Slashdot Mirror

mikp writes "In a David-and-Goliath style fight, small music companies are battling it out with established behemoths to see who can own the future of mobile music. Spotify, the Europe-based music streaming company, is about to launch its iPhone app and has plans to develop it for other mobile platforms soon. In a preview, Spotify shows how you can cache songs to your iPhone so that you don't always need a connection but the songs don't remain on your iPhone permanently. Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CWM phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year. The question remains, are people more likely to stream or download music on their mobile phones?"

consonant writes "FT is reporting that Google has reached a deal with Sony to ship Chrome on the Vaio line of PCs. Google confirmed that Sony PCs carrying Chrome had started to go on sale and said it was in talks for similar deals with other computer makers. It said the arrangement was 'experimental' and part of wider efforts to boost distribution, including a deal to make Chrome available to internet users who download the RealPlayer software and the company's first use of television advertising. While mainstream media coverage and financial details were very sparse, El Reg terms it a 'Microsoft-snubbing deal.' Google also mentioned it was pushing for similar deals with other vendors. Could this spell the beginning of the end for IE?"

RobotRunAmok writes "The Nielsen Company has been the principal entity tracking TV shows' popularity, and, by extension, their potential profitability. But as our media consumption practices change, some believe that Nielsen's methods have not kept pace. A new consortium including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, and Walt Disney — along with major advertisers — is calling for the creation of a new audience measurement service, and planning to solicit bids from outside firms by the fourth quarter of this year. Nielsen says they're not worried about so many of their customers ganging up on them, having just invested more than a billion dollars in research to stay modern. Except that today Nielsen announced they would pointedly not be adding weights to DVR households, and that adding weights for the presence of a personal computer or Internet access in under-represented households would provide 'no significant change or enhancement' to its national TV ratings sample. The pundits deride Nielsen's 'archaic' methodology and 'disco-era tactics,' but others scoff that such a consortium will only 'put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.' Stay tuned..."

e9th writes "Despite a bump or two along the way, it seemed that compulsory ID cards were a done deal in the UK. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that the scheme has been shelved. Unfortunately, it seems that this was more a matter of convenience than of concern for citizens' privacy."

Speaking with Financial Times, Hideki Komiyama, president of Sony Ericsson, raised the possibility of a mobile handset based on PlayStation gaming. The company has been struggling to find an answer to current smartphones, and they plan to release three new models within the next year which run Symbian, Android, and Windows Mobile. Komiyama likened a PlayStation-related handset to the music-based Walkman handset and the camera-based Cybershot handset. Quoting the FT: "He expresses interest in Sony Ericsson carving out a niche for itself based on Sony's strength in gaming. He says a PlayStation mobile, building on the Walkman and Cybershot phones, 'could happen.'"

theodp writes "Barack Obama has squared up for a major battle with big business, announcing a crackdown on offshore tax avoidance and evasion by US multinationals that's designed to raise $210B and make it easier for companies to create 'good jobs here at home'. Obama cited a building in the Cayman Islands where more than 18,000 US companies are housed: 'Either this is the biggest building in the world or it is the biggest tax scam in the world,' he said. 'I think the American people know which it is.' The administration says that more than a third of US foreign profits in 2003 came from Bermuda, the Netherlands and Ireland, and noted US companies paid an effective tax rate of just 2.3% on the $700bn they earned in foreign profits in 2004. Among tech companies affected by the crackdown, Microsoft joined 200 companies who signed a letter complaining that the proposed tax changes would put them at a disadvantage with their rivals, Cisco moaned that the measures 'would adversely impact our ability to invest and grow our business in the US,' and Google declined to comment for the time being."

Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Financial Times, scientists are building a shoal of robot fish to be let loose in the port [of Gijon, Spain] to check on the quality of the water. The fish are equipped with tiny chemical sensors capable of detecting pollutants in the water. These let them home in on the sources of hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or undersea pipelines. Modeled on carp and costing about £20,000 ($29,000) each to make, the fish are to be lifelike in appearance and swimming behavior so they will not alarm their fellow marine inhabitants."

Chris Wilson writes "According to the Financial Times, Google has announced their support for a new initiative called O3B to 'bring internet access to 3bn people in Africa and other emerging markets by launching at least 16 satellites to bring its services to the unconnected' by 2010. Coverage is available from Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal as well. 'The $750m project to connect mobile masts in a swath of countries within 45 degrees of the equator to fast broadband networks ... could bring the cost of bandwidth in such markets down by 95 per cent.' This will probably be the largest single investment in network infrastructure for developing countries in history. Google clearly wishes to use this project to enable broadband Internet access in developing regions, but many other things must be in place before that can happen, including fixed power infrastructure, PCs or OLPCs, technical support and skills, and useful content and services for areas with lower literacy."

A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story about United's 2002 bankruptcy filing, was picked up from a Google search by an investment newsletter on Monday morning, triggering a massive sell-off of United shares until trading was stopped. The stock fell as low as $3 before finally bouncing back to $12.30. Attorneys on both sides have started investigations and the incident has caught the attention of securities officials. I wonder what the market is going to do when they learn that Germany has invaded the Sudetenland.

unassimilatible writes to tell us that according to the Financial Times, the music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing websites. A recent study of the recent Radiohead album release found that huge numbers of illegal downloads actually helped the band's popularity and, by extension, concert ticket sales. "Radiohead's release of In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want basis last October generated enormous traffic to the band's own website and intense speculation about how much fans had paid. He urged record companies to study the outcome and accept that file-sharing sites were here to stay. 'It's time to stop swimming against the tide of what people want,' he said." Update 19:46 GMT by SM: Several readers (including the original author) have written in to mention that it isn't stressed enough that this study was engaged by the music industry itself, making the findings that much more interesting. Take that as you will.

An anonymous reader writes "The Financial Times has the story that billions in incorrect AAA ratings given out by Moody's were the result of a coding error in its computer models. 'Internal Moody's documents seen by the FT show that some senior staff within the credit agency knew early in 2007 that products rated the previous year had received top-notch triple A ratings and that, after a computer coding error was corrected, their ratings should have been up to four notches lower.'"

