What if your art could be transformed in a song? Would it still look the same? Would the visual feeling transform into something more delectable and pleasing to the senses if it invaded your audio canal? A new wave of graffiti is on the horizon. Audio bombing is the newest trend making way in the tagging world.

<img src="http://talentspeaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/audiograffiti.jpg">

After having recorded on a cassette any information or sound you desire, you remove the tape and cut out the segments to be used. Then take your tape segments and go tag whatever you want in urban space. You can listen to the tag by running an augmented playhead spray over the magnetic tape. Seem complicated? It is.

Since the graffiti is less visually obtrusive (a thin black strip), it can infiltrate spaces traditional graffiti can not such as office buildings, under tables, elevators, schools, coffee shops, etc. Still picking up what I’m putting down? Good, then let’s move on to more information on audio bombing.

The prototype consists of a hacked cassette player. The casing was removed, the play head dismantled from the circuit board to allow it to function externally. Audio Bombing is the creation of several University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students. Check out their website for ongoing audio tagging. Whether you think graffiti is art or not, this notion is definitely unique and creative. So why not call it art?

Israel's Triumph

On the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, a noted Mideast scholar judges how the conflict reshaped the region

"Most wars begin raggedly," the great historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed. And the Six-Day War of 1967, which would recast the Middle Eastern world into what we know today, was true to Taylor's dictum.

The great irony of this war was that it began with a hoax-a piece of faulty Soviet intelligence given to the Egyptians. On May 13, the Soviet ambassador to Cairo informed the Egyptians that Israel was massing "10 to 12 brigades" on the Syrian border in preparation for a big push against the radical regime in Damascus. There was no love lost between Syria's rulers and the charismatic leader at the helm in Cairo, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian was the dominant Arab of his time; on the eve of the war, he stood at the peak of a career full of reversals and triumphs. A few years earlier, he had taken his burdened country into a war in Yemen that would be dubbed Nasser's Vietnam. He had brought his fervor and revolutionary gospel of Arab unity to the Arabian Peninsula, a proxy war against the ruling dynasty in Saudi Arabia. The war had dragged on, and the man who had been the master and the voice of the "Arab street" was fighting a two-front war against the Syrians on the left and the Arab monarchies on the right.

Deliverance presented itself in mid-May, or so the Egyptian ruler thought. In response to that Soviet report, Nasser mobilized his troops on May 14 and dispatched them into the Sinai. Two days later, the Egyptians demanded the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force serving as a buffer in the Sinai between Egyptian forces and those of Israel in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War. Nasser's Arab rivals in Damascus; Amman, Jordan; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had taunted him about hiding behind international peacekeepers and dodging a showdown with Israel.

The casus belli would come on May 22, when Nasser cast caution to the wind and announced the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. "The Jews threaten war; we tell them: Welcome. We are ready for war." The Israeli port of Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, was vital to Israel's commerce; the whole Israeli doctrine of deterrence had been challenged. Euphoria gripped the Arab world; the Egyptian ruler, it seemed, had recovered his political mastery and magic. He hadn't fired a shot, but great gains had come his way. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan rushed to Cairo to place his Army under Egyptian command. Now the balance of power of the region had been undone. In the words of a popular song making the rounds in Israel at the time, Nasser was now "waiting for [Yitzhak] Rabin," the chief of staff of Israel's forces.

Rabin, the taciturn soldier, had prepared his Army well for this war. But Israel was led by the mildest of men, an unlikely leader for a time of war, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Fate had cast Eshkol at the helm of a young country being hurled into a war for its very survival. He dreaded the prospect of war and sought to defer the moment of reckoning. There hovered over Eshkol and Rabin the shadow of the legendary David Ben-Gurion. The "Old Man" of Israeli politics, who had brought his people from dispersion to statehood, had quit the political field four years earlier. He was now a brooding prophet at odds with his former companions. In the midst of this great crisis, Rabin sought out the advice of the country's undisputed father. He was to find no comfort there. "You have led the state into a grave situation," Ben-Gurion said, scolding him for mobilizing Israel's reserves in response to Egypt's moves. "We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility."

In the countdown to war, Israel would dispatch Foreign Minister Abba Eban to Paris, London, and Washington in search of support. France had been the principal supplier of Israel's arms, an ally and a diplomatic protector. But a different wind now blew: Charles de Gaulle had walked away from the fight over Algeria and had embarked upon a great accommodation with the Arab-Islamic world. "Don't make war," de Gaulle told the visiting Israeli. "At any rate, do not be the first to shoot." Reminded that France had championed Israel's rights in the Gulf of Aqaba a decade earlier, de Gaulle crystallized the change that had overtaken French diplomacy: "That policy was correct, but it reflected the heat of the hour. That was 1957. It is now 1967." The Franco-Israeli alliance had been severed.

