traditional business software that resides on corporate networks, are delivered as services over the Web and are considered less secure.

The acquisition of Postini — a private company whose products allow businesses to control spam and viruses and help them to monitor and preserve e-mail messages to comply with regulations — is an effort by Google to allay some of those concerns.

“In bigger businesses, security and compliance requirements are a must,” said Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president and general manager for enterprise.

If completed, the deal would be the third-largest acquisition in Google’s history, after its planned $3.1 billion purchase of the online advertising company DoubleClick and its $1.65 billion deal for the video site YouTube.

Google and other companies say that software will increasingly move to the Web and will often be free and supported by advertising. Over the last year, Google has pursued that vision with efforts to turn some of its Web programs, which are popular with consumers, into business tools.

Last year, the company began to offer companies, academic institutions and nonprofit organizations a version of Gmail and other business applications at no charge. In February, Google packaged a broader set of business programs, including a word processor and spreadsheet, into Google Apps and began charging businesses $50 a user annually for a version that includes customer support.

By comparison, the market research firm Gartner estimates that businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Microsoft Office, which includes Word and Excel, and for Exchange, the widely used corporate e-mail program.

Microsoft, for its part, has sketched out a future in which business programs are likely to become a hybrid of desktop software and Web services.

Moving in that direction, Microsoft acquired FrontBridge Technologies, a Postini competitor, in 2005, and offers that company’s products as Web services. And while its core e-mail Exchange products are still programs that it sells and that customers must install on their networks, some Microsoft partners offer Exchange as a Web service.

Microsoft played down the notion that Google’s acquisition of Postini would create more competition for Exchange and other Microsoft applications.

“What we are hearing from our customers is that they are looking for an experienced solutions provider,” said Roger Murff, director of marketing for unified communications services at Microsoft. The deal is “further validation that we are doing the right thing and have been doing the right thing for several years,” Mr. Murff said.

For now, Google’s efforts to make inroads into the $2.5 billion corporate e-mail business remain just that. The company said more than 100,000 businesses are using Google Apps, but it will not say how many of them are using the pay version. Microsoft’s e-mail products are used by 62 percent of corporate users, and I.B.M.’s by 26 percent, according to Gartner.

Web e-mail services like Gmail will not be a significant force in the corporate market until 2010, when they are likely to become the first choice of 8 percent of corporate users, according to a Gartner forecast in January.

“Google has a long ways to go before they become a strong competitor to Microsoft” in business software, said Chenxi Wang, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.

Still, the size of the deal underscores how important the corporate software market is for Google.

“Google wouldn’t spend $625 million on something that they didn’t think would be a material opportunity for them,” said Mark Mahaney, a securities analyst with Citigroup. “It really fits into Google’s worldview of being a repository for all users’ — including business users’ — information.”

Google has been working with Postini since April, when the two companies announced a deal to deliver Postini’s service to Gmail customers. The acquisition will allow the companies to tie their products more closely. “We were dating back then; now we are moving toward marriage,” Mr. Girouard said.

Google plans to continue offering Postini’s services, which customers pay for, to users of other e-mail systems, Mr. Girouard said. But he added that Google intended to make it easy for Postini’s customers to “test drive” Google Apps. Mr. Girouard also said Google had not decided which of those services would be integrated into the free and paid versions of Google Apps.

Postini said it had 35,000 business customers that delivered its services to 10 million users worldwide. More than 60 percent of those customers use Microsoft Exchange, the company said.

Postini, which is based in San Carlos, Calif., has about 300 employees, and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Google.

Shares of Google rose $3.16 Monday, to $542.56. Early in the day, the stock reached a record of $548.74.

    Google Buys a Manager of E-Mail, NYT, 10.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/technology/10google.html

MySpace, Chasing YouTube, Upgrades Its Offerings

June 27, 2007
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, June 26 — Two years ago, millions of MySpace users began adding video clips to their profile pages, helping to give rise to YouTube, which Google bought last October for $1.65 billion.

This week, MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, will show that it is serious about challenging YouTube in the booming world of online video.

On Thursday, MySpace plans to rename and refurbish the video-sharing service on its popular social network. The new service, called MySpace TV, will be set up as an independent Web site (www.myspacetv.com) that people can visit to share and watch video, even if they have not signed up for MySpace. The site will also offer some new ways for members of MySpace, which attracts 110 million users a month, to more easily integrate the videos they create and watch into their personal profiles.

The company’s plan underscores its particular emphasis on professional video, as opposed to the homemade depictions of wrestling dogs and cats — the genre known as user-generated content — that are more prominent on most video sites. For example, last week MySpace became the exclusive site for Sony’s “Minisodes”— five-minute versions of ‘80s sitcoms like “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Silver Spoons.” Tens of thousands of users have watched the clips.

With MySpace TV, that professional material will be front and center, said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace’s co-founder and chief executive. “We haven’t really freshened up our video offering since we launched it,” Mr. DeWolfe said. “We wanted to highlight the fact that we have a video destination on the Web with all this great content that we’ve acquired.”

MySpace also wants to strengthen its hand against YouTube. The company says it is cutting into YouTube’s lead. According to the research firm ComScore, MySpace had 50.2 million United States viewers of its videos in April, the last month for which ComScore published data. You-Tube had 57.9 million, only slightly higher, and MySpace grew at a faster rate.

YouTube has said, however, that more than half of its audience is overseas, and ComScore also published data that shows YouTube served up nearly twice as many videos as MySpace in April.

Mr. DeWolfe said he believed that “no one has really pointed out that MySpace has been focused on video and has quietly come within striking distance of YouTube.”

MySpace has another reason for taking on YouTube more directly. Just as MySpace TV is being fashioned to compete with YouTube, engineers at YouTube are busy developing social networking features. On YouTube’s “Test Tube” page, where the company tests products in development, new tools allow YouTube users to chat while they watch the same clip and share their favorite videos.

“I’m not surprised MySpace is promoting video heavily,” said Timothy Tuttle, a vice president at America Online who is responsible for AOL’s video search technology efforts. “YouTube is becoming a social network that is maybe even more powerful than MySpace. So they are rightly focusing on that.”

Asked to comment on MySpace’s plans, a YouTube spokesman, Ricardo Reyes, said: “We are focused on continuing to provide a global platform for our community to express themselves, share experiences, and inspire one another.”

MySpace first entered the Web video market in January 2006, after it noticed its members adding videos from YouTube to their pages. The original service still appears rudimentary.

Though MySpace has became the second most popular video-sharing site on the Web, even its own executives agree that the site is lacking.

“When you go to MySpace video now, what you see is far less appealing to the eye than what you get from other video sites,” said Jeff Berman, a MySpace executive who took over the video effort in March.

MySpace TV is meant to change that. The service will be immediately available in 15 countries and 7 languages, much like YouTube’s own foray into nine countries announced this month. It adds features like categories — groupings like animals and politics where similar topics can be collected for easier navigating — which YouTube has had nearly since its inception.

MySpace TV is also meant to more closely tie video into the social network. Each MySpace member page will link to a separate MySpace TV channel, which will display the videos the user has uploaded. Users can change the design of those pages, adding the same flourishes they use to personalize their profiles.

Later this year, MySpace also plans to let users edit and combine videos on MySpace TV into new clips. MySpace acquired the technology for this in May when it bought a start-up called Flektor.

But MySpace also wants MySpace TV to show off content like the Minisodes or television shows and movies from NBC Universal and Fox, which is part of News Corporation. The two studios are working on a joint Internet video effort, and will distribute their programs on the video sites of MySpace, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

Short ads will appear before clips on the site. Josh Felser, chief executive of the video-sharing site Grouper, which was bought last fall by Sony, said advertisers clearly preferred such professional content over less predictable user-submitted material.

“Most of the video content today is unsellable,” Mr. Felser said. “We are all in this industry looking at generating inventory that is higher quality.”

MySpace expects that part of the appeal of MySpace TV to studios and professional videomakers will be its aggressiveness in protecting intellectual property. The company was among the first major video sites to use filtering software, which checks uploaded videos to determine if they are protected by copyright. YouTube has also embraced filters, but it is fighting a lawsuit brought by Viacom over past infringement.

“We are sensitive to that issue because we are part of a bigger content company, and protecting intellectual property is part of our bigger business,” Mr. DeWolfe said.

But whether that will help lure more must-see videos to MySpace TV is another matter. Michael D. Eisner, the former Disney chairman turned Internet entrepreneur, produced a popular series of Web shows this spring called “Prom Queen” and let MySpace post them for 12 hours before he gave them to other sites.

Mr. Eisner, speaking of MySpace, said, “It makes me feel good that there is a multigenerational history in that organization of honoring and respecting professionally produced content.”

Mr. Eisner is creating a sequel and another comedy series, “The All for Nots.” He said he would not necessarily give the exclusive rights to MySpace TV or even YouTube.

“Everyone is rethinking how they are going to work in content,” he said. “Down the road, content will help to define all these platforms.”

    MySpace, Chasing YouTube, Upgrades Its Offerings, NYT, 27.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/27video.html

Murdoch’s Dealings in China: It’s Business, and It’s Personal

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING, June 25 — Many big companies have sought to break into the Chinese market over the past two decades, but few of them have been as ardent and unrelenting as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Mr. Murdoch has flattered Communist Party leaders and done business with their children. His Fox News network helped China’s leading state broadcaster develop a news Web site. He joined hands with the Communist Youth League, a power base in the ruling party, in a risky television venture, his China managers and advisers say.

Mr. Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi, is a mainland Chinese who once worked for his Hong Kong-based satellite broadcaster, Star TV. Her role in managing investments and honing elite connections in China has underscored uncertainties within the Murdoch family about how the family-controlled News Corporation will be run after Mr. Murdoch, 76, retires or dies.

Regulatory barriers and management missteps have thwarted Mr. Murdoch’s hopes of big profits in China. He has said his local business hit a “brick wall” after a bid to corral prime-time broadcasting rights fell apart in 2005, costing him tens of millions of dollars.

But as he seeks to buy Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, his track record in China has attracted attention less because of profits and losses than for what it shows about his management style.

Mr. Murdoch cooperates closely with China’s censors and state broadcasters, several people who worked for him in China say. He cultivates political ties that he hopes will insulate his business ventures from regulatory interference, these people say.

In speeches and interviews, Mr. Murdoch often supports the policies of Chinese leaders and attacks their critics. A group of China-based reporters for The Journal accused him in a letter to Dow Jones shareholders of “sacrificing journalistic integrity to satisfy personal and political aims,” a charge the News Corporation denies.

His courtship has made him the Chinese leadership’s favorite foreign media baron. He has dined with former President Jiang Zemin in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing and repeatedly met other members of the ruling Politburo in Beijing, New York and London. Television channels affiliated with Mr. Murdoch beam more programming into China than any other foreign media group.

“The reality is that the Chinese government is not going to let anything radical happen in media,” says Gary Davey, an Australian who once ran Star TV for Mr. Murdoch. “But we got a lot farther than anyone else did.”

News Corporation officials in Beijing and Hong Kong declined to comment for this article. After The New York Times began a two-part series on Monday about how Mr. Murdoch operates his company, the News Corporation issued a statement:

“News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.”

China has never been a make-or-break proposition for the News Corporation, since its operations here represent a small part of the company, which is valued at $68 billion. But Mr. Murdoch pushed for nearly 15 years to create a satellite television network that would cover every major market in the world, including China.

He coveted the $50 billion in ad spending that flows mainly to China’s state-owned news media whose products, even after years of improvements, still reflect propaganda directives as well as consumer demand.

The News Corporation’s competitors in television and film, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom and Time Warner, also had to accommodate Chinese demands as the price of admission to the local market.

But Mr. Murdoch gave more, his associates said.

“The Chinese discovered that Rupert was a real emperor who controlled everything himself,” said H. S. Liu, who oversaw government relations for the News Corporation in China. “His rivals had big, cautious bureaucracies that could not always deliver.”

China has long meant more than business to the Murdoch clan. Mr. Murdoch’s father, Keith, wrote about China as a war correspondent in the 1930s. As a newspaper proprietor in Australia, he collected Ming dynasty porcelain.

When Rupert Murdoch visited Shanghai in 1997, Wendi Deng, then a junior News Corporation employee in Hong Kong, flew up to serve as his translator. Together they explored Shanghai, which was then emerging as a lively center of finance and commerce.

“He was knocked over by the place,” recalled Bruce Dover, a former China manager for Mr. Murdoch, “and by her.” Within two years, Mr. Murdoch had left his second wife, Anna Mann, and married Ms. Deng.

Clawing Back

Mr. Murdoch’s initial foray into China was disastrous. Shortly after he purchased the satellite broadcaster Star TV in Hong Kong for nearly $1 billion in 1993, he made a speech in London that enraged the Chinese leadership.

He said that modern communications technology had “proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.” Star could beam programming to every corner of China, and Murdoch had paid a big premium for the broadcaster for that reason.

Prime Minister Li Peng promptly outlawed private ownership of satellite dishes, which had once proliferated on rooftops. Star TV faced a threat to its viability.

Chinese leaders rebuffed his attempts to apologize in person — a ban that lasted nearly four years. But he sought to placate them. One target was Deng Xiaoping, then retired but still China’s senior leader.

HarperCollins, Mr. Murdoch’s book unit, published a biography of Mr. Deng written by his daughter, Deng Rong. Although it mainly recycled propaganda about Mr. Deng, Mr. Murdoch threw an elaborate book party at Le Cirque in New York. The book sold poorly.

He also cultivated ties with Mr. Deng’s eldest son, Deng Pufang, who is disabled. Mr. Murdoch chartered a jet to ferry a troop of disabled acrobats that the younger Mr. Deng had promoted to perform abroad, according to a former News Corporation official.

Star TV overhauled its programming to suit Chinese tastes. In 1994 it dropped BBC News, which had frequently angered Chinese officials with its reports on mainland affairs.

Mr. Murdoch said the decision was made for business reasons, not political reasons. Mr. Davey, who then ran Star TV, agreed that cost was a primary consideration.

But he said he had pressed the British broadcaster to stop showing a video of a man facing down a tank outside Tiananmen Square — an indelible image from China’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989 — during its on-air programming breaks. He said the BBC refused, calling the video a “journalistic presentation.”

“The BBC never got the sensitivities of the situation,” Mr. Davey said. “It was relentless and stupid. Neither party was too upset about ending the relationship.”

If Star was a potential threat to the one-party state, it was also a new opportunity. Chinese officials disliked Western news media coverage of China and wanted to present their own face to the world. Mr. Murdoch provided the access they wanted.

In 1996, he entered a joint venture with Liu Changle, a onetime radio host for the People’s Liberation Army who had connections with propaganda officials. Their joint news and entertainment channel, called Phoenix, beamed programs to the small number of urban households permitted to see foreign broadcasts in China. Mr. Murdoch transmitted the same programming around the world on his satellites.

Phoenix imitated the fast pace and on-the-scene reporting style popular in the West and shook up the mainland’s staid news media, which still featured well-coiffed narrators reading scripts about meetings between senior leaders held that day. But Phoenix also tended to steer clear of the most sensitive political topics and could be bombastically nationalistic.

Phoenix may have demonstrated that the Chinese news media could become more sophisticated and dynamic without threatening the party’s power. It also showed that Mr. Murdoch could be an asset.

“Officials realized he had a good intentions,” Mr. Liu said.

After Phoenix proved a hit, Ding Guangen, a hard-liner who exercised sweeping control over all Chinese news media as chief of the country’s Propaganda Department, granted Mr. Murdoch his first meeting. So did Zhu Rongji, then the prime minister.

Mr. Zhu noted that Mr. Murdoch had become an American citizen to comply with television ownership rules in the United States. He joked that if he wanted to broadcast more in China, he should consider becoming Chinese, a person who attended the meeting recalled.

Friendly Relations

The News Corporation’s outreach intensified. When Mr. Murdoch learned that China Central Television, known as CCTV, was struggling to develop a news Web site, he dispatched a team from Fox News to help design and operate one. Another News Corporation team brought People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, online.

China also needed help encrypting satellite transmissions so it could develop a pay-TV service, a specialty of the News Corporation’s NDS subsidiary. NDS helped Beijing create a proprietary encryption system. It never realized sizable royalties, people who worked at the News Corporation said.

Similarly, the company brought delegations of Chinese officials to Britain, so they could study how Mr. Murdoch’s BSkyB unit had become a lucrative gateway for satellite television in Europe.

“Our thinking was that we would show off our technology and they would contract News Corporation to do the same for them,” said Mr. Dover, Mr. Murdoch’s former China manager. “Their thinking was, ‘We want this for ourselves.’ ”

“It ended being more of a giveaway,” Mr. Dover said.

In late 1998, President Jiang invited Mr. Murdoch to Zhongnanhai. The official Xinhua news agency, reporting on the session, made clear that the media baron had a new reputation.

“President Jiang expressed appreciation for the efforts made by world media mogul Rupert Murdoch in presenting China objectively and cooperating with the Chinese press over the last two years,” Xinhua said.

The Murdochs often echoed the Chinese government line. In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair, Mr. Murdoch spoke disparagingly of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese condemn as a separatist. “I have heard cynics who say he is a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” he said.

James Murdoch, who ran Star TV from 2000 to 2003, said in a speech in Los Angeles in 2001 that Western reporters in China supported “destabilizing forces” that are “very, very dangerous for the Chinese government.” He lashed out at the Falun Gong spiritual sect, which had just endured brutal repression in China, calling it “dangerous and apocalyptic.”

The Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong movement in 2001. Last month, seven China-based reporters for The Journal wrote a letter to Dow Jones’s current controlling shareholders arguing that the articles on Falun Gong “may never have seen the light of day” if The Journal had been owned by Mr. Murdoch.

News Corporation officials say such fears are baseless. While several reporters who worked in China for the company’s publications in the 1990s say Mr. Murdoch’s editors pressed them to tone down their coverage of delicate issues that could anger the Chinese leadership, reporters serving in such posts now say they have not come under similar pressures.

By the late 1990s, Mr. Murdoch was traveling several times a year to the country. He was often joined by Wendi Murdoch, who left her formal position in the company but continued to scout for investments in China and participate in strategy decisions there, several people who worked for the News Corporation said.

One of her roles: introducing her husband to Chinese entrepreneurs. Many of them had received business degrees in the United States, as she had at Yale.

The Murdochs invested about $150 million in half a dozen start-up Internet and telecom companies at the height of the Internet bubble between 1999 and 2001. Only one, Netcom, returned an appreciable investment profit, two former News Corporation executives said.

But one of the entrepreneurs the Murdochs befriended during the investment spree was Jiang Mianheng, the son of President Jiang. Ms. Murdoch and some other News Corporation employees argued internally that the younger Mr. Jiang could help Star distribute its broadcasts more widely, two former News Corporation executives said.

It is unclear what role, if any, Mr. Jiang played. But in 2002, the company became the first foreign broadcaster to receive “landing rights” to sell programs to cable systems in Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong.

The license came with a catch. The News Corporation again consented to transmit Chinese programs — this time, the English-language news, talk shows and cultural shows on CCTV’s Channel 9 — to the United States and Britain. Time Warner later agreed to similar terms. But the market appeared to be opening, with the News Corporation in the lead.

Prime Time

The News Corporation and its joint venture partners controlled 9 of the 31 foreign channels, including news, movies, music videos and sports, more than any other foreign media company. Officially, however, it could still reach only government and foreign compounds and luxury hotels, as well as homes in Guangdong. Mr. Murdoch wanted more.

Good news appeared to come in 2004. The authorities began allowing Chinese-foreign joint ventures to produce shows that could be broadcast locally without the restrictions that apply to overseas content.

Mr. Murdoch interpreted the order liberally. The News Corporation allied itself with a state-run broadcaster in the western province of Qinghai. The arrangement covered not only production but also distribution. Through middlemen, the News Corporation also purchased prime-time slots in 25 Chinese provinces. It had become a backdoor national broadcaster.

Aware that the venture pushed the limits of what regulators allowed, the News Corporation sought to arrange political cover, people involved in arranging the deal said. It recruited a media and stock market entrepreneur named Ding Yuchen to join the venture as a partner. Mr. Ding’s father, Ding Guangen, was the longtime propaganda chief. A second partner was the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, considered the political power base of China’s new top leader, Hu Jintao.

In comments to News Corporation investors in early 2005, Mr. Murdoch boasted of a “new venture,” which he did not name, “where we’ll have nearly 50 percent of a prime-time channel, which will have access to well over 100 million homes.”

It did not endure. The News Corporation used Qinghai to broadcast branded shows it had produced for its own, more limited channel. When they began appearing nationally, competitors complained that Mr. Murdoch was getting special treatment.

The Propaganda Department forced the News Corporation to end its involvement with Qinghai shortly thereafter. The cost of the debacle: between $30 million and $60 million, people connected to the company at the time said.

News Corporation executives said they felt the political winds had shifted against them. President Jiang, who retired from his final post as military chief in 2004, had lost much of his day-to-day influence. President Hu’s propaganda team pulled in the reins. Mr. Murdoch said publicly that he had hit a “brick wall.”

Mr. Liu, Mr. Murdoch’s partner at Phoenix, said the Qinghai venture “is not something I would have tried” because it ran afoul of media regulations. But he said Mr. Murdoch had not lost the good will of senior officials. “They still recognize his contributions,” he said.

When Mr. Murdoch visited China late last year, he met Liu Yunshan, Mr. Ding’s successor as propaganda chief, and Liu Qi, the party secretary of Beijing and the top coordinator for the 2008 Olympics.

The News Corporation also entered an alliance with China Mobile, the state-owned company that is the world’s largest mobile communications operator. Mr. Liu of Phoenix said the move “could open a new, lucrative highway” to provide media content to China’s 480 million mobile-phone users.

Wendi Murdoch has stepped up her role in China. She plotted a strategy for the News Corporation’s social networking site, MySpace, to enter the Chinese market, people involved with the company said. The News Corporation decided to license the MySpace name to a local consortium of investors organized by Ms. Murdoch.

As a local venture, MySpace China, which began operations in the spring, abides by domestic censorship laws and the “self discipline” regime that governs proprietors of Chinese Web sites. Every page on the site has a link allowing users or monitors to “report inappropriate information” to the authorities. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have made similar accommodations for their Web sites in China.

The Murdochs will soon be able to call Beijing home. Workers have nearly finished renovating their traditional courtyard-style house in Beijing’s exclusive Beichizi district, a block from the Forbidden City. Beneath the steep-pitched roofs and wooden eaves of freshly coated vermillion and gold, the courtyard has an underground swimming pool and billiard room, according to people who have seen the design.

Plainclothes security officers linger on the street outside. One neighbor is the retired prime minister, Mr. Zhu, who invited Mr. Murdoch to become Chinese.

    Murdoch’s Dealings in China: It’s Business, and It’s Personal, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/asia/26murdoch.html?hp

Murdoch Reaches Out for Even More

June 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JO BECKER

This article was reported by Jo Becker, Richard Siklos, Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, and written by Ms. Becker.

In the fall of 2003, a piece of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media empire was in jeopardy.

Congress was on the verge of limiting any company from owning local television stations that reached more than 35 percent of American homes. Mr. Murdoch’s Fox stations reached nearly 39 percent, meaning he would have to sell some.

A strike force of Mr. Murdoch’s lobbyists joined other media companies in working on the issue. The White House backed the industry, and in a late-night meeting just before Thanksgiving, Congressional leaders agreed to raise the limit — to 39 percent.

One leader of the Congressional movement to limit ownership was Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. But in the end, he, too, agreed to the compromise. It turns out he had a business connection to Mr. Murdoch. Months before, HarperCollins, Mr. Murdoch’s publishing house, had signed a $250,000 book deal to publish Mr. Lott’s memoir, “Herding Cats,” records and interviews show.

An aide to Mr. Lott said the book deal had no bearing on the senator’s decision, and a spokesman for Mr. Murdoch chalked it up to coincidence. Still, the ownership fight showcases the confluence of business, political and media prowess that is central to the way Mr. Murdoch has built his global information conglomerate.

His vast media holdings give him a gamut of tools — not just campaign contributions, but also jobs for former government officials and media exposure that promotes allies while attacking adversaries, sometimes viciously — all of which he has used to further his financial interests and establish his legitimacy in the United States, interviews and government records show.