MaineCoasts writes "The Financial Times reports that eBay's new CEO is evaluating a sale of Skype if new ways cannot be found for the fast-growing service to support its core e-commerce business. EBay reported earlier this week that Skype had a 61 percent increase in first-quarter revenue over the same quarter last year and now has 309 million users worldwide."

superbrose notes that despite lots of legal difficulties regarding Internet privacy, the UK government is going ahead with plans to punish ISPs for allowing their customers to download illegal music and films. The claim is that there is "rampant piracy" in Britain with more than 6 million broadband users downloading files illegally every year. "The government will on Friday tell internet service providers they will be hit with legal sanctions from April next year unless they take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films. Britain would be one of the first countries in the world to impose such sanctions. Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted."

mrogers writes "A journalism student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death by a Sharia court for downloading and sharing a report criticizing the treatment of women in some Islamic countries. The student was accused of blasphemy and tried without representation. According to Reporters Without Borders, sixty people are currently in jail worldwide for criticizing governments online, fifty of them in China, but this may be the first time someone has been sentenced to death for using the internet. Internet censorship is on the rise worldwide, according to The OpenNet Initiative."

zeromemory writes "The Financial Times reports that " Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers' recent backing of Sony's Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end." According to the Times, Warner Brother's recent defection to Blu-Ray allowed Paramount to terminate their exclusive relationship with HD DVD. Universal Studios remains the only major studio to exclusively support the HD DVD format, though rumors have surfaced that their contract may also contain a termination provision similar to that exercised by Paramount."

rdavison writes "According to a recent article on the Financial Times site, 'internet users in France who download music and films without paying for them could find their web access shut down by a government body.' The proposal originated with FNAC, an entertainment retailer. According to the article, the proposal has a good chance of being accepted. 'In exchange for the clampdown on illegal downloading, the music industry has agreed to make individual downloads of archive French material available on all types of players by dropping digital rights management protection. The French film industry has agreed to release DVDs more quickly after a film's first cinema screening, reducing the delay from 7½ months to 6 months. However, consumer groups and even some of Mr Sarkozy's own members of parliament on Thursday attacked the proposal for a new internet policeman as a threat to civil liberties.'"

The Financial Times (via Gamespot) is reporting that (after having already been in stores for about a week), the Xbox 360 Arcade sku is now official. "The $279 Arcade will include a wireless controller and casual games including Pac-Man [Championship Edition], Uno and Luxor 2. Its launch has been widely rumoured but Mr Bach's comments were the first official confirmation. While Microsoft may hope to steal sales from the Wii with the Arcade, its Premium $349 Xbox 360 faces pressure from the $399 PS3, which has a bigger, 40-gigabyte hard drive, built-in wi-fi and a Blu-ray drive."

Tabernaque86 writes "What started as joke among gamers Sony is now using as a Christmas advertising campaign. Kaz Hirai, president of the games unit, has been quoted as saying that the PlayStation 3 'makes a great Blu-Ray player'. That theme will be central to a wave of ads in North America and Europe. From the article: 'Sony on Thursday disappointed analysts by failing to cut the PS3's price, but Mr Hirai did not rule out a future price cut. "Going aggressive only on price without being able to back it up with content doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," he said. A price cut would have a "real impact" on sales only if there were enough software titles to support the PS3. But analysts were skeptical and said Sony could miss its shipment targets for the year. "Without a price cut close to Christmas, reaching 11m shipments is going to be very tough," said David Gibson, analyst at Macquarie in Tokyo.'" This is regrettable, too, because there really are a number of strong titles coming out for the console this year.

iFrated informs us of a successful penetration of US Defense Department computers by the Chinese military last June. From the article: "The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defense secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the [Chinese] People's Liberation Army. One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a 'very high level of confidence... trending towards total certainty' that the PLA was responsible." The PLA is also accused of breaking into German government computers, including a network in the office of the Chancellor.

An anonymous reader writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft will take a charge against profits of more than $1bn as it tries to limit the potential damage to its videogames business from a design flaw in the Xbox 360 games console leading to units failing." It's bigger even than that, though. Early this week the news was about Xbox Live's growth, but since yesterday the headlines have taken a turn. Peter Moore has admitted the company is shy of their goal, some 400,000 units short of the 12 million Xboxes they'd planned to ship. These facts combined have made for some grim questions, including the San Jose Merc's Nooch asking why you'd want to buy an Xbox in the first place.

chance_encounter writes "President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus has published an article in the Financial Times in which he seems to equate the current global warming debate with totalitarian thought control: 'The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced ... The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.' At the end of the article he proposes several suggestions to improve the global climate debate, including this point: 'Let us resist the politicization of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus," which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.'"

Via GameDaily a Financial Times interview with with Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, gives fans the first hope that price cuts may be coming soon. Lauding the Wii's performance in last month's NPD numbers, Stringer says that Sony is looking to 'refine' the PS3's pricepoint. "'Nintendo Wii has been a successful enterprise, and a very good business model, compared with ours . . . because it's cheaper,' Mr Stringer said in a video interview. 'That [price cuts] is what we are studying at the moment. That's what we are trying to refine.' Sir Howard said he expected 'energy [in PS3 sales] by Christmas, and then you will begin to see break-out games'. Sony is launching a virtual-world game called Home this year, and up to 30 other games."

