net127

Granted Asylum, Nun Held in Va. Jail

David Cho, Washington Post Staff Writer, reports:

HOPEWELL, Va. -- Sonam always feared her devotion to Buddhism would land her behind bars in her native China. As it turns out, she is serving a long term in jail -- not in East Asia but in central Virginia.

The 30-year-old Buddhist nun, who grew up in a Tibetan village near the foot of Mount Everest, fled to the United States in August after family members had been tortured and friends jailed for their faith, she said. But when she arrived at Dulles International Airport and requested asylum, federal immigration officials detained her and placed her in the local jail in this small city outside Richmond.

Sonam, who is known by that one name, has been here ever since except for a brief visit in November to a court room in Arlington where a federal immigration judge granted her asylum. But even as she was hugging her attorney in celebration, the lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security announced that she was appealing the case.

Sonam was then shackled and returned to her cell, where she waits for her next court date, which is likely to be in the fall at the earliest, her attorney said.

Sonam is among thousands of asylum seekers who have fled persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States, a new report by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights shows.

By law, the Department of Homeland Security detains all asylum seekers who arrive without proper documents. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal immigration officials have also been denying parole to these immigrants and appealing rulings in their favor, a practice that can keep them locked up for years, according to the report, which monitored the department's activities for a year and details scores of cases, including Sonam's.

Homeland Security officials deny they are trying to keep asylum seekers behind bars, although they acknowledge that long incarcerations occur. They say they are reviewing their practices in response to the report and are tallying statistics on how many asylum seekers have been detained, refused parole or seen their cases appealed.

"Even a well-balanced policy can get out of kilter on an individual case because someone has exercised poor judgment," said Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for border and transportation security.

At the same time, he and others say there is concern that a terrorist could slip into the country under the guise of an asylum request.

"People who come here may have no legitimate [reason]. They are here for economic reasons or for criminal reasons and have been trained to assert asylum," Hutchinson said.

"That requires us to be careful and . . . sometimes it makes people more skeptical of asylum cases than they should be."

Last week, during an interview at the Riverside Regional Jail, Sonam spoke of her journey to the United States that began with a desperate, eight-day walk to Nepal across snow-capped mountains and ended with her first ride on an airplane, which frightened her so much she couldn't look out the window.

Sonam Singeri, a Tibetan working for Radio Free Asia who has befriended Sonam, was at the interview to translate. As soon as Sonam walked into the visitors' room and saw Singeri, she collapsed into her arms and sobbed uncontrollably.

"It's so lonely. It's so hard. Why is this happening" she cried out, Singeri said.

Sonam told a story of flight and fear. She said her father had been jailed in Tibet and tortured with electric shock. She described hiding from police patrols as she made her way across the Himalaya Mountains to Nepal, where she lived for three years.

But even there, she said, she worried about her safety. In May, the Nepalese government began to round up Tibetan refugees and send them back to China, where they were sure to face prison and torture, she said.

Even after asylum seekers such as Sonam have convinced immigration judges that they are bona fide and pose no threat, Homeland Security lawyers continue to press appeals in many cases, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights report says.

"They are indefinitely detaining asylum seekers who have already been granted relief, who present no risk, who have often been tortured in their home countries," said Archi Pyati, who works in the lawyers committee's asylum program.

"We are sending a message that in the United States . . . we don't hope that asylum seekers find their way here because if they do they will find themselves in a very difficult situation and in prolonged detention."

Immigrants seeking asylum in this country must prove not only their identities but also that they are in danger in their native countries.

Sonam's case was appealed because she did not have enough documentation to back up her story, according to a brief filed by Homeland Security attorney Deborah Todd. The fact that Sonam lived in Nepal for three years indicated that she could have safely stayed there and did not need to come to the United States, Todd argued in her appeal.

Asked to comment, a spokesman for Homeland Security said the department does not talk about ongoing cases.

Sonam said she had no way to get identity documents in Nepal because the government does not recognize refugees from China. She feared that she would be deported to China along with other Tibetans who were being sent back at the time. So she sought a way to get to the United States.

Using the money she had made as a seamstress before she joined her monastery in Nepal, Sonam booked a flight through Calcutta to Dulles.

After she was jailed in Virginia, her attorney, who has taken the case pro bono, twice asked the Department of Homeland Security to release her from detention, arguing that Sonam poses no danger. But immigration officials denied both requests without much explanation, according to Sonam's attorney.

The hardest part of Sonam's life these days is that she cannot speak or understand the language of the inmates or guards. (She is also illiterate in her native Tibetan tongue.) She has not been able to have a conversation with anyone since her hearing in November and wept as she recounted her seemingly endless days of silence and isolation in jail.

"I live in a prison but always in my mind, I hold onto a picture of His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] in my heart," she said. "This prison has become my monastery."

An hour into the interview, a guard tapped the window of the visitors' room. It was time to go.

Sonam shed a few more tears. It might be months before her next conversation. She hugged Singeri again and then followed the guard back to her part of the jail where she does not speak, cannot understand anyone and where she waits in her prison within a prison.

Parrot's oratory stuns scientists

Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, writes:

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N'kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.

Polished wordsmith

He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive.

One N'kisi-ism was "flied" for "flew", and another "pretty smell medicine" to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York.

When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N'kisi said: "Got a chimp"

He appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: "You got to put this bird on the camera."

Dr Goodall says N'kisi's verbal fireworks are an "outstanding example of interspecies communication".

In an experiment, the bird and his owner were put in separate rooms and filmed as the artist opened random envelopes containing picture cards.

Analysis showed the parrot had used appropriate keywords three times more often than would be likely by chance.

Captives' frustrations

This was despite the researchers discounting responses like "What ya doing on the phone" when N'kisi saw a card of a man with a telephone, and "Can I give you a hug" with one of a couple embracing.

Professor Donald Broom, of the University of Cambridge's School of Veterinary Medicine, said: "The more we look at the cognitive abilities of animals, the more advanced they appear, and the biggest leap of all has been with parrots."

Alison Hales, of the World Parrot Trust, told BBC News Online: "N'kisi's amazing vocabulary and sense of humour should make everyone who has a pet parrot consider whether they are meeting its needs.

"They may not be able to ask directly, but parrots are long-lived, and a bit of research now could mean an improved quality of life for years."

All images courtesy and copyright of Grace Roselli.

Flower-Power Could Help Clear Land mines

:

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years.

"We are really excited about this, even though it's early days. It has considerable potential," Simon Oestergaard, chief executive of developing company Aresa Biodetection, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

According to data compiled by Aresa, more than 100 million land mines have been spread out in 45 countries, hidden killers that often remain for years after a conflict is over.

Oestergaard said the problem of sowing the seeds in a potential land mine could be overcome by clearing strips through a field by conventional methods or by using crop planes.

Currently land mines are mostly removed by putting a stick into the ground to locate the mine, then removing it and detonating it. Dogs and metal detectors are also often used.

"We don't think our invention will completely replace other methods. The main target of this product is soil that will be used for different agricultural activities," Oestergaard said.

Although there are no official figures for the number of victims of land mines, peace activists say tens of thousands are injured, maimed or killed each year.

Aresa's invention, based on research at the Institute of Molecular Biology at Copenhagen University, uses a plant's normal reaction to turn red or brown when subjected to stressful conditions such as cold or drought, but has genetically coded it to react only to nitrogen-dioxide.

TESTS START THIS YEAR

Aresa has succeeded in growing the genetically modified plant and hopes to launch restricted tests this year and to apply for field tests in Denmark and abroad after that.

Oestergaard said a prototype could be on the market within a couple of years but he declined to give a more specific date.

The use of land mines was outlawed in the 1997 Ottawa Convention and more than 90 countries committed themselves last year to cleaning up the debris of war to reduce the number of civilian casualties from munitions left by armed conflicts.