Mr. Murdoch may be best known in the this country as the man who created Fox News as a counterweight to what he saw as a liberal bias in the news media. But he has often set aside his conservative ideology in pursuit of his business interests. In recent years, he has spread campaign contributions across both sides of the political aisle and nurtured relationships with the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

More than 30 years after the Australian-born Mr. Murdoch arrived on the American newspaper scene and turned The New York Post into a racy, right-leaning tabloid, his holding company, the News Corporation, has offered $5 billion to buy a pillar of the business news establishment — Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

The sale would give Mr. Murdoch control of the pre-eminent journalistic authority on the world in which he is an active, aggressive participant. What worries his critics is that Mr. Murdoch will use The Journal, which has won many Pulitzer Prizes and has a sterling reputation for accuracy and fairness, as yet another tool to further his myriad financial and political agendas.

“It is hard to imagine Rupert Murdoch publishing The New York Post in Midtown Manhattan, with all of his personal and political biases and business interests reflected every day, while publishing The Wall Street Journal in Downtown Manhattan with no interference whatsoever,” James Ottaway Jr., a 5 percent shareholder and former director of Dow Jones, said recently.

Members of the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, have sought elaborate assurances from Mr. Murdoch that he will preserve the independence of The Journal’s news coverage. Last night, advisers to both sides said they were close to reaching an agreement on editorial control, but it was unclear whether the Bancrofts would approve a deal. When he bought The Times of London in 1981 he gave similar assurances, but some former editors say he meddled with news operations anyway.

Mr. Murdoch declined a request for an interview, but has recently said he would preserve The Journal’s independence. Gary L. Ginsberg, a News Corporation executive, said it was “insulting” for anyone to suggest that Mr. Murdoch would compromise the integrity of “one of the world’s great newspapers” adding, “It’s not good business and it’s not good politics and it’s absurd on its face.”

From his beginnings as a proprietor of a single Australian newspaper, Mr. Murdoch now commands a news, entertainment and Internet enterprise whose $68 billion value slightly exceeds that of the Walt Disney Company.

The American newspaper industry has never seen a publisher quite like him. Mr. Murdoch has long been a pivotal figure in England and Australia, and in the dozen years since he has moved his base of operations to this country, he has insinuated himself into the political and financial fabric of the United States. His businesses have thrived in a highly regulated environment in part because of his remarkable ability to mold the rules to fit his needs.

This became clear in the regulatory fight over media ownership, a battle critical to Mr. Murdoch’s audacious creation of a fourth national television network, Fox. He has also turned his political clout on business rivals, as he did when he mounted a campaign recently against the Nielsen television rating agency.

“Rupert is sort of an 18th-century guy: the world is still forming, and he’s going to do what he can to hack out a place in the wilderness and defend it,” said Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time Warner, who both competes and socializes with Mr. Murdoch.

Political Relations

Shortly before Christmas in 1987, Senator Edward M. Kennedy taught Mr. Murdoch a tough lesson in the ways of Washington.

Two years earlier, Mr. Murdoch had paid $2 billion to buy seven television stations in major American markets with the intention of starting a national network. To comply with rules limiting foreign ownership, he became an American citizen. And to comply with rules banning the ownership of television stations and newspapers in the same market, he promised to sell some newspapers eventually. But almost immediately he began looking for ways around that rule.

Then Mr. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, stepped in. Mr. Kennedy’s liberal politics had made him a target of Murdoch-owned news media outlets, particularly The Boston Herald, which often referred to Mr. Kennedy as “Fat Boy.” He engineered a legislative maneuver that forced an infuriated Mr. Murdoch to sell his beloved New York Post.

Mr. Murdoch was able to buy back the tabloid five years later, but the sale represented a rare and, some say, transforming defeat.

“Teddy almost did him in,” said Philip R. Verveer, a cable television lobbyist. “I presume that over time, as his media ownership in this country has grown and grown, he’s realized that you can’t throw spit wads at leading figures in society with impunity.”

In fact, among the ranks of the lobbyists who have done Mr. Murdoch’s bidding in Washington in recent years is Anthony Podesta, Mr. Kennedy’s former counsel.

Over time, Mr. Murdoch has shown an ability to adapt to changing political winds. In Britain, his newspapers had a long history of being pro-Tory and anti-Labor, and he was personally close with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But in 1997, two of Mr. Murdoch’s papers endorsed Tony Blair for prime minister. Mr. Murdoch became a frequent guest at No. 10 Downing Street, “effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet,” said Lance Price, who was a Blair spokesman from 1998 to 2001.

Mr. Murdoch had reason to court Mr. Blair: ensuring that the new government would allow him to keep intact his British holdings, which by then included The Times of London, multiple tabloids and a stake in Sky News. Many in the Labor Party under Mr. Blair favored the enactment of media ownership limits, which could have forced Mr. Murdoch to divest some of his interests. But Mr. Blair “quietly dropped the policy,” Mr. Price said.

“Blair’s attitude was quite clear,” Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times under Mr. Murdoch in London from 1983 to 1994, said in an interview. “If the Murdoch press gave the Blair government a fair hearing, it would be left intact.”

Mr. Murdoch’s trajectory in the United States has been similar. His credentials as a purveyor of conservative journalism notwithstanding, he operates like many less visible corporate executives in not allowing his personal politics to get in the way of his bottom line.

An analysis of campaign finance records shows that since 1997, Republicans have received only a slight majority — 56 percent — of the $4.76 million in campaign donations from the Murdoch family and the News Corporation’s political action committees and employees. Since Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 elections, the company and its employees have given more than twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans, the records show.

“We did seek more balance,” said Peggy Binzel, Mr. Murdoch’s former chief in-house lobbyist. “You need to be able to tell your story to both sides to be effective. And that’s what political giving is about.”

Mr. Murdoch has an army of outside lobbyists, who have reported being paid more than $11 million since 1998 to address issues as diverse as trade relations, programming decency and Internet regulation.

One firm focuses almost exclusively on parts of the tax code that affect the News Corporation. By taking advantage of a provision in the law that allows expanding companies like Mr. Murdoch’s to defer taxes to future years, the News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. During that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation’s domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion.

The News Corporation’s outside lobbying team has been a veritable political Noah’s ark. It has included Republicans like Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman; former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York; and the firm headed by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York. But it has also included former Democratic members of Congress, as well as several high-ranking Clinton administration officials, including Jack Quinn, former White House counsel.

Mr. Murdoch’s association with the Clintons is perhaps the best example of his ever-morphing relationships with the powerful, and theirs with him. For years, the former president was a favorite target of The New York Post, which seemed to delight in referring to him as “former horndog-in-chief.”

In October 2002, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch had a lunch meeting at Mr. Clinton’s office in Harlem. It was arranged by Mr. Ginsberg, who had worked in the White House counsel’s office in the Clinton administration and is now the News Corporation’s executive vice president for corporate affairs.

More recently, Mr. Murdoch donated $500,000 to the former president’s Global Initiative and was one of its featured panelists at a 2005 event in New York. In 2006, The Post issued a surprising endorsement of Mrs. Clinton in her Senate re-election bid. On June 5 and 6 of this year, Mr. Ginsberg and Peter A. Chernin, president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, were hosts of back-to-back fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, one in New York and one in Los Angeles.

The Nielsen Battle

In early 2004, an alarm went off at the News Corporation headquarters.

Nielsen Media Research was preparing to switch to a more sophisticated technology to calculate ratings that television stations use to set advertising rates for local programming. Results of a trial run showed sharp drops in ratings for shows carried on stations owned by the News Corporation, particularly those aimed at minority viewers.

With millions of dollars at stake, Mr. Murdoch sprang into action. He hired the Glover Park Group, a consulting firm with deep ties to the Clinton administration, to run a grass-roots ground war. Charging that the system was faulty and that it undercounted minorities, the firm started an extensive advertising campaign intended to delay the rollout of the new technology and staged protests around the country that drew such unlikely allies as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Among the Democrats who wrote to Nielsen opposing the new system was Mrs. Clinton.

The New York Post pursued the story, running news headlines like “Nailing Nielsen” and routinely failing to mention its parent company’s interest in the outcome.

The resulting two-year campaign was unusually brazen, even by Beltway standards. Protesters massed outside Nielsen offices in New York. The atmosphere grew so charged that Nielsen’s chief, Susan Whiting, hired a personal bodyguard and the company strengthened security at its headquarters, according to Nielsen officials.

At one point, Ms. Whiting publicly accused Mr. Chernin and Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan of threatening to do “everything possible to discredit you and the company in Washington” if she did not back down. Mr. Chernin and Mr. Murdoch publicly denied making the threat.

But the News Corporation turned to Republican allies to put pressure on Nielsen. Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican who was chairman of the Commerce Committee’s communications subcommittee, and Representative Vito J. Fossella, a New York Republican, introduced legislation that threatened Nielsen with government oversight.

One day after the bill was introduced, The New York Post ran an opinion article co-written by Mr. Fossella expressing outrage over plans for a museum at ground zero in Lower Manhattan. A news report in the paper that day raised the same concerns. Mr. Ginsberg said “the notion that Rupert had anything to do with that is laughable.”

Political contributions flowed to nearly all the legislation’s supporters. In 2005, the year the legislation was introduced, records show that the bill’s 29 sponsors and co-sponsors together received at least $144,650 in donations from the News Corporation’s political action committees and lobbyists.

Ultimately, the dispute was settled quietly. Mr. Murdoch succeeded in keeping the old rating system in place for several months in the three top markets, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Those months included the sweeps period, when advertising rates are set.

Mr. Ginsberg said the campaign was successful in highlighting concerns about tracking minority viewership and “educating certain groups as to how to use this new technology.”

But Dale Snape, who lobbied for Nielsen, said: “It was a classic example of him using all his resources to try to politically influence an outcome — he bought a Hill debate. It was scorched earth, and it was all about money. They created a public interest furor where there was none.”

Media Ownership Rules

For more than 70 years, the federal government has regulated media ownership to protect against any entity gaining too much power over the dissemination of information. And for much of the last two decades, Mr. Murdoch has chafed against those restrictions, winning exceptions and easing regulations.

Again and again, Mr. Murdoch won crucial skirmishes with the Federal Communications Commission. In this he was helped most by his Republican allies, including former Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Bush administration, which has promoted measures to allow more consolidation.

During the Clinton administration, Mr. Murdoch was able to draw upon Republican support when the F.C.C. chairman at the time, Reed E. Hundt, opened an investigation into whether the News Corporation had violated commission rules in acquiring television stations to form the Fox Network.

According to two former F.C.C. officials, Mr. Murdoch’s chief in-house lobbyist at the time, Preston Padden, confronted Mr. Hundt’s chief of staff at a meeting at a coffee shop near the agency’s headquarters. Mr. Hundt would not be able to “get a job as dog-catcher” if the F.C.C. took away a single News Corporation television license, Mr. Padden warned, they said.

The warning, one of the officials said, “was designed to send a harsh signal that if we continued, they would do everything in the world to make our life miserable.” As Mr. Hundt later recalled in a memoir, Mr. Murdoch assailed him in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, and Congressional Republicans rose up against him.

In the end, the F.C.C. found that the deal had violated the rules. But Mr. Hundt declined to strip Mr. Murdoch of his licenses, reasoning that the fault lay with the Reagan-era F.C.C. for approving the acquisitions in the first place. Mr. Padden, who has left the News Corporation, refused requests for an interview.

It was the first of many victories for Mr. Murdoch in the new political climate that swept into Washington in 1994 when the Republicans won control of Congress. It was a fortunate time for Mr. Murdoch, whose business interests and political ideology were in ascendancy.

The new Congress overhauled telecommunications laws for the first time in decades, allowing media companies like Mr. Murdoch’s to expand by increasing the share of the national audience they could reach. So long as a company did not reach more than 35 percent of American households, it could buy as many stations as it wanted.

Mr. Murdoch’s lobbyists were also able to get a provision in the bill requiring the F.C.C. to review the cap periodically. It was just such a review that led the Bush administration to increase the cap again in 2003. By then, Mr. Murdoch had bought additional stations that put him over the 35 percent limit, as had another company, Viacom.

The F.C.C. chairman at that time, Michael K. Powell, proposed a broad loosening of media ownership rules, including raising the cap to 45 percent. (Two of Mr. Powell’s top advisers, Susan Eid and Paul Jackson, now work for Mr. Murdoch.)

Ultimately, a federal appeals court threw out the new rules. But by then, Congress and the White House had intervened, passing into law the 39 percent compromise.

Mr. Lott, an outspoken critic of media consolidation, agreed to the increase because it was still lower than what Mr. Powell had proposed, said his spokesman, Nick Simpson. Mr. Simpson added that Mr. Lott did not want to force companies to sell stations and that his book deal did not affect his view of Mr. Murdoch’s legislative agenda.

Many companies publish books by public officials. But because of Mr. Murdoch’s wide business interests, HarperCollins’s book deals have at times drawn scrutiny. Its decision to cancel a book critical of Chinese Communist leaders by Hong Kong’s last British governor was assailed as a move by Mr. Murdoch to protect his Chinese business interests, a charge he denied.

HarperCollins also provoked a firestorm when it gave Mr. Gingrich a $4.5 million book contract as Congress was preparing to redraw the media ownership rules.

Mr. Ginsberg pointed out that Mr. Murdoch later fired the Gingrich book’s editor for making what he regarded as an “uneconomical and unseemly” deal. He said that in general Mr. Murdoch did not involve himself in decisions about book contracts, and added, “If these books aren’t viable, they aren’t published.”

Mr. Lott’s book sold 12,000 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of all domestic retail and Internet sales. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, received $24,506 from HarperCollins for his modest-selling book “Passion for Truth,” according to financial disclosure forms. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, got $141,666 for her book “American Heroines,” which has sold better. All sit on either the Commerce or Judiciary Committees that most closely oversee the media business.

HarperCollins has also given book deals to Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and a $1 million advance to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, both of whose books are due out next year.

A former HarperCollins executive, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the company, said Mr. Murdoch was less hands-on than people assumed. “It’s not done in a direct way where he issues instructions,” the executive said. “It’s a bunch of people running around trying to please him.”

Ms. Binzel, the former chief government strategist for the News Corporation, said Mr. Murdoch got the breaks he did in the United States based on the merits, not his political connections. He took on the major networks and created more competition in the media marketplace, something regulators had long desired, she said.

“Rupert has always been a visionary, and when you bring in a visionary, they are frequently going up against the establishment,” she said. “So much of what Rupert has faced in Washington has been getting rid of rules that protect incumbents. The reason he convinced people to do that was that he was going to be providing something new.”

The Dow Jones Bid

Now, Mr. Murdoch is trying to convince the Bancroft family to sell him The Journal.

Dow Jones has proposed a committee to safeguard the paper’s editorial independence that includes a continuing role for some members of the Bancroft family and current Journal editors and executives.

Mr. Murdoch has said he prefers the model of committee used at The Times of London. His company bought The Times in 1981 and in order to win approval for the deal Mr. Murdoch agreed to an independent oversight committee and guidelines intended to prevent him from meddling in coverage.

According to interviews with former Times editors and affidavits filed in an unrelated 1995 libel suit, there were clashes over the publisher’s involvement in the paper from the very start.

Harry Evans, who was editor at the time of Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition and was forced out soon after, wrote a memoir vividly describing his constant fights with the new publisher. In his affidavit, Mr. Evans describes Mr. Murdoch’s ordering the publication of a cartoon that Times editors had deemed tasteless and his complaining that too many stories had a left-wing bent. Another former editor said Mr. Murdoch once pointed to the byline of a correspondent and asserted, “That man’s a Commie.”

Fred Emery, another former Times editor, said Mr. Murdoch once said to him: “I give instructions to my editors all around the world; why shouldn’t I in London?”

The turmoil of those first years subsided, in part, one former Times editor said, because Mr. Murdoch got rid of those who did not adhere to his politics. “He puts people in who will do his bidding,” said Mr. Neil, the former editor.

The current editor of The Times, Robert Thomson, paints a different picture: “I’ve had absolutely no interference and a lot of investment in a loss-making newspaper, for which Rupert Murdoch gets no credit.”

Under Mr. Thomson, the business pages of The Times expanded, and there are now 18 foreign reporters, compared with 8 when he came to the paper. The Times is the only British newspaper with a Baghdad bureau.

Mr. Thomson, who is expected to play an important role at The Journal if the News Corporation buys it, said Mr. Murdoch would invest in the paper and expand overseas coverage.

Over the years, as Mr. Murdoch built his empire, he has lusted after The Journal.

In the mid-1980s, he attended a black-tie press dinner in New York and found himself sitting next to Julie Salamon, then The Journal’s film critic and a former New York Times reporter. She vividly recalls his fascination with the inner workings of the newspaper and said he clearly expressed his desire to own it someday.

Ms. Salamon initially dismissed Mr. Murdoch. “The idea of this tabloid guy buying The Journal, which was then at the zenith of its success, seemed preposterous,” she said.

But by the end of the meal, impressed by Mr. Murdoch’s canny sense of the American media landscape, Ms. Salamon said, “I went home with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, like this guy might actually do it.”

Jo Becker and Richard Siklos reported from New York, Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner from London. Griff Palmer contributed from New York.

    Murdoch Reaches Out for Even More, NYT, 25.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/business/media/25murdoch.html?hp

Talk Shows Influence Immigration Debate

June 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:20 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Immigration has supplanted Iraq as the leading issue on television and radio talk shows, complicating the prospects of a Senate bill desperately wanted by President Bush.

Conservative talk radio's impact on the immigration debate reached new heights last week, with one host effectively writing an amendment for when the Senate returns to the imperiled bill this week.

National talk show hosts have spent months denouncing the bill as providing amnesty for illegal immigrants. Some top Republicans who support the legislation have defied the broadcast pundits. Others GOP lawmakers have tried to placate them, even to the point of accepting their ideas for amendments.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the key conservative negotiator behind the compromise bill, told reporters Friday that California-based radio host Hugh Hewitt ''had several ideas'' that ''we are trying to include'' in amendments to be offered in an upcoming series of crucial votes.

Hewitt, a conservative who has criticized many aspects of the bill, had Kyl as a guest on Thursday and asked: ''Does the bill provide for any separate treatment of aliens, illegal aliens from countries of special concern?''

Kyl replied: ''It's going to, as a result of your lobbying efforts to me.''

People seeking entry the U.S. from countries that the U.S. has designated as state sponsors of terrorism will get a higher level of scrutiny, Kyl said Friday.

Other Bush allies have tried more confrontational approaches to the talk hosts, sometimes with bruising results.

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., told reporters last week, ''Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.'' Some hosts, he added, do not know what is in the lengthy bill.

The comments incensed conservative talk show hosts who generally had supported Lott over the years.

Lott is ''upset that the American people got right into the middle of the conversation over the problem with illegal aliens and it didn't turn out all that well for the pro-amnesty forces,'' Atlanta-based talk show host Neal Boortz wrote on his Web site.

''If Trent Lott and his other buddies up on the Hill aren't listening to 'talk,' then what are they listening to? The answer is either their wallet or their legacy.''

Radio host Rush Limbaugh asked his audience: ''What are we going to do about Mississippi Senator Trent Lott?''

Lott's treatment contrasted sharply with that given to Kyl. In a column posted on his Web site, Hewitt called Kyl ''perhaps the single most effective and principled conservative in the United States Senate.''

The immigration bill would tighten borders and workplace enforcement, create a guest worker program and provide ways to legal status for many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

The legislation faces showdown votes this coming week that lawmakers on all sides agree will be close.

If the measure fails, talk radio and TV -- where CNN's Lou Dobbs has been especially critical -- will deserve substantial credit, academics and politicians say.

''Talk radio and talk TV are most effective when there's an immediate action pending,'' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, who is an authority on media and politics. ''It's a classic instance of mobilization with all the pieces in place and it's sure to have an effect.''

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a leading opponent of the bill, said in an interview that ''talk radio has had a significant impact on this issue.''

A frequent guest of Dobbs, Hewitt and other conservative hosts discussing immigration, Sessions said, ''I think people have learned more from talk radio than from reading the newspapers.''

As for Lott, Sessions said: ''I can't imagine what Trent was thinking. Maybe his mouth was moving and his brain was in neutral.''

Michael Harrison, editor of the talk show industry magazine Talkers, said immigration has replaced the Iraq war as the most discussed topic and has led many conservative hosts to show more loyalty to the anti-amnesty issue than to the Republican Party.

''I think talk radio should be credited with possibly saving the American people from George Bush's immigration bill,'' Harrison said, adding that he and his magazine are nonpartisan.

Some Republicans who recently announced their opposition to the bill said constituent concerns were their main reason. But they acknowledged the intensity of talk radio hostility in their states.

''Neal Boortz, he popped us pretty good,'' said Lindsay Mabry, a spokeswoman for Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., who shifted from qualified support to opposition to the bill in recent days. She said Chambliss consulted with Boortz on immigration even though the senator was not an on-air guest during the debate.

------

On the Net:

Information on the bill, S. 1348, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/

    Talk Shows Influence Immigration Debate, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Talk-Radio.html

Online Sales Lose Steam as Buyers Grow Web-Weary

June 17, 2007
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL and BOB TEDESCHI

SAN FRANCISCO, June 16 — Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?

Since the inception of the Web, online commerce has enjoyed hypergrowth, with annual sales increasing more than 25 percent over all, and far more rapidly in many categories. But in the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies.

Growth in online sales has also dropped dramatically in diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies. Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.

The reaction to the trend is apparent at Dell, which many had regarded as having mastered the science of selling computers online, but is now putting its PCs in Wal-Mart stores. Expedia has almost tripled the number of travel ticketing kiosks it puts in hotel lobbies and other places that attract tourists.

The slowdown is a result of several forces. Sales on the Internet are expected to reach $116 billion this year, or 5 percent of all retail sales, making it harder to maintain the same high growth rates. At the same time, consumers seem to be experiencing Internet fatigue and are changing their buying habits.

John Johnson, 53, who sells medical products to drug stores and lives in San Francisco, finds that retailers have livened up their stores to be more alluring.

“They’re working a lot harder,” he said as he shopped at Book Passage in downtown San Francisco. “They’re not as stuffy. The lighting is better. You don’t get someone behind the counter who’s been there 40 years. They’re younger and hipper and much more with it.”

He and his wife, Liz Hauer, 51, a Macy’s executive, also shop online, but mostly for gifts or items that need to be shipped. They said they found that the experience could be tedious at times. “Online, it’s much more of a task,” she said. Still, Internet commerce is growing at a pace that traditional merchants would envy. But online sales are not growing as fast as they were even 18 months ago.

Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that online book sales will rise 11 percent this year, compared with nearly 40 percent last year. Apparel sales, which increased 61 percent last year, are expected to slow to 21 percent. And sales of pet supplies are on pace to rise 30 percent this year after climbing 81 percent last year.

Growth rates for online sales are slowing down in numerous other segments as well, including appliances, sporting goods, auto parts, computer peripherals, and even music and videos. Forrester says that sales growth is pulling back in 18 of the 24 categories it measures.

Jupiter Research, another market research firm, says the growth rate has peaked. It projects that overall online sales growth will slow to 9 percent a year by the end of the decade from as much as 25 percent in 2004.

Early financial results from e-commerce companies bear out the trend. EBay reported that revenue from Web site sales increased by just 1 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year. Bookings from Expedia’s North American Web sites rose by only 1 percent in the first quarter of this year. And Dell said that revenue in the Americas — United States, Canada and Latin America — for the three months ended May 4 was $8.9 billion, or nearly unchanged from the same period last year.

“There’s a recognition that some customers like a more interactive experience,” said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president for consumer products at Dell. “They like shopping and they want to go retail.”

The turning point comes as most adult Americans, and many of their children, are already shopping online.

Analysts project that by 2011, online sales will account for nearly 7 percent of overall retail sales, though categories like computer hardware and software generate more than 40 percent of their sales on the Internet.

There are other factors at work as well, including a push by companies like Apple, Starbucks and the big shopping malls to make the in-store experience more compelling.

Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits, said that the leveling off of e-commerce reflected the practical and psychological limitations of shopping online. She said that as physical stores have made the in-person buying experience more pleasurable, online stores have continued to give shoppers a blasé experience. In addition, online shopping, because it involves a computer, feels like work.

“It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think: ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’ ” she said, noting that online shopping is more a chore than an escape.

But Ms. Koehn and others say that online shopping is running into practical problems, too. For one, Ms. Koehn noted, online sellers have been steadily raising their shipping fees to bolster profits or make up for their low prices.