Sony is considering proposals from commercial distributed computing concerns, mulling over rolling out more Folding@Home-like clients to their PlayStation 3 consoles. Gamasutra reports on a Financial Times article, discussing the future of the system. Because they would be commercial and not charitable organizations, the company is considering some form of compensation for users who would participate. "Sony Computer Entertainment CTO Masa Chatani indicated in an interview that Sony had already received numerous inquiries. 'A start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilize this kind of infrastructure. We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications', he said."

srinravi writes "ArsTechnica reports that Quanta, the company manufacturing the XO laptops, has plans to begin selling low-cost budget mobile computers for $200 later this year. 'According to Quanta president Michael Wang, the company plans to leverage the underlying technologies associated with OLPC's XO laptop to produce laptop computers that are significantly less expensive than conventional laptops.' While OLPC plans to sell the laptops in bulk to governments, which will then distribute the hardware to school children, the XO computer itself is not for sale on the open market. These XO-like commercial devices are still something of an unknown, but it has been announced they'll be using Open Source software."

mid-devonian writes "Close on the heels of the temporary blocking of YouTube by a Turkish judge, a group of academics has published research showing that Web censorship is on the increase worldwide. As many as two dozen countries are blocking content using a variety of techniques. Distressingly, the most censor-heavy countries (which includes China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan) seem to be passing on their technologically sophisticated techniques to other areas of the world. 'New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China's block on Wikipedia or Pakistan's ban on Google's blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as 'keyword filtering', which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Financial Times writes that Microsoft will launch a series of lawsuits against cybersquatters, and will urge other companies to help tackle what it says is a growing problem on the internet. Microsoft says it hopes its example will encourage other trademark owners to bring similar lawsuits: "Cybersquatting is a growing problem for brands around the world and we hope to educate other brand holders and encourage them to take action," said Aaron Kornblum, senior attorney on Microsoft's internet safety enforcement team."

00_NOP writes "HateMyTory is the world's first political rating site and occasionally gets blasted or promoted by British bloggers on either side of the political spectrum. But here's something even more intriguing: when the right come visiting they hate the site but they are disproportionately likely to be users of free software, whether that is just Firefox on top of their Windows box, or all the way with some Linux distro. But when the left rally to the cause they are more likely than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple. If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree? As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling."

Jeian writes "None other than Bill Gates has spoken out against tighter immigration policies in the US. According to Gates, the US is losing skilled immigrants to other countries that are easier to immigrate to. Among his comments: "I personally witness the ill effects of these policies on an almost daily basis at Microsoft.""

Makarand writes "The IRS thinks that many sellers on online auction sites are unaware of their obligation to declare their profits and pay their taxes to the IRS. Tax experts are now asking the IRS to require online auction sites like eBay, Yahoo, and Ubid to report the gross sales numbers for their sellers. Such a requirement will surely send a shock wave across the online trading world because it could drastically reduce the profits a seller would make on these sites. The IRS thinks it can collect an extra $2 billion in taxes from this requirement that auctioneers report sellers who complete 100 or transactions a year worth at least $5,000."

Regular contributor Bennett Haselton has written in to say that "The Global Online Freedom Act, introduced last year during a firestorm of controversy over American companies cooperating with totalitarian governments in China and elsewhere, was introduced this month as the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007. When Chris Smith (R-NJ) first introduced the law in 2006, Yahoo was under fire for recently turning over information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of a political dissident, Microsoft was attacked for removing pages from MSN Spaces China at the behest of the government, Google was being criticized for removing political sites from search results displayed to China, and Cisco was accused of helping to enable Chinese filtering of the Web. All four corporations testified at a February 2006 House hearing during which Representative Tom Lantos summed up the mood of many of his colleagues by telling the companies, "I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night." The companies protested that they had no choice but to comply with local Chinese laws, but that they were troubled by their own actions, and -- in a rarity for individual tech companies, much less for a chorus -- they all invited the U.S. government to play a bigger role, while being vague about what the role should be."

GOFA would create a U.S.-government-designated list of "Internet restricting countries" and would in most cases prohibit U.S.-based companies from censoring content or turning over users' information to the governments of those countries. Do these companies want GOFA to pass? And is GOFA a good law? I think, yes and yes, but the answers are more complicated than they seem.

With American "collaboration" less in the news, GOFA made less of a splash when it was re-introduced this year, but it is still the subject of spirited debate. Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, and other human rights groups have already signed a statement supporting the July 2006 version of the bill (nearly identical the 2007 version). But blogger-journalist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that by creating a government-maintained list of "Internet censoring countries", the law falls short of calling for support of free speech in all countries (the initial list, for example, includes Iran and China, but leaves out notorious human rights violator and net-censor Saudi Arabia). Danny O'Brien of the EFF backs this position as well, and also argues the organization's long-standing position that "code is speech" and that filtering software should not be subject to export regulations that are proposed in the law.

I agree with MacKinnon that instead of using a list of "Internet restricting countries", we should require the same standards of U.S. companies wherever they do business, or at least, stop playing silly games like leaving Saudi Arabia off of a list of human rights violators because Bush is friends with the ruling family. I agree with the EFF that filtering software should be considered First-Amendment-protected speech like encryption software, and not be included on an export-prohibited "munitions" list. And for reasons listed below, I think that the law won't stop censoring countries from blocking any speech they want. But even with all of these qualifications, I think the law would be a step in the right direction, if only for the rules prohibiting companies from turning over users' personal information to the governments of countries like China and Iran. It's painful to give a pass to countries like Germany that also censor political speech, but I think that the situation is so much worse in places like China that we should do what we can in the short term. And for reasons I'll get into, I think that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Cisco are secretly hoping that a law like GOFA does get passed -- even if they can't come out and say so.

First, what the law does not do: There is still nothing to stop a U.S. company from blocking or removing legal, political content at the request of a foreign government. Section 204 says only that American content-hosting companies and content-filtering companies have to provide the U.S. government with a list of sites that have been removed or blocked at the behest of a censoring country.

Section 205 does say that U.S. companies may not block or remove sites that are operated by the U.S. government, or by any entity that receives grants from the International Broadcasting Bureau to help defeat foreign censorship. Presumably that would include Peacefire, at least during the periods when we're under contract to the IBB to develop the Circumventor software (but before you start calling me Hallibennett, I'm not working for the IBB right now, and it was my own idea to write this). So the American government, while requiring schools to block us in the U.S., would actually be helping to get us un-blocked in China and Iran! But Section 205 only says that a U.S. business may not block or shut down such sites. As far as I can tell, that means if the Cisco engineer on site in China sets up their routers for them, the Cisco engineer can't put VOANews.com on the block list. But then the Chinese official can walk across the room and add it to the list himself, can't he? Which is almost certainly what they'll do, since the routers are in their country.