Aresa, a private company, is currently seeking strategic partners to speed up its development, both through financial and intellectual support, and has filed for intellectual property protection under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

Oestergaard said Aresa's scientists were not the only ones trying to use genetically modified plants to detect land mines but its research was entirely independent from other projects.

It hopes to use the Thale Cress also for detecting and cleaning soil contaminated by heavy metals such as lead, copper, zinc and chromium, a major source of pollution in many industrialized countries.

Oestergaard said the modified weed was infertile and unable to spread its seeds, meaning the risk was minimal that the plant would spread into unwanted areas.

Solving and creating captchas with free porn

Cory Doctorow writes:

Someone told me about an ingenious way that spammers were cracking "captchas" -- the distorted graphic words that a human being has to key into a box before Yahoo and Hotmail and similar services will give her a free email account. The idea is to require a human being and so prevent spammers from automatically generating millions of free email accounts.

The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.

Now, chances are that they didn't need to do this, since optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve.

My cow-orker Seth Schoen points out that human-generated captchas are much harder to solve: say, picking out a photo of an animal, at a funny angle, in a cage, and challenging attackers to correctly identify it. People can do so readily, machines probably can't.

Except, of course, that getting people to pick out pix of animals at funny angles doesn't scale. Unless, of course, you offered them free porn to do so ("Want free porn Identify the animal in this cage!").

Which suggests a curious future, where commodity pornography, in great quantities, is used to incent human actors to generate and solve Turing tests like captchas in similarily great quantities.

The Giant Wooden Horse Did It!

Mark Rasch, Security Focus, writes:

According to Greek mythology, the seer Laocoon, a priest of Apollo, warned the residents of Troy against accepting into their city the giant wooden horse designed by Odysseus and created by the architect Epeius. His famous warning, "Trojans, trust not the horse. Whatever it be, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts," applies equally today to importing unknown files as it did to the Trojans 4,000 years ago.

We think we know all about the dangers of Trojan horses, but there is a new and more dangerous legal wrinkle to consider. In the past few months, a couple of people in England were acquitted based upon the so-called "Trojan defense" -- what we criminal lawyers used to call the "SODDI" defense: Some Other Dude Did It.

The Trojan defense presents two equally frightening problems: the possibilities of acquitting the guilty, or convicting the innocent.

In the first case, given the nature of electronic evidence, virtually all computer crime prosecutions rely on "circumstantial" evidence. To prove that John Doe, for example hacked into ABC company, you collect IP history logs and other corroborating data, maybe engage in an IRC chat with John Doe, get a warrant or subpoena for his ISP information, show a pattern of activity consistent with the hacking, and then (if you are a law enforcement agent) get a warrant to kick in Mr. Doe's door and seize his computer. If the forensic examination of the computer shows hacking files, access to hacking sites, relevant e-mail, and even versions of the malicious code, it's a slam-dunk case for conviction. Right

Trouble in the UK

But what if, in addition to all of this "evidence," you also find the existence of a Trojan horse server -- say, a version of Optix Pro or another remote access program. Does the mere existence of such a program provide a Get Out of Jail Free card Probably not. However, given the ephemeral nature of electronic evidence, and the fact that it can always be altered, how confident would you be that Doe was in fact guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

The higher the hacker's profile, the more attractive a target he or she may make for other hackers. And after all, if you were a hacker, would you want to store your contraband files on your own machine, or, like the cuckoo, would you keep your eggs in another bird's nest Such "file parking" strategies have been used by hackers for years.

In October, 2002 Julian Green was arrested in Devon, England after police searched his home PC and found examples of child pornography. ISP had logs identified Green as the person responsible for the downloads, and the existence of the child porn on his PC seemed to be all the corroboration the constable would have needed to obtain a conviction.

However, a defense forensic expert also found evidence that there were Trojans planted on Green's computer that were designed to piggyback his browser, and log into porn sites. The Trojans probably were downloaded as e-mail attachments -- made all the more likely by the fact that Green had a teenage son. Unable to definitively prove that Green knowingly and intentionally downloaded the files, the prosecution dismissed the charges.

Similarly, Aaron Caffrey, a 19-year-old hacker, was charged in Southwark Crown Court with carrying out a denial of service attack on the computers of the port of Houston, Texas on September 20, 2001 -- less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The port's webserver was frozen, and ISP logs traced the source of the attack to Caffrey's computer.

Unlike Green's case, a forensic audit of Caffrey's computer showed no trace of a Trojan. At his trial, Caffrey simply argued that a Trojan could have been responsible, and that the government could not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury agreed, and acquitted Caffrey in October, 2003.

Trojan Extortions

In late December, 2003 companies around the world began to report a new kind of cyber-attack that had been apparently going on for about a year. Cyber extortionists (reportedly from Eastern Europe) threatened to "plant" child pornography on their computers and then call the cops if they didn't agree to pay a small fee. Unless the recipient pays a nominal amount ($30), the hacker claims he will either wipe the hard drive or plant kiddie porn. The possibility of Trojans and the relative ease with which they could be used to promulgate just such an attack made the threats credible.

The two British cases illustrate the problems with the Trojan defense: not only does it make it difficult to definitively prove guilt with electronic evidence, but it is relatively easy to manufacture and plant electronic evidence consistent with guilt. In fact, with a few skills and tools, not only could you plant such evidence, but you could do so in such a way as to be virtually undetected, and so that it would be virtually impossible to determine that your target was not guilty.

The very Trojan planted to launch the attack or download the incriminating files may be designed to self destruct and wipe itself from the hard drive. It would be almost impossible to overcome the circumstantial evidence pointing to your guilt. With sentencing guidelines becoming ever more draconian for computer related offenses, it is only a matter of time before not only cyber extortion but cyber set-ups become reality, if they aren't already.

Of course, good information security practices help in this regard. Preventing the Trojans from entering in the first place, scanning for malware, monitoring for unusual activity and spam filtering all can help. Audit logging and reviewing can also help. Similarly, strong authentication and access control might prevent such activity. Yet another reason to do what the security professionals have been arguing for years.

As for Laocoon, the first to issue an advisory on the Trojan horse danger, his warning to the Trojans violated the wishes of Poseiden, so the gods sent serpents to kill him and his sons. This proved another axiom in law: no good deed goes unpunished.

1,110% Markup on Digium FXO Card

The $99.95 Digium Wildcard X100P single port FXO card is nothing more than an Intel chipset Voice/Data/Fax PCI modem, available from Copmuter Geeks for $8.99

joakimsen said, "They change the PCI vendor ID via a resistor, simply modify one byte of the source code and it will detect it as the X100P." Realty Dan adds, "Looking at your modified source code, the change from 0x8085 to 0x8086 [in zaptel/wcfxo.c] appears to be the one byte you referred to earlier. The resistor change was apparently used to produce the revised "pseudo-vendor" code in the much more expensive Digium card. This was an obvious move to make sure the cheaper card would not be recognized and, therefore, unusable. Hardly a way for a company to gain support and customer loyalty."

iChatnaked

R.I.P. Kodaks 35mm Cameras, APS

BBC reports:

35mm Camera has reached the end of its role. The album seems to be closing on the era of taking photographs using film.

The sad news came with the announcement from Kodak, the firm which gave the world the $1 Brownie, and thus was largely responsible for getting the planet pointing and snapping, that it will no longer sell 35mm cameras in the US or Western Europe.

While it will still make film, for those who cling to fond traditions, the company also announced the passing of APS, its young offspring which had tried to broaden the company's horizons in the mid 90s.

35mm Camera joins a growing list of victims of technology - gramophones, VCRs and typewriters - that is above all concerned with the ascendance of ones and zeroes. For the first time in 2003 in the US, more digital cameras were bought than traditional film cameras.