In response, a so-called clicks-and-bricks hybrid model is emerging, said Dan Whaley, the founder of GetThere, which became one of the largest Internet travel businesses after it was acquired by Sabre Holdings.

The bookseller Borders, for example, recently revamped its Web site to allow users to reserve books online and pick them up in the store. Similar services were started by companies like Best Buy and Sears. Other retailers are working to follow suit.

“You don’t realize how powerful of a phenomenon this new strategy has become,” Mr. Whaley said. “Nearly every big box retailer is opening it up.”

Barnes & Noble recently upgraded its site to include online book clubs, reader forums and interviews with authors. The company hopes the changes will make the online world feel more like the offline one, said Marie J. Toulantis, the chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com. “We emulate the in-store experience by having a book club online,” she said.

The retailers that have started in-store pickup programs, like Sears and REI, have found that customers who choose the hybrid model are more likely to buy additional products when they pick up their items, said Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Consumers are generally not committed to one form of buying over the other. Maggie Hake, 21, a recent college graduate heading to Africa in the fall to join the Peace Corps, said that when she needs to buy something for her Macintosh computer, she prefers visiting a store. “I trust it more,” she said. “I want to be sure there’s a person there if something goes wrong.”

Ms. Hake, who lives in Kentfield, Calif., just north of San Francisco, does like shopping online for certain things, particularly shoes, which are hard to find in her size. “I’ve got big feet — size 12.5 in women’s,” she said. “I also buy textbooks online. They’re cheaper.”

John Morgan, an economics professor from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said he expected online commerce to continue to increase, partly because it remains less than 1 percent of the overall economy. “There’s still a lot of head room for people to grow,” he said.

Matt Richtel reported from San Francisco. Bob Tedeschi reported from Guilford, Conn.

    Online Sales Lose Steam as Buyers Grow Web-Weary, NYT, 17.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/technology/17ecom.html?hp

Web Help for Getting a Mortgage the Criminal Way

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIE CRESWELL

Want to buy a home, but hampered by bad credit, an empty bank account or no job? No problem!

That may sound like an exaggeration of a late-night infomercial. But it is, in effect, the pitch that a number of Web sites are making to consumers, saying insolvent home shoppers can be made to look more attractive to lenders.

The sites, for example, offer better credit scores by hitching customers to a stranger’s credit card, or providing them pay stubs from a bogus company. One has even offered a well-stocked bank account to rent for a month or two.

Industry experts say these sites, which are relatively new, played a role in fueling the rampant mortgage fraud that has caused a huge spike in loan defaults in recent months because people bought homes they could not afford.

“There is a whole underground world — an online cottage industry — that has grown up that allows anyone to commit mortgage fraud,” said Constance Wilson, executive vice president at the financial fraud detection firm Interthinx.

Regulators and the mortgage industry are now vowing to crack down on aggressive lending practices that have led to a rising number of foreclosures. But that greater scrutiny, including lenders requiring more documentation than they have in the past, may actually increase demand for some of the services that these Web sites offer.

“We think these types of Web sites are increasing,” said Frank McKenna, chief fraud strategist at BasePoint Analytics, which helps banks and mortgage lenders identify fraudulent transactions.

Policing them is difficult, partly because it is unclear which laws, if any, the Web sites might be breaking (for their customers, though, the laws are clear — anybody who uses fake paycheck stubs or other false documents to misrepresent financial status to a bank or mortgage lender is committing fraud).

The people who operate these sites can also be hard to track down. At the first whiff of trouble, they can easily shut down and then quickly start a new Web site with a different name.

No statistics exist on the number of these Web sites and how many people use them, or whether any of the operators of such sites have been prosecuted.

An examination of loans made last year, including prime and subprime, in which some sort of fraud occurred, showed that incidents of false tax or financial statements had risen to 27 percent from 17 percent in 2002; fraudulent verifications of deposit had climbed to 22 percent from 15 percent four years ago; and false credit reports rose to 9 percent from 5 percent in 2002, according to a report issued this spring by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute based in Virginia.

If any documents were required, it was unclear whether the bogus documents were created by do-it-yourselfers or whether they turned to the products and services sold over the Internet.

Still, Joan E. Ferenczy, director of institutional investigations at Freddie Mac, said there had been a growing discussion in recent months among industry investigators about Web sites offering false identifications and income statements.

“Either it has been underground all along, or there has been a spike of activity there,” she said.

One service that appears to have grown exponentially in recent months, investigators say, are sites that offer to improve an individual’s credit score by adding them onto the credit cards of individuals with good credit scores and histories.

The practice, known as piggybacking, started innocently enough with individuals adding their spouses or children to their credit card accounts as authorized users.

One site, RaiseCreditScoreNow .com, offers to add a person to four separate $20,000 credit lines with 10 years of “perfect payments” for $4,000 (although they do not have access to the actual credit line). Doing so could increase an individual’s credit score by as much as 200 points in 90 days, the site says, and make the difference between qualifying for a home loan or not.

People with strong credit scores and a reliable payment history of at least 24 months on various credit accounts can be paid up to $1,000 for each person they add to the account as an authorized user, the site offers.

Several lawyers said it was unlikely that this practice was illegal, although many warned it could open the person renting out their credit card lines to fraud or identify theft. Attempts to contact the Web site were unsuccessful.

Another company, which operates SeasonedTradeLines.com, claims on its site to have an inventory of more than 100 real, verifiable credit card accounts with perfect payment histories dating back to 1974. The site asks: “How would your life be different with a 700+ credit score?”

A person answering the phone at the company declined to comment. “I’m not going to answer any questions,” he said. “I’m not going to give out any information.”

Last week, the Fair Isaac Corporation, the company that developed FICO credit scores, said it was trying to shut down piggybacking.

Starting in September, Fair Isaac said people who were added to someone else’s credit line would not benefit from the secondhand credit history in its formula, which is used by the three major credit bureaus.

“There is going to be no way to get around the new system,” said Ron Totaro, vice president for global scoring solutions at Fair Isaac.

One Web site that prompted mortgage regulators in Nevada to issue an alert to consumers and the mortgage industry two years ago offered to set up a bank account that could be “rented out” and verified to creditors or lenders at a cost of about 5 percent of the value of the assets. The people renting the assets did not actually have access to them.

While that site has disappeared, fraud experts say others have moved in to replace it.

“We’re seeing now a lot of checking accounts where funds are going in and out,” said Mr. McKenna of BasePoint. “Borrowers begin the month with $4 in the account and end the month with much, much more.”

Other sites offer help to people who need proof that they are working.

For $55, for example, the company that operates VerifyEmployment .net will ostensibly hire a person as an independent contractor, providing a paycheck stub showing an “advance,” with the corporate name and address. Another $25 will assure telephone verification of employment when a lender calls to check.

Last year, a Florida-based company that operated a Web site called NoveltyPaycheckStubs.com agreed to stop using the name of the payroll company ADP after it was sued in federal court by ADP for trademark infringement.

“It is plain that defendants are peddling counterfeit ADP earnings statements for others to use to engage in fraudulent financial transactions,” ADP claimed in its lawsuit.

NoveltyPaycheckStubs.com has since disappeared, but people looking for fake IDs or payroll stubs can still find them at FakePaycheckStubs .com.

While the site states the products are used for “entertainment purposes only,” phrases like “car loan” and “home loan” are sprinkled on the site. For $49.95, customers can receive a computer program to create paycheck stubs at home with their name and a fictional hourly salary. Attempts to contact someone at the site were unsuccessful.

For all the mentions of the pay stubs being only for entertainment, the site does offer one piece of legal advice: “I highly suggest you do not use logos from companies that are real on these stubs. I wouldn’t use any real company trademarks or copyrights either.”

    Web Help for Getting a Mortgage the Criminal Way, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/technology/16fraud.html?hp

TV's 'Mr. Wizard' Don Herbert Dies at 89

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Don Herbert, who as television's ''Mr. Wizard'' introduced generations of young viewers to the joys of science, died Tuesday. He was 89. Herbert, who had bone cancer, died at his suburban Bell Canyon home, said his son-in-law, Tom Nikosey.

''He really taught kids how to use the thinking skills of a scientist,'' said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s ''Watch Mr. Wizard'' series, which became a fond baby boomer memory.

In ''Watch Mr. Wizard,'' which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.

''He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze. ... The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along,'' Jacobs said. ''You were learning about the forces of nature.''

Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes ''science sidekick'' to Herbert on the '80s ''Mr. Wizard's World'' that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.

When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn't require special tools.

'''You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,''' Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. ''He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn't just for special people and places.''

Herbert's place in TV history was acknowledged by later stars. When ''Late Night with David Letterman'' debuted in 1982, Herbert was among the first-night guests.

Born in Waconia, Minn., Herbert was a 1940 graduate of LaCrosse State Teachers College and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot during World War II. He worked as an actor, model and radio writer before starting ''Watch Mr. Wizard'' in Chicago on NBC.

The show moved to New York after several years.

He is survived by six children and stepchildren and by his second wife, Norma, his son-in-law said. A private funeral service was planned.

------

On the Net:

http://www.mrwizardstudios.com 

    TV's 'Mr. Wizard' Don Herbert Dies at 89, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Herbert.html

YouTube to Test Video Fingerprint Tool

June 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The popular user-generated video sharing site YouTube will begin testing video recognition technology in conjunction with partners Time Warner Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.

The test will begin next month with hopes that the software, designed to recognize copyright content in videos, will be ready to roll out later this year, the company said.

The site's owner, Google Inc., has previously pledged to adopt some kind of solution to identify copyright content on its site so it can remove pirated content or negotiate with owners for a license.

While much of YouTube's videos are homegrown, copyright content from such partners as CBS and NBC also attract viewers. Protecting those relationships is key for online video sites.

The importance of those relationships was highlighted in March when Viacom Inc. sued YouTube and Google for more than $1 billion in a federal complaint alleging YouTube hasn't done enough to prevent its users from posting thousands of copyright clips to the site.

YouTube said it had started using audio recognition technology from Audible Magic Corp. earlier this year to either block unauthorized content or pay royalties to the major record labels who have licensed their content to the site.

The company was searching for a similar video fingerprinting technology when it was bought by Google in October for $1.65 billion.

''What we found was that no one had anything we felt was accurate enough and scalable enough for our needs,'' YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy said Tuesday.

YouTube engineers discovered that Google had been developing such video technology.

''The technology is built for maximum flexibility,'' he said. ''It can be used to remove content once it is identified or used to license content where we pay a revenue share to our partners.''

Video recognition is more complicated than audio fingerprinting, Maxcy said. It involves extensive indexing of images from videos and collecting the images in a database. It also involves compiling the rules associated with each piece of content as set by the copyright holder.

For instance, a TV network could tell YouTube to pay a royalty whenever one clip is uploaded to its site but block another that is unauthorized.

    YouTube to Test Video Fingerprint Tool, NYT, 12.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Google-Video-Fingerprints.html

Rapper 50 Cent Enters Virtual World Zwinktopia

June 6, 2007
By REUTERS
Filed at 4:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Even in a virtual world on the Internet, teens long to be cool. And what can be cooler than a Ramones T-shirt on your self-styled Web persona?

Zwinktopia, the fashion-conscious virtual community from IAC/InterActiveCorp., is letting major musicians set up shop in its universe, with deals for a boutique from rapper 50 Cent to tout an upcoming album and virtual merchandise from rock bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Slipknot.

The deals mark a first for both the musicians and the growing Zwinktopia community, home to more than 6.5 million registered "Zwinky" users who create and dress Web characters, then use them to interact with friends online.

What started as a game mimicking a child's play with baby dolls has burgeoned into a new business opportunity for entertainment and brands, the next frontier for Web growth after social networks like News Corp.'s MySpace.

Executives involved in the deals said they were still working out the financial model for the business.

"It's the equivalent of sending a marketing team to a new country where there is a new economy," said Chris "Broadway" Romero, creative director of digital media for 50 Cent.

The rapper's virtual store will allow Zwinky members to dress up characters in 50 Cent gear for free and provide a chance to listen to his next album "Curtis," due in September.

A separate locale for bands represented by merchandiser Bravado International Group will charge users for a Ramones T-shirt, or other goods, in the virtual Zwinky currency, known as Zbucks.

Users can win Zbucks by playing online games, but down the road the Web site is expected to offer the opportunity to buy Zbucks with money as well.

Ultimately, Zwinktopia aims to create a marketplace for virtual and real merchandise among one of the most sought-after audiences for advertisers -- teenagers and young adults.

"Our users have asked for everything from fashion brands like Prada and Juicy Couture, as well as more entertainment entities," said Scott Garell, chief executive of IAC's consumer applications and portals division.

"All of this fits into our roadmap where we're going to position ourselves around fashion and lifestyle, with all the clothes and accessories," Garell told Reuters.

A LOT OF FLIRTING

Zwinktopia tends to attract teenage girls and young adults. If that seems like an unlikely target for rappers and hard rock bands, frequent Zwinky user Camille Fleury puts such doubts to rest.

"Everyone online is usually into this punk style, so I have to talk more about that stuff and get more in touch with it," Fleury, 14, said by phone from her home in Lakewood, Colorado.

Fleury "works" at an Internet coffee shop and a pizza joint that exists only in Zwinky-land, and has designed uniforms for her Web avatar to wear.

The success of Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds for adults that boasts its own commerce system, has helped raise interest for younger-skewing sites like Stardoll, Doppelganger and Club Penguin.

ComScore measurement data show over 4.5 million unique visitors went to the site to create Zwinkies in April. The data have yet to be updated since the launch of virtual world Zwinktopia on April 30, but Garell estimates as many as 1.5 million of its members have joined in that time.

Just as crucial to potential media partners and advertisers, the average amount of time a user spends on the Zwinky site has doubled to 50 minutes in the past month.

With such growth already apparent, IAC hopes to see Zwinktopia expand to as many as 10 million users in the next nine months, Garell said.

Fleury says she can spend several hours a day in Zwinky land. Much of that time is devoted to dissecting teenage woes with her online friends, who "are always talking about boyfriends and girlfriends."

"There's a lot of flirting going on," she said. While her real-world self might giggle over the latest cartoon movie with schoolmates, online "it's all serious and you have to watch R-rated movies a lot to know what everyone is talking about."

    Rapper 50 Cent Enters Virtual World Zwinktopia, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-iac-zwinktopia.html

Big Ten Joins Google Book Project

June 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:44 p.m. ET
The New York Times

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) -- Twelve major universities will digitize select collections in each of their libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project. The goal: a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.

The partnership involves the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference (yes, there are 11): Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

''We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world's printed treasures,'' said Northwestern Provost Lawrence Dumas.

The committee said Google will scan and index materials ''in a manner consistent with copyright law.'' Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books.

Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries. But Google still faces a lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over its plans to incorporate parts of copyrighted books.

------

On the Net:

Committee on Institutional Cooperation: http://www.cic.uiuc.edu

Google Book Search: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html

    Big Ten Joins Google Book Project, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-TechBit-Google-Big-Ten.html

Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play

June 6, 2007
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL and BRAD STONE

Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll Emporium.

The site lets her chat with her friends and dress up virtual dolls, by placing blouses, hair styles and accessories on them. It beats playing with regular Barbies, said Presleigh, who lives near Dallas.

“With Barbie, if you want clothes, it costs money,” she said. “You can do it on the Internet for free.”

Presleigh is part of a booming phenomenon, the growth of a new wave of interactive play sites for a young generation of Internet users, in particular girls.

Millions of children and adolescents are spending hours on these sites, which offer virtual versions of traditional play activities and cute animated worlds that encourage self-expression and safe communication. They are, in effect, like Facebook or MySpace with training wheels, aimed at an audience that may be getting its first exposure to the Web.

While some of the sites charge subscription fees, others are supported by advertising. As is the case with children’s television, some critics wonder about the broader social cost of exposing children to marketing messages, and the amount of time spent on the sites makes some child advocates nervous.

Regardless, the sites are growing in number and popularity, and they are doing so thanks to the word of mouth of babes, said Josh Bernoff, a social media and marketing industry analyst with Forrester Research.

“They’re spreading rapidly among kids,” Mr. Bernoff said, noting that the enthusiasm has a viral analogy. “It’s like catching a runny nose that everyone in the classroom gets.”

Hitwise, a traffic measurement firm, says visits to a group of seven virtual-world sites aimed at children and teenagers grew 68 percent in the year ended April 28. Visits to the sites surge during summer vacation and other times when school is out. Gartner Research estimates that virtual-world sites have attracted 20 million users, with those aimed at younger people growing especially quickly.

Even as the children are having fun, the adults running the sites are engaged in a cutthroat competition to be the destination of choice for a generation of Americans who are growing up on computers from Day 1.

These sites, with names like Club Penguin, Cyworld, Habbo Hotel, Webkinz, WeeWorld and Stardoll, run the gamut from simple interactive games and chat to fantasy lands with mountains and caves.

When Evan Bailyn, chief executive of Cartoon Doll Emporium, said that when he created the site, “I thought it would be a fun, whimsical thing.” Now, he says, “it’s turned into such a competitive thing,” adding that “people think they are going to make a killing.”

Even Barbie herself is getting into the online act. Mattel is introducing BarbieGirls.com, another dress-up site with chat features.

In recent months, with the traffic for these sites growing into the tens of millions of visitors, the entrepreneurs behind them have started to refine their business models.

Cartoon Doll Emporium, which draws three million visitors a month, is free for many activities but now charges $8 a month for access to more dolls to dress up and other premium services. WeeWorld, a site aimed at letting 13- to-25-year-olds dress up and chat through animated characters, recently signed a deal to permit the online characters to carry bags of Skittles candy, and it is considering other advertisers.

On Stardoll, which has some advertising, users can augment the wardrobe they use to dress up their virtual dolls by buying credits over their cellphones. At Club Penguin, a virtual world with more than four million visitors a month, a $5.95-a-month subscription lets users adopt more pets for their penguin avatars (animated representations of users), which can roam, chat and play games like ice fishing and team hockey.

Lane Merrifield, chief executive of Club Penguin, which is based in Kelowna, British Columbia, said that he decided on a subscription fee because he believed advertising to young people was a dangerous proposition. Clicking on ads, he said, could bring children out into the broader Web, where they could run into offensive material.

Mr. Merrifield also bristles at any comparison to MySpace, which he said is a wide-open environment and one that poses all kinds of possible threats to young people.

To make Club Penguin safe for children, the site uses a powerful filter that limits the kinds of messages users can type to one another. It is not possible, Mr. Merrifield said, to slip in a phone number or geographic location, or to use phrases or words that would be explicit or suggestive. Other sites are also set up to minimize the threat of troublesome interactions or limit what users can say to one another.

“We’re the antithesis of MySpace,” Mr. Merrifield said. “MySpace is about sharing information. We’re all about not being able to share information.”

Other sites are more open, like WeeWorld, which permits people to create avatars, dress them up and then collect groups of friends who type short messages to one another. The characters tend to be cute and cartoonish, as do the home pages where they reside, but the chatter is typical teenager.

“There’s a lot of teasing and flirting,” said Lauren Bigelow, general manager of WeeWorld. She said that the site had around 900,000 users in April and is growing around 20 percent a month.

Ms. Bigelow said that 60 percent of WeeWorld users are girls and young women, a proportion that is higher on some other sites. Stardoll said that its users are 93 percent female, typically ages 7 to 17, while Cartoon Doll Emporium said that it is 96 percent female, ages 8 to 14.

Some of the companies are aiming even younger. The Ontario company Ganz has a hit with Webkinz, plush toys that are sold in regular stores and are aimed at children as young as 6. Buyers enter secret codes from their toy’s tag at webkinz.com and control a virtual replica of their animal in games. They also earn KinzCash that they can spend to design its home. The site draws more than 3.8 million visitors a month.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the social aspects of technology, said that the participants on these sites are slipping into virtual worlds more easily than their parents or older siblings.

“For young people, there is rather a kind of fluid boundary between the real and virtual world, and they can easily pass through it,” she said.

For some children, the allure of these sites is the chance to participate and guide the action on screen, something that is not possible with movies and television.

“The ability to express themselves is really appealing to the millennial generation,” said Michael Streefland, the manager of Cyworld, a virtual world that started in South Korea and now attracts a million users a month in the United States, according to comScore, a research firm. “This audience wants to be on stage. They want to have a say in the script.”

But Professor Turkle expressed concern about some of the sites. She said that their commercial efforts, particularly the advertising aimed at children, could be crass. And she said that she advocates an old-fashioned alternative to the sites.

“If you’re lucky enough to have a kid next door,” she said, “I’d have a play date instead of letting your kid sit at the computer.”

    Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/technology/06doll.html?hp

Man Described as a Top Spammer Arrested

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:46 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SEATTLE (AP) -- A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised ''zombie'' computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.

''He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world,'' said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. ''He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.''

A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that -- even with four bank accounts seized by the government -- he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

A public defender who represented him for Wednesday's hearing declined to comment.

Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called ''zombies'' because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it was spending $1,000 a week to fight the spam it was receiving, and other businesses and individuals complained of having their reputations damaged when it appeared spam was originating from their computers.

''This is not just a nuisance. This is way beyond a nuisance,'' Warma said.

Soloway used the networks of compromised computers to send out unsolicited bulk e-mails urging people to use his Internet marketing company to advertise their products, authorities said.

People who clicked on a link in the e-mail were directed to his Web site. There, Soloway advertised his ability to send out as many as 20 million e-mail advertisements over 15 days for $495, the indictment said.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

''Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet -- both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,'' organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

Soloway remained in federal detention pending a hearing Monday.

    Man Described as a Top Spammer Arrested, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Spam-Arrest.html

Google Chairman Dismisses Privacy Issue

May 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:48 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that U.S. regulatory approval of his company's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick will not be hindered by concerns over privacy.

''We're quite convinced that the proposed merger meets all of the appropriate U.S. laws and is ultimately very good for consumers and for advertisers and publishers,'' Schmidt said at a news conference.

Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine company, announced its plan to buy New York-based DoubleClick Inc. last month in a $3.1 billion acquisition that privacy advocates have urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.

DoubleClick helps its customers place and track online advertising, including search ads, which Google -- more than its nearest search competitors Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- has turned into an extremely lucrative business.

Google confirmed Tuesday that the FTC is conducting an antitrust review of the deal. Typically, antitrust reviews focus on monopoly concerns. But there is precedent for them to address privacy issues, analysts say.

Schmidt said that Google, when considering the acquisition, ''looked very carefully'' at privacy and other issues that would come under legal review ''because we knew competitors would raise those issues, as indeed they have.''

Mountain View, California-based Google Inc. is ''not concerned that the choice of the FTC brings in some new issue that we had not thought about,'' Schmidt said.

Schmidt was in South Korea to participate in the Seoul Digital Forum 2007, a three-day gathering of technology and media industry leaders organized by South Korean TV network SBS.

Schmidt predicted Google would clear all regulatory hurdles and complete the acquisition by the end of 2007. He reiterated that view Wednesday, saying, ''we're hoping to close later this year.''

Several consumer advocacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, urged the FTC to investigate the privacy implications of the acquisition.

The groups said in their April 20 complaint that the two companies, when combined, would have access to an unprecedented amount of data on consumers' Web usage and Internet search habits.

Regarding other possible acquisitions, Schmidt said Google is ''always open'' to the idea.

DoubleClick had been the target of a fierce bidding war between Google and Microsoft. The Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft earlier this month agreed to buy U.S.-based online advertising firm aQuantive Inc. and has reportedly been in discussions with Yahoo for a possible merger or takeover.

Schmidt carefully steered clear of any comment on Microsoft when asked about the company's activities.

''We are not very focused on our competitors and so I won't speculate on Microsoft's current or future M&A activities,'' he said. ''We've found it better to stay focused on our mission, our advertisers, our partners and our global presence as we're doing today.''

AP Business Writer Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington and Associated Press Writer Josh Dubow in San Francisco contributed to this report.

    Google Chairman Dismisses Privacy Issue, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-SKorea-Google-DoubleClick.html

Google, South Korean Co Mull Wider Deal

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- The top executives of Google Inc. and Daum Communications Corp., South Korea's No. 2 Internet search engine, met Tuesday to discuss broadening their partnership, Daum said.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Daum CEO Seok Jong-hoon discussed cooperating in Internet search services and Daum's user-created video content service, said Lee Seung-jin, a Daum official. No official agreements were made, Lee said.