No diplomatic way out was to be offered by the British or by the Americans. Eban had known Lyndon Johnson for a dozen years or more, but the man he encountered had a "tormented" look in his eyes. Vietnam was now Johnson's nightmare. He sympathized with Israel but was averse to being drawn into new entanglements. He was not a "feeble mouse or a coward," Johnson was to tell Eban, but Israel had to show patience. Johnson knew that America had given commitments to Israel's freedom of navigation, but these commitments, he said, "will not be worth five cents if the people and Congress did not support their president now. Without the Congress, I am just a 6-foot-4 Texan." He was not worried about Israel, Johnson added, for American intelligence was unanimous in its judgment that "you will whip the hell out of them."

In the years to come, an intense debate would arise over the color of the light that Washington had given Israel. In one version, Johnson had given Israel a clear red light, an admonition not to use military force. In the other, the light had been green from the start, aimed perhaps at toppling the Egyptian ruler. On the 25th anniversary of the war, the debate was settled by William Quandt, an American foreign policy analyst with considerable government experience. Quandt's analysis sustains a "yellow light" interpretation of the diplomacy that preceded the war. In the early days of the crisis, Johnson had "genuinely hoped to avoid war in the Middle East," Quandt wrote. But this would change as Johnson realized that the only way to avoid a crisis entailed an American military commitment to reopen the Strait of Tiran, the waterway from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aqaba. "As far as Johnson was concerned, Israel was free to act, but on its own. The red light turned yellow-but not quite green. For the Israeli cabinet, that was enough."

Decisive actions. When the war came on June 5, its military outcome was sealed in the first hours. It had been predicted that the war would start with an Israeli airstrike against Egypt's air bases. The Egyptians had known this and insisted that they could handle the first blow. But when Israel's strike came, the Egyptians were unprepared, and their Air Force was eliminated as a factor in this war. A Jordanian chronicler, Samir Mutawi, in an unsentimental account, Jordan in the 1967 War, wrote of the military outcome in stark terms: "From the afternoon of the first day of the war the Arabs fought with virtually no air cover at all. As a result, the war was lost almost as soon as it had begun."

It was not just Egypt's Air Force that was destroyed in the course of this battle. What lay mortally wounded was the myth of secular Arab nationalism. The old order in the Arab world of monarchs and emirs and feeble semiparliamentary regimes had lost the war of 1948, and this had become its shame and burden. Now these "New Men" in Cairo and Damascus had been shown to be braggarts and pretenders. The road to Cairo, Damascus, and Amman lay open before Israel's Army. But Israel had its hands full with one great, taxing outcome of its victory: its acquisition of the territories of mandatory Palestine and its control over the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Wars have cunning; the Palestinians, defeated and dispersed in 1948, were the unintended beneficiaries of this new war. The defeat of the standing Arab armies had rid them of the shame of their own debacle in 1948. For Israel, now sovereign over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, there had come a monumental change: The "first republic" (1948-1967) had been an overwhelmingly secular polity, its center of gravity, and demography, in Tel Aviv and along the Mediterranean coast. The new country that emerged out of this war was now in possession of Jerusalem and of Hebron and Jericho-lands suffused with religious meaning. Israel's secularism would now have to duel with the religious pull of these new territories.

At the remove of four decades, we should not overdo the importance of that Soviet report about the phantom Israeli brigades. At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy and statehood. Israel's victory in 1967 delivered a message: that the state that had fought its way into the world in 1948 is there to stay.

Contributing Editor Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author, most recently, of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

Israel's Triumph

On the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, a noted Mideast scholar judges how the conflict reshaped the region

"Most wars begin raggedly," the great historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed. And the Six-Day War of 1967, which would recast the Middle Eastern world into what we know today, was true to Taylor's dictum.

The great irony of this war was that it began with a hoax-a piece of faulty Soviet intelligence given to the Egyptians. On May 13, the Soviet ambassador to Cairo informed the Egyptians that Israel was massing "10 to 12 brigades" on the Syrian border in preparation for a big push against the radical regime in Damascus. There was no love lost between Syria's rulers and the charismatic leader at the helm in Cairo, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian was the dominant Arab of his time; on the eve of the war, he stood at the peak of a career full of reversals and triumphs. A few years earlier, he had taken his burdened country into a war in Yemen that would be dubbed Nasser's Vietnam. He had brought his fervor and revolutionary gospel of Arab unity to the Arabian Peninsula, a proxy war against the ruling dynasty in Saudi Arabia. The war had dragged on, and the man who had been the master and the voice of the "Arab street" was fighting a two-front war against the Syrians on the left and the Arab monarchies on the right.

Deliverance presented itself in mid-May, or so the Egyptian ruler thought. In response to that Soviet report, Nasser mobilized his troops on May 14 and dispatched them into the Sinai. Two days later, the Egyptians demanded the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force serving as a buffer in the Sinai between Egyptian forces and those of Israel in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War. Nasser's Arab rivals in Damascus; Amman, Jordan; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had taunted him about hiding behind international peacekeepers and dodging a showdown with Israel.