Although Kodak is nowadays better known for making film than cameras, the symbolism of the firm which in 1888 invited the world to "press the button, we do the rest" could not be clearer. If everyone has nifty digital cameras in their mobile phones, who needs to pay for film which then needs developing and printing

Ultimately, even the handiness of the little plastic films tubs for storing unused foreign coins is unlikely to offer much of a salvation.

Friends of 35mm Camera might have seen the writing on the wall when Kodak announced last year it was ceasing production of slide projectors. The writing, perhaps, but not the holiday snaps.

35mm Camera is survived by its controversial sibling, Disposable Camera, who despite being a popular character at parties has never quite found the gravitas of its other family members.

No flowers.

Teenage girl 'has X-ray vision'

BBC reports:

Scientists in Russia are baffled by a girl who apparently has X-ray vision and can see inside human bodies.

Reports say 16-year-old Natalia Demkina has been tested by doctors at the children's hospital in Saransk and they can't explain her strange talent.

Natalia, who can describe the inside of bodies in detail, said she was pleased the doctors didn't think she was lying.

But she claims to be worried "that they might be hiding something from me about why I can see through objects".

Spooky talent!

Natalia's apparent spooky talent has caught the imagination of the Russian public.

Her mother, Tatiana Vladimirovna, said: "I knew she was a talented girl. When she started to claim she sees through things, that worried me."

New air software after near miss

BBC reports:

Computer systems which direct Britain's air traffic are to be changed after a near-miss between two passenger planes over Wales, according to reports.

A mix-up at the national air traffic control centre at Swanwick in Hampshire put the two jets on a collision course in October 2002, Computer Weekly said.

A cockpit collision avoidance system alerted the Virgin pilot to the danger and he lifted his plane clear.

Air traffic control bosses said new software will be in place next month.

'High' risk

Computer Weekly said the changes were prompted by the near-miss 15 months ago, between a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 and a Delta Airlines Boeing 767.

It said the controller thought his instructions to the pilots of the aircraft would direct the planes away from each other.

But the opposite happened, because he had mistakenly transposed identifying data on the positions of the two aircraft.

As he tried to force the jets apart he brought them closer together, the magazine said.

The publication added that the pilot of the Virgin plane, flying into Heathrow from New York, assessed the risk of a collision with the Boeing 767 as "high".

At one point, the Virgin plane was just 100 ft above the 767 and separated laterally by 1.8 nautical miles - in breach of the legal minimum distance between aircraft.

National Air Traffic Services (Nats) - which manages the skies above Britain - brought in new procedures after the near-miss, Computer Weekly said.

'No repeat'

Nats said that software changes would be made next month following "an extensive design and test programme".

The general manager at Swanwick, Paul Louden, told BBC Radio Five Live the near-miss happened when a controller became confused about the position of the two planes.

He said changes had been made immediately after the incident to make sure that there could be no repeat.

"We have set in train a procdeural system so that actually the confusion could not repeat and we have now strengthened that by going through this process with the software change."

Finns miss death in tax office

BBC reports:

A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.

The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.

The head of personnel at the office in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, said the man's closest colleagues had been out at meetings when he died.

He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful - and procedures would have to be reviewed.

'Coincidences'

According to the Finnish tabloid newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Monday, co-workers had assumed the dead man - a tax auditor - was silently poring over returns.

"The reason for this was caused by many coincidences," Anita Wickstroem, director at the Helsinki tax office, told AFP news agency.

"He was very much working alone and often visiting companies, while his friends and colleagues who used to have lunch or coffee with him were busy in meetings or outside the office at the time," she added.

There were about 100 other staff in the auditing department on the same floor the dead tax official worked on.

Finnish citizens pay among the highest taxes in the world, but enjoy one of the best welfare systems.

JOICARDS

by Joi Ito

Vietcong Starbucks Remix

(CrapHound via BoginBoing)

No Talking. No Fun. It's Called a Vacation.

S-H-H-H-H! Participants in the retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center in the Colorado Rockies observe the formal Zen Buddhist dining ritual known as oryoki. (Kevin Moloney for The New York Times)

KAREN ROBINOVITZ, The New York Times, writes:

IGHT after the new year, Tracey Ross, owner of the Los Angeles boutique that bears her name, turned in her Manolo Blahniks for Nike hiking sneakers and headed out to the mountains of Calabasas, Calif., to check into the Ashram, a boot camp-like spa where the motto is "To become, we overcome."

For seven days, Ms. Ross, 42, had to wake at 5:45 a.m. to do yoga before breakfast (a k a one scrambled egg, three slices of apple and herbal tea), hike for hours up a trail that previous guests like Oprah Winfrey had named Heartbreak Hill, ("It's straight up and so unforgiving," Ms. Ross said), grab lunch (six pieces of vegetable sushi with brown rice or a salad consisting of one apple and tofu yogurt dressing, along with three almonds), and then endure five more hours of intense physical activity — ranging from aqua aerobics to weight training — before having a bowl of lentil soup for dinner and crawling into bed to pass out. She endured blisters, an array of aches and pains, chapped lips and no-frill accommodations that were nothing like her experiences at the top-tier hotels she normally frequents. For this she paid $3,500. And she called it a vacation.

"I needed a timeout from my busy life," she said. "I can't get that in St. Barts, where I wind up shopping and going out every night. I needed to get back to the basics and nature. I needed sweating and a sense of accomplishment, not to mention a week without makeup and getting dressed up."

Ms. Ross is hardly alone. Many travelers these days seem to be swapping Frette sheets and 24-hour room service for shared dorm rooms and 1,000-calorie-a-day diets. They are heading to places like the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, an ayurvedic medicine-yoga-meditation-fasting oasis in Patagonia, Ariz., ($1,420 for a seven-day stay ). They are signing up with Vladi, a German company that offers stays on the remote island off Chile where Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for "Robinson Crusoe," was marooned; the package features a chance to camp in the cave where Selkirk survived for nearly five years ($140 a day, plus $250 for a cave survival kit). They are going on retreats to the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, Calif., where talking is forbidden and sitting is an all-day activity ($400 and up a week). They're meditating, handling kitchen duties, and sleeping in tents at the Shambhala Mountain Center, a spiritual retreat in the Colorado Rockies ($200 for a weekend to $1,805 for a month). And they are trying to book a room at the Ashram, where there is a six-month waiting list for people who want nothing more than to deprive themselves of all the comforts of modern life.

"There is an enormous trend of people who have the need to get out and do something different. They're looking for any kind of escape, and if that means, `beat me up a little bit,' so be it," said Gary Mansour of Mansour Travel in Beverly Hills. "The point is to work your system to the point where you feel purified."

After a taxing 2003, not to mention a gluttonous holiday season, Sally Narkis, 35, of Hoboken, N.J., will be vacationing later this month at We Care, a holistic health center in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., where fasting and daily colonics are the agenda. She has never done anything like this before but feels that starving the body is the best way to feed the soul. "I get funny looks when I tell people I'm off to starve in the desert," she said. "First of all, why starve yourself And why pay for it But spiritually, I think this will give me the clarity and path to inner awareness that I'm looking for — and won't find in Cabo San Lucas."

That may be why even many of the country's best-known spas, like the Canyon Ranch chain, Miraval near Tucson and the Greenhouse Spa in Arlington, Tex., have added strenuous activities in recent years, including Navy Seals-type training, sweat lodges and Army-style ropes courses to meet the demands of their challenge-seeking guests. Of course, such exhausting activities typically last only an hour or two, after which guests return to the extreme pampering of the traditional spa vacation. (Ultramoisturizing body wrap, anyone)

"We've added more demanding options in the last three years," said Amy McDonald, director of the spa and program development at Miraval, "partially because more men were coming to the spa, and they wanted to climb walls, walk across wires, jump off a telephone pole and do physically intensive things. And when the women saw the men push themselves, they wanted it, too. We call it embracing your inner Everest. Being brought to the physical edge brings out a lot of emotion. And the more of these things we add, the more people sign up for them."