So, I think the regulations against Internet blocking will be easy for foreign governments to ignore. But where the law could make a difference is in the prohibition against turning over users' personal data to law enforcement in censoring countries. Section 201 says that servers located in a censoring country cannot contain personally identifiable user information (so that the local police cannot simply storm in and seize the data). Section 202 says that American companies can only turn information over to law enforcement of a censoring country if the information is needed "for legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes as determined by the Department of Justice". MacKinnon has criticized this aspect of the law as well -- "If Americans don't want the DOJ to have access to their user information, why should anybody else?" Very true. But, even at the lowest point of public confidence in the Department of Justice, I think most people living outside of fortified compounds stocked with beef jerky and gold bullion, can agree that the U.S. DoJ has more integrity and legitimacy than the government of China, and that such a rule would mean fewer Chinese dissidents going to jail.

What do the affected U.S. companies think of the law? Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco did not respond to requests for comment. A Google PR person replied to say, "We welcome intiatives that expand access to information and protect the rights of users across the globe. At the same time, we remain concerned that legislation in this area can have unintended consequences, so we intend to study any such proposals closely, and work with proponents and others to reach the right outcome." When I replied that the Global Online Freedom Act had been proposed more than a year ago and had been online in its current form since June 2006, presumably enough time to "study such a proposal closely" and take a position on it, he said they would stick with that statement for now. (In his e-mail, he actually put quote marks around the company's statement, which I thought was a nice dry touch.)

But past statements from the respective companies have indicated they would be amenable to such a law. Bill Gates, never one to be shy about criticizing government regulation that he disagreed with, was asked in a February 2006 interview with the London Times, "Should the US government establish guidelines to regulate how internet companies deal with censorship in countries like China?" and answered, "I think something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a resounding success in terms of very clearly outlining what companies can't do and other rich countries largely went along with that." At the February 2006 house hearings to discuss American companies' cooperation with overseas censors, representatives from all companies indicated that they actually wanted the government to play a bigger role -- they were vague about what such a role would be, but this was only a month after the first draft of the Global Online Freedom Act had been proposed, the only such law on the table at the time.

At first this might seem paradoxical -- why would companies seem amenable to, even supportive of, laws that would restrict what they can do? But it actually makes sense if you consider their negotiating position with the Chinese government. Currently, the Chinese censors can tell Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google that they either have to either play by the Chinese rules or get out, and the censors know that the companies will comply (without even necessarily feeling guilty about it -- the companies can always say that the Chinese people are better off with a censored version of their services than no access at all).

But if the companies' hands are tied by U.S. law, then they can basically present the Chinese government with a take-it-or-leave-it deal: You can use our e-mail and messenger and blog services, just know that our government won't let us turn over users' personal information if you ever want it. The Chinese censors are presumably coming from the point of view that they'd rather have a controlled Internet, but that it's more important to reap the economic benefits of having the Internet in their country, even if some control is lost (after all, if they didn't believe that, they wouldn't have connected to the Internet in the first place). Hence it's not likely that they'd throw out Yahoo Mail and Google search and MSN Messenger when so many users depend on these and use them for business as well as personal use. (Even if there are Chinese-made alternatives, there would be the huge cost of switching everyone over, and no longer being able to use the old tools to communicate with American companies.) So a law controlling the actions of U.S. companies would very probably allow them to keep doing business in censored countries, while giving them an excuse not to turn over users' data.

But, that might not work if it looks like the companies pushed too hard for the law themselves. If the Chinese see Yahoo fighting tooth and nail to pass a law that restricts what information Yahoo can hand over to China, the Chinese censors could take that as a slap in the face, and punish Yahoo for defying them even after the law is passed that prohibits Yahoo from cooperating. "Oh, you can't give us that information because of the law? This law right here that you lobbied for?"

So, when the general counsel of Yahoo says, "Ultimately, the greatest leverage lies with the U.S. government"; when the Vice President of Google tells Congress, "And certainly also, finally, there is a role for government. We do need your help, and you can help us"; when the associate general counsel of Microsoft testifies, "It is, therefore, the responsibility of governments, with the active leadership of the United States, to seek to reduce or reconcile these differences", I think what we're hearing are subtly encoded messages saying, "Pass this law, or something like it; we just can't look like we wanted it to pass." So, Congress should give them what they want, even if they can't ask for it directly. And at the same time they would be helping users in censored countries all around the world, before the next one gets sent to jail because an American company turned over their information.

Dystopian Rebel writes "The Financial Times reports that Taiwanese company Luxpro (discussed on Slashdot last year) intends to sue Apple for US$100M for 'lost revenue caused by Apple's abuse of their global power.' In 2005, Apple obtained an injunction against Luxpro's Super Shuffle/Super Tangent but the Taiwanese Supreme Court has overturned the injunction, opening the door to Luxpro's legal action. From the article: 'The [Luxpro] product had almost the same measurements and weight, came in a white plastic casing and had similar buttons on the front. Its name, Super Shuffle, also closely resembled the original.'"

moore.dustin writes "Universal and MySpace look to be on a collision course that could shape the future of media companies and the internet. The article discusses the DMCA's impact on their case, and talks ways in which the law lags behind the realities of technology." From the article: "Yet, as lawyers prepare for battle, they do so on uncertain legal ground. The legislation at the heart of the debate, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was written years before social networking sites such as MySpace even existed. That fact has injected considerable uncertainty into the matter, according to copyright experts, and helps explain why lawyers from both sides are proclaiming that the DMCA, as it is known, is on their side."

cdneng2 writes "Sony may be aware that something is just not right. There's a reshuffling of management occurring within Sony. Kazuo Hirai is set to head their videogame unit, as Ken Kutaragi has been bumped to the Sony board. Jack Tretton, former COO for SCEA, is now the president and CEO of that arm of the company. There's no word on the reasoning behind these position shifts. On the same day, Namco announced that they must sell 500,000 games to begin making profit on PS3 games. A Financial Times article confirms speculation on how hard it will be for Sony to make money, as analysts with UBS predict that 30 games must be sold per PS3 for them to break even." To add insult to injury, EA CEO Larry Probst has said PS3 numbers were lower than expected. Current thinking is that Sony managed to ship roughly half of the 400,000 units they were promising.