The casus belli would come on May 22, when Nasser cast caution to the wind and announced the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. "The Jews threaten war; we tell them: Welcome. We are ready for war." The Israeli port of Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, was vital to Israel's commerce; the whole Israeli doctrine of deterrence had been challenged. Euphoria gripped the Arab world; the Egyptian ruler, it seemed, had recovered his political mastery and magic. He hadn't fired a shot, but great gains had come his way. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan rushed to Cairo to place his Army under Egyptian command. Now the balance of power of the region had been undone. In the words of a popular song making the rounds in Israel at the time, Nasser was now "waiting for [Yitzhak] Rabin," the chief of staff of Israel's forces.

Rabin, the taciturn soldier, had prepared his Army well for this war. But Israel was led by the mildest of men, an unlikely leader for a time of war, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Fate had cast Eshkol at the helm of a young country being hurled into a war for its very survival. He dreaded the prospect of war and sought to defer the moment of reckoning. There hovered over Eshkol and Rabin the shadow of the legendary David Ben-Gurion. The "Old Man" of Israeli politics, who had brought his people from dispersion to statehood, had quit the political field four years earlier. He was now a brooding prophet at odds with his former companions. In the midst of this great crisis, Rabin sought out the advice of the country's undisputed father. He was to find no comfort there. "You have led the state into a grave situation," Ben-Gurion said, scolding him for mobilizing Israel's reserves in response to Egypt's moves. "We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility."

In the countdown to war, Israel would dispatch Foreign Minister Abba Eban to Paris, London, and Washington in search of support. France had been the principal supplier of Israel's arms, an ally and a diplomatic protector. But a different wind now blew: Charles de Gaulle had walked away from the fight over Algeria and had embarked upon a great accommodation with the Arab-Islamic world. "Don't make war," de Gaulle told the visiting Israeli. "At any rate, do not be the first to shoot." Reminded that France had championed Israel's rights in the Gulf of Aqaba a decade earlier, de Gaulle crystallized the change that had overtaken French diplomacy: "That policy was correct, but it reflected the heat of the hour. That was 1957. It is now 1967." The Franco-Israeli alliance had been severed.

No diplomatic way out was to be offered by the British or by the Americans. Eban had known Lyndon Johnson for a dozen years or more, but the man he encountered had a "tormented" look in his eyes. Vietnam was now Johnson's nightmare. He sympathized with Israel but was averse to being drawn into new entanglements. He was not a "feeble mouse or a coward," Johnson was to tell Eban, but Israel had to show patience. Johnson knew that America had given commitments to Israel's freedom of navigation, but these commitments, he said, "will not be worth five cents if the people and Congress did not support their president now. Without the Congress, I am just a 6-foot-4 Texan." He was not worried about Israel, Johnson added, for American intelligence was unanimous in its judgment that "you will whip the hell out of them."

In the years to come, an intense debate would arise over the color of the light that Washington had given Israel. In one version, Johnson had given Israel a clear red light, an admonition not to use military force. In the other, the light had been green from the start, aimed perhaps at toppling the Egyptian ruler. On the 25th anniversary of the war, the debate was settled by William Quandt, an American foreign policy analyst with considerable government experience. Quandt's analysis sustains a "yellow light" interpretation of the diplomacy that preceded the war. In the early days of the crisis, Johnson had "genuinely hoped to avoid war in the Middle East," Quandt wrote. But this would change as Johnson realized that the only way to avoid a crisis entailed an American military commitment to reopen the Strait of Tiran, the waterway from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aqaba. "As far as Johnson was concerned, Israel was free to act, but on its own. The red light turned yellow-but not quite green. For the Israeli cabinet, that was enough."

Decisive actions. When the war came on June 5, its military outcome was sealed in the first hours. It had been predicted that the war would start with an Israeli airstrike against Egypt's air bases. The Egyptians had known this and insisted that they could handle the first blow. But when Israel's strike came, the Egyptians were unprepared, and their Air Force was eliminated as a factor in this war. A Jordanian chronicler, Samir Mutawi, in an unsentimental account, Jordan in the 1967 War, wrote of the military outcome in stark terms: "From the afternoon of the first day of the war the Arabs fought with virtually no air cover at all. As a result, the war was lost almost as soon as it had begun."

It was not just Egypt's Air Force that was destroyed in the course of this battle. What lay mortally wounded was the myth of secular Arab nationalism. The old order in the Arab world of monarchs and emirs and feeble semiparliamentary regimes had lost the war of 1948, and this had become its shame and burden. Now these "New Men" in Cairo and Damascus had been shown to be braggarts and pretenders. The road to Cairo, Damascus, and Amman lay open before Israel's Army. But Israel had its hands full with one great, taxing outcome of its victory: its acquisition of the territories of mandatory Palestine and its control over the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Wars have cunning; the Palestinians, defeated and dispersed in 1948, were the unintended beneficiaries of this new war. The defeat of the standing Arab armies had rid them of the shame of their own debacle in 1948. For Israel, now sovereign over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, there had come a monumental change: The "first republic" (1948-1967) had been an overwhelmingly secular polity, its center of gravity, and demography, in Tel Aviv and along the Mediterranean coast. The new country that emerged out of this war was now in possession of Jerusalem and of Hebron and Jericho-lands suffused with religious meaning. Israel's secularism would now have to duel with the religious pull of these new territories.