Daum late last year decided to end its advertising relationship with Yahoo Inc. in favor of using Google for paid search results.

Google, the world's No. 1 search engine company, has lagged local search engines such as NHN Corp.'s dominant Naver Web site. Users in South Korea say the local sites are better adapted to factors specific to the market, with more visually complex sites and reliance on human interaction instead of software to get search results.

Schmidt was in South Korea to participate in the Seoul Digital Forum, an annual gathering of industry and media figures.

    Google, South Korean Co Mull Wider Deal, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-SKorea-Google-Daum.html

Google Deal Said to Bring U.S. Scrutiny

May 29, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google’s planned $3.1 billion purchase of the online advertising company DoubleClick, an industry executive briefed on the agency’s plans said yesterday.

The inquiry began at the end of last week, after it was decided that the Federal Trade Commission instead of the Justice Department would conduct the review, said the executive, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak. The two agencies split the duties of antitrust enforcement.

An F.T.C. spokesman said yesterday that the agency did not comment on pending inquiries.

The deal, involving powerful forces in their respective niches of the online advertising business, prompted privacy advocates and competitors to raise concerns after it was announced last month. Those concerns and the deal’s size made a preliminary investigation all but certain, according to antitrust experts.

The F.T.C. has also issued Google a detailed list of questions, the industry executive said. This step, known as a "second request" for information, can suggest that a proposed acquisition raises more serious antitrust issues. But legal experts said the request is mainly a sign that the agency is closely scrutinizing the Google deal.

Google said it was confident that the deal would withstand scrutiny.

Privacy groups said it was significant that the F.T.C., the agency that monitors online privacy issues, would be conducting the review.

“We think it’s very important that the F.T.C. is taking a look at the Google-DoubleClick deal,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group.

In the days after the planned merger was announced, Mr. Rotenberg’s center and two other advocacy groups, the Center for Digital Democracy and the United States Public Interest Research Group, filed a request for the F.T.C. to investigate the privacy implications.

In the complaint, the groups noted that Google collects the search histories of its users, while DoubleClick tracks what Web sites people visit. The merger, according to their complaint, would “give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world.”

Google has built a lucrative business in selling small text ads that appear alongside its search results and on other Web sites. DoubleClick is the leader among companies that specialize in placing graphical and video ads online.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said that decisions made now about the structure of the online advertising industry could have lasting effects on data collection and personal privacy on the Internet, especially if control rests with a “few powerful gatekeepers” led by Google.

Still, privacy issues are not typically the concern of antitrust officials. In reviewing a proposed merger, legal experts say, regulators weigh the likely impact on competition and struggle with tricky technical matters like defining the relevant market to measure.

“To the extent that a reduction in competition could make it more difficult to protect privacy, it could be a consideration,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. “But it would have to be linked to competition. Strictly speaking, privacy is not an antitrust issue.”

Google, the Internet search giant, is facing questions about its privacy practices not only from advocacy groups in the United States, but also from an advisory panel for the European Union. The company has said it welcomes the debate. It defends its privacy safeguards and says its business is based on consumer trust.

As for the DoubleClick acquisition, Google yesterday repeated its optimism that antitrust regulators would approve the deal.

“We are confident that upon further review the F.T.C. will conclude that this acquisition poses no risk to competition and should be approved,” said Don Harrison, a senior corporate counsel for Google.

Mr. Harrison pointed to the flurry of deals in recent weeks, after Google announced its bid for DoubleClick on April 13. Later in the month, Yahoo announced it would pay $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media, an online ad exchange, that it did not already own.

In May, WPP, the big ad agency, said it would pay $649 million for 24/7 Real Media, whose ad serving business competes with DoubleClick. And then Microsoft, which pushed for an antitrust investigation of the Google-DoubleClick deal, agreed to pay $6 billion for aQuantive, an Internet ad company. One of aQuantive’s units, Atlas, competes with DoubleClick.

Mr. Harrison said that “the online advertising industry is a dynamic and evolving space — as evidenced by a number of recently announced acquisitions.” And he added that “rich competition in this industry will bring more relevant ads to consumers and more choices for advertisers and Web site publishers.”

Among the competitors that had called for an antitrust review were Microsoft, which had lost out in the bidding for DoubleClick, and AT&T, which distributes services over the Internet like digital television.

    Google Deal Said to Bring U.S. Scrutiny, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/technology/29antitrust.html?hp

Actor Charles Nelson Reilly Dies at 76

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Charles Nelson Reilly, the Tony Award winner who later became known for his ribald appearances on the ''Tonight Show'' and various game shows, has died. He was 76.

Reilly died Friday in Los Angeles of complications from pneumonia, his partner, Patrick Hughes, told the New York Times.

Reilly began his career in New York City, taking acting classes at a studio with Steve McQueen, Geraldine Page and Hal Holbrook. In 1962, he appeared on Broadway as Bud Frump in the original Broadway production of ''How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.'' The role won Reilly a Tony Award.

He was nominated for a Tony again for playing Cornelius in ''Hello, Dolly!'' In 1997 he received another nomination for directing Julie Harris and Charles Durning in a revival of ''The Gin Game.''

After moving to Hollywood in 1960s he appeared as the nervous Claymore Gregg on TV's ''The Ghost and Mrs. Muir'' and as a featured guest on ''The Dean Martin Show.''

He gained fame by becoming what he described as a ''game show fixture'' in the 1970s and 80s. He was a regular on programs like ''Match Game'' and ''Hollywood Squares,'' often wearing giant glasses and colorful suits with ascots.

His larger-than-life persona and affinity for double-entendres also landed him on the ''Tonight Show'' with Johnny Carson more than 95 times.

Reilly ruefully admitted his wild game show appearances adversely affected his acting career. ''You can't do anything else once you do game shows,'' he told The Advocate, the national gay magazine, in 2001. ''You have no career.''

His final work was an autobiographical one-man show, ''Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly,'' about his family life growing up in the Bronx. The title grew out of the fact that when he would act out as a child, his mother would often admonish him to ''save it for the stage.''

The stage show was made into the 2006 feature film called ''The Life of Reilly.''

Reilly's openly gay television persona was ahead of its time, and sometimes stood in his way. He recalled a network executive telling him ''they don't let queers on television.''

Hughes, his only immediate survivor, said Reilly had been ill for more than a year.

No memorial plans had been announced.

    Actor Charles Nelson Reilly Dies at 76, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Reilly.html

House Approves Bill to Combat Spyware

May 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:51 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House passed legislation Tuesday to combat the criminal use of Internet spyware and scams aimed at stealing personal information from computer users.

Spyware, said bill sponsor Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., ''is one of the biggest threats to consumers on the Internet.'' She and other lawmakers cited estimates that up to 90 percent of computers in this country are infected with some form of spyware.

Spyware is software that secretly collects information about a person or organization and sends it to another entity without the user's consent.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., cosponsor of the bill, said it had been written so that it ''protects consumers by imposing stiff penalties on the truly bad actors'' while protecting legitimate online businesses that are developing new services to keep track of user preferences.

The bill makes it a criminal offense, subject to a prison term of up to five years, to access a computer without authorization to further another federal criminal offense. Obtaining or transmitting personal information with the intent of injuring or defrauding a person or damaging a computer is punishable by up to two years in prison.

The measure approves $10 million a year over the next four years to help the Justice Department fight other computer scams such as ''phishing'' -- the use of fake e-mails or Web sites to trick consumers into providing bank account, credit card or other personal information -- and ''pharming,'' where hackers redirect Internet traffic to fake sites in order to steal personal information.

Similar bills have been approved by the House in past sessions of Congress, but have yet to clear the Senate.

------

The bill is H.R. 1525.

On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/

    House Approves Bill to Combat Spyware, NYT, 22.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Spyware.html

Cities Struggle With Wireless Internet

May 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:37 p.m. ET
The New York Times

A $3 million plan to blanket Lompoc, Calif., with a wireless Internet system promised a quantum leap for economic development: The remote community hit hard by cutbacks at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base would join the 21st century with cheap and plentiful high-speed access. Instead, nearly a year after its launch, Lompoc Net is limping along. The central California city of 42,000, surrounded by rolling hills, wineries and flower fields more than 17 miles from the nearest major highway, has only a few hundred subscribers.

That's far fewer than the 4,000 needed to start repaying loans from the city's utility coffers, potentially leaving smaller reserves to guard against electric rate increases.

And Lompoc isn't alone. Across the United States, many cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries that a number will fail, resulting in millions of dollars in wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight.

More than $230 million was spent in the United States last year, and the industry Web site MuniWireless projects $460 million will be spent in 2007.

Without revenues they had counted on to offset that spending, elected officials might have to break promises or find money in already-tight budgets to subsidize the systems for the low-income families and city workers who depend on the access. Cities might end up running the systems if companies abandon networks they had built.

The worries come as big cities like Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., complete pilots and expand their much-hyped networks.

''They are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered,'' said Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank.

Municipal Wi-Fi projects use the same technology behind wireless access in coffee shops, airports and home networks. Hundreds or thousands of antennas are installed atop street lamps and other fixtures. Laptops and other devices have Wi-Fi cards that relay data to the Internet through those antennas, using open, unregulated broadcast frequencies. In theory, one could check e-mail and surf the Web from anywhere.

About 175 U.S. cities or regions have citywide or partial systems, and a similar number plan them, according to Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.

Rhode Island has proposed a statewide network, while one in California would span dozens of Silicon Valley municipalities. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta also want one.

Because systems are just coming online, it's premature to say how many or which ones will fail under current operating plans, but the early signs are troubling.

''I will be surprised if the majority of these are successful and they do not prove to be drains on taxpayers' money,'' said Michael Balhoff, former telecom equity analyst with Legg Mason Inc. ''The government is getting into hotly contested services.''

Most communities, including Lompoc, paid for their projects. Elsewhere, private companies agreed to absorb costs for the chance to sell services or ads.

The vendors remain confident despite technical and other problems. Chuck Haas, MetroFi Inc.'s chief executive, said Wi-Fi networks are far cheaper to build than cable and DSL, which is broadband over phone lines.

Demand could grow once more cell phones can make Wi-Fi calls and as city workers improve productivity by reading electric meters remotely, for instance.

Balhoff, however, believes the successful projects are most likely to be in remote places that traditional service providers skip -- and fewer and fewer of those areas exist. Cities, he said, should focus on incentives to draw providers.

In Lompoc's case, officials say construction was delayed about a year once they realized wireless antennas had to be packed more closely together. Then the city learned that its stucco homes have a wire mesh that blocks signals, making Internet service poor or nonexistent indoors without extra equipment.

But more importantly, just as Lompoc committed to the network, cable and telephone companies arrived with better equipment and service, undercutting the city's offerings.

''It seemed like we announced we were going to do this and that and the next day we got trucks from the providers doing this and that, when we've been asking for years and nothing ever happened,'' Lompoc Mayor Dick DeWees said.

D.A. Taylor, who runs a software business from her home, said Lompoc's Wi-Fi service lacks key features she gets through DSL.

''It's a really great idea, but they didn't spend a lot of time thinking who their target market was,'' Taylor said.

DeWees acknowledged that Lompoc might have to pull the plug if it cannot boost subscriptions, but he said the city still has an aggressive marketing push in store. Lompoc recently slashed prices by $9, to $16 a month, for the main household plan.

Just a few years ago, these municipal wireless projects seemed foolproof.

Politicians got to tout Internet access for city workers and poorer households -- many programs include giveaways for lower-income families. Some cities bear no upfront costs when a company pays for construction in exchange for rights to use fixtures like lamp poles.

Vendors like EarthLink Inc. saw a chance to offset declines in dial-up subscriptions. MetroFi, offering free service, got to join the burgeoning market for online advertising. Google Inc. also is jumping in for the ads, partnering with EarthLink in San Francisco, although the city's Board of Supervisors is resisting their joint proposal.

As projects get deployed, both sides are seeing chinks in their plans.

Many cities and vendors underestimated the number of wireless antennas needed. MobilePro Corp.'s Kite Networks wound up tripling the access points in Tempe, Ariz., adding roughly $1 million, or more than doubling the costs.

''The industry is really in its infancy, and what works on paper doesn't work that same way once you get into the real world,'' said Jerry Sullivan, Kite's chief executive.

Networks like St. Cloud, Fla., and Portland, meanwhile, shared Lompoc's difficulties penetrating building walls, requiring indoor users to buy signal boosters for as much as $150. And when it works, service can be slower than cable and DSL.

''There's an antenna literally at the curb of my house, but when I've tried to log on, it cuts in and out,'' said Landon Dirgo, who runs a computer repair shop in Lompoc.

One recent sunny afternoon in Portland, few could be found surfing the Internet from the city's downtown parks.

Mari Borden, a student at Portland State, said she couldn't connect to MetroFi's free network from several locations, even though her computer could detect a signal (MetroFi officials say users might need stronger wireless cards to send back a signal).

The vendors insist they have been upfront with customers about limitations. But MetroFi's Adrian van Haaften said managing expectations can be challenging.

EarthLink said it has 2,000 customers in four markets -- New Orleans; Milpitas and Anaheim, Calif.; and Philadelphia -- paying $22 or less a month. MetroFi said it had 8,000 free users in Portland in April, averaging 10 hours online; the city says about 1,000 use the network on any given day.

Although both companies say their numbers are good given that their networks aren't fully built yet, they also are realigning expectations.

MetroFi will insist that future contracts commit cities to spend a specific amount for public safety and other municipal applications. EarthLink, which recently suspended new bids while it focuses on existing projects, said it would likely seek minimums, too.

Glenn Fleishman, editor of the Wi-Fi Networking News site, said vendors could no longer afford to treat projects as testbeds and loss leaders for winning publicity and new business.

Municipalities, meanwhile, are becoming more cautious. Applying lessons from other municipalities, Boston plans to raise money upfront from local groups and businesses and avoid tax dollars or a corporate partner.

Competition and expectations will only increase as DSL and cable modems get faster.

Users today are struggling with e-mail and the Web over some wireless systems, yet video and online games will require even more capacity.

''Most people if they are going to do serious work aren't looking to be sitting in a park,'' said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for DSL provider Verizon Communications Inc. ''They want to be at a desk where they have their papers or business records.''

Lompoc's backers, though, still claim success, ''even if the whole network were to be written off tomorrow,'' said Mark McKibben, Lompoc's former wireless consultant.

''Prices dropped and quality of service went up,'' he said. ''That's the way a lot of cities look at it. They don't look at business profits and losses. They see it as a driver for quality of life.''

AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Associated Press Writer Sarah Skidmore in Portland contributed to this report.

    Cities Struggle With Wireless Internet, NYT, 21.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Municipal-Wireless-Woes.html

MySpace to Share Sex Offender Data

May 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Faced with legal demands from state attorneys general, MySpace.com said Monday it will release data on registered sex offenders it has identified and removed from the popular social networking Web site.

The company, citing federal privacy laws, initially rebuffed a demand from North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and colleagues in seven other states who last week asked for data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live.

MySpace agreed Monday to provide the information to all states after some members of the group filed subpoenas or took other legal actions to demand it. The company said last week such efforts were required under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act before it could legally release the data.

''Different states are going about it different ways,'' said Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for Cooper, who filed a ''civil investigative demand'' for the information.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal used a subpoena that ''compels this information right away -- within hours, not weeks, without delay -- because it is vital to protecting children,'' he said.

''Many of these sex offenders may have violated their parole or probation by contacting or soliciting children on MySpace,'' Blumenthal said.

MySpace obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., which the company partnered with in December to build a database with information on sex offenders in the United States.

''We developed 'Sentinel Safe' from scratch because there was no means to weed them out and get them off of our site,'' said Mike Angus, MySpace's executive vice president and general counsel.

Angus said the company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp., had always planned to share information on sex offenders it identified and has already removed about 7,000 profiles, out of a total of about 180 million.

''This is no different than an offline community,'' he said. ''We're trying to keep it safe.''

Angus said the company had also made arrangements to allow law enforcement to use the Sentinel software directly.

Cooper, Blumenthal and attorneys general in Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data last week.

Social networking sites such as MySpace allow users to create online profiles with photos, music and personal information, and lets them send messages to one another and, in many cases, browse other profiles.

Cooper said the information from Sentinel could potentially be used to look for parole violations or help in investigations. He said lawmakers in North Carolina are considering legislation that would further restrict access to social networking Web sites, including one that would require parents' permission for minors to set up a profile.

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann said sharing the information is a good first step toward enacting those kinds of protections.

''MySpace needs to do more, including implementing an effective age verification system that will make the site considerably safer,'' he said.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said his office will subpoena the records as well.

''I think once we find out the content of the messages -- of course, it will depend on how long they retain that information -- we may very well find that some of the messages included illegal enticement of a child,'' he said.

Associated Press writer Pat Eaton-Robb in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.

    MySpace to Share Sex Offender Data, NYT, 21.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Sex-Offenders.html

IBM to Launch Power6 Chip Next Month

May 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- Delivering on its promise of a superfast server chip, IBM Corp. said Monday that its new Power6 microprocessor will go on sale next month, boasting twice the clock speed of the previous generation while consuming roughly the same amount of power.

The dramatic performance boost comes as the semiconductor industry has largely shifted its focus away from pure performance measurements -- overheating becomes a major problem as transistors shrink and operate at breakneck speeds -- and instead has become more concerned with a balance of performance and power consumption.

While other chipmakers are dialing down clock speeds and adding more computing engines, or cores, to their chips to manage the competing concerns, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said its new dual-core chip is a breakthrough on both fronts.

Analysts said the chip, which operates at 4.7 gigahertz and cycles at a speed 25 million times as fast as the flap of hummingbird wings, will allow businesses to consolidate servers and handle substantially larger workloads.

By comparison, Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 server processor tops out at 1.66 gigahertz.

In addition to raw power, the new IBM chip also has massive bandwidth -- 300 gigabytes per second -- which the company says can process the download of the entire iTunes music catalog, currently more than 5 million songs, in about a minute.

To feed data quickly to the processor, IBM has quadrupled the amount of on-chip memory, or cache, to 8 megabytes. The chip is designed for higher-end servers running the Unix operating system and is accompanied by the launch of a new server designed around it.

''Go back a few years, and the Power brand was an also-ran in the big iron chip race -- in fact, it wasn't really clear how committed IBM was to its own chip development,'' said Gordon Haff, principal IT adviser for Illuminata Inc. ''But IBM decided to double down its bets on Power, and the results have been pretty impressive.''

Bernard Meyerson, chief technologist of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, said the chip is the first product delivered under the company's energy efficiency initiative announced earlier this month. The campaign includes a pledge to spend $1 billion to spread technologies and services designed to make corporate computing centers more environmentally friendly.

Besides the obvious processing gains, ''this translates into a much, much smaller carbon footprint'' for companies, he said.

    IBM to Launch Power6 Chip Next Month, NYT, 21.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-IBM-Power6.html

Monster Signs Up More Newspapers

May 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Online job-search company Monster Worldwide Inc. is expanding its partnerships with newspapers, adding 80 recruitment Web sites associated with papers owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.

Monster already has deals with 60 daily newspapers to provide online job-search functions, including The New York Times as well as The Boston Globe, which is also owned by The New York Times Co., The Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Petersburg Times in Florida and the Akron Beacon Journal.

Monster has been forging alliances with local media outlets, mainly newspapers, as a way to build up the number of job listings in its nationwide online job database.

For the local media sites, teaming up with Monster gives them a way to quickly build an online service for employers and job-searchers as an expansion of their existing classified ad business in print.

Community Newspaper Holdings has 93 daily newspapers and is based in Birmingham, Ala. Under the deal announced Monday, each of the 80 new sites cobranded sites with Monster will be tied to a daily newspaper from Community Newspaper Holdings.

Monster competes in the online job-search arena with CareerBuilder, a joint venture owned by the three largest newspaper publishers in the country -- Gannett Co., Tribune Co. and McClatchy Co. -- as well as Yahoo Inc.'s HotJobs. Yahoo has also signed up about 260 newspapers in a consortium to sell classified job-search advertising online.

    Monster Signs Up More Newspapers, NYT, 21.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Monster-Newspapers.html

Tilting at a Digital Future

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD SIKLOS

IN Rupert Murdoch’s world, two things are certain: the sun never sets on the kingdom, and a TV is always on in the background.

On the evening of April 26, several large television monitors adorned the terrace of Mr. Murdoch’s Beverly Hills mansion for a dinner celebrating a special edition of “American Idol” that raised more than $70 million to fight poverty. An Asian noodle station was set out by the pool; nearby, sushi chefs busily sliced tuna for “Idol” co-hosts Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, and seven, hyperactive “Idol” finalists who, when they weren’t clamoring around megastar Tom Cruise, dreamily watched themselves on the big screens. Wendi Deng, Mr. Murdoch’s wife, wore a billowy, green dress and introduced their 5-year-old daughter, Grace, to guests before sending her to bed.

Mr. Murdoch casually sipped wine and chatted with his daughter, Elisabeth, and other guests. He had planned for the event to be an early dinner party, but he finally headed to bed at 1 a.m., leaving music impresario Quincy Jones and others chatting on a sofa. After all, he had work to do.

What partygoers didn’t know was that during the previous week, on April 17, Mr. Murdoch had offered to buy Dow Jones & Company, the venerable publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion. So far, he had not heard back directly from the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. Signals sent by the Bancrofts’ intermediaries were not encouraging, but he was prepared to fly cross-country and meet with the family on a moment’s notice.

As is so often the case with Mr. Murdoch, the Dow Jones bid is counterintuitive and seemingly quixotic. While investors and media giants have cooled on the newspaper industry, the News Corporation’s czar has patiently waited for the right moment to bid on a prize he has long coveted but felt was beyond his reach. Mr. Murdoch’s bid has also caused hand-wringing about his intentions for The Journal, a publication that has long led the pack in authoritative business coverage.

Perhaps the chief worry among those concerned about the journalistic future of Dow Jones is how much editorial independence the company would have under Mr. Murdoch’s rule. It also raised questions about how well the strait-laced Journal would fit within a conglomerate whose offerings include the online hangout MySpace, racy British tabloids, and table-thumpers like Bill O’Reilly.

WHATEVER the media mogul says he may do with such a powerful enterprise, a close look at what he’s actually done in the past — particularly how he has deployed his far larger Hollywood and television properties — is a telling indicator of what life may be like for Dow Jones in a Murdoch regime.

When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Yet Mr. Murdoch restored the studio, let his staff there produce the films they wanted (for the most part), and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.

“Rupert Murdoch is utterly consistent,” says Barry Diller, who once ran Fox and now oversees the IAC/Interactive Corporation. “It’s not like he’s adding toys. This is oxygen to him.”

In almost every case, Mr. Murdoch endured years of losses to put new offerings like Sky Television in England the Fox News Channel in America on the map. There is scant evidence of Mr. Murdoch’s envelope-pushing imprimatur at the studio that is the center of it all, just as it is less in evidence at the large quality newspapers he owns, including The Times of London and The Australian.

Mr. Murdoch’s long-held desire to own The Journal fits into a similar grand plan: to revitalize if not save the original business — newspapers — on which he built his empire. Mr. Murdoch’s vision is to fold together the far-flung news businesses he owns into a seamless digital platform anchored by the Web-oriented Journal and, in the process, reinvent the newspaper industry that his company was built on. “We are a relatively old company deeply rooted in print journalism,” Mr. Murdoch told his top news executives in his Aussie drawl a few days after the “Idol” party. “Now, we have to make huge leap into a completely different world.”

The digital future he envisions has information zipping across an expanding, ubiquitous array of screens — TVs, laptops and cellphones. In a world of proliferating broadband, Mr. Murdoch sees video as a bigger component of the news blur and he wants to meld his disparate video assets into his sprawling digital infrastructure: from Fox News in the United States, Sky News outlets around the world, and the business TV channel he is launching this fall in America and plans to take international (which, if his cards play out, he hopes to tie closely to The Journal).

As Mr. Murdoch tries to make the digital future a reality, skeptics wonder whether he will use his newfangled media platform to merely transmit news and analysis or whether he will package information according to his own needs — and even use it as a cudgel.

A couple of days embedded in the Murdoch camp yields a few clues about what makes Rupert run and why. At age 76, he appears to be in his strongest position in years — with his company’s share price up nearly 50 percent in the past two years and his grip over his company finally secure. He remains unblinkingly fixated on the advancement of the News Corporation as though it were a nation state and his relentless corporate march has imbued his company with a maverick culture less apparent at other media giants scrambling to adapt to the hurly-burly of the digital age.