"Being deprived of basic luxuries makes me appreciate the little things and let go of stress, commotion and the things I think of as important, like the need to go to a nice restaurant or spend $500 on a bag," said Pam Flakowitz, 33, the marketing director for American Express in New York. In December 2002, she stayed a week in the cramped quarters of Body & Soul Adventures on Brazil's Ilha Grande, where each day she kayaked on waters framed by jungles and rain forests, all on a daily diet of 1,200 calories. She had no modern conveniences, no telephone or computer access, no contact with the outside world.

"I cried the first three days, thinking, `What did I do to myself' All I wanted was a glass of wine and a poolside massage, but in the end, I realized it was so much better than a spa," Ms. Flakowitz said. In fact, she returned in July and has booked another trip in the spring.

Body & Soul charges $2,850 for a week on the island.

PHYSICALLY, it's hard, but mentally, it's harder," said Nicole Slaven, 32, a recipe developer at Martha Stewart Living. She went to the Boulder Outdoor Survival School two years ago just to see if she could last a week with nothing more than a poncho, a blanket, a knife and a small packet of food. On the first night, hoping to find a dry patch a land to sleep on, she had to settle for a plastic garbage bag. For the rest of the week, she did without showers, toilets and electricity.

"I could go to Mexico and sit on a beach any time, but I wanted to unwind in a different way," she said. "After a week in Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, where no one could care less about what you wear or what kind of shoes you have, I came home with a keener sense of self and a sharper mind. It was empowering to have a new set of skills, even if I can't make use of them on the Upper East Side of Manhattan."

Josh Bernstein, president of Boulder Outdoor in Colorado, said he believed that "since 9/11, people have re-evaluated what's important, and that applies to their vacation time."

"Ten years ago, it was a fringe group of outdoor adventurers," he added. "Today, mainstream people who have lavish lifestyles are coming to find a way to get to know themselves more deeply."

They also want a challenge. "There's a new need people have to prove themselves," said Jane Buckingham, president of Youth Intelligence, a trend-forecasting firm. "Can I fast for three days Can I be quiet for a long time"

Although Gabby Tana, a film producer who lives in Manhattan, has been to some of the most elegant spas in the world, including the Golden Door in California and Quiberon in Brittany, she said that none had been as healing as her stay at the Lucky Dog Lodge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The $1,200, weeklong yoga retreat involves sharing a bathroom with other guests, cleaning and cooking duties, silence during meals and five hours of yoga a day.

"The fact that you don't feel like you're being indulgent is the greatest indulgence," said Ms. Tana, 40, who first embarked on this minimalist journey five years ago. "It's so restorative, especially from the film industry, where it's all about being in Maui over Christmas and vacations where you have wait in lines to get a chaise in a prime location. Plus, there's no `I'll have that extra helping of dessert because I'm on vacation' feeling. It's all about being healthy. You come home feeling like a good person, not a bad person."

Ms. Tana felt so strongly about her escape that three years ago, she dragged along her friend Andrea Blanch, a fashion photographer for Vogue, Rolling Stone and Revlon. "She is all about luxury," said Ms. Tana. "I had to practically pack her bags for her as she kicked and screamed. She's been back three times since."

Ms. Tana added: "I will always like four-star luxe living. It was challenging for me to rough it and not speak for periods of time, but the results made up for it. I left with such an amazing feeling that, although I complained about little things, like hearing other people go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, "I returned refreshed."

"It was freeing," she continued. "So what if it meant having to make my own bed"

Although Ms. Tana, said she was happy to return to her old life, where she is free to talk — "loudly" — whenever she feels like it, others say they have come back transformed by the process.

Dave Platter, 32, once a partner at Quinn & Company, a public relations firm, was hardly the spiritual, New-Age type when he decided to spend a week in silence at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., last January. "I was so busy. I never stopped. My whole life was talk, talk, talk. I was always entertaining others, managing a staff, and I needed some time to myself. A friend suggested this, and I figured, why not experiment," said Mr. Platter, whose previous meditation experience was, "five minutes here and there."

Although his friends thought he was losing his mind and joining a cult, Mr. Platter, never a fan of New Year's Eve parties, went to Insight to embrace 2003. "I was oblivious to what I was getting myself into. It seemed weird at first. People were really serious about it. The vibe was morose. For days, I fantasized about breaking out and talking to someone or going for a beer," he said.

Then, he said, by Day 4 an incredible thing happened. "I kind of enjoyed it. I stopped being worried about what everyone else was thinking and doing, and I zoned in on myself. It was suddenly a relief to not have to try to be anything for someone else."

The experience was an awakening one. When he came home, he sold his share of his business, sold his apartment, got back together with his ex-girlfriend (to whom he proposed) and decided to do something more meaningful.

"You fill your life up with so much stuff you don't need — attitudes about work, relationships," said Mr. Platter, who now does public relations work for the Shambhala Mountain Center. "My retreat gave me time to reflect and see what's really important and what's driving me. It sounds hokey, but I saw things about myself I never knew."

Brooklyn's Revival Is Betting on the Nets

CHARLES V. BAGLI and RICHARD SANDOMIR, The New York Times, report:

The revival of Brooklyn has been painfully slow, an effort eked out neighborhood by neighborhood, with chic new restaurants in Fort Greene, artists' lofts in Williamsburg, new businesses in industrial Red Hook and the transformation of derelict factory buildings into million-dollar condominiums in an area with the unlikely name of Dumbo.

But the prospect of a professional basketball team moving across two rivers to Brooklyn seemed, until recently, as remote as shipbuilding returning to the sprawling Brooklyn Navy Yard complex. Now, Bruce Ratner, the developer, is negotiating to buy the New Jersey Nets and install the team in a glamorous new home designed by a world-renowned architect at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

For many residents, politicians and economists, a move by the Nets to Brooklyn would crystallize the rejuvenation of the borough and repudiate a 50-year cycle of decline that saw the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957, the closing of the Navy Yard, the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the riots during the blackout of 1977.

``It would cap the rebirth of Brooklyn,'' said Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union who lives in Flatbush. ``You'd heal some of the old wounds from the Dodgers having left, and people would discover all the other changes in Brooklyn.''

The borough's resurgence will probably continue whether Mr. Ratner and his investors succeed in his effort to buy the Nets. Mr. Ratner, who has bid about $300 million, is vying with a New Jersey group headed by Charles Kushner, a developer, and Senator Jon Corzine that intends to keep the team at its current home in New Jersey. Mr. Kushner has offered $267.5 million for the team and suggested that he may yet raise his bid.

``We're reviewing all the financial information and due diligence to see if an adjustment in price is warranted,'' Mr. Kushner said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. ``I can tell you that I believe it's not done.''

Even if Mr. Ratner did win the auction and get the necessary approval of the National Basketball Association, he would still face some daunting challenges in trying to move the team to Brooklyn. He wants to move the Nets to a $435 million, 19,000-seat glass-walled arena over Long Island Rail Road yards. The arena would be the centerpiece of a $2.5 billion commercial and residential development that would stretch for three blocks along Atlantic Avenue, one of the borough's two main thoroughfares.

Mr. Ratner needs the state to condemn the properties not already owned by the railroad, as well as up to $150 million in government funds for streets and rail connections. The project faces stringent environmental reviews and local opposition, much of it from people who moved into what was a rough neighborhood 10 and 20 years ago and made it better.