At the remove of four decades, we should not overdo the importance of that Soviet report about the phantom Israeli brigades. At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy and statehood. Israel's victory in 1967 delivered a message: that the state that had fought its way into the world in 1948 is there to stay.

Contributing Editor Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author, most recently, of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

If that doesn't happen, other taxes may zoom upward instead, warned Sen. Michael Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "Are we implicitly blessing a situation where states are forced to raise other taxes, such as income or property taxes, to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue?" Enzi said. "I want to avoid that."

A flurry of proposals that pro-tax advocates advanced this week push in that direction. On Tuesday, Enzi introduced a bill that would usher in mandatory sales tax collection for Internet purchases. Second, during a House of Representatives hearing the same day, politicians weighed whether to let a temporary ban on Net access taxes lapse when it expires on November 1. A House backer of another pro-sales tax bill said this week to expect a final version by July.

"The independent and sovereign authority of states to develop their own revenue systems is a basic tenet of self government and our federal system," said David Quam, director of federal relations at the National Governors Association, during a Senate Commerce committee hearing on Wednesday.

Internet sales taxes
At the moment, for instance, Seattle-based Amazon.com is not required to collect sales taxes on shipments to millions of its customers in states like California, where Amazon has no offices. (Californians are supposed to voluntarily pay the tax owed when filing annual state tax returns, but few do.)

Ideas to alter this situation hardly represent a new debate: officials from the governors' association have been pressing Congress to enact such a law for at least six years. They invoke arguments--unsuccessful so far--like saying that reduced sales tax revenue threatens budgets for schools and police.

But with Democrats now in control of both chambers of Congress, the political dynamic appears to have shifted in favor of the pro-tax advocates and their allies on Capitol Hill. The NetChoice coalition, which counts as members eBay, Yahoo and the Electronic Retailing Association and opposes the sales tax plan, fears that the partisan shift will spell trouble.

One long-standing objection to mandatory sales tax collection, which the Supreme Court in a 1992 case left up to Congress to decide, is the complexity of more than 7,500 different tax agencies that each have their own (and frequently bizarre) rules. Some legal definitions (PDF) tax Milky Way Midnight candy bars as candy and treat the original Milky Way bar as food. Peanut butter Girl Scout cookies are candy, but Thin Mints or Caramel deLites are classified as food.

The pro-tax forces say that a concept called the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement will straighten out some of the notorious convolutions of state tax laws. Enzi's bill, introduced this week, relies on the agreement when providing "federal authorization" to require out-of-state retailers "to collect and remit the sales and use taxes" due on the purchase. (Small businesses with less than $5 million in out-of-state sales are exempted.)

It's "important to level the playing field for all retailers," Enzi said during Wednesday's hearing.

While it's too early to know how much support Enzi's bill will receive, foes of higher taxation are marshaling their allies. Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said Wednesday that he'd like "to see an impregnable ban on taxes on the Internet."

Jeff Dircksen, the director of congressional analysis at the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va., said in written testimony prepared for the hearing: "If such a system of extraterritorial collection is allowed, Congress will have opened the door to any number of potential tax cartels that will eventually harm rather than help taxpayers."

Internet access taxes
A second category of higher Net taxes is technically unrelated, but is increasingly likely to be linked when legislation is debated in Congress later this year. That category involves access taxes, meaning taxes that local and state governments levy to single out broadband or dial-up connections. (See CNET News.com's Tech Politics podcast this week with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey on this point.)

If the temporary federal moratorium is allowed to expire in November, states and municipalities will be allowed to levy a dizzying array of Net access taxes--meaning a monthly Internet connection bill could begin to resemble a telephone bill or airline ticket with innumerable and confusing fees tacked on at the end. In some states, telephone fees, taxes and surcharges run as high as 20 percent of the bill.

These fees that states levy on mobile phones, cable TV and landlines run far higher than state sales taxes at an average of 13.3 percent, cost the average household $264 a year, and total $41 billion annually, according to a report published by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute this month. Landlines are taxed at the highest rate, 17.23 percent, with Internet access being virtually tax free, with the exception of a few states that were grandfathered in a decade ago.

Dircksen, from the National Taxpayers Union, urged the Senate on Wednesday to "encourage economic growth and innovation in the telecommunications sector--in contrast to higher taxes, fees and additional regulation" by at least renewing the expiring moratorium, and preferably making it permanent. Broadband providers like Verizon Communications also want to make the ban permanent.

But state tax collectors are steadfastly opposed to any effort to renew the ban, let alone impose a permanent extension. Harley Duncan, the executive director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, said Wednesday that higher taxes will not discourage broadband adoption and his group "urges Congress not to extend the Act because it is disruptive of and poses long-term dangers for state and local fiscal systems."

Sen. Daniel Inouye, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, said: "Listening to the testimony, I would opt for a temporary extension, if at all."