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

1) Where do you see newspapers' role in this?
by Stick_Fig

First off, my credentials: I'm the former employee of an experimental newspaper, Bluffton Today, located in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's an exciting place, let me tell you. The focus has been on reverse publishing but at the same time tempering blogs with traditional journalism. The staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. They use the web only to the degree where it doesn't dip into libel and slander and builds on its strengths. My question to you is, do you think Bluffton is on the right track? It felt like, in the 15 months I was there, they definitely were, but I'm a biased party. I left thinking, "If only newspapers did more of this..." I know what I'm betting the farm on in my career, and it isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. Rather, I feel that it's important to look at both sides and find how they can work together, because God knows there's some 60-year-old editor somewhere who won't look at Bluffton as anything more than a gimmick. I'm gonna be that guy in the newsroom fighting the good fight to get more untraditional voices into the the paper in more places than the editorial page.

Rosen:

Bluffton Today (Bluffton, SC is near Hilton Head Island) did several things that were important to try in 2005. They said the editorial engine would be the online edition; it would "produce" the printed paper. This is the opposite of how newspapers did things for the first ten years of their Web lives. They just re-purposed the content from the print edition, and called that an "online newspaper."

By reversing what's primary in production you change head sets in the newsroom because a professional newsroom engineers everything--including the talents of its employees--around the production ordeal. The "daily miracle" it was once called, because making the newspaper required such a fantastic act of just-in-time coordination. Many things had to be routinized for the miracle to occur. (Including ideas about journalism and the user's place in it.)

Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, who worked on the Bluffton Today site, called it an "inversion" because content would flow from the Web to print rather than vice versa. The editorial engine should be the more interactive one, in which more of the community can participate. The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea.

How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address. I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

If the experience of doing Bluffton Today has tempered some of that initial boldness, that's as it should be. I'm not surprised that the staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. A web-to-print, highly-interactive, low barrier to entry, read-write, everyone-contributes newspaper is still a daily production headache. Articles, photos, headlines, and ads have to come together. Unedited, the site would have almost no value, although it can have unedited parts with high value.

"It isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. It's important to look at both sides..." I agree with that, Stick. My new adventure, NewAssignment.Net, is a hybrid site for that reason. (Pros and amateurs collaborate on reporting projects.) In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over for the same reason.

Bluffton today was a first wave attempt at innovation. Today initiatives like that face some second wave facts. Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. "The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation" is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

There's just a long way to go. But yeah, you were on the right track working for those guys. Deeply so.

2) How to Get More Respect
by NewYorkCountryLawyer
I am convinced that online media have made a huge contribution to getting out the truth when the corporate media are seeking to suppress the truth. While there are a growing number of people aware of this phenomenon, reports in the 'blogosphere' just do not get the same respect and currency received by reports in the 'major' or 'corporate' media. What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large?

Rosen:

Well, "suppressing" the truth is not how I see the failures of modern journalism, or of our current press. I think it's bigger than that.

Bob Woodward, who is in the news this week, is at the top of the reporting game, an industry unto himself. In two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, he failed to tell the truth about the Bush White House because his methods were not up to the obstacle they met: an administration that had broken through all the reality checks normally placed on a president and his closest aides. One by one these measures came under abnormal stress. The policy-making process used by presidents got subverted. The normal channels for sounding out opinion were just disowned. The intelligence community came under extreme stress when asked to supply facts for a decision already made.

A Congress controlled by the same party was expected to go along, which meant accepting the president's definition of reality. Oversight got evacuated. The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead. I haven't read his new book yet, just the reviews and excerpts. But from early accounts, State of Denial is his attempt to get back the ground he lost, despite having the best access.

Woodward didn't "suppress" the story. Rather, he couldn't imagine it. Those are the kinds of failures that interest me. Sometimes things are suppressed. Often, the truth eludes professional journalism because no one thought to look for it. I welcome your question, What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large? My first answer is: we have to look for it.

You know how, when you've really mastered something and there's a news account of it, the news story will invariable get several (basic) things wrong? Eliminate the several things and respect will rise. If you want to inform the world of something, grok it before you rock it is a good simple rule.

Correct ourselves early and often. Correct the reporting in the major media, early and often. Fact check your own ass first, then your neighbor's. We should major in transparency; the "major" media will take a minor in that. Diversity of outlook in the reporters ultimately improves the reporting. The blogosphere has advantages there, especially as it does more reporting.

I think we have to accept that Big Media, which isn't going anywhere, is society's default legitimacy-distribution machine. But that doesn't mean it works well. The machine itself can lose legitimacy without exactly falling apart. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you suck at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you're really good at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. Then when you assume the shape of a writes-itself story--first bloggers to go to the political conventions!--Big Media will over-cover you, spreading a small bit of understanding over lots and lots of stories. Six months later it's time to debunk the trend they missed, then over-hyped and finally misdescribed. It's not personal. It's protective. It's also cheaper than figuring out what's going on.

We can win a lot of points for Net journalism just by being the opposite of that.

3) What about mob-rule journalism?
by Chas

What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?

Rosen:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

What sort of safeguards are in place? Here are my answers so far. You tell me what is missing or cracked in this foundation:

One: The editors are full time on it. Assignments flow through editors several times before they are published by NewAssignment.Net. That's the pro-am way. It's an editor's job not to be gamed, not to publish bum facts. Everything that goes out has the editor's name on it. It's not an answer to everything--this reliance on "good editors"--but it's a proven system, a simple one, and a start.

Two: Users Self-Police. I'm not sure "community" is the right word for the eventual users of New Assignment. People use that term too loosely, in my opinion. But if NewAssignment.Net develops a base of active, loyal and intelligent users, it's not unreasonable that they can help police the site, especially if they understand that verifiying information and preventing fraud are basic to everything we're trying to do. And so a second answer, after editors, is a culture among users: catch errors, catch mistakes, catch fraud and manipulation. A mob mentality has to be met by something stronger; if you attract the right kind of users, that can happen. It would be foolish to think it will just because you're counting on it.