``He is proposing to knock out a significant portion of Prospect Heights to create Ratnerville,'' said Patty Hagan, a leader of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition and a 25-year resident. ``This neighborhood revived in a gradual, organic way, almost building by building. It's solid. The businesses that risked opening here have grown with the community.''

But elsewhere the idea of a professional team moving into Brooklyn is dazzling. Max Stephenson, manager of the nearby Modells sports store at Flatbush and Atlantic, envisions the team in a great crosstown matchup against the Knicks.

``It would be great rivalry,'' Mr. Stephenson said. ``We could have a subway basketball series.''

The borough's resurgence mirrors the revival of other areas of the city like parts of the South Bronx and Harlem. But in Brooklyn that transformation seems more pronounced. College graduates now often steer toward Brooklyn instead of Manhattan; chefs at some of Manhattan's finer restaurants regularly open up restaurants across the river, and companies like the Bank of New York are moving large numbers of employees there, signaling the return of the borough as a commercial hub.

``Over the last 20 years, Brooklyn has crawled along,'' said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the New York City Partnership, who lives in Bay Ridge. ``This would catapult us into being a destination location for business.''

Many Brooklynites mark the beginning the borough's downward slide to 1957, when Walter O'Malley decided to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles. In the decades that followed, the Navy yard closed. Many of the borough's breweries and printers also shut down or moved. Between 1961 and 1976, 170 major manufacturers left Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope were among the first neighborhoods to turn around, benefiting from the resurgence of Lower Manhattan in the 1980's as young people, artists and Wall Street executives renovated brownstones.

The revival spread slowly to other neighborhoods. New businesses and small manufacturers moved into South Brooklyn. Mr. Ratner, who is also planning to build a new headquarters for The New York Times in Manhattan, is completing another big complex in Brooklyn, Metrotech, a seven-million square foot office development.

The Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league team, recently took up residence at a new ballpark in Coney Island. Now even the Cunard Line wants to bring the Queen Mary II, the first trans-Atlantic liner built in 30 years, to a new passenger terminal at the foot of Atlantic Avenue.

Coincidentally, the Nets would be based at the same site that Walter O'Malley wanted as a new home for the Dodgers before moving the team to California.

``To have a team on the same corner where Walter O'Malley wanted to build a domed stadium would close the sorry chapter on the Dodgers leaving,'' said Michael Shapiro, author of ``The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Last Pennant Race Together.'' ``It would be enormous.''

Over at Borough Hall, Brooklyn's most voluble cheerleader awaits word of a deal.

Watchmaker With Time to Lose

From the JPL Website:

They said it couldn't be done. But in the sleepy little town of Montrose, California, nestled in the hills surrounding JPL, master watchmaker Garo Anserlian of Executive Jewelers is perfecting a timepiece for hundreds of Earthlings bound to Mars' irregular day. Past the glass cases of what looks like an ordinary jewelry store is a workshop where watches are losing 39 minutes a day.

Rover controllers have to monitor Spirit (and soon, Opportunity) all the time; this doesn't just mean 24 hours a day " it means 24 hours, 39 minutes a day. The martian day is longer than Earth's, but this minimal variance can amount to physical and mental fatigue. Every day, team members are reporting to work 39 minutes later than the previous day.

"Everything on this mission is based on local solar time on Mars," said Julie Townsend, Mars Exploration Rover avionics systems engineer. "From home, during the mission practice tests, it was very difficult to constantly translate Earth time to Mars time."

Townsend and her co-worker Scott Doudrick, a systems engineer on the project, set out to find a solution for this otherwordly problem. The pair began to ask watchmakers to tackle the challenge but each one turned them away, saying that it couldn't be done unless they placed a large order (10,000 plus) for quartz-controlled watches; they insisted that attempting to convert mechanical watches was not possible.

A neighborhood store located on a strip of distinct specialty shops "not a chain store in sight " Garo's workshop is far from a cookie-cutter assembly line. Tables covered with disassembled watches and clocks seem to mirror the intent watchmaker's mind; taking things apart and fixing them is, for him, second nature.

"When I do something I like to know the maximum about it," he stressed. "This is not just a hobby, it is my career."

A man who found his passion at the age of eight, an underling to his father, now guides his own young apprentice, nine-year-old son, David. Clearly enamored of his father, David relayed his own novice clock-making prowess and declared that he would one day take over the store. When he does inherit the business, he will have benefited from his father's finely honed skills, acquired under master watch and clockmakers in Switzerland and Germany.

Garo acknowledged that the Mars watch request is the strangest he has ever received. It took him about two months to design, fine-tune and streamline the process that would keep the watch on Mars time.

"Since I was a young child I've put my heart into making very precise time pieces, now I was being asked to create a watch that was slow on purpose " it was going to be a challenge if it was even possible," Garo said. "I spent more than $1,000 trying to figure this out " damaging watches, trying different parts, just searching for a way."

Watchmaking is a careful process that involves very small parts and wheels. In order to make the watches useful to the Mars Exploration Rover team, Garo had to physically attach additional specific lead weights thus precisely altering the movement of the wheels and hands on certain existing famous-maker wristwatches. Working on the 21-jeweled self-winding mechanical wristwatches was sometimes frustrating.

"At one point my helpers and I looked at each other and said 'forget it, we're wasting time and money.'" But Townsend and Doudrick wouldn't let him quit. The two came by his shop every week, assuring him that his highly anticipated watches would be a valuable asset to the team.

Garo finished Doudrick's watch first and after initial testing, discovered that it was off by no more than ten seconds in 24 hours Earth time " an amazingly accurate feat for an entirely mechanical watch. Now, when the store is fully staffed, the experts can retrofit and thus create about ten watches per day. After he accommodates all rover team members who wish to own a custom-made Mars watch, he will market his patented rarity to the public.

Garo watched with million of others as mission control described Spirit's near-perfect landing. But his connection to the mission was personal.

"I felt proud; I got goosebumps," he said. "I saw that some of them had two watches on and I thought, one of them was mine! I was proud as an American that it landed and secondly that my watches will be used."

Used, indeed, by a team of scientists and engineers who looked to a truly old world craft for a solution to a very modern problem. And like the rover team, that faced countless challenges and criticism, Garo gets to say, "I told you so" to those who said it couldn't be done.

Artist on Acid

http://www.cowboybooks.com.au/html/acidtrip1.html

'I am... everything is... changed... they're calling... your face... interwoven... who is...' Patient mumbles inaudibly to a tune (sounds like 'Thanks for the memory). He changes medium to Tempera.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Photoshop Blocks Currency Images

WASHINGTON (AP) - Adobe Systems Inc. acknowledged Friday it quietly added technology to the world's best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world's major currencies.

The unusual concession has angered scores of customers.

Adobe, the world's leading vendor for graphics software, said the secretive technology "would have minimal impact on honest customers." It generates a warning message when someone tries to make digital copies of some currencies.

The U.S. Federal Reserve and other organizations that worked on the technology said they could not disclose how it works and would not name which other software companies include it in their products. They cited concerns that counterfeiters would try to defeat it.

"We sort of knew this would come out eventually," Adobe spokesman Russell Brady said. "We can't really talk about the technology itself."

A Microsoft Corp. spokesman, Jim Desler, said the technology was not built into versions of its dominant Windows operating system.

Rival graphics software by Taiwan-based Ulead Systems Inc. also blocks customers from making copies of currency.

Experts said the decision by Adobe represents one of the rare occasions when the U.S. technology industry has agreed to include third-party software code into commercial products at the request of government and finance officials.

Adobe revealed it added the technology after a customer complained in an online support forum about mysterious behavior by the new $649 "Photoshop CS" software when opening an image of a U.S. $20 bill.

Kevin Connor, Adobe's product management director, said the company did not disclose the technology at the request of international bankers. He said Adobe may add the detection mechanism to its other products.