If the moratorium expires, one ardent tax foe is predicting taxes on e-mail. A United Nations agency proposed in 1999 the idea of a 1-cent-per-100-message tax, but retreated after criticism. (A similar proposal, called bill "602P," is, however, actually an urban legend.)

"They might say, 'We have no interest in having taxes on e-mail,' but if we allow the prohibition on Internet taxes to expire, then you open the door on cities and towns and states to tax e-mail or other aspects of Internet access," said Sen. John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican. "We need to be honest about what we're endorsing and what we're opposing."

Getting in Deeper...
Another week reveals more lapses in judgment by the Bush team
By Chitra Ragavan
Posted 5/20/07

For months, congressional Democrats have tried to force embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales out of his job by using what one congressional source called "conventional weapons"-incriminating E-mails, damaging memorandums, and other documents related to the controversial firings of nine U.S. attorneys. And for months, against the unwavering support of President George W. Bush, they have failed. But last week, the committee investigating the firings detonated what the same source called a "thermonuclear device." And in doing so, they have put Gonzales's future in serious doubt.

Bedside drama. The bomb in question is James Comey, a highly regarded former deputy attorney general who dramatically described Gonzales's dark role in reauthorizing the National Security Agency's secret wiretap program. In riveting congressional testimony last week, Comey disclosed that in March 2004, when then Attorney General John Ashcroft lay deathly ill in a hospital bed, Gonzales-then White House counsel-and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to the hospital to persuade the ailing Ashcroft to sign off on the program. Comey, serving as acting AG, had refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the wiretapping program because he questioned its legality. Alerted to the others' visit, Comey raced to the hospital himself, getting there with just minutes to spare. "I remember waiting; it wasn't long, but it felt like forever," Comey told U.S. News in an exclusive interview. "And I was thinking, 'What am I going to do? What if they get him to sign something? Do I intervene physically? What do I do?'"

Ashcroft, although barely conscious, found the strength to support him, Comey testified. But Bush continued the program without any certification. So Comey said he, Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and senior Justice staffers all prepared to resign, prompting Bush to back Comey's demand for changes to the program. "If the thinking in the administration was that Gonzales can ride it out," says Steven Dettelbach, a former federal prosecutor and former Democratic staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, "this is Exhibit A that it could get worse."

Indeed, congressional sources tell U.S. News that Democrats will ask the Texas Bar Association to determine whether Gonzales violated his code of professional responsibility or broke laws by bringing up the NSA program in the hospital in front of Ashcroft's wife, who lacks security clearances. "I am not going to speculate on discussions that may or may not have taken place," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd responded, "much less attempt to render a legal judgment on any such discussions."

What makes the latest testimony so compelling is that it comes from Comey, a former mob and white-collar-crime prosecutor with impeccable credentials and unimpeachable credibility. Not insignificantly, he is also a Republican and a Bush appointee. "He's got very significant conservative stripes," says Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The fact that he was so concerned about the legality of the NSA program should send a message to Congress."

Bulldog. This is hardly the first time that Comey, now senior vice president and general counsel of Lockheed Martin, has taken on the White House. He has repeatedly disputed Gonzales's assertions that the fired U.S. attorneys had performance problems. In 2003, he named a close friend, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, as a special counsel to investigate the CIA-Valerie Plame leak affair-a case that resulted in the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Comey challenged Cheney on what he and his advisers believed was the shaky legality of memorandums that authorized aggressive interrogations and other "war on terror" policies.

Such actions have made Comey something of a bete noire in the Bush administration-even though Comey believes that Bush respected him and wanted him to do the right thing. Indeed, now some Democrats, including Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, say they will even back Comey for attorney general if Gonzales resigns. "The only thing worse than being vilified by the left," says Comey with a laugh, "is being idolized by the left."
Likable and 6 foot 8, the 46-year-old Comey invariably invites comparisons to James Stewart in his portrayal of an idealistic congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. A graduate of William and Mary and the University of Chicago law school, Comey was beloved by prosecutors for his legal acumen and his easy management style, which he describes as obtaining results by eliciting equal parts affection and guilt. He continually urged prosecutors to protect their integrity, the credibility that the court instantly conferred on them, he says, simply by virtue of their office. Comey has likened that goodwill to a vast reservoir: It takes enormous time and effort to fill, but it can be irreparably damaged with just "one hole in the dam."

Comey told U.S. News he was prepared to testify about the Ashcroft incident for more than three years but never did. Why? "Nobody ever asked," he said. "I've never been in a forum where I was obligated to answer the question. Short of that, it was not something I was going to volunteer."

His actions at the hospital, he testified, earned him Card's wrath. Soon after Gonzales became attorney general, his then chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told Comey that Gonzales's "vision" was to merge the deputy's office with Gonzales's own office. That meant that Comey would have lost some of his autonomy, becoming less of a leader and more of a senior staff member. A source close to Sampson says he merely wanted Gonzales and Comey to operate as a "seamless leadership team," with "harmony rather than conflict," and never meant to "degrade the status or authority" of the deputy. Comey didn't buy it. "You may want to try that with the next deputy attorney general," Comey is said to have responded to Sampson. "But it's not going to work with me."