Three: Given enough eyeballs, all facts can be checked. I think there is every chance of developing a special subgroup of users who are effective fact checkers of the larger base of contributors, including new and casual contributors. One thing we are definitely going to do is see whether retired journalists and ex-journalists will volunteer to work with other natural born sticklers and operate our fact-checking system, which not only has to work, but eventually be better than industry standard. I don't know yet what that system will look like, or how systematic it will be. One of my advisers is interested in this puzzle and working on some ideas, assisted by a professional fact checker who emailed me offering to help. That's how we are going to solve this. Social scientists call it "muddling through."

Four: The site itself has to make verification easy. I mean in the way it is built and meant to operate. For example, editors have to be able to sort the raw from the initially verified from the double checked. This is one of the challenges for the developers of the New Assignment site, which will be Chapter Three. It's a new partnership--here's an about page for them--formed by Zack Rosen, who is my nephew, one of the originators of Dean Space and the co-founder of CivicSpace on the Drupal platform; and Josh Koenig, a co-founder of DeanSpace who started Music for America, a non-profit. They are both Drupal developers, active in that community. The third partner is Matt Cheney, who is trained as a librarian and worked as a researcher at National Center for SuperComputing Applications.

They're going to build the site with open source tools. Josh Koenig has a post up about the New Assignment project. It promises an Open Practice model: "posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others." Verification and fact-checking have to become open practices themselves. The developers understand that.

Five: The one percent rule.. Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one percent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

Six: How have others solved the problem? You tell me: has creating a reliable system of volunteer contributors ever been faced before on the Web? Did it prove unsolvable? I would expect NewAssignment.Net to look at prior cases first and find the key lessons.

4) Money
by truthsearch

Do you believe that as money flows into civic journalism that it'll change the equation? Obviously there are some people who's primary goal is to become famous and/or make money through more open journalism. Will the large community of contributors flush out those with less altruistic intentions? I guess I'm really asking will civic journalism be self-correcting as it gets bigger? Or is there a way it may become just as corrupted as much of the current mainstream professional journalism?

Rosen:

I doubt there's any incorruptible system, just different kinds of pressures, with greater and lesser freedoms for the journalists involved. We can certainly hope for a self-correcting system, but it's not likely to happen on its own.

There's nothing wrong with seeking recognition for great work. People who want to be become famous or make a salary through the more open forms in Net journalism aren't the enemy. Not at all. But they are going to have to work with users under conditions that build trust and permit collaboration. It's hard for me to see how the bad actors will succeed at that, but I am not discounting it, either.

Here's a site called Sportingo. It says it's a "new type of sports media company," which is "focused on telling the story from the fans' perspective." Users can write articles, which will be "professionally edited." They can rate and comment on articles written by peers.

Sportingo will own all the content published on the site. There are no plans to pay contributors. The company is for-profit. Tal Rozow, the marketing manager, told me that that "Sportingo authors aiming for a professional writing career will be able to benefit from having by-lines appearing on our website." He said he's confident that a strong network of independent sports writers will emerge at the site, and maybe that will happen. But I'm not sure it's a system designed to build trust among all the players involved.

Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

5) What's wrong with other extant examples?
by crush

I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:

* The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.

* The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show)

* The New Standard

What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?

(And of course, how could I forget WikiNews?)

Rosen:

There's nothing "wrong" with these prior examples. I admire them all. I was especially pleased to see that the New Standard met its do-or-die fundraising goal last week. That site is an experiment with reader-supported, totally independent, strenuously-factual reporting. High standards of verification are meant to prevail. I think the New Standard has a lot in common with professional journalism, except it rejects the political economy of commercial news media entirely. It's run as a collective among those who do the work. I am thrilled that it will remain around, because we need to try lots of solutions to how to fund serious reporting. Just as I'm thrilled that Independent Media Center and its collectives around the world keep humming. I agree with Chris Anderson that what blogging begat--citizen journalism--Indy Media begat, too.

I didn't "evaluate and reject" the New Standard, Indy Media, Pacifica and Wiki News. Nor is it my place to decide they need fixing. They don't. The people who founded those organizations deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and daring-- and genuinely alternative. They inspired me. So did lots of others. (New West, for example, or Witness.org.) NewAssignment.Net is really about a single proposition: that if journalists and networks of users can report stuff together that neither could easily do alone, the public sphere will benefit and the site will build trust. I think there's room for that.

My decision to accept $100,000 from Reuters means we'll have an editor who can test the possibilities in networked journalism, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. My job is to make sure that Reuters has no influence on that person. The company has said it will have no editorial control, and no claim on the content. I agree: it won't. I think we can persuade users that it works as advertised. But people are free to draw their own conclusions about what the gift means, and I'm sure they will.

6) Plagiarism and Ethics?
by goombah99

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is, the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed, breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.

Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomenon, plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.

It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journalism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?

A related question is the ethical division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain for the most part. Indeed, the NY times just went so far as to remove the typeset justification from any article that contained any sort of analysis or opinion, reserving the justified typesetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrained journalist?

Rosen:

When people plagiarize they do it for a particular self-interested reason: to meet a deadline, get an unwanted task out of the way, get their full time salary with limited work. These motivations will probably be rarer in the New Assignment model. Why volunteer for a project only to cheat at it?

"The common man cannot restrain himself." Sorry, I don't trust that kind of language. Beyond that making stuff up is not a way to develop a base of users on the Web; people aren't that dumb! You speak of a "low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author." But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.

What some people can't seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems--and professional journalism is one--develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable.

We aren't going to learn much about this puzzle by asking how the "common man" can be trained to imitate his betters in the news media. I refer you to sociologist Raymond Williams, who once said, "There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses." It is these ways of seeing that are retrograde. But they show up in the most surprising places.

7) Scale
by FuturePastNow

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen journalism other than Jeff Jarvis' [buzzmachine.com], but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

Rosen:

Ten years from now? Jeez, I have no idea what the world of media access will be like then. But anyone who is just starting out in self-publishing should consult Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, so as not to become prematurely disillusioned by discovering its truths later on.