Mr. Murdoch has also shown little hesitation to reverse course when his plans go awry. He says that China, for instance, is no longer the corporate imperative that it once was for him. Until recently, he was determined to build a global satellite-TV empire to delivery his programming, but the rapid emergence of the Internet cooled his ardor. DirecTV, was a company he pursued for years with as much fervor as he now shows for Dow Jones, but he recently agreed to sell it only three years after it was acquired. While the News Corporation’s involvement in the newspaper business could seem like nostalgic attachment to an industry that has seen better days, Mr. Murdoch is hardly known for being sentimental. Indeed, Mr. Murdoch is pretty much the same in public as he is in private, with little evidence of an inner Rupert — even to some who work closely with him.

“This is a man who’s been single-minded since he was 22 years old and he’s woken up every morning with the same agenda: which is to extend the reach and power and influence of his company,” said one person close to Mr. Murdoch who was given anonymity to speak openly about him. “I think tomorrow is the same as today in that respect.”

Mr. Murdoch has had an eventful personal life — including six children from three marriages — and his raw ambition dovetails with an endless curiosity about world affairs, a mischievous streak, and a self-image as the ultimate outsider. In fact, Mr. Murdoch says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites” — words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices. (The Journal, of course, represents one of the quintessential elite media trophies).

Asked if even now he doesn’t consider himself an elite, Mr. Murdoch shakes his head. “No, I’m going to keep myself as much of an outsider as possible,” he says. “We just don’t join clubs.”

MR. MURDOCH’S many critics over the years have viewed him in a far less noble light, accusing him of a cynical worldview that appeals to the lowest common denominator. In sum, they say, he is willing to sacrifice principle for profit.

“His business is privatized, government propaganda; that’s all the company essentially does,” says Bruce Page, a journalist who worked at The Sunday Times of London before Mr. Murdoch owned it and is among his toughest critics. Mr. Page’s 2003 book, “The Murdoch Archipelago,” portrayed Mr. Murdoch as nothing less than a threat to democracy. “It isn’t that Murdoch’s particularly wicked. He’s not a fearsome, warriorlike figure. He’s Falstaff. He has absolutely no concept of honor.”

James H. Ottaway Jr., whose family owns 6 percent of Dow Jones, sounded a similar, if more measured, alarm in a statement on May 6 opposing the offer. “When Rupert Murdoch’s news interests conflict, his business interests usually prevail,” Mr. Ottaway wrote.

This is far from how Mr. Murdoch sees himself, although he has acknowledged that “it has been a long career, and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes.” He also argues that he has evolved as a newspaper owner and does not interfere in coverage or dictate editorial positions at his quality titles.

There are certainly well-worn stories about how he dropped BBC from his Chinese satellite service to appease the government, published the so-called Hitler Diaries in his Sunday Times, and pummeled foes in the pages of The New York Post. But his proponents say that there are the less-told stories about how he once owned The Village Voice and New York magazine and left their editorial operations largely alone.

Asked what he would tell the Bancrofts if they granted him a meeting, Mr. Murdoch says, “I want to tell them how much I appreciate them as a family and to impress on them that my family would be a worthy successor.”

Mr. Murdoch half-jokingly says that he is too busy to roll up his shirtsleeves and write headlines; after all, he has 47,000 employees. He has also offered to install an independent board at The Journal to ensure independence, something he did at The Times. But he has also made it clear that he is not offering a 67 percent premium over Dow Jones’ share price to stay away from the place — and that he vows to invest in the business. In the British market, for example, he has spent nearly $1 billion on new presses, converted the venerable Times to a tabloid format while expanding its foreign bureaus, and started a free daily — all in the past few years.

Although Mr. Murdoch is a huge fan of The Journal’s conservative editorial pages, which are routinely aligned with the political tenor of the Fox News Channel, he insists that most of his editors pick for themselves which candidates they support in elections. In England, it is not unusual for The Sunday Times and The Times of London to support different candidates; same for his big tabloids The Sun and News of the World. (In this political season, Mr. Murdoch says that personally, he is keeping his options open; among the American presidential candidates, “I’m not madly enthusiastic for anyone,” he says.)

Without his cherished newspapers, Mr. Murdoch would be just another billionaire spouting about politics and world affairs and occasionally chairing fund-raisers — not playing as defining a role in shaping public opinion and packaging information. But print isn’t, at first blush, where the action is in the Murdoch kingdom.

From the sprawling Fox studio lot in Century City and the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles splayed out beneath his terrace, newspapers seem like a quaint and distant quadrant of the empire, contributing just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007, and 14 percent of its $3.2 billion in operating income. Like most newspaper companies, the newspaper group is facing slow revenue growth, and its operating margins are running at a solid, if unspectacular, 14 percent.

Over his usual lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary three days before CNBC first reported his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch boasted that the “underlying readership of newspapers is going through the roof.” Yet he had notably sat on the sidelines as two of America’s largest newspaper groups, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company, went up for sale and failed to attract more than a single bidder. Had the industry become so impaired that he would never buy another newspaper again?

“It’s all possible,” he said, with an earnest smile. “Never say never.”

In the days after he submitted his bid for Dow Jones, Mr. Murdoch says that he had started to think his offer was going to be quietly rejected. But the Bancrofts authorized the family’s trustee to hire bankers and lawyers to represent them — an encouraging sign. Then, word leaked out through CNBC, to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch and his advisers, who worried that if it became public the family may close ranks.

Mr. Murdoch was back in New York when the news broke and went on the Fox News Channel to talk about his offer. While he was in the studio, the Bancrofts issued a statement that family members representing 52 percent of the votes in Dow Jones opposed the offer. Mr. Murdoch said that he held out hope — which he says he still maintains — for a meeting with the family.

Three days after his Fox News appearance on May 3, Mr. Murdoch still had not received any direct word from the Bancrofts. He sat on a sofa in his office on the eighth floor of the News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters, behind him a wall of TV screens showing his channels, set next to a luminescent blue and yellow map of the world. (There is also a rack for his newspapers, flown in daily).

He said that he believed some of the 35 Bancroft family members may be swayed to take his offer, and then did something he rarely does: talk about the past. He spoke of his father’s beginnings in Australian newspapers, and how he rescued papers that, he said, would have otherwise disappeared. “There’s a pattern that goes right up to today, of providing choice.”

Later that same day, he boarded the company jet for a flight to Monterey, Calif. For the third year in a row, he was gathering his top publishing and digital executives from here and abroad to brainstorm about how to go about conquering the Internet. By the time the jet was over Michigan, several News Corporation executives were playing poker in the back of the plane. Col Allan, the editor of The New York Post, watched the Republican debate on a big television screen and Robert Thomson, editor of The Times of London, phoned his newsroom to get the results of the French election.

Mr. Murdoch had planned to view some TV pilots, but never got around to it as he, Mr. Thomson and his executive vice president of corporate affairs, Gary Ginsberg, sat in his study and talked into the night about politics and world affairs. At one point, Mr. Murdoch, wearing a beige cardigan, glanced at a screen tuned to his news channel.

“Fair and balanced,” he declared, repeating the Fox News motto, which he meant as a playful jab at Mr. Ginsberg, who worked in the Clinton administration.

THE next morning, Mr. Murdoch was joined by Peter A. Chernin, the News Corporation president, to kick off the “Digital News Initiative” conference at the Monterey Plaza Hotel. The 60 or so attendees ran the gamut of his company’s news operations, including teams from not only his British and Australian papers and The Post, but also from Sky Television in London, the Fox television group and MySpace.

There was urgency in the room, because the company’s online media outlets do not have the same kind of dominance they enjoy in TV and in print. For instance, both FoxNews.com and NYPost.com saw the number of unique users to their sites rise around 30 percent in April versus a year earlier, but they still ranked only 9th and 26th among the most visited general news sites, according to ComScore Networks.

Guest speakers included Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, and Kjell Aamot, the chief executive of Schibsted, the Norwegian publisher that generates a majority of its earnings from its online operations. Mr. Murdoch was staying at his ranch in nearby Carmel, where he had a dinner for the group.

Critical to reinventing the newspaper business, Mr. Murdoch told the audience, is getting the 175 newspapers the company owns to share resources and move quickly in unison. “We need to take advantage of our global scale everywhere,” he said.

Although Mr. Murdoch had not expected to discuss his offer for Dow Jones at the meeting, he offered a brief explanation. “We had hoped to keep it private and secret for a lot longer while they were having proper time to consider it,” he said. “I think it’s an incredible franchise with outstanding people.”

The challenges facing Dow Jones are somewhat different then those facing Mr. Murdoch’s papers because financial news is one of the few forms of information that consumers will pay for online. Still, The Journal, like other newspapers, has struggled to find ways to grow as print advertising and readership has come under pressure.

Jeremy Philips, a 34-year-old former Internet executive who joined the company last year to oversee strategy and acquisitions, followed Mr. Murdoch with a presentation that brought the challenges and opportunities facing the newspaper industry into sharp focus.

Online news is typically free, and advertising rates for it are comparatively low. Mr. Philips calculated that for every print reader a newspaper loses, it currently needs 100 online readers to generate the same amount of revenue. The more encouraging news is the costs of reaching those readers are less expensive through the Internet than through print — indeed, The Times of London, which recently revamped its Web site, is regularly visited by more users outside of England than within.

Another slide posited that of the millions of readers who come to various newspaper sites in a given month, a huge majority come only once, a consequence of all those referrals from search engines and aggregators. Mr. Philips said he sees that traffic, despite how fleeting it may be, as an incredible opportunity if all those one-time visitors can be compelled to come back a few times more.

Mr. Murdoch perked up when discussing the online potential of The New York Post, which has consistently lost money since he acquired it for a second time in 1993. At a break in the conference, Mr. Murdoch sought out Rebecca Wade, the editor of The Sun, to discuss the results of that day’s Scottish election. For a while, he sat at the back of the ballroom chatting with Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook, who sat next to him again at dinner. Mr. Murdoch listened closely.

If one thing was clear over the weekend, it was that Mr. Murdoch’s determination to revitalize the news will depend as much on mastering geeky technology as storytelling and layout. Winning The Journal will require other masterful feats like convincing the Bancrofts that the sometimes fractious Murdoch clan will be worthy stewards.

Mr. Murdoch says that if the Bancrofts grant him a meeting, he would like to introduce them to his grown children so they can see the passion they all share for the news business.

Of course, Mr. Murdoch does not exactly see himself as a wizened septuagenarian preparing to hand off his media assets. His wife, Wendi, is 38 years his junior, and they have socialized with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his fiancée, Anne Wojcicki. The Murdochs are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller; it is another prize that Mr. Murdoch has said he has long coveted.

By every measure, he appears to believe he has plenty of time to get exactly what he wants. As he wrapped up the conference in Monterey last Sunday, he looked out at his employees and said: “You all think I’m too old.” Pausing for a beat, he added: “I think you’re too old.”

    Tilting at a Digital Future, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/yourmoney/13murdoch.html

Virtual Trip: Travel in 'Second Life'

May 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The tour was a whirlwind: dancing at a beachside disco in Spain surrounded by scantily clad women, grabbing a seat at a lively pub in Dublin, flying in a small aircraft above a lush, tropical forest. Time elapsed? Less than two hours. With no tickets required, no money spent and no need to leave your seat, touring in the virtual world of ''Second Life'' holds a certain appeal for travelers willing to delve deep into the Internet to find their escape.

Visitors need only download a free program, then log in. With the help of elaborate 3-D locales designed and built by the world's residents, tourists can watch their online embodiments -- known as their avatars -- lounge at the beach, dine at a romantic restaurant, or go out dancing at a crowded nightclub.

Like in the real world, it's easy to get lost. Longtime inhabitants of ''Second Life'' are creating automated tours, opening virtual travel agencies and even publishing travel guidebooks modeled after those seen in the hands of confused tourists.

Of course, there are some glaring differences between your average Frommer's guide and ''The Unofficial Tourists' Guide to Second Life,'' published in April by St. Martin's Press.

''There are sections on how to fly and how to hover,'' said co-writer Paul Carr. But despite such necessary adjustments, he said, ''it's very much like going to a foreign country.''

With the ability to fly and even teleport from place to place in ''Second Life,'' which hosted more than 1 million visitors in April, a vacation does not need to be a lengthy affair.

As they travel to virtual Roman neighborhoods and fantastical worlds, visitors can interact with other participants from all over the (real) world -- about three-quarters of users are from outside the U.S., mostly from Europe, Brazil, Canada, Japan and Australia.

In ''Second Life,'' even language difficulties are a thing of the past. Visitors can pick up a free translation program and carry on typed conversations with others speaking any of nine languages.

For those looking to get their bearings, one option is the guided tour. Virtual travel agency Synthravels seeks to match up ''tourists'' and volunteer guides in 27 different online worlds, including ''Second Life,'' ''World of Warcraft'' and others.

On one recent tour of ''Second Life,'' Synthravels founder Mario Gerosa led the way to a virtual representation of the Spanish island of Ibiza, stopping first at a shop selling traditional flamenco garb, then at a disco surrounded by sand and sea, where with the click of a mouse avatars can dance.

Next stop is Midnight City, where a flight above the skyscrapers shows the moon's light reflected on the ocean's waves. Nearby, a simulation of a solar eclipse allows Gerosa's avatar, Frank Koolhaas, to walk right up to a blazing sun, standing on the fabric of outer space.

Also on the tour: Dublin, a popular hangout among Irish users, and an island called Svarga, where a flying pod carries avatars above what appears to be a rain forest filled with huge trees and giant mushrooms.

Like any guided tour in ''Second Life,'' though, this one carried its own inherent difficulties. With both leader and led under their own power, it was quite easy to get separated. Several times, Gerosa's avatar lost some of its clothes.

Like the Vatican in the height of tourist season, ''Second Life'' locations tend to get especially crowded when it's evening in the U.S. or Europe, and the resulting computer lag time can make navigating cumbersome.

And finding a guide, in of itself, can be a challenge. The Synthravels Web site has connected guides and tourists more than 200 times, according to Gerosa, but for now it does not charge visitors or pay guides, and finding a tour depends on the sometimes-fickle interest of volunteers.

But with some persistence and a willingness to just walk up to knowledgeable avatars and ask, there are guides to be found, Carr said.

''There are quite a few people in 'Second Life' who will offer a tour in exchange for a few Linden dollars,'' said the writer, referring to the world's currency, which can be bought and sold for real-world cash.

Those having a hard time securing a personal tour can turn to a number of automated options. Many site creators post vehicles near arrival points and program them to give visitors a tour of the location.

By heading to The Guided Tour Company of Second Life, where automated tour vehicles ranging from hang-gliders to flying carpets are sold, avatars can access a programmed tour of tours.

By clicking on the free guide, users can teleport to Icarus, where a giant dragonfly carries them to a romantic dance floor surrounded by twinkling stars. Clicking again brings them to Venice Island, where a gondola takes them to an old church adorned with Renaissance paintings and an ornate, carved pulpit.

Another click leads to Cocoloco Island Resort, where a white hot-air balloon ferries them around what looks amazingly like a Caribbean resort: beach chairs, thatch cabanas, and a pool that -- with a few mouse clicks -- allows visitors to float on their backs for hours.

At least for now, few people are charging visitors for such travel services. Even a stay at ''aloft,'' a recently reopened virtual hotel by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., is free. But the many entrepreneurs of ''Second Life'' may yet find a way to make travel pay, said Jeska Dzwigalski, a community developer with San Francisco-based Linden Research Inc., which runs the virtual world.

She said she has seen the tours and ''travel agencies popping up that help people and give them an experience they might not otherwise find. ... As we've grown, that became a potential business for people.''

Karen Hemmes has seen the demand firsthand -- or at least through the eyes of her avatar, Sierra Sugar.

A Gainesville, Fla., nurse by day -- and a DJ at ''Second Life'' events by night -- Hemmes received a virtual hot-air balloon as a gift, and started taking friends for rides. By the end of many of these tours meant for two, her balloon was packed to capacity with passers-by who had asked to join in, she said.

Visitors can even capture a few photos or home videos to remind them of their trip. Screen grabs of a virtual Times Square and videos of avatars surfing are easily found on image-sharing sites around the Web.

For those planning to go, though, Carr suggests visitors don't follow his example.

''If you want to retain friends and not kill yourselves, then you need to take lots of breaks,'' said Carr, who holed himself up in a London apartment with co-writer Graham Pond in the final days of their research, subsisting on tinned goods and bottled water.

    Virtual Trip: Travel in 'Second Life', NYT, 12.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Virtual-Travel.html

Google to Block Video Clips That Thais Say Insult King

May 12, 2007
By REUTERS
The New York Times

BANGKOK, May 11 (Reuters) — Google has agreed to block four video clips on its YouTube Web site that the government of Thailand said insulted its king.

But in a letter to the minister of communications, Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, Google said two other videos that had angered Thailand’s military government would stay on the site, because they did not break laws against offending the monarchy.

“They appear to be political comments that are critical of both the government and the conduct of foreigners,” said the letter, signed by Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “Because they are political in nature, and not intended insults of His Majesty, we do not see a basis for blocking these videos.”

The government, which blocked access to YouTube last month when clips mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej first appeared, gave copies of the letter to reporters on Friday. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mr. Sitthichai, who threatened to sue Google earlier in the week, said he no longer wished to take legal action but he did not say whether the company’s concession was enough for him to unblock YouTube for Thai Internet surfers.

“The Thai police will not take any action against any company,” he told a news conference. “Instead they will look into ways of fighting the person who uploaded the video onto the Web site.”

The letter said Thailand had sent YouTube a list of 12 video clips it deemed offensive. Six of the clips had already been removed by their creators or because they violated YouTube’s “code of service,” it said.

Insulting royalty is a serious offense in Thailand, but the generals who ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a military coup in September have also used the strict laws about the monarchy to stifle criticism of themselves or their actions.

    Google to Block Video Clips That Thais Say Insult King, NYT, 12.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/technology/12youtube.html

Some Profit Off Va. Tech Domain Names

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:43 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- When Fred McChesney heard about the Virginia Tech shooting spree on April 16, he was appalled. But what he did next has appalled many others. Within hours of the rampage, the Phoenix man began buying dozens of domain names -- CampusKillings.com, VirginiaTechMurders.com, SlaughterInVirginia.com -- in the hopes of selling them later to the highest bidder.

McChesney, 48, said he saw it as an opportunity to show his contempt for firearms by featuring anti-gun content on the domains he is selling.

He also saw it as an opportunity to cash in.

''Everyone is profiting off of this,'' McChesney said. ''I'm not hurting anyone.''

Domain names related to the tragedy were snapped up almost immediately by people hoping to sell them off for a profit or use them to link to advertisers. The cost of registering such domains is generally less than $10 -- but some are now being auctioned off for thousands.

While many consider the practice repellant, experts say it has become commonplace.

''Any time there's a big news event, people go register the domain names,'' said Christine Jones, general counsel for GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain registration service. ''Nine-eleven they did it, Katrina they did it, the tsunami in southeast Asia they did it.''

Especially troubling to some is the registration of domain names related to those killed in the tragedy. On the same day the victims' names were released, people began registering domains named after the dead, such as JarrettLane.com. Victims' friends and family members seeking to create a memorial site under the same Internet address would then have to purchase it from the domain name owner -- for whatever price the owner wants.

''If anybody is working to make a profit off of this tragedy by selling these kinds of things, it's just a crying shame,'' university spokesman Mark Owczarski said. ''Obviously, you wouldn't want anybody to make a profit off something as horrendous as this.''

Jeremiah Johnston, chief operating officer for domain name broker Sedo.com, said his company has shut down domains named after the victims as well as dozens of others related to the tragedy, including BlacksburgBloodbath.com and SchoolSlaughter.com.

''We do feel that they fly in the face of our offensive domain policy,'' Johnston said. ''It is quite tasteless.''

GoDaddy.com shut down one site purporting to raise money for the victims' families after university officials said they weren't aware of any such charity, Jones said.

But in general, there are few restrictions on what people can register. The Internet's key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has arbitration procedures for resolving disputes, but they cover only trademarks and service marks, which can include names of celebrities. Federal laws also focus on trademark owners, not the names of non-famous individuals such as the victims.

''It's kind of exploitative, but it's not really cybersquatting,'' University of South Carolina cyberspace law professor Ann Bartow said. ''It's socially, normatively disgusting, but it's not trademark bad faith.''

McChesney, who has been ''hugely anti-gun'' since his brother shot him in the face with a BB gun when he was a child, said he hopes to use some of his domains to draw attention to what he calls an epidemic of gun violence in America.

He also plans to give away his memorial domain names to Virginia Tech students, and has donated one so far. He hopes to sell others, such as VaTechTheMovie.com, to companies. So far, he hasn't sold any.

He understands that many will vilify him. But he doesn't think he's doing anything wrong.

''What I'm doing is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,'' he said. ''Period.''

    Some Profit Off Va. Tech Domain Names, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Domain-Names.html

Comcast CEO Shows Off Super Quick Modem

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday, showing off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems.

The cost of modems that would support the technology, called ''channel bonding,'' is ''not that dissimilar to modems today,'' he told The Associated Press after a demonstration at The Cable Show. It could be available ''within less than a couple years,'' he said.

The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network is already capable of providing 100 Mbps and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.

The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity. The laboratory said last month it expected manufacturers to begin submitting modems for certification under the standard by the end of the year.

In the presentation, ARRIS Group Inc. chief executive Robert Stanzione downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it long before a standard modem worked through an estimated download time of 16 minutes.

Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster's visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.

''If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,'' Roberts said. ''The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks.''

Other cable industry executives, including Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons, News Corp. President Peter Chernin and Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Philippe Dauman, cheered the demonstration during a panel afterward.

Brian Dietz, spokesman for the conference host, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said the demonstration was the key technological advance showcased at the conference.

''It's an exponential step forward and we're very excited,'' Roberts said. ''What consumers actually do with all this speed is up to the imagination of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.''

------

On the Net:

The Cable Show, www.thecableshow.com

Cable Television Laboratories, www.cablelabs.com

    Comcast CEO Shows Off Super Quick Modem, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Fast-Cable-Modem.html

Beam It Down From the Web, Scotty

May 7, 2007
The New York Times
By SAUL HANSELL

PASADENA, Calif. — Sometimes a particular piece of plastic is just what you need. You have lost the battery cover to your cellphone, perhaps. Or your daughter needs to have the golden princess doll she saw on television. Now.

In a few years, it will be possible to make these items yourself. You will be able to download three-dimensional plans online, then push Print. Hours later, a solid object will be ready to remove from your printer.

It’s not quite the transporter of “Star Trek,” but it is a step closer.

Three-dimensional printers have been seen in industrial design shops for about a decade. They are used to test part designs for cars, airplanes and other products before they are sent to manufacturing. Once well over $100,000 each, such machines can now be had for $15,000. In the next two years, prices are expected to fall further, putting the printers in reach of small offices and even corner copy stores.

The next frontier will be the home. One company that wants to be the first to deliver a 3-D printer for consumers is Desktop Factory, started by IdeaLab, a technology incubator here. The company will start selling its first printer for $4,995 this year.

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years.

“We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model,” he said. “The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials.”

Others are working on the same idea.

“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”

Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals.

3D Systems, a pioneer in the field, plans to introduce a three-dimensional printer later this year that will sell for $9,900.

“We think we can deliver systems for under $2,000 in three to five years,” said Abe Reichental, the company’s chief executive. “That will open a market of people who are not just engineers — collectors, hobbyists, interior decorators.”

Even at today’s prices, uses for 3-D printers are multiplying.

Colleges and high schools are buying them for design classes. Dental labs are using them to shape crowns and bridges. Doctors print models from CT scans to help plan complex surgery. Architects are printing three-dimensional models of their designs. And the Army Corps of Engineers used the technology to build a topographical map of New Orleans to help plan reconstruction.

Entrepreneurs like Fabjectory are beginning to find interest in 3-D printing among aficionados of online games, like Second Life and World of Warcraft, in which players design their own characters. Electronic Arts hopes to offer a similar service to create three-dimensional models of characters in Spore, a game to be introduced later this year.

Eventually, 3-D design software will let people make sculptures and design housewares at home.

But 3-D printers may be useful for people who do not want to learn how to use such sophisticated programs.