A few weeks ago the Pew Research Center released their newest Political Knowledge Survey, a report that tracked the general political knowledge of responding Americans, and compared it to similar survey results from 1989. The results show that, as Pew reports, "public knowledge of current affairs is little changed by news and the information revolutions." It seems somewhat reassuring for Pew to say we really haven't gotten any dumber on politics. But a closer look at the results not only shows we are getting dumber, but that the internet and cable news "revolutions" really haven't made us a whole lot smarter on politics, when you'd think that they would have. In fact, it seems more like these wonderful new sources of information we have at our fingertips have helped us but tread water in the hunt for a more informed public... even losing some ground.

Pew puts a rosy face on this news, but it certainly seems less optimistic when one takes a bit of time to think about the results. Saying that "On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago", Pew makes it seem as if nothing has really changed in the level of correct knowledge that Americans have about politics. But, there are some hints, even in their report, that things have actually deteriorated.

Interestingly, with a rhetorical wave of the hand, Pew seems to dismiss the information revolution's failure to increase American's level of political knowledge. On the Info revolution, Pew concludes "...a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs." But they do not develop the thought much.

I suppose that the Pew report isn't the place to consider larger implications, as the facts of the survey are really the purpose of the report, naturally. Still, it is alarming that, with all the knowledge daily offered in so many forms to each American citizen and with the easy access we all have to that knowledge, we are not seeing any corresponding rise in knowledge base.

In fact, a quick perusal of the charts on the Pew webpage will show that we have actually lost some small percentage here and there of correctly answered survey questions compared to 1989.

One would think that with 24 hour cable news coverage, unstoppable Internet outlets on top of the traditional media offerings like TV, newspapers, and magazines, we would be much better informed than comparable Americans from 1989. The point seems to be that, whether all these new avenues of information are available or not, not enough Americans are making use of these newer news outlets.

The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs. The polling does find the expected correlation between how much citizens know and how avidly they watch, read, or listen to news reports. The most knowledgeable third of the public is four times more likely than the least knowledgeable third to say they enjoy keeping up with the news "a lot."

On a good note, among those who do use the new media, however, the rate of correct knowledge is quite high in comparison to the rest which would tend to vouch for the success of those outlets if only among those who use them.

Unfortunately, the responding sample did poorly once the 23 question surveys were graded.

Using a common school grading scale in which 90% correct is the minimum necessary to receive an A, 80% for a B, 70% for a C, 60% for a D and less than 60% is a failing grade, Americans did not fare too well. Fully half would have failed, while only about one-in-six would have earned an A or B. While such a scale is useful in the classroom, it may be a poor way to judge whether people are sufficiently informed. Opinions vary about what people "should" know about news events, and a different mix of questions could easily have produced very different results.

"Fully half would have failed". A miserable showing, indeed. To my mind at least, the "money shot" in this article is that our generally higher levels of formal education does not seem to have done us much good.

...despite the fact that education levels have risen dramatically over the past 20 years, public knowledge has not increased accordingly.

And therein lies the chief failure of our culture. It isn't that the new media has not made things better but that our educational system has slipped so far down the rat hole of government indifference and failure that the new media outlets have only helped us to merely stay at the same level as 20 years ago when there were far fewer avenues to educate oneself.

By simple logic, higher levels of education should mean a smarter -- or at least more informed -- public. As Pew alludes, more Americans have high school and college diplomas than ever before, yet we are not better informed despite all this "education". This tends to be an indictment of the failure of our schools as opposed to one leveled against the new media outlets.

An inescapable conclusion seems to be that our schools are horribly failing us. Our schools are not helping us gain knowledge about our forms of government, our leaders and international politics. Our schools are also not instilling in our nation an interest in those areas of study.

This failure to teach even simple civics was brought home quite abruptly by the general confusion generated by the 2000 presidential election. So many Americans didn't know how a president actually gets elected that calls of a "stolen election" rang true to too many ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of civics. And the many discussions of 9/11, Supreme Court rulings and immigration reproves this dearth of basic civics knowledge time and again.

I'd lay odds that, had the information revolution not occurred, we would have seen a further decline in political knowledge than we did in the Pew study. And the blame can only be laid at the feet of our failing schools and the resulting cultural disinterest.

So, I'd rebrand their study "Schools Failures Lead to Lower Public Knowledge About Politics".

by Warner Todd Huston

Amazon.com, the biggest online seller of CDs, is joining the movement against copy-protection software for digital music. It plans to sell songs that can be freely copied to any computer, cellphone or music player, including the iPod from Apple.

The move could be another step toward the demise of the copy-protection systems that have frustrated some online music buyers and created confusion about compatibility between digital players and downloaded songs. Critics charge that the software has slowed the public embrace of legal digital downloads while failing to stop illicit copying, at a time when the music industry is desperate for ways to make up for declining CD sales.

Amazon announced plans yesterday to add a music download store to its Web site this year. It will sell songs and albums in the MP3 format without the layer of software for digital rights management, or D.R.M., that is used by most other online music retailers.