Certainly there are new gatekeepers. (Slashdot itself is one. But does it work the same way the old system did?) Traffic-wise, there's still rich and poor. (But is this list as static as that one?) Hierarchies have not gone away. (And who said they would?) Inequality has not disappeared. (But did you really think it could?)

You still have to fight to be noticed, good work can still go unnoticed. Life online is not entirely fair, or completely different. There's a new attention economy to replace the old. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to these common sense conclusions, the easier it will be to see what is actually different today.

Here are some things that stand out for me: Amateurs have joined professionals and they own a part of "the press." An audience that was once connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other is now connected both ways. The cost for like-minded people to locate each other and collaborate has fallen dramatically. The tools of media production have been widely distributed, and broad distribution of content is no longer impossible for small, upstart producers. For professionals, they're not required to affiliate with Big Media in order to operate as a journalist, though most will. They can be stand alones and independents. The people formerly known as the audience (as I call them) are now a productive force to be reckoned with, and Big Media has just started that reckoning. The Net has new ways of distributing attention, which have taken their place alongside the old.

Still, there's a long way to go before we can say that our media system has been made more democratic, responsive and responsible.

8) What impact would this have on national elections?
by StressGuy

The Electoral process seems to be more of a "marketing contest" and marketing takes bags and bags of money. There's commercial time, signs, billboards, radio, etc. Let's face it, a commercial is, at most 90 seconds to tell me why I should vote for you - hardly enough time. So, all we see are glittering generalities or, all to often, "don't vote for the other guy" spots.

If "Citizen Journalism" takes off, do you see this as a way that candidates without the massive financial resources normally required to sustain a traditional campaign could actually compete? Could this make the "third party candidates" a credible threat? Could this actually serve to "level the playing field"?

Rosen:

We should be cautious here. I think the most we can say is that a system that was almost entirely closed and self-sustaining--in which a handful of people raised the money, took the polls, handled the candidates, made the ads, narrated the campaign and talked about the candidates on TV--has been disrupted. The people who ran it are not as confident as they once were in their ability to manage things and get the outcomes they want. Their party has been crashed, but it's not "over." Nor is it "ours."
It's possible that insurgent candidacies--not backed by current players in the system--will have an easier time of it in the years ahead, just as insurgent news providers have more of an opening now. That's as far as I would go on the leveled field.

9) Dilution of Protection
by ObsessiveMathsFreak

How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?

Rosen:

As a matter of law and public policy, I think "fourth estate" protections should focus on significant acts of journalism, not people in pre-fab categories or the kind of organization that surrounds the giver of news. All those who are engaged in the act of informing a broader public of what's going on deserve to be under the First Amendment umbrella that protects the press. The press itself is composed of amateur and professional wings.

But that's no answer to goons with lawyers who threaten to sue. Citizen journalists are definitely vulnerable there, which makes you realize why we have big media organizations in the first place. We have to be more creative. Robert Cox, head of the Media Bloggers Association (I am a founding member of the group) has shown that "an orchestrated campaign by bloggers to defend a fellow blogger in what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit" can work. That's encouraging but not a complete answer, either. Legal intimidation will happen, and I'm sure there will be times when the bad guys will win.

10) Blogging
by From A Far Away Land

When asking a primary source for information, I find that telling them I'm doing so to create a report on my blog tends to make them clam up, or continue to be unwilling to provide information that ought to be publicly available. What technique or phrases should I use to convince the interviewee that I both have a legitimate use for their information, and the right to obtain it?

Rosen:

Sometimes you have a right to obtain information from a primary source. Sometimes it's not a matter of your rights but their decision to recognize you and cooperate. If search costs are high for making an informed decision about whether to trust a blogger who shows up with questions, sources will seek to reduce costs by using reputation and even stereotype (bloggers: ugh) as proxies.

I don't think there's a proper technique or a magic phrase that will solve this problem. There's only one solution I can see. Send the guy the URL for the "about" section of your site. That page ought to persuade potential sources that legitimate use will be made of their information. It should tell them what you are up to, and why. The site itself, the reporting and commentary there, is the best reason any source has to cooperate. Ah, but how do you convince them to take the time and look?

There's at least one way. Break a story so that the source's world is talking about it and next time around the source will speak to you-- and go to your About page. I asked Dean Wright of Reuters what the biggest obstacle for NewAssignment.Net will be when it launches. "The same one that the more minor players in the mainstream media have: getting your calls returned," he said. "Then when you complete a project and publish, you may find that other media outlets are reluctant to pick up your stories." The only answer to that is "do some compelling projects that cannot be ignored."

NewAssignment.Net will try to take that advice. It will do stories developed by users into assignments that are given to journalists. It could also do stories developed by journalists and divided into parts for users to assign themselves. (Mechanical Turk meets the Center for Public Integrity.) I hope it will do stories where teams of users and journalists figure out the division of labor together.

Sometimes the network will be the knowledge producer, the journalist the enabler. Other times the journalist will be the producer, and the network the enabler. Pro-am journalism is not inherently better than am-pro. Amateur users could in some cases do it all themselves, with editors watching and giving the green light in stages. Different combinations beg to be tried. It's unwise to say in advance that we know how it will work, or that it can't.

davidwr writes "Is Microsoft unfairly locking anti-virus companies out of Vista? Symantec and McAfee seem to think so and they aren't being very quiet about it, placing a full-page ad in the Financial Times. If you've found the ad online, please post a link."

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a funny article by James Boyle in the Financial Times on what it really feels like to be part of the long tail economy." From the article: "Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system. The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth."