"The average consumer is never going to encounter this in their daily use," Connor said. "It just didn't seem like something meaningful to communicate."

Angry customers have flooded Adobe's Internet message boards with complaints about censorship and concerns over future restrictions on other types of images, such as copyrighted or adult material.

"I don't believe this. This shocks me," said Stephen M. Burns, president of the Photoshop users group in San Diego. "Artists don't like to be limited in what they can do with their tools. Let the U.S. government or whoever is involved deal with this, but don't take the powers of the government and place them into a commercial software package."

Connor said the company's decision to use the technology was "not a step down the road towards Adobe becoming Big Brother."

Adobe said the technology slows its software's performance "just a fraction of a second" and urged customers to report unexpected glitches. It said there may be room for improvement.

The technology was designed recently by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, a consortium of 27 central banks in the United States, England, Japan, Canada and across the European Union, where there already is a formal proposal to require all software companies to include similar anti-counterfeit technology.

"The industry has been very open to understanding the nature of the problem," said Richard Wall, the Bank of Canada's representative to the counterfeit deterrence group. "We're very happy with the response."

Some policy experts were divided on the technology. Bruce Schneier, an expert on security and privacy, praised the anti-counterfeit technology.

Another security expert, Gene Spafford of Purdue University, said Adobe should have notified its customers prominently. He wondered how closely Adobe was permitted to study the technology's inner-workings to ensure it was stable and performed as advertised.

"If I were the paranoid-conspiracy type, I would speculate that since it's not Adobe's software, what else is it doing" Spafford said.

ON THE NET

Adobe Systems: www.adobe.com
Facts about banknote images: www.rulesforuse.org
Bureau of Engraving & Printing: www.moneyfactory.com

Niue may return to New Zealand rule

DAVID FISHER IN NIUE, Sunday Star Times (NZ), reports:

Niue's status as a nation is under question after the cyclone that hit the tiny Pacific nation, causing more than $50 million damage.

In the aftermath of the storm, some island leaders are calling for a return to New Zealand governance, and expect the population to fall from about 1200 native Niueans to an unsustainable 500 people.

Such a drop would likely render the nation unviable. Niue currently receives $8m in aid a year from New Zealand, the equivalent of a cash hand-out of around $16,000 per head should the population fall to the predicted 500.

Fears for Niue's political survival come amid the declaration of a major health crisis over asbestos in the air, accusations of looting among destroyed villages and claims that early plans to alert the island's population to the cyclone were called off.

Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff yesterday acknowledged that a population drop could force New Zealand to take over Niue's governance.

Goff said until now, Niueans had been adamant they wanted to retain the status quo - financial and administrative support from New Zealand while retaining their own sovereignty.

But, as the smallest independent state in the world, Goff said the Niuean population was comparable to an average-sized New Zealand secondary school and so its constitutional status remained "under review".

Goff gave a formal directive to New Zealand government departments last year - not publicly announced at the time - to assist Niue, treating it as an extension of New Zealand.

He said if Niue's population continued to drop, economies of scale would become even more difficult to achieve. "We need to acknowledge what the people on Niue want, rather than being seen as a former colonial country imposing our will."

Niue has been self-governing in free association with New Zealand since 1974, and New Zealand has an ongoing responsibility to provide necessary economic and administrative assistance.

Acting premier Toke Talagi said he believed a closer relationship would be formed that would allow Niue to use the machinery of the New Zealand government to perform some public service duties. He said the "administrative" aspect of the 1974 agreement had never been properly defined.

But he cautioned there should be no hasty decisions about Niue returning as part of New Zealand. "If we are going to do that we must go back to the United Nations and say the system they put in place for Niue has failed. We as Niue and New Zealand have failed."

Talagi predicted a dramatic increase in the number of Niueans who would leave for New Zealand.

"Many, I'm sure, have been thinking about options other than living in Niue. Those people who have contemplated leaving will now be resolved to leaving.

"The fact we have free access to New Zealand means that we have that option. It is a blessing and a curse."

A blessing, he said, because it offered access to a more developed nation, but a curse for Niue's future.

Terry Coe, former minister of finance and current MP, said the island should merge with New Zealand in some form.

He predicted the population would drop as low as 500 people. "The morale of people is really quite low . . . people have already started leaving."

He said businesses, already struggling to survive, would collapse if more people left. "Integration has to come. But it is not going to be cheap for New Zealand. To try and go it alone certainly hasn't worked."

He said if the two countries were to merge, people living on Niue needed assurance they would be entitled to all the benefits of New Zealand citizenship including the unemployment benefit and superannuation.

Coe said there were examples in the Pacific of the arrangement Niue and New Zealand could develop. "The Norfolk Island relationship with Australia is a good example."

Yesterday, Talagi called a halt to the clean-up even as it began, on the advice of New Zealand health officials concerned about the danger posed by asbestos.

Many houses destroyed in the cyclone, built by New Zealand before Niue's independence in 1974, contain asbestos in the walls and roofs.

Dr Jason Drelaud, of Occupation Safety and Health, said particles of the deadly substance had been released into the air, and were being added to by locals burning wreckage of roofs and walls.

A lack of rain and strong winds were dispersing it further, he said.

The team sent on Thursday to inspect the asbestos houses was allotted two days by the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry. Yesterday New Zealand high commissioner Sandra Lee Vercoe asked Wellington to let the team stay and train locals.

Drelaud said Niue's 14 main villages would be the first priority. "It is a serious health risk if we can't deal with it immediately. Although families are grieving for loss of life or home, this is the highest priority."

A group of 75 people, kitted out in overalls and respirators, is expected to be trained and to begin work this week collecting asbestos, which is then likely to be shipped back to New Zealand for disposal.

Talagi said: "It will delay our clean-up until we can get rid of the stuff. We have to put everything on hold until it is done."

A radio message was broadcast yesterday afternoon urging people not to burn rubbish, and to stop cleaning up after the cyclone.

An island pastor also broadcast a plea for looting on the island to stop. Shopkeepers spoken to by the Sunday Star-Times said any surviving goods in their stores had been stolen in the hours after the cyclone.

Wrecked houses were also being targeted by looters.

Hui Paola, who returned to live on the island in 1999, said he visited his ruined shop the morning after the cyclone to find people taking stock from the ruins.

"It's a shame . . . people were grabbing everything they could get hold of. I felt sorry for them, I couldn't tell them to leave it alone. When I thought about it afterwards, I realised it was my loss."

Coe, who runs a mechanic's and a grocery store, said he had also been looted. He said people were inside the store at 4am the morning after the cyclone hit, while a fierce storm raged on.

Coe was critical of the warning given before the cyclone. Radio Sunshine broadcast the highest alert - red - at 1pm. But Coe claimed a decision to broadcast the alert at 7pm the night before the cyclone struck had been changed by the disaster committee.

Lee Vercoe said the island had underestimated the cyclone's strength. The warning at 1pm meant many people were still in coastal villages when the storm reached its peak at 1.30pm.

What the ailing record industry can learn from a successful subway musician.

Nicholas Thompson, Washington Monthly, writes:

Every two weeks or so, I pack up my Taylor acoustic guitar, fill my backpack with CDs of my music, and head down into the New York City subways to busk away. I make good money, and I get to watch and study people, too. For example, I can now tell from about 50 feet away whether a woman is likely to give me money.

If she's walking fast, wearing headphones, angrily porting a briefcase, or chasing down one of her children, that's an easy no. She wouldn't throw a dime into Jimi Hendrix's case. Other women, who are more aware of their surroundings, have greater possibility. Usually it boils down to makeup and midriffs. If the woman is decked out, she may look at me, but only to see if I'm looking at her. But if a woman is dressed casually, walking slowly, and thinking about something beside herself, she's likely to listen for at least a few moments, and then I have a decent chance she'll enjoy the music, stop, and maybe buy an album.