Amazon said its service would include music from one major label, EMI, and from 12,000 independent music companies that have chosen not to use copy-restricting software.

“We are offering a great selection of music that our customers love in a way they clearly desire, which is D.R.M.-free, so they can play it on any device they own today or in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media.

Amazon’s announcement comes three months after Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, wrote an open letter to the music industry arguing that it should stop using D.R.M. He noted that consumers get unprotected music anyway when they buy CDs and copy the songs to their computers.

Last month, Apple followed up on that letter, striking a similar deal with EMI to sell songs without copy protection through its iTunes store. Apple, which controls more than 85 percent of the United States market for music downloads, will charge $1.29 for unprotected songs that will also have improved sound quality, versus 99 cents for a protected track. Apple plans to start selling those songs this month.

If the unprotected tracks from Apple and Amazon prove popular, other labels could feel pressure to follow EMI’s example.

“More than 50 percent of the entire music catalog is going be available without D.R.M. before Christmas,” said David Goldberg, the former general manager of Yahoo Music and now an entrepreneur in residence at the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. “The music labels do not want Apple to have control of the download space, and although they won’t say it, they are very, very concerned about the lack of growth of digital music.”

Among the four major record companies, EMI has the smallest share of the United States market, and it has been struggling, posting two profit warnings this year and fielding takeover proposals from private equity investors. It potentially has the most to gain from experimenting with new digital music formats as a way to increase online sales.

Other major music labels, like Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, have appeared reluctant to join EMI in forgoing copy protection. But Universal Music Group, which is the world’s largest label with about one-third of the United States market, may be getting ready to make the leap. It has been dabbling with unprotected files in Europe, where it is selling new recordings from artists like the French singer Émilie Simon in the MP3 format.

According to music executives briefed on the company’s discussions, Universal has recently devised a broader set of offerings meant to test the market for unprotected songs through Amazon and other outlets.

In addition to the likely sale of classical music in MP3 form, these executives said the company was discussing selling unprotected recordings by stars like Gwen Stefani and Fergie, the lead singer from the Black Eyed Peas.

Universal has also talked about possible MP3 sales through Google, which has been studying the music market, the executives said. A spokesman for Universal declined to comment.

Several analysts noted that the major labels could easily just stand back and watch EMI’s progress. “The other labels will all wait to see how the EMI experiment goes,” said James L. McQuivey, a vice president at Forrester Research. “They have the luxury of knowing good data is just around the corner.”

Amazon’s service could lead to a shift in the record labels’ relationship with Apple. Four years after the iTunes service established the market for paid downloads, the music corporations have become unsettled by the company’s clout in determining pricing and other terms.

Many label executives say a successful entrance by Amazon could provide them with needed leverage in their current talks with Apple over renewing their contracts. Of course, even if the iTunes service faces new competition, Apple retains great power thanks to the popularity of the iPod, which has 70 percent of the music player market and works smoothly with the iTunes store.

Amazon did not announce many details of its new service, and it would not comment on its planned pricing for songs and albums. Executives who have talked with Amazon said they expected the service to sell D.R.M.-free songs for 99 cents — less than Apple’s $1.29 — though they noted the terms could still change.

Yesterday’s announcement puts to an end several years of industry speculation about Amazon’s plans for the digital music business. Last year, for example, there were reports that the company was on the verge of selling its own music players that would be linked to a subscription service. But the company later changed course, reportedly after Microsoft unveiled its own Zune player.

Despite the long wait, David Card, an analyst at JupiterResearch, said Amazon’s new store would immediately position the company as a credible rival to Apple and Microsoft. “We’ve been waiting for Amazon to be a serious player in digital music for some time,” Mr. Card said. “They know how to sell music, and this is a powerful endorsement of the MP3 strategy.”

Not everyone thinks selling unprotected music can offset the decline in CD sales and save the music business. Many industry watchers are urging the industry to experiment with other approaches, including wholesale changes in its business model, like introducing music services that are free and supported by advertising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others are working on the same idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Desktop Factory’s version is meant to be compact enough for a home office — 25 by 20 by 20 inches — with a weight of less than 90 pounds.

The origin of Desktop Factory was not so much a desire to print Barbies as a frustration with the Internet. After making a lot of money starting Internet companies like CitySearch, IdeaLab lost even more with flops like eToys. With its investors disgruntled, the company shrank, slowed down and turned its attention from the Web to technologies like solar energy and robotics.

“We traded bits for atoms,” Mr. Gross said.

IdeaLab’s new interest in things required it to build a machine shop, and eventually Mr. Gross bought a 3-D printer from Stratasys. IdeaLab engineers kept the machine going around the clock, experimenting with designs.

Mr. Gross even downloaded a model of an octopus to print out for a project on vertebrates in his daughter’s eighth-grade biology class.

This convinced Mr. Gross that there was a market for 3-D printers, especially if the price could be cut.