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article by James Boyle in the Financial Times, the United States is helping push a Treaty that would create an entirely new type of intellectual property right in the US, in addition to copyright, covering anything that is broadcast or webcast. (Regardless of whether the work was in the public domain, Creative Commons Licensed etc, the broadcaster would control any copies made from the broadcast for 50 years.) Boyle argues that this is dumb, unconstitutional, and anyway should be debated domestically first."

anaesthetica writes "The Financial Times is reporting that Viviane Reding, the EU media commissioner, wants to spur a pan-European market through which companies could buy and sell cross-border access to the European spectrum regime, including frequencies used by TV, radio, mobile telephone and broadband services. Large European media companies are skeptical about the spectrum trading plan, saying both that there is no logic behind a pan-European telecom model, and that such a plan could interfere with satellite radio. Ms. Reding believes that the change would spur harmonization of the fragmented European telecom band allocation. This change is set to coincide with the 2012 switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting, when a significant portion of the spectrum will be freed up."

mytrip writes to mention a Financial Times article detailing Microsoft's apparent interest in Yahoo!, and Yahoo!'s rude reaction to their interest. From the article: "The fight is on between the three internet search titans, after Yahoo's Terry Semel laid down the gauntlet to Microsoft saying the software giant's recently elevated ambitions in the search arena were a lost cause. 'My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed,' he said in an interview with the New Yorker's Ken Auletta."

PygmySurfer writes "Apple Computer on Monday revealed it had renewed contracts with the four largest record companies to sell songs through its iTunes digital store at 99 cents each. The agreements came after months of bargaining, and were a defeat for music companies that had been pushing for a variable pricing model."

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including the Supreme Court declines Falwell's appeal, GP2X now shipping in the US, a new version of Systrace released, Lessig and Stallman look back at Sun's OpenDRM, NASA jumps on the anti-matter propulsion bandwagon, GoDaddy donates $10,000 to OpenSSH, Ellison explains why he would NOT acquire Novell or Red Hat, and pictures of the Ball State wireless 'sculpture' -- Read on for details.

The Supreme Court declines Falwell's Appeal. yEvb0 writes "The US Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of Jerry Falwell, who claims that "gripe site" http://www.fallwell.com/ infringes on his trademark by luring surfers away from his own site. Despite winning a case in federal court, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with Falwell last year and said that operator Christopher Lamparello was free to operate his site about Falwell's views on gays because he 'clearly created his Web site intending only to provide a forum to criticize ideas, not to steal customers.'"

GP2X now shipping in the US. An anonymous reader writes "The Gamepark GP2X, a Linux-based handheld gaming platform that runs native and emulated games, is now shipping in the US, according to LinuxDevices. The device can reportedly run more than a thousand classic arcade games, through open-source console game emulators such as MAME, SNES, Genesis, and PC Engine. It has a 3.5-inch QVGA (320x240) color TFT LCD screen, and includes a media player supporting MPEG, JPEG, and MP3 formats."

New version of Systrace released. Niels writes "I just recently released a new version of Systrace that runs on Linux without requiring any kernel patches. I termed it the Phoenix release because it has been almost three years since I did any work on Systrace. However, I finally had the need to do some sandboxing on Linux without being able to change the kernel. So, voila, after a few late nights, here we go: Systrace for Linux using a ptrace back end."

Lessig and Stallman look back at Sun's OpenDRM. H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The Register has an excellent article featuring Lessig and Stallman on 'Open Source' DRM. The spark for the article came from comments made about Sun's 'OpenDRM' by Lessig which were not wholly negative and were interpreted by some as an endorsement. Lessig clarifies: 'There's no disagreement about where we should end up - No DRM.'"

NASA jumps on the anti-matter propulsion bandwagon. steveo777 writes "NASA has an interesting read about creating yet another form of rocket propulsion. They plan on using Anti-electrons (positrons) combine with normal electrons to release enough energy to fuel the way to Mars and back. Its byproduct will be lower energy gamma radiation. From the article, '"Our advanced designs, like the gas core and the ablative engine concepts, could take astronauts to Mars in half that time, and perhaps even in as little as 45 days," said Kirby Meyer, an engineer with Positronics Research on the study.'"

GoDaddy donates $10,000 to OpenSSH. wcbrown writes "Go Daddy has donated $10,000 to the OpenSSH project, which is apparently used extensively within the company." This is another great donation in what hopefully will continue to be a trend within the community. No word on when the blinking will stop.

Ellison explains why he would NOT acquire Novell or Red Hat. Robert writes to tell us CBROnline is reporting that a recent statement by Larry Ellison covered so extensively in the news regarding speculation about why Oracle might be "planning to buy Novell or Red Hat" may have been a little off base. The full transcript of his interview with the FT is illuminating precisely because it reveals why the company would NOT acquire either Novell or Red Hat, and - apparently - why the company did not buy JBoss.

Pictures of the Ball State Wireless 'sculpture'. popeguilty writes "Slashdot readers may recall the story about the Wireless 'Sculpture' at Ball State University. The artwork is up and running, and I've got a few pictures posted for general consumption."

Rytis writes "An article at the Financial Times is analysing the growing impact of internet pornography, the phenomena itself and the problems that it causes to our society. Surveys within Great Britain have shown that more than a half of 9-19 years olds have seen pornography online. From the article: 'To some men, Haynes argues, clicking on porn is simply a way to pass the time. It's a hobby. Once they'd idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site. Others, though, succumb to addiction: Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space, and addiction is always destructive.'"

An anonymous reader writes "An article by James Boyle in the FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology. Apparently there will be a (free) conference at Stanford on the subject soon, organized by Larry Lessig's Center there."

Firmafest writes "New York Times reports that "Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations." The Financial Times has more on the partnership" CT: Sorry folks. My email is broken this morning and i'm not getting error reports.

Been on TV writes to tell us that Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday the opening of their Office file formats, according to Financial Times. From the article: "Microsoft will submit its Office file formats to Ecma International, the standards body, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."

An anonymous reader writes " Corante's Copyfight has a piece up about this new column in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the early side) the 15th anniversary of Berners-Lee's first draft of a web page . The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.'"

An anonymous reader writes " Corante's Copyfight has a piece up about this new column in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the early side) the 15th anniversary of Berners-Lee's first draft of a web page . The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.'"

An anonymous reader writes " Corante's Copyfight has a piece up about this new column in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the early side) the 15th anniversary of Berners-Lee's first draft of a web page . The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.'"

pjones writes "It's always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, "More rights are wrong for webcasters." Boyle lays it out so that "economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money" can get what's wrong."