IdeaLab hopes companies will sell three-dimensional designs over the Internet. This would allow people to print out replacements for a dishwasher rack at home. And it would open up new opportunities for toys.

“You could go to Mattel.com, download Barbie, scan your Mom’s head, slap the head on Barbie and print it out,” suggests Joe Shenberger, the director of sales for Desktop Factory. “You could have a true custom one-off toy.”

How many people will want such a thing? It is impossible to say for sure, but some who work with the current crop of 3-D printers say they will be very attractive when the price puts them in reach of home users.

“When laser printers cost more than $5,000, nobody knew they needed desktop publishing,” said A. Michael Berman, chief technology officer for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, which has a half-dozen 3-D printers for its students to use. “The market for 3-D printing isn’t as big as for laser printers, but I do believe it is huge.”

And Desktop Factory’s version is meant to be compact enough for a home office — 25 by 20 by 20 inches — with a weight of less than 90 pounds.

The origin of Desktop Factory was not so much a desire to print Barbies as a frustration with the Internet. After making a lot of money starting Internet companies like CitySearch, IdeaLab lost even more with flops like eToys. With its investors disgruntled, the company shrank, slowed down and turned its attention from the Web to technologies like solar energy and robotics.

“We traded bits for atoms,” Mr. Gross said.

IdeaLab’s new interest in things required it to build a machine shop, and eventually Mr. Gross bought a 3-D printer from Stratasys. IdeaLab engineers kept the machine going around the clock, experimenting with designs.

Mr. Gross even downloaded a model of an octopus to print out for a project on vertebrates in his daughter’s eighth-grade biology class.

This convinced Mr. Gross that there was a market for 3-D printers, especially if the price could be cut.

At first, the prospects looked difficult. The three leading 3-D printer companies all used different technologies, but none seemed simple enough to be modified for inexpensive home devices. Stratasys makes models out of liquid plastic using a very expensive heated print head that resembles a glue gun. 3D Systems uses lasers to harden liquid polymers. And the Z Corporation, a unit of the private equity group EQT, builds models by squirting a sort of glue over layers of sandlike plaster.

In a brainstorming session, Kevin Hickerson, an IdeaLab engineer, proposed the method the company would ultimately choose. First the machine spreads a powdered plastic over a roller, which is heated to just below the plastic’s melting point. Then a sharply focused beam of light melts dots of plastic on the roller. After the unmelted powder is brushed off, the roller deposits the hot plastic onto a platform. This process is repeated until the object is assembled from the bottom up.

It took IdeaLab a year to prove that the basic approach would work and a second year to develop the technology to get the layers to stick to each other properly. (The model is gently squished, as in a sandwich press, after each layer is applied.) And it has taken two more years to write the required software and to create a working design for the first production model.

IdeaLab has made about 10 of the printers so far. It is preparing to begin production at its combination office and factory in an industrial building half a mile from the company’s headquarters. This summer it will start to deliver its initial test machines to the 200 customers who have agreed to buy them.

Desktop Factory says the machines pose no hazard to users because they use a safe nylon-based material.

Some in the 3-D printer industry say Desktop Factory may have cut too many corners. Its first model makes objects with rather jagged edges because it applies layers that are 0.01 inch thick, two to three times thicker than many other machines’. Moreover, it uses a nylon mixed with aluminum and glass that produces gray objects, with a rather sandy finish that many do not find attractive.

Kathy Lewis, the chief executive of Desktop Factory, said the company saw enormous initial demand among small engineering firms that simply cannot afford the larger printers, as well as high schools and colleges that teach computer-aided design.

To appeal to the home market, she said, the company is trying to develop new materials — a smoother plastic and a very soft, bendable substance suitable for toys.

Much of the research in the field is about how to develop materials of various properties that can be applied in tiny digital specs. Cornell’s 3-D printer, called Fab@Home, is particularly suited to those experiments because it moves a syringe in three dimensions that can be filled with any substance. So far, it has built objects out of silicone, plaster, Cheez Whiz and Play-Doh.

Noy Schaal, a high-school freshman in Louisville, modified the design with a heated syringe to extrude a chocolate bar, decorated with the letters KY for Kentucky. (Koba Industries has started selling kits with all the parts needed to make the Fab@Home design for about $3,000.)

Professor Lipson said researchers are developing ways to use the process to build parts with more complex functions. They have preliminary designs for batteries, sensors, and parts that can bend when electricity is applied.

“A milestone for us would be to print a robot that would get up and walk out of the printer,” Professor Lipson said. “Batteries included.”

    Beam It Down From the Web, Scotty, NYT, 7.5.2007,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/technology/07copy.html

Shock Radio, Playing Rough, Shrugs at Imus’s Fall

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG

Almost two weeks after CBS Radio fired Don Imus for his racially and sexually demeaning remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Nick Di Paolo opened his talk show on another CBS station in New York by mocking a manual that, he said, one of his bosses had given him that morning.

The booklet was entitled “Words Hurt and Harm” and, as described by Mr. Di Paolo, it urged him and his brethren to avoid the sort of stereotypes that had not only upended Mr. Imus but had also just gotten two colleagues on WFNY (92.3 FM) suspended for broadcasting a six-minute prank call littered with slurs to a Chinese restaurant.

“Right away, we’re starting with a false premise,” Mr. Di Paolo told his listeners on April 25, just after noon. “Because words don’t hurt.”

He then proceeded to refer to someone in the studio who was apparently of Colombian descent as “a drug dealer,” before using an exercise in the manual as a springboard to the following observations: that “enough” Native Americans drank to make them fair game for a joke; that waiters in Chinese restaurants were “efficient” and “better than most, you know, other ethnic groups as waiters and waitresses”; and that Jewish mothers were “bad cooks and a little hairy.”

The part of the radio spectrum where Mr. Di Paolo holds forth each day — shows in which commentary and entertainment fuse, sometimes under the rubric of a morning or afternoon “zoo” — remains as arguably and insidiously untamed in the days after Mr. Imus’s collapse as it was before, based on a New York Times screening of nearly 250 hours of shock-talk radio broadcast over the last week.

Gay men and lesbians, and women and Muslims, among others, were frequent targets of ridicule; coarse, sexually explicit banter, particularly descriptions of anal and oral sex, proliferated, much of it reminiscent of the routines that once drew Howard Stern heavy penalties; and meanness appeared to be a job prerequisite, whether a host was belittling someone who called in or the unwitting subject of a prank call.

In a sense, the hosts of these shows are juggling live grenades each day, putting the companies that broadcast and sponsor them at the greatest risk of collateral damage, particularly as the smoke clears from the Imus affair.

After being told of Mr. Di Paolo’s comments, for example, officials of the New York State Lottery said they had decided to discontinue all advertising on his show. They also said they would no longer sponsor “Opie and Anthony,” a morning show on the same station, after being apprised of a line uttered by a comedian who is a regular guest. “Would it be possible, could you whistle ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ while I rape a girl?” the comedian had asked another guest, a professional whistler, in an old interview replayed on April 25.

All told, The Times listened to a dozen prominent shows on so-called terrestrial radio for five weekdays in a row. Some, like “Mancow’s Morning Madhouse,” out of Chicago, and “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” a Spanish-language program originating in New York, draw tens of thousands of listeners each day on multiple stations across the country. Others tend to reach a more regional audience, including “The Jersey Guys,” an afternoon talk show that is among the most popular in New Jersey, and “Steve and D.C.,” which has similar reach in St. Louis.

In one respect, Mr. Imus and the hole he dug for himself were unique: a nationally syndicated radio host who interviewed the powerful used his bully pulpit, not just on radio but also on a cable news network, to make a racially charged aside about largely defenseless victims.

And yet, in the weeks after his firing, the nation’s AM and FM airwaves have continued to crackle with the kind of crude remarks, off-color bits and unfiltered rage that might well run afoul of the standards that Mr. Imus was said by his employers, and critics, to have violated.

One morning late last month, for example, Mancow, the syndicated talk show host whose real name is Erich Muller and whose audience was estimated at 1.5 million by Talkers magazine as recently as last fall, could be heard dismissing a caller as a “brain-dead fetus” and a “late-term abortion that somehow crawled out of the Dumpster” after the man’s phone connection gave out.

Mr. Muller — whose show is heard prominently on AM talk radio in South Florida (the station call letters are WMEN, a nod to its format), as well as in Houston, Indianapolis and San Francisco — also suggested on the same broadcast that “radical Muslims” would not stop until they had flattened American religion like a steamroller.

His children, he predicted, “will probably be killed because I’m bringing them up Catholic, and maybe their children will be brainwashed and put into some sort of situation where they’re wearing a burka and they follow Shia law, because that’s what these radicalized Muslims want.”

He also mused about several other matters, including, “I just wonder why we care so much about Virginia Tech kids.” He quickly qualified the remark by saying, “Don’t pull that out of context,” before indicating that soldiers killed in Iraq deserved comparable gestures of mourning.

And that was just one day’s show.

Asked about the appropriateness of that host’s remarks in a post-Imus world, a representative for the company syndicating the show — Talk Radio Network, which also distributes the hosts Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham — said he would pass on the question to the company’s chief executive, Mark Masters, and to the show’s producer. Neither responded.

Meanwhile, a representative for one of the show’s advertisers — the American Council on Education, an association of colleges — said that the group had been unaware that its spots promoting higher education had run on the show. The commercials are part of a public service campaign created and donated by the Ad Council, said Terry Hartle, a spokesman for the college group.

“We will certainly talk with the Ad Council about that particular placement,” Mr. Hartle said.

Still, no targets on such shows — which are overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, led by disaffected white men like Mr. Muller — are fired at with greater frequency than women.

Last Monday Mr. Di Paolo, a stand-up comic whose show on 92.3 “Free FM” in New York is heard by nearly 160,000 people each week (ranking it 27th in the market, according to Arbitron), proposed that homeless women be employed to monitor traffic.

“Go to the women’s shelter,” he said. “Get a bunch of chicks with black eyes and one tooth.”

On April 27, in an extended rant in support of Alec Baldwin’s right to lose his temper in private, he wondered about the last film role of the actor’s former wife, Kim Basinger. “What did she play?” Mr. Di Paolo asked. “An old tampon?”

Asked about the propriety of Mr. Di Paolo’s comments — especially in light of the action taken by CBS Radio against Mr. Imus and “J.V. and Elvis,” the hosts suspended over their prank against the Chinese restaurant — Karen Mateo, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment. Reached on Friday night, Mr. Di Paolo said he knew that in the current climate, his reluctance to filter his harshest opinions could ultimately cost him his show, which began on WFNY in December.

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” said Mr. Di Paolo, 45, who has been working as a comedian for nearly two decades. “It’s got to stop somewhere. And I’m hoping they say enough is enough — not as far as what I do, but as far as censoring people.”

He added, “At least with my show, I take shots at everybody.”

Across the Hudson River earlier in the week, the hosts of the “Jersey Guys” show on WKXW (101.5 FM) in Trenton, among the most popular in the state, were imagining the sex life of Gov. Jon S. Corzine.

Having decided a few days earlier that the governor’s girlfriend had surely cleared his hospital room to give him “a little servicing” after his car accident, they were now encouraging the governor, as he continued his recovery at his mansion, to find additional female companionship.

“I’d get bitches, wouldn’t you?” said Craig Carton, one of the hosts, on their April 30 program, which was simulcast live on the radio station’s Web site. “Poolside bitches ... with big leaves to fan the governor down after exhausting physical therapy, maybe a little massage.”

“That should be his new mantra,” Mr. Carton added. “I’m the governor, I’ve had a reawakening, I now believe everyone should have poolside bitches.”

Such talk was mild, though, when measured against what is offered every morning on Spanish-language radio, the Wild West of the medium.

Just as Mr. Imus’s show might have featured an interview with a presidential candidate followed by a bawdy imitation of Cardinal Edward M. Egan, “El Traketeo,” a morning show on an FM station owned by Univision in Miami (its title roughly translates as “the uproar” or “the hoax”) toggles between weighty discussion of matters like immigration and chatter that borders on the pornographic.

On April 26, for example, the show, heard by an estimated 142,000 listeners each week, broadcast a parody of a salsa song in which a man pleaded with his girlfriend for anal sex.

“I understand that you’re afraid,” he said. “Relax a little.”

A day later the show’s hosts conducted a phone interview about rising property taxes with Marco Rubio, a Republican from Miami who is speaker of the State House of Representatives. Sometime after Mr. Rubio hung up, the show broadcast another song parody, this one about a man whose life is being cramped by the taxes Mr. Rubio is trying to cut.

I had to have sex in a bus, the singer laments, because “I couldn’t afford the motel.”

Asked if Mr. Rubio had been aware of the shenanigans that are part of the show’s daily diet, a spokeswoman for him, Jill Chamberlin, said that he appreciated “the opportunity Univision has given him to get the cut-property-tax message out to the citizens.”

Whether the Federal Communications Commission or Congress will step up sanctions against radio programs after Mr. Imus’s firing remains unknown. The commission does not actively monitor such shows — it relies on listener complaints to initiate investigations — and even then, harsh or racy speech is often protected by the First Amendment.

Which is not to say that the F.C.C. is not paying attention: in 2004 the hosts of “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” a show that until recently originated in Miami on WXDJ FM, were fined $4,000 by the commission for broadcasting a prank call to Fidel Castro, who apparently thought he was speaking to Hugo Chávez; they have since left the station.

Emmis Communications, which had broadcast Mr. Muller’s show on its FM station in Chicago, let him go last summer, two years after it had agreed to pay $300,000 to settle indecency complaints against his show.

Still, employers may not wait for the government, choosing instead to apply their own standards, particularly if advertisers begin to object.

After Mr. Imus’s comments about the mostly black Rutgers team, the hosts on two predominantly black stations in New York — WQHT (97.1 FM) and WBLS (107.5) — have made references on their programs to the need to police themselves, and their callers, better.

Tarsha Nicole Jones, who as “Miss Jones” is host of a show on WQHT that reaches nearly 700,000 listeners a week, has taken to using “wenches” and “itches” as substitutes for harsher words, and she reprimanded a caller on Monday for using a common racial slur twice.

Later the show ran a stentorian public service announcement that said, “Due to new regulations regarding the use of language, the ‘Miss Jones Show’ has made the appropriate adjustments.”

Reporting was contributed by Terry Aguayo, Rebecca Cathcart, Bob Driehaus, Theo Emery, Ann Farmer, Malcolm Gay, Jon Hurdle, Carolyn Marshall, Lori Moore, Regan Morris, Colin Moynihan and Andrea Zarate.

    Shock Radio, Playing Rough, Shrugs at Imus’s Fall, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/business/media/06talk.html?hp

States Ponder Laws to Keep Web Predators From Children

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

HARTFORD, May 4 — Nearly every American teenager, it seems, has a Web page displaying his or her life details. And nearly every parent has nightmares that someone might visit those pages, easily discovering where the children live and what they like.

It happened in Fairfield County in Connecticut in October 2005, when an F.B.I. task force arrested two men in unrelated cases who were suspected of trolling social-networking sites to lure young girls for sex. One of the predators, a 22-year-old man, molested an 11-year-old girl in her home while her parents slept upstairs. In the other case, a 39-year-old man met a 14-year-old girl at a mall and had her perform oral sex on him in his car.

It also happened in Youngsville, N.C., last June, when girls ages 12 and 13 were found at a swimming pool with a 21-year-old woman at 4 a.m. The girls told the police that they had met the woman through MySpace.com, where they had lied and said they were 17 and 18. The police charged the woman with two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The woman, who did not have a previous criminal record, said she had not been planning anything inappropriate.

[And just last week, a 27-year-old Texas man was charged in Michigan with criminal sexual conduct involving a 14-year-old girl he met on MySpace.]

Now, after years of exponential growth of such Web sites and dozens of high-profile cases of criminal activity stemming from them, politicians in a half-dozen states are pushing legislation aimed at protecting children by requiring sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com to verify the age of every user and require parental permission for those under 18.

But while the proposals have earned praise from worried parents, those who run the sites and independent technology experts say they are little more than grandstanding and would be impossible to enforce.

Indeed, MySpace already requires that users be at least 14 to create profiles, and limits access to those belonging to anyone under 18, while Facebook requires that users be older than 13 and shows profiles only to other members in the same social network.

Neither set of rules has stopped children like those in North Carolina from lying about their ages or blocked adults from masquerading as teenagers.

“Everyone looking at this has good intentions at their core, but there are some solutions that sound like they are the easy silver bullet and there is just no such thing,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace, warning that the proposed restrictions could create a false sense of safety. “You’ll see teens who are going to get around it and probably end up in a place where it is more difficult to protect them.”

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has spearheaded the growing movement to crack down on the sites, frequently brushes off such concerns by arguing that “if we can put a man on the moon, we can verify someone’s age.”

“This is a basic issue of safety,” he said in a recent interview. “These kinds of Web sites have created this complete delusion that this is a private world that an outsider does not get into, but it is a total misnomer. Anyone can get in.”

Mr. Blumenthal and Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general, both Democrats, started a national task force last year on the issue that now includes attorneys general from nearly every state. The initial focus was on pressuring MySpace to raise its minimum age for registration to 16 from 14, but when the company resisted, Mr. Blumenthal and others began introducing legislation to force its hand.

In Connecticut, the bill sailed through two committees and is awaiting a vote by the full legislature. In North Carolina, the legislature’s Judiciary Committee is scheduled to address the matter in the coming days. Similar proposals have been introduced by state lawmakers in New York and Georgia, while a legislator in Illinois has proposed blocking access to social-networking sites in public libraries and schools.

Fears about unsuspecting children being stalked by tech-savvy predators are as old as the Internet itself. But far more than their predecessors, chat rooms and bulletin boards, the social-networking sites often feature intimate details and pictures, including a child’s hometown and school, and can be easily seen by anyone, without the creator’s explicit permission.

Still, experts worry that the proposed restrictions would stymie overall participation, since requiring users to verify their age would give the sites access to a person’s true identity. Currently, users must enter an e-mail address and basic information like a birthday and a ZIP code, but there is nothing to stop people from making them up.

Detective Frank Dannahey, who specializes in Internet crimes for the Police Department in Rocky Hill, Conn., said that verification “of course, would be helpful,” but that it was not clear whether the proposed legislation would actually make children safer.

“It’s a quandary,” said Detective Dannahey, who has worked with both MySpace and Mr. Blumenthal over the years. “If you are a teenager, are you going to go ask your parents for permission, or are you just going to go around it and use another Web site, which might be less safe? The only way you will really know whether or not it will work is if it is done.”

None of the proposed bills specifically outline the way the sites should verify the age of users, but the politicians pushing them suggest they could hire private contractors to do so. Most models of identity verification on the Internet involve financial transactions, typically using a credit card. Several sites that sell cigarettes or alcohol use existing databases like those for state driver’s licenses to verify that customers are above the minimum legal age.

But Internet experts say verification would be exponentially more difficult for minors, who typically do not have government-issued or other easily verifiable forms of identification. It would also significantly increase costs for running the sites, which are now almost entirely automated.

“They don’t have driver’s licenses, or for that matter any public records useful for determining age, and present a tremendous challenge to accurately identify,” Jeff Schmidt, the chief executive of Authis, an information security company, wrote in a paper circulated to the attorneys general this spring. “We’re trying to match an identifier and attribute to someone we’ll never see and who is probably located thousands of miles away in another city, state or country.”

Despite the fears of parents — and the warnings of politicians — researchers say that many teenagers are already self-policing the sites.

According to a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all teenagers with an Internet profile somehow either limit access to their Web pages or leave out sensitive information like proper names and addresses.

Nearly half of those with public profiles, according to the survey released in March of more than 900 users ages 12 to 17, said they lied about the more telling details, and more than two-thirds of those who have been contacted by strangers said they ignored them.

“The good news is that most teens already have a pretty healthy sense of paranoia,” said Mary Madden, an author of the Pew report. “The teens who say they are using the network to make new friends that they only know online make up a fairly small portion of users.”

Adam D. Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation who has studied sexual predators on the Internet, said that while age verification is the “argument du jour,” research shows that limiting convicted sex offenders’ access to the Internet would be more effective. Several states, including New York, have enacted legislation requiring sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses with law enforcement; New Jersey has a similar proposal pending.

“It’s the same thing as saying to a kid, ‘You can’t hang out in video arcades, because someone might try to come and get you,’ ” Mr. Thierer said. “The better thing to do would be to stop the criminal from getting there. This worrying just creates a new kind of moral panic.”

But with parents packing forums on Internet safety and frequently wary of technology their children navigate better than they do, the proposals have met with relatively little opposition so far. Many argue that stopping even one predator would make regulations worth it.

Beyond the question of feasibility, opponents of the age-verification rules are concerned about unintended consequences, like limiting participation on blogs or other sites, since the legislation does not explicitly define “social-networking sites.”

In Connecticut, several political blogs have posted warnings that they could be shut down if the bill passes. On Wednesday, one blogger posted a petition against the legislation. Lawmakers, in turn, have written their own posts to assure Web-savvy politicos that they were weighing the potential minefields of regulating the Internet.

“While there is a real concern for children, there is also a concern that we don’t sweep in all kinds of other problems by trying to fix this one,” said State Senator Andrew J. McDonald, a Democrat who represents Stamford and Darien. Mr. McDonald was one of the four legislators, out of 39 who voted, to oppose the Connecticut proposal in one committee.

“I am afraid we are dealing with this by coming down with a sledgehammer,” he said, “where a small mallet would be more appropriate.”

    States Ponder Laws to Keep Web Predators From Children, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/nyregion/06myspace.html

News Corp. Makes a Bid for Dow Jones

May 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and RICHARD SIKLOS

The News Corporation, owner of the Fox News Channel and The New York Post, has made an unsolicited $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Dow Jones confirmed today that it had received the offer but said only that the Bancroft family, which controls the company, was evaluating the bid. “There can be no assurance that this evaluation will lead to any transaction,” the company said in a written statement.

A person close to the situation said that it came in the form of a letter to the Dow Jones board two weeks ago.

After news of the offer was reported this morning on CNBC, shares of Dow Jones leaped 58 percent. News Corp. offered $60 a share in cash for all outstanding stock in Dow Jones — a whopping premium over the $36.33 closing price on Monday. Trading of Dow Jones stock was briefly halted on the New York stock exchange as shares approached $58. When trading resumed by midday, the price fell back somewhat but remained above $54.

The news had a ripple effect across the media industry today. Shares of media companies rose broadly in trading today, with stock of Reuters, Gannett and The New York Times Company all posting unusually high gains.

The acquisition of Dow Jones would broaden the reach of News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, into business reporting and American media in general. The Journal has the second biggest circulation of any American newspaper, more than two million, behind USA Today. In addition, Dow Jones owns a widely circulated newswire service, other business news outlets like Barron’s and the MarketWatch Web site. The company had $1.78 billion in revenue last year.

Mr. Murdoch already has ambitious plans to add business news reporting to the portfolio of News Corp. In February, News Corp. announced it was moving ahead with plans to start a business cable news channel. The channel, which is scheduled to start broadcasting late this year, will carry the Fox News name.

Mr. Murdoch has made his desires to own The Journal well known for years. And now that the News Corp. offer has come to light, other suitors for the paper could surface. But the Bancrofts have so far expressed no interest in selling the company, which the family has controlled since 1902.

News Corp. had no immediate comment today on the offer.

Any sale of the company would require the family’s approval. In the mid-1980s, Dow Jones established Class B shares, with 10 times the voting power of the company’s common stock. Like similar stock structures at The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company, the arrangement allows the family to retain control of the company.

It was initially unclear what prompted Mr. Murdoch to make his offer now. He has put out feelers in the past but determined that the Bancrofts were not interested in selling. This time, in offering such a large premium for the company, Mr. Murdoch may be trying to present the board with an offer it cannot resist. Like shares of other publishing companies, the stock of Dow Jones has slumped as readers and advertisers have migrated to the Internet, hampering the company’s ability to grow.

In recent years, Mr. Murdoch has focused his effort more on businesses like his Fox film and TV studios, the BSkyB satellite service in Britain and his MySpace Web business. Meanwhile, the entire newspaper industry has come under pressure — most recently leading to the break-up of Knight-Ridder Inc. and a proposal led by the financier Sam Zell to take the Tribune Company private.