This is but one of the lessons I've learned from performing in train stations that I think could be helpful to the floundering music industry, or at least to the many talented musicians stifled by it. These lessons haven't gotten me rich, but I've sold about 500 records in the subways playing sporadically since releasing my new album in January. I make more money down there per hour than I do as a journalist. And while my sales and profits have gone up, the music industry's have gone down. Sales of recorded music in the United States have dropped by more than a 100 million units in the past two years, and, after decades of steady gains, industry revenues have dropped 15 percent over the last three years.

Different experts will give different reasons for the decline. The music industry itself blames its customers, or more specifically young people who download music for free from increasingly popular file-sharing networks. Others, such as Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research, blame competition from video games and other entertainment. Whatever the reason, it's clear that the music industry's old model of doing business isn't working so well in today's market. That old model relied on labels plucking out a handful of bands they believed would sell big, and investing millions of dollars in production, promotion, and marketing to get them the time on the radio dial or the space in the record stores they required to catch fire. The industry defended itself against complaints by saying they were simply meeting the demands of popular taste.

In truth, there was always a tautological element to this argument. The music industry functions like a cartel, and the public's preferences have always been limited by the choices they were given. Now that the market for music has changed, and CD sales are declining, the record industry is hiring lawyers and lobbyists to squelch the new technologies that are changing the music business. Over the last few months, the Recording Industry Association of America has issued hundreds of subpoenas to college kids who swap music over the Internet. Meanwhile, the industry's lobbyists have convinced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), himself a songwriter, to float the idea of allowing companies to remotely slag computers whose owners used them to download movies and songs.

But the industry's efforts are counterproductive. About 60 million people in the United States have already swapped copyrighted material over the Internet, and that number isn't likely to shrink. The times are a changin', and record companies should learn to how to profit in this new environment. With all the modesty required of a guy who doesn't make enough money on a given night to buy front-row seats at a Mariah Carey concert, let me offer a few pointers.

Number One: Drop the price of CDs

When I first started playing in the subways, I experimented with different prices for my albums: $2, $5, $8, $10. I sold slightly more CDs at $2, but far fewer at $8 or $10. The sweet spot seemed to be a price of $5. Later, I gave up pricing my CDs altogether when I got a ticket for selling CDs in the NYC subways. Now I post a sign saying that my CDs are technically free, but they cost something to make, and people should pay what they want. Occasionally someone will take one for free. Sometimes a passerby will drop $20 into my guitar case. But the mean, median, and mode are all, again, $5. This could merely be the measure of what my music is worth. But my strong sense is that five dollars is what people will pay for a CD they like by a musician that they've never heard of. So why does the average CD sell for more than $17 It's not the manufacturing cost. My last album cost me about $1.10 for each CD manufactured. I had high quality work done at every step, from the mastering to the packaging. People who print larger runs have vastly lower costs.

True, recording solo acoustic guitar is vastly easier than a full band, but even industry-produced acoustic guitar albums sell for that price. That means the companies are either reaping cartel prices or most of the money is just going to the layers of middlemen: the redundant producers paid by the hour to fine-tune albums, the marketers, and the promotional photo shoots. If you're U2 or the Rolling Stones and sell millions of albums, such expenses may be perfectly worthwhile. But drooping industry sales figures and my own experience suggest that for the vast majority of artists, the industry is going to have to drop the price of its CDs--maybe not to $5, but certainly closer to that than to $17.

Number Two: Branch out

The beauty of the subway system is that it's about as free a market as there is. If I play good songs that I'm passionate about and that I have down cold, I make money. If I play junk, I don't make a dime. Naturally, though, I've had to learn a few things about how to place myself. The New York City subway has two good places for musicians to perform: the platforms where the trains stop, and the hallways leading between platforms and up to street level. The advantage of a hallway is that everyone passing by hears you for a few seconds; in a platform, you get far fewer people, but they hear you longer. Hallways, it turns out, work great for playing music that's instantly familiar. In my favorite station, there's frequently a talented hallway musician who plays Beatles songs, the kind of music that in three notes can jar a pleasant memory for a huge number of people. The instrumental guitar music I play, on the other hand, is a little unusual. To people who know the genre, it sounds like a poor man's version of Leo Kottke or Michael Hedges. To people who don't know the genre, it's a poor man's version of Duane Allman's Little Martha or Jimmy Page's Bron-y-aur. In any event, it's fairly complicated, and I literally don't make a penny when I try to play in the spot where the Beatles troubadour sings. But on a platform where I have roughly three minutes between trains coming, I can get folks' attention long enough to make some sales.

One might think that my only audience would be the Birkenstock nature-lovers and 14-year-old kids porting around their first guitars--and I do do well with that crowd. But I also do well with middle-aged black couples, 40-year-old white couples with kids, white blue-collar workers, and the Ecuadorian immigrants who sell jewelry in my favorite station. In fact, I have a much better chance of telling whether someone will like the music based on the way that they walk than based on their age, sex, or apparent income.

The music industry tends to divide both bands and audiences into broad, set formats: alt-music, hip-hop, and modern country. There is an obvious reality to these categories, but in truth, they exist largely for the benefit of record companies, which can then narrow and target their promotion efforts. Unfortunately, most bands and artists can't get to first base unless their music fits one of these formats, and there are many other bands and other types of music-like mine-that don't fit into any set genres. Many people's tastes stretch well beyond formats, and might they want to buy some of this music if they heard it. Indeed, it's almost guaranteed that somewhere between these formats, the next big thing in music is brewing. But figuring out how to profitably micro-market heterogeneous bands to scattered audiences is something the music industry has not yet figured out how to do.

Number Three: Embrace file-sharing

Fortunately, the Internet allows a wide audience to inexpensively sample a huge array of music. File-sharing networks like Kazaa, and artists who allow free downloads off their Web pages, are roughly like playing in the subway. The Net allows artists access to a substantial potential audience at almost no marginal cost, while providing listeners with short samples of a wide variety of artists and musical styles they may not hear on the radio with a low investment of time and almost no investment of money.

As I'm writing this, my computer is downloading songs by Nigerian afro-pop innovator Fela Kuti in anticipation of a trip to a museum show about him. Last night, I tried to download music from several artists currently performing in New York to decide if I wanted to see any of them live. Unfortunately, I couldn't find free downloads of most of their music, so I watched a movie instead. I was happy, though, when I saw that someone had downloaded a song off my album.

That's a risk, but it's one worth taking. I profit tremendously when people download my songs. It makes them more likely to pay to come to my concerts. It helps raise my profile and makes it more likely that people will call radio stations to request my songs--which could one day be a source of album sales and my ultimate transition from a Washington Monthly contributing editor into a major music icon.

Big artists do indeed lose with file sharing, and it's their profits on which the industry depends for survival. That's why they're fighting it so hard. But it's a fight they will eventually lose, and that won't be a bad thing either for bands or fans. Eventually, much as the movie industry eventually figured out how to profit from the VCR, record companies should look harder to find ways to make money off of the Internet--probably once they learn to be more nimble and pay more attention to the particular tastes of a diverse audience. Meanwhile, file sharing helps small artists with limited distribution find their audience and make a decent living--a truer expression of the free market in music. If everyone could download tracks from groups playing in their city that weekend, the best band would draw the most fans and a lot of unknown bands would surge. That may scare big groups who have become popular under the current system, but it shouldn't scare fans or scare the industry. Record companies will just have to get better at serving their customers.

Nicholas Thompson is a Washington Monthly contributing editor.His latest CD, Lend Me Your Ears, can be purchased at nickthompson.com.