At first, the prospects looked difficult. The three leading 3-D printer companies all used different technologies, but none seemed simple enough to be modified for inexpensive home devices. Stratasys makes models out of liquid plastic using a very expensive heated print head that resembles a glue gun. 3D Systems uses lasers to harden liquid polymers. And the Z Corporation, a unit of the private equity group EQT, builds models by squirting a sort of glue over layers of sandlike plaster.

In a brainstorming session, Kevin Hickerson, an IdeaLab engineer, proposed the method the company would ultimately choose. First the machine spreads a powdered plastic over a roller, which is heated to just below the plastic’s melting point. Then a sharply focused beam of light melts dots of plastic on the roller. After the unmelted powder is brushed off, the roller deposits the hot plastic onto a platform. This process is repeated until the object is assembled from the bottom up.

It took IdeaLab a year to prove that the basic approach would work and a second year to develop the technology to get the layers to stick to each other properly. (The model is gently squished, as in a sandwich press, after each layer is applied.) And it has taken two more years to write the required software and to create a working design for the first production model.

IdeaLab has made about 10 of the printers so far. It is preparing to begin production at its combination office and factory in an industrial building half a mile from the company’s headquarters. This summer it will start to deliver its initial test machines to the 200 customers who have agreed to buy them.

Desktop Factory says the machines pose no hazard to users because they use a safe nylon-based material.

Some in the 3-D printer industry say Desktop Factory may have cut too many corners. Its first model makes objects with rather jagged edges because it applies layers that are 0.01 inch thick, two to three times thicker than many other machines’. Moreover, it uses a nylon mixed with aluminum and glass that produces gray objects, with a rather sandy finish that many do not find attractive.

Kathy Lewis, the chief executive of Desktop Factory, said the company saw enormous initial demand among small engineering firms that simply cannot afford the larger printers, as well as high schools and colleges that teach computer-aided design.

To appeal to the home market, she said, the company is trying to develop new materials — a smoother plastic and a very soft, bendable substance suitable for toys.

Much of the research in the field is about how to develop materials of various properties that can be applied in tiny digital specs. Cornell’s 3-D printer, called Fab@Home, is particularly suited to those experiments because it moves a syringe in three dimensions that can be filled with any substance. So far, it has built objects out of silicone, plaster, Cheez Whiz and Play-Doh.

Noy Schaal, a high-school freshman in Louisville, modified the design with a heated syringe to extrude a chocolate bar, decorated with the letters KY for Kentucky. (Koba Industries has started selling kits with all the parts needed to make the Fab@Home design for about $3,000.)

Professor Lipson said researchers are developing ways to use the process to build parts with more complex functions. They have preliminary designs for batteries, sensors, and parts that can bend when electricity is applied.

“A milestone for us would be to print a robot that would get up and walk out of the printer,” Professor Lipson said. “Batteries included.”

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:44 pm

May 1st, 2007

You may already know that “deleting” a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data?

No? Then read on.

What do you mean “delete” doesn’t delete?
File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that “delete” does is erase the file’s reference information. Your OS can’t find it, but the data is still there.

That’s what those “file recovery” programs look for: data in blocks that the directory says aren’t in use.

You really want to do this
If you keep business, medical, or personal financial information on disks, simple deletion isn’t enough to protect the data when disposing of the equipment.

Besides identity theft, data loss may leave you or your company liable under federal laws such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Graham-Leach-Bliley or other state laws. Criminal penalties include fines and prison terms up to 20 years. Not to mention the civil suits that can result.

So what’s the magic?
Something called Secure Erase, a set of commands embedded in most ATA drives built since 2001. If this is so wonderful, why haven’t you heard of it before? Because it’s been disabled by most motherboard BIOSes.

Secure Erase is a loaded gun aimed right at all your data. And Murphy’s Law is still in force. But hey, if you’re smart enough to read Storage Bits, you’re smart enough to not play with Secure Erase until you need to.

How does Secure Erase work?
Secure Erase simply overwrites every single track on the hard drive. That includes the data on “bad blocks”, the data left at the end of partly overwritten blocks, directories, everything. There is no data recovery from Secure Erase.

Says who?
The National Security Agency, for one. And the National Institute for Standards and Testing (NIST), who give it a higher security rating than external block overwrite software that you’d have to buy. Secure Erase is approved for complying with the legal requirements noted above.

UCSD’s CMRR to the rescue
The University of California at San Diego hosts the Center for Magnetic Recording Research. Dr. Gordon Hughes of CMRR helped develop the Secure Erase standard.

Download his Freeware Secure Erase Utility, read the ReadMe file and you’re good to go.

To use it you’ll need to know how to create a DOS boot disk - in XP you can do it with the “Format” option after you right-click the floppy icon in My Computer. If you want to know more CMRR’s 12 page Tutorial on Disk Drive Data Sanitization should satisfy you.

The Storage Bits take
Protecting data sometimes means erasing it. With this utility every storage pro has another tool to protect confidential information.

PS. Mac users already have a similar option under the Finder: “Secure Empty Trash”. And with Disk Utility you can perform a secure erase of all drive free space.