The bid for Dow Jones in part reflects Mr. Murdoch’s belief that combining the company’s print and online assets with a television outlet could prove immensely valuable and competitive. Dow Jones co-owns, with NBC Universal, the television operations of CNBC in Asia and Europe. Under an arrangement that Mr. Murdoch would presumably seek to terminate, Dow Jones also provides news content to CNBC in the United States, and Wall Street Journal reporters are frequent contributors.

    News Corp. Makes a Bid for Dow Jones, NYT, 1.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/business/media/02dowjones-web.html?hp

Google Helps Make Public Records Available

April 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- By providing free consulting and some software, Google Inc. is helping state governments make reams of public records that are now unavailable or hard to find online easily accessible to Web surfers.

The Internet search company hopes to eventually persuade federal agencies to employ the same tools -- an effort that excites advocates of open government but worries some consumer privacy experts.

Google plans to announce Monday that it has already partnered with four states -- Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia -- to remove technical barriers that had prevented its search engine, as well as those of Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., from accessing tens of thousands of public records dealing with education, real estate, health care and the environment.

These newly available records will not be exclusive to the search engines owned by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of more than 65 watchdog groups that advocate greater government openness and accountability, lauded Google's efforts. Since the Sept. 11 attack on the United States, many public agencies have tried to restrict certain data from the Internet due to concerns about national security.

Despite the obvious benefits of this Google initiative for those conducting Web searches, privacy advocates said they are worried about unintended consequences, cautioning that some records may contain personal and confidential information that should not be widely available.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said many public health and financial records shouldn't necessarily be widely available because they often contain citizens' Social Security numbers. Such information should be redacted from records regardless of whether they're viewed online or in person at a government office, he said.

Rotenberg also said Google has a ''checkered past'' on privacy, noting that the company tracks Internet search users who access government data in order to target ads at them. EPIC recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission urging it to investigate Google regarding such activities, as well as its proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc.

Officials from states partnering with Google are hopeful that the education and tools provided to them by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company will make it easier for average citizens to navigate agency Web sites.

''Unless you had a master's degree in government administration, you probably wouldn't find the actual information you're looking for,'' said Chris Cummiskey, Arizona's chief information officer.

J.L. Needham, who manages Google's public-sector content partnerships, said at least 70 percent of visitors to government Web sites get there by using commercial search engines. But too often, he said, Web searches do not turn up the information people are looking for simply because government computer systems aren't programmed in a way that allows commercial search engines to access their databases.

Still, if users can't get the information they're looking for, they blame the search engine, not the government, Needham lamented. The remedy, which Google has been working on with state technology officers for roughly six months, is to create virtual roadmaps by which search engines can find the databases that store public records.

''We have a vested interest in ensuring that the results we provide in every area, including government services, are high quality, authoritative and trustworthy,'' he said. Google has had discussions with several federal agencies, including the departments of Education and Energy, about making their data easier to access, Needham said.

Not all government officials have responded favorably to Google's effort, Needham said, sometimes because they assume Google is trying to sell them a new service.

California's chief information officer, Clark Kelso, said he is concerned about the consumer privacy issues raised by this initiative and he has directed all state agencies to redact Social Security numbers and other confidential information from documents that will now be available online.

    Google Helps Make Public Records Available, NYT, 30.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Google-State-Records.html

'Rabbit Ears' Find New Life in HDTV Age

April 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:41 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CLEVELAND (AP) -- Buying an antenna for a high-definition television seems as out of place as using a rotary phone to make a call. But some consumers are spending thousands of dollars on LCD or plasma TVs and hooking them up to $50 antennas that don't look much different from what grandpa had on top of his black-and-white picture tube.

They're not doing it for the nostalgia.

Local TV channels, broadcast in HD over-the-air, offer superior picture quality over the often-compressed signals sent by cable and satellite TV companies.

And the best part? Over-the-air HD is free.

''Eighty-year-old technology is being redesigned and rejiggered to deliver the best picture quality,'' said Richard Schneider, president of Antennas Direct. ''It's an interesting irony.''

A few years ago, Schneider started an assembly line in his garage and sold antennas out of the trunk of his car. Now his Eureka, Mo.-based company has seven employees and did $1.4 million in sales last year. He expects revenue to double in 2007.

''People thought I was nuts. They were laughing at me when I told them I was starting an antenna company,'' Schneider said.

Before cable and satellite existed, people relied on antennas to receive analog signals from local TV stations' broadcasting towers. Stations still send out analog signals, but most now transmit HD digital signals as well. (Congress has ordered broadcasters to shut off old-style analog TV broadcasts by Feb. 17, 2009.)

Consumers who can get a digital signal from an antenna will get an excellent picture, said Steve Wilson, principal analyst for consumer electronics at ABI Research.

One major difference with a digital over-the-air signal is it doesn't get snowy and fuzzy like the old analog signal. Instead, the picture will turn into tiny blocks and go black.

''You either get it or you don't,'' said Dale Cripps, founder and co-publisher of HDTV Magazine. ''Some people can receive it with rabbit ears, it depends where you are.''

Schneider recommends indoor antennas only for customers within 25 miles of a station's broadcast tower. An outdoor antenna will grab a signal from up to 70 miles away as long as no mountains are in the way, he said.

The Consumer Electronics Association has a Web site http://www.antennaweb.org/ that tells how far an address is from towers and recommends what type of antenna to use.

''When you're using an antenna to get an HD signal you will be able to receive true broadcast-quality HD,'' said Megan Pollock, spokeswoman for the group. ''Some of the cable and satellite companies may choose to compress the HD signal.''

Compression involves removing some data from the digital signal. This is done so that the providers will have enough room to send hundreds of other channels through the same cable line or satellite transmission.

The difference in picture quality is a matter of opinion, said Robert Mercer, spokesman for satellite provider DirecTV Inc.

''We believe the DirecTV HD signal is superior to any source, whether it's over-the-air or from your friendly neighborhood cable company,'' Mercer said.

Others disagree.

Self-described TV fanatic Kevin Holtz, of suburban Cleveland, chose an antenna because he didn't want to pay his satellite provider extra for local broadcast channels.

Holtz, 30, can't get the signal from one local network affiliate or a public broadcasting station but said the rest of the stations come in clearer than they would through satellite. He uses a $60 antenna for a 40-inch Sony LCD, which retails for about $3,000.

''Over-the-air everything is perfect,'' Holtz said.

Another downside to using just an antenna is that only local channels are available, meaning no ESPN, TNT, CNN or Discovery Channel. Some consumers partner an antenna with cable or satellite service.

Many people aren't aware that they can get HD over the airwaves, Wilson said. He estimates there are 10 million households with HDTVs and that fewer than 2 million of them use antennas. Including homes with analog sets, 15 million of the 110 million households in the United States use antennas.

HD antenna prices range from $20 to $150 for indoor and outdoor versions. The many models of available indoor antennas look more like a fleet of spaceships than the rabbit ears of old. Brand names include Terk, Philips, Audiovox, Jensen and Magnavox.

Those really interested in saving a buck and who have a little MacGyver in them could make their own antenna. Steve Mezick of Portland, Ore., created one out of cardboard and tinfoil.

''I decided to build it because the design looked exceedingly simple. I scrounged up stuff around the house and put one together,'' said Mezick, a bowling alley mechanic who repairs pin spotters.

The 30-year-old has since upgraded his original design using a wire baking sheet, clothes hanger and wood. He mounted it to the side of his house and gets all of his local stations.

''It works brilliantly,'' he said.

------

On the Net:

http://www.antennasdirect.com

    'Rabbit Ears' Find New Life in HDTV Age, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rabbit-Ear-Revival.html

Internet Key in Probe of Va. Tech Gunman

April 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:55 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- Computer forensics are playing a key role in the probe of the Virginia Tech gunman, with investigators revealing he bought ammunition on eBay designed for one of two handguns used to kill 32 people and himself.

The eBay account and other Internet activities provided insight Saturday into how Seung-Hui Cho may have plotted for the rampage, including the purchase of two empty ammo clips about three weeks before the attack.

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities. Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.

''Within 24 hours, after Cho's identity was made public, we had reached out to law enforcement to offer our assistance in any investigation,'' Durzy said.

Authorities are also examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.

Cho, 23, also used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.

A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are ''aware of the eBay activity that mirrors'' the Hotmail account.

One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications -- written and electronic.

On March 22, Cho bought two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named ''oneclickshooting,'' which sells gun accessories and other items. Details on the purchase were unclear, and the seller could not be reached for comment.

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

''The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class,'' Cho wrote on the site.

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.

His eBay rating was superb -- 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

''great ebayer. very flexible,'' the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

''We took him to one football game,'' he said. ''We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game.''

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include ''Men, Women, and Chainsaws'' by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include ''The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre''; and ''The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense'' by Joyce Carol Oates -- a book in which the publisher writes: ''In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.''

Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class.

Experts say things like eBay transactions can be hugely valuable in trying to figure out the motivation behind crimes.

An examination of a computer is ''very revealing, particularly for a person like this,'' said Mark Rasch of FTI Consulting, a computer and electronic investigation firm. ''What we find ... particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves with the anonymity that computers and the Internet give you.''

Cho's computer could hold a record of just about anything he has done, even of activities or communications he may have tried to erase. But Rasch said that likely will not be a problem, noting the way the gunman created a record of his thinking in videos, photos and documents.

''This guy wanted to leave a trail. He wasn't trying to conceal what he did,'' Rasch said.

Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.

    Internet Key in Probe of Va. Tech Gunman, NYT, 22.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Shooting.html

Tech Gunman Bought Ammo Clips on EBay

April 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:42 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- The Internet activities of the Virginia Tech gunman provided more insight Saturday into how he may have plotted for the rampage, with revelations that he bought two ammunition clips on eBay.

Seung-Hui Cho purchased two empty clips about three weeks before the attack in which Cho killed 32 people and himself. The clips were designed for one of the two types of handguns he used.

Cho, 23, also used the account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities.

A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are ''aware of the eBay activity that mirrors'' the Hotmail account.

The eBay account demonstrates the prime role computer forensics and other digital information have played in the investigation. Authorities are examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.

One question they hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications -- written and electronic.

On March 22, Cho bought two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named ''oneclickshooting,'' which sells gun accessories and other items. Details on the purchase were unclear, and the seller could not be reached for comment.

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

''The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class,'' Cho wrote on the site.

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.

His eBay rating was superb -- 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

''great ebayer. very flexible. AAAAAA+++++'' the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

''We took him to one football game,'' he said. ''We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game.''

Durzy, the eBay spokesman, said the company has been assisting investigators since the start of the case.

''Within 24 hours, after Cho's identity was made public, we had reached out to law enforcement to offer our assistance in any investigation,'' Durzy said. ''In looking at his activity on the site, we can confirm that at no point that he used eBay to purchase any guns and ammunition. It is strongly against eBay policy to try to sell guns and ammunition.''

Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include ''Men, Women, and Chainsaws'' by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include ''The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre''; and ''The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense'' by Joyce Carol Oates -- a book in which the publisher writes: ''In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.''

Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class.

Experts say things like eBay transactions can be hugely valuable in trying to figure out the motivation behind crimes.

An examination of a computer is ''very revealing, particularly for a person like this,'' said Mark Rasch of FTI Consulting, a computer and electronic investigation firm. ''What we find ... particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves with the anonymity that computers and the Internet give you.''

Cho's computer could hold a record of just about anything he has done, even of activities or communications he may have tried to erase. But Rasch said that likely will not be a problem, noting the way the gunman created a record of his thinking in videos, photos and documents.

''This guy wanted to leave a trail. He wasn't trying to conceal what he did,'' Rasch said.

Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.

    Tech Gunman Bought Ammo Clips on EBay, NYT, 22.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Shooting.html

MySpace Offers News Recommendations

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The popular online hangout MySpace entered the news business Thursday with a feature that lets its users determine what items other members see.

MySpace News brings to a much larger audience the user-recommendation capabilities already available through Digg and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape. It also marks the site's further inroads into becoming an Internet portal akin to Yahoo Inc. and others.

Unlike Digg and Netscape, which rely heavily on user submissions, MySpace will also scan thousands of Web journals and news sites and group results by categories such as sports and politics. MySpace will go further than Google Inc.'s news offering by letting users vote on items, helping to determine what makes the front or section pages.

As part of the service, MySpace will pull and display headlines from the outside news sites, a practice that contributed to legal challenges against Google. The search engine leader recently reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and earlier with The Associated Press, although no lawsuit had been filed by the AP.

MySpace, like Google, would let publishers exclude their items from the site, said Dan Strauss, whose group helped develop the news service. He also said MySpace would be helping to drive traffic to the news sites, bringing MySpace readers who might not otherwise be visiting.

The feature, launched Thursday as a ''beta'' test at http://news.myspace.com , uses technology developed by Newroo, which MySpace parent News Corp. bought last year. Strauss said items from News Corp., which owns the Fox network and other media outlets, won't get special treatment.

    MySpace Offers News Recommendations, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-News.html

Profits Up 69% at Google, Exceeding Expectations

April 20, 2007
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
 

SAN FRANCISCO, April 19 — For much of this year, the buzz around Google has been all about the flurry of new initiatives at the No. 1 Internet search company, from its YouTube video sharing site, to its new software for office workers, to its forays into television, radio and newspaper advertising.

On Thursday, Google executives sought to change the focus.

The company said that nearly three of every four Googlers, as the company’s workers call themselves, remained focused on the business that turned Google into a money-minting Internet powerhouse: search and online advertising.

And it is that business, executives said, that delivered a surge in Google’s profits during the first three months of the year, as the company continued to outpace rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.

“We are ecstatic about our financial results this past quarter,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said during a conference call.

Google said first-quarter profit rose 69 percent, to $1 billion, or $3.18 a share, from $592.3 million, or $1.95 a share, in the period a year ago. The results topped analysts’ expectations, sending Google’s shares up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading.

Mr. Schmidt predicted that search and advertising would continue to be the main source of profits for the foreseeable future.

“The core business is search and ads,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We are still at the beginning of that business. It is a huge business, and we have a lot of room to grow.”

For example, Mr. Schmidt said that just as in previous quarters, the company devoted significant resources to continuing to perfect the art of linking search results with ads that are tailored to users’ interests. Since, Google is paid when users click on an ad, those efforts translate into higher profitability.

“We are showing fewer ads and those ads are worth more because they are better targeted,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Overall quarterly revenue was $3.66 billion, up from $2.25 billion a year ago. Excluding commissions paid to marketing partners, revenue was $2.53 billion, compared with $1.53 billion a year earlier.

Excluding certain expenses, like stock-based compensation, profits were $3.68 a share, though analysts noted that without a benefit resulting from a change in tax rates, the figure would have been $3.50. On that basis, analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected Google to earn $3.30 a share and report revenue of $2.5 billion, without the marketing commissions.

“Google has been able to deliver amazing profitability given its enormous investments in human resources and capital equipment,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Google said its overseas business was particularly strong. Revenue from outside the United States was $1.7 billion, or 47 percent of the total.

Google’s strong growth stands in sharp contrast to that of Yahoo, which announced this week that sales increased 7 percent from the year-ago quarter, while profits dropped 11 percent.

A growing number of Internet users are going to Google for their search needs. Nielsen/NetRatings reported Thursday that the number of searches conducted on Google in February reached 3.6 billion, up 40 percent from a year earlier. By comparison, searches on Yahoo grew 12 percent, to 1.3 billion, and on Microsoft, 9 percent, to 618 million.

Google continued to add workers at a brisk pace, ending the quarter with 12,238 employees worldwide, nearly 1,600 more than at the end of the previous quarter.

Earlier this year, Google’s shares dipped as investors worried that its expenses for everything from engineers and sales staff to computers and data centers would grow. But expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, actually declined to 31 percent of revenue, from 33 percent, said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Company.

“That’s particularly impressive given that they hired 1,600 employees,” Mr. Munster said.

Google’s shares slipped $4.36 in regular trading, to close at $471.65, up a bit more than 2 percent for the year. After the earnings announcement, the stock rose to more than $486 in extended trading.

The earnings report comes after a period of ambitious expansions into new businesses by Google. Just last week, the company said it would acquire the online ad services company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Google also recently announced deals with Clear Channel to sell radio ads and with EchoStar Communications to sell television commercial time.

If such initiatives are not contributing to Google’s bottom line yet, they are earning it a long list of increasingly assertive rivals.

During the quarter, Viacom filed a $1 billion suit against Google over copyrighted material that users post on YouTube. And this week, Microsoft and AT&T asked antitrust officials to scrutinize Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, which they say would reduce competition in the online advertising market.

On Friday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy organization, is planning to file a related complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asking it to open an investigation into the privacy implications of the DoubleClick acquisition.

“No one knows today what a combined Google and DoubleClick will be able to do in the future,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the center. “But we think this is the right time for the commission to look at that issue and require genuine privacy safeguards if the acquisition is to go forward.”

Mr. Schmidt said in an interview that as part of the integration with DoubleClick, Google already planned to strengthen privacy protections.

“Our incentive is to get this right because our whole business is dependent on the trust of users,” he said.

    Profits Up 69% at Google, Exceeding Expectations, NYT, 20.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/business/20google.html

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

The code of conduct already has some early supporters, including David Weinberger, a well-known blogger (hyperorg.com/blogger) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway,” he said.

But as with every other electrically charged topic on the Web, finding common ground will be a serious challenge. Some online writers wonder how anyone could persuade even a fraction of the millions of bloggers to embrace one set of standards. Others say that the code smacks of restrictions on free speech.

Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly were inspired to act after a firestorm erupted late last month in the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers. In an online shouting match that was widely reported, Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.

Distraught over the threats and manipulated photos of her that were posted on other critical sites — including one that depicted her head next to a noose — Ms. Sierra canceled a speaking appearance at a trade show and asked the local police for help in finding the source of the threats. She also said that she was considering giving up blogging altogether.

In an interview, she dismissed the argument that cyberbullying is so common that she should overlook it. “I can’t believe how many people are saying to me, ‘Get a life, this is the Internet,’ ” she said. “If that’s the case, how will we ever recognize a real threat?”

Ms. Sierra said she supported the new efforts to improve civility on the Web. The police investigation into her case is pending.

Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media.

Nowadays, those conversations often take place on blogs. At last count, there were 70 million of them, with more than 1.4 million entries being added daily, according to Technorati, a blog-indexing company. For the last decade, these Web journals have offered writers a way to amplify their voices and engage with friends and readers.

But the same factors that make those unfiltered conversations so compelling, and impossible to replicate in the offline world, also allow them to spin out of control.

As many female bloggers can attest, women are often targets. Heather Armstrong, a blogger in Salt Lake City who writes publicly about her family (dooce.com), stopped accepting unmoderated comments on her blog two years ago after she found that conversations among visitors consistently devolved into vitriol.

Since last October, she has also had to deal with an anonymous blogger who maintains a separate site that parodies her writing and has included photos of Ms. Armstrong’s daughter, copied from her site.

Ms. Armstrong tries not to give the site public attention, but concedes that, “At first, it was really difficult to deal with.”

Women are not the only targets of nastiness. For the last four years, Richard Silverstein has advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace on a blog (richardsilverstein.com) that he maintains from Seattle.

People who disagree with his politics frequently leave harassing comments on his site. But the situation reached a new low last month, when an anonymous opponent started a blog in Mr. Silverstein’s name that included photos of Mr. Silverstein in a pornographic context.

“I’ve been assaulted and harassed online for four years,” he said. “Most of it I can take in stride. But you just never get used to that level of hatred.”

One public bid to improve the quality of dialogue on the Web came more than a year ago when Mena Trott, a co-founder of the blogging software company Six Apart, proposed elevating civility on the Internet in a speech she gave at a French blog conference. At the event, organizers had placed a large screen on the stage showing instant electronic responses to the speeches from audience members and those who were listening in online.

As Ms. Trott spoke about improving online conduct, a heckler filled the screen with personal insults. Ms Trott recalled “losing it” during the speech.

Ms. Trott has scaled back her public writing and now writes a blog for a limited audience of friends and family. “You can’t force people to be civil, but you can force yourself into a situation where anonymous trolls are not in your life as much,” she said.

The preliminary recommendations posted by Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly are based in part on a code developed by BlogHer, a network for women designed to give them blogging tools and to guide readers to their pages.

“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.

A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors. They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.

That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.

Robert Scoble, a popular technology blogger who stopped blogging for a week in solidarity with Kathy Sierra after her ordeal became public, says the proposed rules “make me feel uncomfortable.” He adds, “As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran.”

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

    A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/technology/09blog.html?hp

Court Rejects Law Limiting Online Pornography

March 23, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday struck down a 1998 law that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to gain access to material deemed “harmful.”

The ruling is the second major setback in federal efforts to control Internet pornography. The United States Supreme Court struck down a similar law in 1997.

Senior Judge Lowell A. Reed Jr. of Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. Judge Reed added that there were far less restrictive methods like software filters that parents could use to control their children’s Internet use.

“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he said he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”

The law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, never took effect because of an injunction that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2004.

Civil libertarians applauded Judge Reed’s decision as a victory for free speech and creativity on the Internet.

“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Internet “would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet,” Mr. Hansen said.

But others were disappointed.

“It’s a very frustrating decision,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough Is Enough, a group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online. Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office, said the department was reviewing Judge Reed’s 84-page opinion and would decide whether to appeal.

Under the 1998 law, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties include a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Congress tried to regulate Internet pornography in 1996 with the Communications Decency Act, but that law that was struck down by the Supreme Court the next year.

In drafting the 1998 law, Congress hoped to pass constitutional muster, narrowing the law to focus on commercial Web sites and defining objectionable material as obscene or that which offends “contemporary community standards.”

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain kinds of federal money to use software filters. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 2003.

Concerning the federal court ruling yesterday, Lawrence Lessig, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University, said the case indicated that civil libertarians had shifted their stance regarding controls directed at the Internet.

“Civil libertarians have long had a love-hate relationship with filters,” Professor Lessig said, adding that although the A.C.L.U. had argued in this case that filters were preferable, the organization had also expressed concerns about them.

“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said.

A result, he said, is to reinforce an “infrastructure of filters” that means “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”

Mr. Hansen said the A.C.L.U. has opposed the mandatory use of filters and not the filters themselves.

    Court Rejects Law Limiting Online Pornography, NYT, 23.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23porn.html

After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees

March 12, 2007
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

After an influential contributor and administrator at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was found last week to have invented a history of academic credentials, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and globetrotting advocate, called for a voluntary system for accrediting contributors who say they have advanced degrees, like a Ph.D or M.D.

The details of how Mr. Wales’s system would work are still being bandied about, and include the idea of having users fax copies of their diplomas to Wikipedia’s offices, or relying on a “circle of trust,” whereby a trusted individual would be in charge of verification. Mr. Wales said he thought that some version of his proposal would begin on the site “in a week.”

But reaction within the fiercely egalitarian Wikipedia world has not been universally favorable. Many writing on Mr. Wales’s user page seemed dumbstruck at the idea of Wikipedia spending its time to verify academic authority when the site’s motto is “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

Florence Devouard, Mr. Wales’s successor as the head of Wikimedia Foundation board, the parent of the many Wikipedias in scores of languages, said she was “not supportive” of the proposal. “I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as ‘cite your source,’ not the quality of credentials showed by an editor,” she added.

Mr. Wales was reacting to the public fallout from the revelation that a contributor and Wikipedia administrator named Essjay who claimed to be a tenured professor in Catholic law was in fact Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old from Louisville, Ky. Mr. Wales said that the Essjay controversy was evidence of “growing pains” for the site, a worldwide phenomenon that has become a default research tool for nearly everyone who uses the Internet.

And while he said “the moral of the story is what makes for a good Wikipedian is not a good credential,” he added that it was important that the general public not think that Wikipedia is “written by a bunch of 12-year-olds.”

NOAM COHEN

    After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees, NYT, 12.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/technology/12wiki.html

Conn. Bill Would Force MySpace Age Check

March 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:46 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Connecticut lawmakers unveiled legislation Wednesday that would require MySpace.com and other social-networking sites to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can post profiles.

The bill comes a day after a man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for using MySpace.com to set up a sexual encounter with an 11-year-old Connecticut girl. It was one of the first federal sex cases involving the popular site.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who met with other attorneys general on Tuesday, said 10 to 20 other states are considering similar legislation.

''The technology is available. The solution is financially feasible, practically doable,'' he said. ''If we can put a man on the moon, we can check ages of people on these Web sites.''