Photoshop CS Adds Banknote Image Detection, Blocking

Phosphor, on SlashDot, writes "A visitor to the Adobe Photoshop-for-Windows Forum (registration required to post, can log in as guest) has described a curious 'feature' with Photoshop 8 (also known as 'CS'). Seems this latest version of Adobe's flagship product has the built-in ability to detect that an image is of American currency. Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file. Apparently it will also do this with Euro notes; info on other currency is pending."

DIRKON – THE PAPER CAMERA

During the 1970s, magazines published in Communist Czechoslovakia were controlled by the state, like the majority of other enterprises. Very few good magazines were available and were difficult to get hold of, so people would borrow and exchange them when given the opportunity. This also applied to magazines aimed at young people, which was probably one of the reasons why almost everyone from my generation, when we get on to the subject of pinhole cameras, has fond memories of the cut-out paper camera known as Dirkon*, published in 1979 in the magazine ABC mladých technik a pírodovdc [An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists].

Its creators, Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolá and Richard Vyškovský, came up with a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera. It may not be the most practical of devices, but it works!

My first attempt at putting together a paper Dirkon a few years after it came out fell victim to a total lack of patience on my part. Today, twenty years later, I decided that I had to include this unusual pinhole camera in my collection. So I got hold of an old copy of ABC and set to work. This time I was successful, and here [is a] sample photograph. (Instructions at pinhole.cz via BoingBoing)

I.M.F. Says U.S. Debts Threaten World Economy

ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS, The New York Times, report:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund.

Prepared by a team of I.M.F. economists, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration's tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits pose "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.

The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years — "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.

The danger, according to the report, is that the United States' voracious appetite for borrowing could push up global interest rates and thus slow global investment and economic growth.

"Higher borrowing costs abroad would mean that the adverse effects of U.S. fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output," the report said.

White House officials dismissed the report as alarmist, saying that President Bush has already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years. The deficit reached $374 billion last year, a record in dollar terms but not as a share of the total economy, and it is expected to exceed $400 billion this year.

But many international economists said they were pleased that the report raised the issue.

"The I.M.F. is right," said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington. "If those twin deficits — of the federal budget and the trade deficit — continue to grow you are increasing the risk of a day of reckoning when things can get pretty nasty."

Administration officials have made it clear they are not alarmed about the United States' burgeoning external debt or the declining value of the dollar, which has lost more than one-quarter of its value against the euro in the last 18 months and which hit new lows earlier this week.

"Without those tax cuts I do not believe the downturn would have been one of the shortest and shallowest in U.S. history," said John B. Taylor, under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs.

Though the International Monetary Fund has criticized the United States on its budget and trade deficits repeatedly in the last few years, this report was unusually lengthy and pointed. And the I.M.F. went to lengths to publicize the report and seemed intent on getting American attention.

"I think it's encouraging that these are issues that are now at play in the presidential campaign that's just now getting under way," said Charles Collyns, deputy director of the I.M.F.'s Western Hemisphere department. "We're trying to contribute to persuade the climate of public opinion that this is an important issue that has to be dealt with, and political capital will need to be expended."

The I.M.F. has often been accused of being an adjunct of the United States, its largest shareholder.

But in the report, fund economists warned that the long-term fiscal outlook was far grimmer, predicting that underfunding for Social Security and Medicare will lead to shortages as high as $47 trillion over the next 70 years or nearly 500 percent of the current gross domestic product in the coming decades.

Some outside economists remain sanguine, noting that the United States is hardly the only country to run big budget deficits and that the nation's underlying economic conditions continue to be robust.

"Is the U.S. fiscal position unique Probably not," said Kermit L. Schoenholtz, chief economist at Citigroup Global Markets. Japan's budget deficit is much higher than that of the United States, Mr. Schoenholtz said, and those of Germany and France are climbing rapidly.

My Precious

Gollum has a new precious, my precious, and he is not going to let that fat hobbit get his filthy paws on it, will he, my precious (T-Shirts Available)

Long-Term Coffee Consumption Significantly Reduces Type 2 Diabetes Risk

Boston, MA— A study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has found that participants who regularly drank coffee significantly reduced the risk of onset of type 2 diabetes, compared to non-coffee drinking participants. The findings appear in theJanuary 6, 2004 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of the study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses Health Study. Some 41,934 men were tracked from 1986 to 1998 and 84,276 women from1980 to 1998 via food frequency questionnaires every two to four years to assess their intake of both regular and decaffeinated coffee.

During the span of the study, 1,333 new cases of type 2 diabetes were diagnosed in men and 4,085 among the women participants. The researchers also found that for men, those who drank more than six cups of caffeinated coffee per day reduced their risk for type 2 diabetes by more than 50 percent compared to men in the study who didn’t drink coffee. Among the women, those who drank six or more cups per day reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes by nearly 30 percent. These effects were not accounted for by lifestyle factors such as smoking, exercise, or obesity.  Decaffeinated coffee was also beneficial, but its effects were weaker than regular coffee.

The researchers note that caffeine, the best known ingredient in regular coffee, is known to raise blood sugar and increase energy expenditure in the short-term, but its long-term effects are not well understood.  Coffee (both regular and decaffeinated) has lots of antioxidants like chlorogenic acid (one of the compounds responsible for the coffee flavor) and magnesium.  These ingredients can actually improve sensitivity to insulin and may contribute to lowering risk of type 2 diabetes.

“This is good news for coffee drinkers, however it doesn’t mean everyone should run out for a latté,” said Frank Hu, senior author of the study and an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We still don’t know exactly why coffee is beneficial for diabetes, and more research is clearly needed.” 

The research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

First Color Image From Mars

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has captured its first color image of Mars. It is the highest resolution picture ever taken of another planet. (JPL/NASA; Jan 6, 2004)

iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux

Andrew Orlowski, The Register (UK), reports:

Exclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store on their GNU/Linux computers.

"We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use," Johansen told The Register via email.

Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format. This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.

But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made this completely seamless, integrating it with theVideoLAN streaming free software project.

How it works
Johansen deduced that the system key that locks the locked music to a single Windows computer is derived from four factors: the serial number of the C: drive, the system BIOS version, the CPU name and the Windows Product ID.

"When you run the VideoLAN Client under Windows it will write the user key to a file. The user key is system independent and can thus be used by the GNU/Linux version of VLC," he explains.

While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself noted recently.

"The RIAA can at any time change the DRM rules," he wrote in November, "and considering their history, it's likely that they will when the majority of consumers have embraced DRM and non-DRM products have been phased out. Some DVDs today include commercials which can't be skipped using 'sanctioned' players. If the RIAA forces Apple to include commercials, what excuses will the Mac zealots come up with 'It's a good compromise'"

Reaction
"The restrictions are very frustrating for consumers, and frankly, are unnecessary," Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred Von Lohmann told The Register.

"Every song on iTunes Music Store has been available on the Peer to Peer networks within four hours. All the DRM does is frustrate legitimate consumers; it doesn't stop file sharing," he says. "The real innovation of the last several years was Kazaa and the other file sharing applications. These are leaps and bounds more relevant than iTunes Music Store."

Although the number of downloaders has diminished in the face of lawsuits by the RIAA, tens of millions of Internet users continue to share music on the P2P networks, dwarfing the number of locked-music downloads from DRM stores such as Apple's iTMS.

Apple is widely expected to announce more locked music playback hardware at the MacWorld show in San Francisco this week. But with support growing for flat fee licensing models even amongst record industry executives, today'sDRM Goldrush (and the ensuing iTunes vs Windows Media war) could be a very short lived skirmish.

Johansen broke the CSS encryption scheme on DVDs - a case the Norwegian government finally let go - so he could watch a movie that he'd legitimately purchased on his Linux PC. Now millions of Linux users can do the same with iTunes locked music. You can download the code here. ®

http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/vlc/modules/demux/mp4/cvsroot=VideoLAN