Under the proposal, any networking site that fails to verify ages and obtain parental permission of users under 18 would face civil fines up to $5,000 per violation. Sites would have to check information about parents to make sure it is legitimate. Parents would be contacted directly when necessary.

MySpace did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The bill, which is scheduled for a public hearing on Thursday, would apply to any organized online networking organization, including chat rooms.

Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace, whose youth-oriented visitors are encouraged to expand their circles of friends through messaging tools and personal profile pages. It has more than 100 million registered users.

The site has responded by expanding educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. It also adopted new restrictions on how adults may contact the site's younger users and has helped design tools for identifying profiles created by convicted sex offenders.

The site's current policy bars children under 14 from setting up profiles. Users who 14 or 15 can display their full profiles -- containing hobbies, schools and any other personal details -- only to people already on the teen's list of friends. Others see only the bare-bones profile, listing username, gender, age and location.

But MySpace relies on users to specify their age.

News Corp.'s MySpace is the largest social-networking site, with more than 100 million registered users.

    Conn. Bill Would Force MySpace Age Check, NYT, 7.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Dangers.html

A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side

March 5, 2007
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity.

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.

To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.

Mr. Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to protect himself from bad actors who might be angered by his administrative role at Wikipedia. (He did not respond to an e-mail message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.)

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud.

Mr. Jordan’s deception came to public attention last Monday when The New Yorker published a rare editors’ note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, “neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name,” and that it took Essjay’s credentials and life experience at face value.

In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine’s article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake, which “Essjay knew to be false.”

After the article appeared, a reader contacted The New Yorker about Essjay’s real identity, which Mr. Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.

In an e-mail message on Friday, The New Yorker’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: “We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

The New Yorker editors’ note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site’s growth. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said of Mr. Jordan’s alter ego.

On Thursday, Mr. Wales, who is traveling in Asia with intermittent Internet connections, stuck by that view. In a statement relayed through Wikipedia’s public relations officer, he said that at that time, “Essjay apologized to me and to the community at large for any harm he may have caused, but he was acting in order to protect himself.

“I accepted his apology,” he continued, “because he is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.”

But the broad group of Wikipedia users was not so supportive. Mounting anger was expressed in public forums like the user pages of Mr. Wales and Essjay. Initially, a few people wrote to express support for Essjay, along the lines of WJBscribe, who left a message saying: “Just wanted to express my 100 percent support for everything you do around here. I think you were totally entitled to protect your identity. Don’t let all the fuss get you down!”

By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Mr. Jordan’s actions “plain and simple fraud.”

Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception by flaunting a fictional Ph.D. and professorship to influence the editing on the site.

“People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments,” said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for which he is covering the story. “Those will get looked at again.”

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term “imprimatur,” as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book “Catholicism for Dummies,” saying, “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”

Over time, Wikipedia users said, Essjay did less editing and writing and spent more time ensuring that the encyclopedia was as free of vandalism and drawn-out editing fights as possible.

By Saturday, Mr. Wales changed his mind about the episode. He cleared off the “talk” section of his own Wikipedia user page — usually cluttered with personal requests, policy debates and compliments — so that “this statement gets adequate attention” and announced that he had “asked Essjay to resign his positions of trust within the community.” He said “that my past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.”

Complicating matters for Mr. Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Mr. Wales helped to found in 2004. Mr. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.

Mr. Snow said the Essjay case “is about the community, the trust the community depends on in terms of being able to review the work we each do.”

“Even though you don’t necessarily know these people personally,” he added, “you see the work enough times and get to know that work.”

Mr. Jordan announced his resignation from Wikipedia on his Essjay user page on Saturday night. In a brief note below, he said simply, “It’s time to make a clean break.”

That page had been a model of industry, with tallies of the more than 20,000 articles he edited and statements of personal philosophy and Wikipedia policy. Where there had been the motto in Latin, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito” (“Yield not to misfortunes, but advance all the more boldly against them,” according to some translations), there is a stark rectangular black box with the word “retired” written in white capital letters.

    A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side, NYT, 5.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html?hp

A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

February 21, 2007
The New York Times
By NOAM COHEN

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

With the move, Middlebury, in Vermont, jumped into a growing debate within journalism, the law and academia over what respect, if any, to give Wikipedia articles, written by hundreds of volunteers and subject to mistakes and sometimes deliberate falsehoods. Wikipedia itself has restricted the editing of some subjects, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said.

Although Middlebury’s history department has banned Wikipedia in citations, it has not banned its use. Don Wyatt, the chairman of the department, said a total ban on Wikipedia would have been impractical, not to mention close-minded, because Wikipedia is simply too handy to expect students never to consult it.

At Middlebury, a discussion about the new policy is scheduled on campus on Monday, with speakers poised to defend and criticize using the site in research.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, “I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.”

He continued: “Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.

“If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.”

Indeed, the English-language version of the site had an estimated 38 million users in the United States in December, and can be hard to avoid while on the Internet. Google searches on such diverse subjects as historical figures like Confucius and concepts like torture give the Wikipedia entry the first listing.

In some colleges, it has become common for professors to assign students to create work that appears on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia’s list of school and university projects, this spring the University of East Anglia in England and Oberlin College in Ohio will have students edit articles on topics being taught in courses on the Middle East and ancient Rome.

In December 2005, a Columbia professor, Henry Smith, had the graduate students in his seminar create a Japanese bibliography project, posted on Wikipedia, to describe and analyze resources like libraries, reference books and newspapers. With 16 contributors, including the professor, the project comprises dozens of articles, including 13 on different Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias.

In evaluations after the class, the students said that creating an encyclopedia taught them discipline in writing and put them in contact with experts who improved their work and whom, in some cases, they were later able to interview.

“Most were positive about the experience, especially the training in writing encyclopedia articles, which all of them came to realize is not an easy matter,” Professor Smith wrote in an e-mail message. “Many also retained their initial ambivalence about Wikipedia itself.”

The discussion raised by the Middlebury policy has been covered by student newspapers at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts, among others. The Middlebury Campus, the student weekly, included an opinion article last week by Chandler Koglmeier that accused the history department of introducing “the beginnings of censorship.”

Other students call the move unnecessary. Keith Williams, a senior majoring in economics, said students “understand that Wikipedia is not a responsible source, that it hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.” Yet he said, “I personally use it all the time.”

Jason Mittell, an assistant professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury, said he planned to take the pro-Wikipedia side in the campus debate. “The message that is being sent is that ultimately they see it as a threat to traditional knowledge,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity. What does that mean for traditional scholarship? Does traditional scholarship lose value?”

For his course “Media Technology and Cultural Change,” which began this month, Professor Mittell said he would require his students to create a Wikipedia entry as well as post a video on YouTube, create a podcast and produce a blog for the course.

Another Middlebury professor, Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said, “I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.”

And yes, back at Wikipedia, the Jesuits are still credited as supporting the Shimabara Rebellion.

    A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source, NYT, 21.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html?em&ex=1172379600&en=ad418204e5130dd2&ei=5087%0A

In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google

February 9, 2007
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 8 — Early in the decade, a struggling Xerox Corporation was trying to sell off a stake in its Palo Alto Research Center, which it could no longer afford to support. But with the technology bubble bursting, the price that investors were willing to pay for a piece of PARC, as the center is known, kept going down.

So in 2002, Xerox switched to Plan B: it spun off the center into an independent subsidiary and sought to prove that it could sustain itself by licensing technology and forming partnerships with outside companies.

On Friday, PARC is announcing a deal that underscores that strategy. It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology to a well-financed start-up with an ambitious and potentially lucrative goal: to build a search engine that could some day rival Google.

The start-up, Powerset, is licensing PARC’s “natural language” technology — the art of making computers understand and process languages like English or French. Powerset hopes the technology will be the basis of a new search engine that allows users to type queries in plain English, rather than using keywords.

In the fall, Powerset raised $12.5 million in its first round of financing from venture-capital firms and individual investors. The challenges facing it are immense, and the odds of success are long. But the PARC technology, which is a result of 30 years of research, is certain to lend it an aura of credibility.

PARC’s natural-language technology is among the “most comprehensive in existence,” said Fernando Pereira, an expert in natural language and the chairman of the department of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. But by itself, it will not guarantee Powerset’s success, Mr. Pereira said.

“The question of whether this technology is adequate to any application, whether search or anything else, is an empirical question that has to be tested,” Mr. Pereira added.

As part of the deal, a leading natural-language researcher at PARC, Ronald M. Kaplan, will join Powerset’s staff of about 40 as chief technology and scientific officer. PARC will also receive an equity stake in Powerset and earn royalties from the company. Additionally, Powerset will sponsor a handful of researchers at PARC.

The specific financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. But Mark Bernstein, president and center director of PARC, said: “It’s one of the biggest deals that we have done, and we hope that it grows into the biggest in terms of the length of the relationship and the amount of value we can create together. It represents a commitment of some of the intellectual crown jewels that PARC has created.”

As part of the business model forged when it was spun off, PARC has struck various business relationships with outside firms and organizations.

About half of its research is still sponsored by Xerox, Mr. Bernstein said. But the lab is also conducting paid research for Fujitsu, Dai Nippon Printing and others. Some of its researchers work on federally financed projects, and the lab is working with ipValue, a intellectual-property licensing firm, to commercialize some of its research.

PARC has also formed a partnership with the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego to develop a system that uses laser printing technology to detect cancer cells.

And in the deal that most closely mirrors the alliance with Powerset, PARC has helped incubate SolFocus, a start-up that is developing solar power technology.

PARC now has about 220 employees, including 160 researchers, down from its peak of 318 employees and 100 contractors and temporary workers in 1995. Mr. Bernstein said PARC, which has an annual budget of $55 million to $60 million, is profitable.

“We are very pleased with where it is today,” Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox’s chief executive, said about PARC. Ms. Mulcahy said she did not rule out the possibility of selling an equity stake in PARC in the future, but added, “We are very comfortable with continued ownership.”

In Silicon Valley and beyond, PARC has often been called the lab of missed opportunities. It has been credited with many breakthroughs, including the graphical user interface and the Ethernet networking technology, that have revolutionized the computer industry, but that were commercialized by others.

“There’s no way anyone can top what they did in the past in terms of dramatic research developments,” said the futurist Paul Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. But Mr. Saffo praised PARC for finding a business model that has allowed it to survive at a time when many research groups at American corporations are being cut.

“This is an organization that has done well at keeping researchers, and spinning out a steady stream of little products,” Mr. Saffo said. “PARC has been a very quiet success.”

The success of its bet on Powerset is another matter. Over the past year, PARC researchers have worked with Powerset engineers to build a prototype, but the company does not expect to release its search engine to the public until the end of this year.

Meanwhile, other start-ups and several of the search giants are also working to develop natural-language search technology. The appeal is clear. A successful natural-language search engine could, in theory, answer real questions — for example, what companies did I.B.M. acquire in the last five years? — that existing search engines are not equipped to handle. And it could turn the process of finding information on the Web into a conversation between the search engine and the user.

“For a lot of things, keyword search works well,” said Barney Pell, chief executive of Powerset. “But I think we are going to look back in 10 years and say, remember when we used to search using keywords.”

Researchers have predicted breakthrough applications for natural languages for years, but the technology has proved usable in only limited contexts, turning many experts into skeptics about its potential, at least in the short term.

“My general feeling about natural-language processing in search is that I’m a bit of a skeptic in the sense that even the best systems, and I include there the systems from PARC, make many mistakes,” said Mr. Pereira of the University of Pennsylvania.

In a November interview, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search and user experience, said: “Natural language is really hard. I don’t think it will happen in the next five years.”

    In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google, NYT, 9.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/technology/09license.html

Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone

January 10, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 9 — With characteristic showmanship, Steven P. Jobs introduced Apple’s long-awaited entry into the cellphone world Tuesday, pronouncing it an achievement on a par with the Macintosh and the iPod.

The creation, the iPhone, priced at $499 or $599, will not be for everyone. It will be available with a single carrier, Cingular Wireless, at midyear. Its essential functions — music player, camera, Web browser and e-mail tool as well as phone — have become commonplace in hand-held devices.

But it was the ability to fuse those elements with a raft of innovations and Apple’s distinctive design sense that had the crowd here buzzing.

Apple’s goal, Mr. Jobs said, was to translate the Macintosh computer’s ease of operation into the phone realm. “We want to make it so easy to use that everyone can use it,” he said. And he was clearly betting on translating Apple’s success with the iPod music player to a hot category of multifunction devices.

Underscoring the transformation of a quirky computer maker into the dominant force in digital music, and signaling his ambitions to extend that reach, Mr. Jobs also announced that Apple was dropping “computer” from its name and would henceforth be known as Apple Inc.

Investors took quickly to the pitch, sending Apple’s stock price up to a record close, while shares of established cellphone makers slumped.

Still, the phone is a gamble on a new business for Apple. And even with its success with the iPod and a reborn line of computers, it has not been immune to marketplace failures, like the Macintosh Cube introduced in 2000.

But in his two-hour presentation before an audience of reporters, analysts and Apple employees at the Macworld Expo trade show, the parallel he repeatedly drew was between the new phone and the Macintosh personal computer, which had a vast impact on the computer industry when it arrived in 1984.

Noting that there are occasionally new products that change everything, Mr. Jobs said, “Apple has been able to introduce a few of these into the world.”

He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.

“Steve can make the internal combustion engine appear to be something new and cool,” said Reed E. Hundt, the former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. “He will provide a certain magic even to the 30-year-old cellphone.”

Mr. Jobs’s product tour de force was even more remarkable for its timing, as questions continue to be raised over the company’s stock options practices and his role in them.

“The truth of the matter is everything is fine,” he said during an interview after his presentation. “We’ve shared it all with the S.E.C.”

He acknowledged the controversy over the timing of some of Apple’s stock option grants, which Apple appears to have fanned recently with a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission that contained a circumspect description of his role in the options award process.

“It’s raised questions,” he said, “but some of the journalism has been so off the mark. But I know the truth. It’s painful to read some of this stuff, but I know it’s kind of ridiculous and will pass.”

If he is in any trouble, Mr. Jobs showed no signs of it either on stage, where he was treated with great warmth by his audience of 4,000, or in an interview afterward in which he showed obvious delight in highlighting subtle industrial design features.

Mr. Jobs showed a series of applications including e-mail, advanced voice mail, photo collections and visually appealing Web searching. He promoted the fact that the new iPhone is powered by the same core OS X operating system that the Macintosh computer is based on, offering power-management features and advanced graphics abilities.

The user interface relies heavily on a high-resolution touch screen that makes it possible to use a finger to control the phone. It has features that are still more subtle, including sensors that track light and movement and proximity, to prompt the phone to control screen brightness and physical orientation and other aspects of its operation. For example, when the phone is placed next to the user’s face, the keyboard is automatically turned off.

Apple chose the name iPhone even though Cisco Systems, the network and consumer wireless company, has recently introduced a Wi-Fi-based phone with the same name. Mr. Jobs had been negotiating with Cisco executives over the trademark in recent days.

The $499 version of the device will have four gigabytes of storage, and the $599 version will offer twice that.

“At $499 and $599, it’s a pretty expensive deal,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, whose online music store is a rival of Apple’s iTunes Store. “Steve is more focused on not cannibalizing iPod sales than on driving volume of phones. Those are not high-volume prices.”

Mr. Jobs defended the higher price of the new phone in a market where prices of so-called smartphones — those combining voice calling with Internet functions — are rapidly plunging to $200 and below. He contrasted the iPhone, which has only one mechanical button on its surface, with the BlackBerry and smartphones from Motorola and Palm. Rather than what he called “small plastic keyboards,” the iPhone will have a display that becomes both the keyboard and control panel, morphing to suit the current application.

“After today I don’t think anyone is going to look at these phones in the same way,” he said.

Apple’s relationship with Cingular began two years ago when Mr. Jobs phoned Stanley T. Sigman, Cingular’s chief executive, and proposed that they speak about a relationship. The two had an initial meeting in February 2005 in a New York hotel.

Apple spoke with other carriers before committing itself to its exclusive link with Cingular, Mr. Jobs said, but he would not give details.

In addition to the Apple relationship with Cingular, which Mr. Jobs said was forged without offering the wireless carrier even a peek at an early prototype, the iPhone will offer special applications from both Google and Yahoo. Users will be able to use both services’ search and e-mail services as well as a custom version of Google Maps.

Eric E. Schmidt, who is chief executive of Google as well as a member of Apple’s board, and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, came on stage to endorse the new hand-held.

“I’m not a board member of Apple, but I would like one of these, too,” Mr. Yang said.

Regis McKenna, the veteran public relations specialist and corporate strategist who tutored Mr. Jobs in the art of high-tech marketing beginning in the late 1970s, said: “This compares favorably with the launch of the Macintosh. The price is high, but it will come down.”

Despite the widespread comment and enthusiasm that the phone generated, there were also many questions about its design and about Apple’s strategy.

Some analysts and industry executives noted that the Apple designers had shunned Cingular’s higher-speed digital cellular network. Mr. Jobs said later models would have additional networking standards.

Others questioned whether the device would be as versatile as other smartphones if it was not truly open — that is, able to accommodate many programs from third parties, as personal computers are.

Mr. Jobs would not say how open the phone would be to other developers, but added: “I don’t want people to think of this as a computer. I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

He also said he was anxious to help protect the Cingular network from the kind of viruses and worms that bedevil the PC world today.

The phones will go on sale in June through Apple and Cingular (online, by phone and in stores). Mr. Jobs said the phone was being announced ahead of its availability to head off disclosure that might have resulted in the course of Federal Communications Commission licensing.

Although it will be a half-year before it is possible to know whether Mr. Jobs has another hit product, there was no shortage of enthusiasm based on the first glimpse today.

“It’s like they read our minds,” said David Myers, executive chef at Sona restaurant in Los Angeles and chief executive of the Food Arts Group, where the employees currently use the Treo smartphone from Palm. “This is the next step in not accepting poor design any longer.”

Before he introduced the phone, Mr. Jobs said Apple TV, the digital video system that he announced as iTV last year, would be available for $299 in February. The device will store up to 50 hours of video and permit wireless streaming of content from a computer to a television.

Laurie J. Flynn and Miguel Helft contributed reporting from San Francisco and Brad Stone from Las Vegas.

    Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone, NYT, 10.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/technology/10apple.html?hp&ex=1168491600&en=35c460df0f87dec1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Google Makes Another Investment in the Internet in China

January 6, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, Jan. 5 — Like almost all of the American Internet giants that have ventured this far, Google is losing in China. So too, are eBay, Yahoo and Amazon. But flush with cash, Google — the world’s leading search engine company — is beginning to invest heavily in research and development here. In its latest move, announced Friday, Google struck a deal to invest about $5 million in one of the country’s fastest-growing Internet start-ups, Xunlei.com, according to people close to the deal.

That follows another hook-up this week, when Google said it would team with China Mobile, the country’s dominant, government-owned mobile telephone carrier, to offer mobile search services using the Internet.

In 2005, the company lured Kaifu Lee, the former head of Microsoft research in China, to shore up its base here. And now the company is looking to sprinkle investments in start-ups and partnerships with Chinese companies.

The investment in Xunlei is small compared with Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube.com last October. But the deals announced this week are an attempt to be smarter about breaking into China’s fast-growing but complex Internet market, which now has about 130 million users, making it second in size only to the United States.

With Xunlei, Google gains another path into the rapidly growing demand in China for downloading music and video over the Internet.

“It’s not YouTube, but it’s close enough,” says Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “Xunlei is a very interesting company. It’s a leader in video downloading and so this should help Google in the battle with Baidu.”

Baidu.com is the 500-pound gorilla in China. The company, an Internet search engine start-up began operating only a few years ago and has one of the most-trafficked Web sites in the world. The look of its home page is similar to that of Google, which invested in Baidu several years ago, but then sold its small stake for a huge gain last year, after Baidu went public on the Nasdaq. Other big brand names here are Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Alibaba.com.

According to iResearch, which tracks the search engine market here, Baidu had a commanding 63 percent share of the market in October, the most recent period for which data is available. Google was second, with 19 percent. Yahoo had only 7.6 percent of the market.

One of the most popular features on Baidu.com is downloading music through its MP3 program search service.

Xunlei, based in the southern city of Shenzhen, is gaining popularity. It was started by two computer science graduate students from Duke University, Zou Shenglong and Cheng Hao, in Silicon Valley in 2002. Mr. Zou had previously worked as a technician in Silicon Valley and Mr. Cheng was once a senior manager at Baidu. After getting $20 million in venture backing from Morningside Ventures and IDG VC Partners and moving the company to China in 2003, Xunlei.com seems to have great promise.

Officials at Xunlei.com say that more than 120 million people have used its software, and the company has also signed up some major advertisers, including KFC and Motorola.

Dick X. Wei, an Internet analyst at J. P. Morgan, says a partnership between Google and Xunlei can enhance video and music search content for Google, help Google bolster traffic growth in China and help the company better compete against Baidu.

In announcing the deal on Friday, Kaifu Lee, the president of Google Greater China, said Xunlei’s Web site would provide a solid platform for Google. That would help it gain a foothold in the country’s booming market for downloading things like video and music, online games, software and cellphone ring tones.

Last month, eBay’s struggling China operation was forced to team with Tom.com, a Beijing-based Internet company controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

Other major American companies have stumbled in China. Monster .com bought China HR, then lost market share. Amazon.com bought Joyo.com, and lost market share. Expedia.com acquired a big Chinese Internet travel company and slipped. And a few years ago, Yahoo bought 3721.com, its biggest competitor here, then handed its operations over to Alibaba.com.

“The globally dominant U.S. Internet companies have failed to take the No. 1 market share position in any category,” said Jason Brueschke, an Internet analyst at Citigroup. “And so there’s something fundamentally different about this market.”

Some analysts say China’s tight regulatory controls over the Internet favor Chinese companies. They also say Chinese companies have been better at creating Internet products for the particular taste of the Chinese. For that reason, some American Internet giants are increasingly looking for Chinese partners.

    Google Makes Another Investment in the Internet in China, NYT, 6.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/technology/06google.html

Editorial

Protecting Internet Democracy

January 3, 2007
The New York Times

One of the big winners in the last election may turn out to be the principle, known as net neutrality, that Internet service providers should not be able to favor some content over others. Democrats who are moving into the majority in Congress — led by Ron Wyden in the Senate and Edward Markey in the House — say they plan to fight hard to pass a net neutrality bill, and we hope that they do. It is vital to preserve the Internet’s role in promoting entrepreneurship and free expression.

Internet users now get access to any Web site on an equal basis. Foreign and domestic sites, big corporate home pages and little-guy blogs all show up on a user’s screen in the same way when their addresses are typed into a browser. Anyone who puts up a Web page can broadcast it to the world.

Cable and telephone companies are talking, however, about creating a two-tiered Internet with a fast lane and a slow lane. Companies that pay hefty fees would have their Web pages delivered to Internet users in the current speedy fashion. Companies and individuals that do not would be relegated to the slow lane.

Creating these sorts of tiers would destroy the democratic quality of the Internet. Big, wealthy voices would start to overpower the smaller, poorer ones. Innovation would be threatened if start-ups and small companies could not afford the new fees. The next eBay or Google might never be born.

A net neutrality law would require cable and telephone companies to continue to provide Web sites to Internet users on an equal basis. Mr. Markey, of Massachusetts, will be taking over a key subcommittee that handles Internet issues. He has promised to hold hearings to educate Congress and the public, and to reintroduce his strong net neutrality bill. Mr. Wyden, of Oregon, plans to reintroduce an equally solid bill in the Senate.

Passing the legislation will not be easy. The cable and telephone companies have fought net neutrality with a lavishly financed and misleading lobbying campaign, because they stand to gain an enormous windfall. But there is growing support from individuals and groups across the political spectrum, from MoveOn.org to the Gun Owners of America, who worry about what will happen to their free speech if Internet service providers are allowed to pick and choose the traffic they carry.

In the last week, there was a limited but important victory for net neutrality. As a condition of approving the AT&T-BellSouth merger, the Federal Communications Commission required AT&T to guarantee net neutrality on its broadband service for the next two years. The commission was right to extract this concession, but it should not be necessary to negotiate separate deals like this one. On the information superhighway, net neutrality should be a basic rule of the road.

Protecting Internet Democracy, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/opinion/03wed1.html