Web firms unite to fight child porn

Internet providers to combat child porn
AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, United Online join forces
The Associated Press

This is just a short article, but it's good to see something being done to try to protect children online.

Updated: 1:06 p.m. ET June 27, 2006
NEW YORK - Five leading online service providers will jointly build a database of child-pornography images and develop other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images.

The companies pledged $1 million among them Tuesday to set up a technology coalition as part of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They aim to create the database by year's end, though many details remain unsettled.

The participating companies are Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., EarthLink Inc. and United Online Inc., the company behind NetZero and Juno.

Ernie Allen, the chief executive of the missing children's center, noted that the Internet companies already possess many technologies to help protect users from threats such as viruses and e-mail "phishing" scams. "There's nothing more insidious and inappropriate" than child pornography, he said.

The announcement comes as the U.S. government is pressuring service providers to do more to help combat child pornography. Top law enforcement officials have told Internet companies they must retain customer records longer to help in such cases and have suggested seeking legislation to require it.

AOL chief counsel John Ryan said the coalition was partly a response to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' April speech identifying increases in child-porn cases and chiding the Internet industry for not doing more about them.

The creation of the technology coalition does not directly address the preservation of records but could demonstrate the industry's willingness to cooperate.

Keeping track of images
Plans call for the missing children's center to collect known child-porn images and create a unique mathematical signature for each one based on a common formula. Each participating company would scan its users' images for matches.


AOL, for instance, plans to check e-mail attachments that are already being scanned for viruses. If child porn is detected, AOL would refer the case to the missing-children's center for further investigation, as service providers are required to do under federal law.

Each company will set its own procedures on how it uses the database, but executives say the partnership will let companies exchange their best ideas — ultimately developing tools for preventing child-porn distribution instead of simply catching violations.

"When we pool together all our collective know-how and technical tools, we hope to come up with something more comprehensive along the lines of preventative" measures, said Tim Cranton, Microsoft's director of Internet safety enforcement programs. (MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

Ryan said that although AOL will initially focus on scanning e-mail attachments, the goal is to ultimately develop techniques for checking other distribution techniques as well, such as instant messaging or Web uploads.

Representatives will begin meeting next month to evaluate their technologies, determining, for instance, whether cropping an image would change its signature and hinder comparisons. Also to be discussed are ways to ensure that customers' privacy is protected. Authorities still would need subpoenas to get identifying information on violators.

The companies involved said they are talking with other service providers about joining. But companies that do not participate still are required by law to report any suspected child-porn images, and many already have their own techniques for monitoring and identifying them.

Hawking warns about warming

Stephen Hawking warns about warming - Science - MSNBC.com





BEIJING - Stephen Hawking expressed concern about global warming Wednesday, even as he charmed and provoked a group of Chinese students.

Before an audience of 500 at a seminar in Beijing, the celebrity cosmologist said, "I like Chinese culture, Chinese food and above all Chinese women. They are beautiful." The audience of mostly university students and professors and a smattering of journalists laughed and applauded.

Asked about the environment, Hawking — who suffers from a degenerative disease, uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer — said he was "very worried about global warming." He said he was afraid Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade [482 degrees Celsius] and raining sulfuric acid."

The comment is a pointed one for China — which is the second-largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming, after the United States. Experts warn that if emissions aren't reduced the world's glaciers could melt, threatening cities and triggering droughts and other environmental disasters.

An occasional visitor to China, Hawking was in Beijing to attend a conference on string theory, an area of physics that attempts to explain and model the universe.

Near-superstar status
Hawking's ability to explain abstruse scientific concepts to laymen has given him a worldwide following. In China, whose communist government regularly preaches that scientific prowess is crucial to the country's future power, Hawking has near-superstar status.

When he was wheeled onstage 20 minutes into the event, the audience rushed forward, taking pictures with their mobile phones.

Many stood and craned to see him better throughout the talk, and one man in the fifth row watched Hawking through binoculars.

Xu Fanrong, a 23-year-old student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics in Beijing, praised Hawking's pithy and humorous remarks during the 90-minute public event. He said Hawking's appearance could help inspire more young Chinese to study physics.

"Our country needs science," said Xu. "No basic science means no basic technology and no economic development."

Other speakers at the seminar included Edward Witten, winner of the Fields Medal in mathematics in 1990; David J. Gross, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for physics; and Harvard University physics professor Andy Strominger.

Despite the stellar academic credentials of his fellow speakers, Hawking stole the show, fielding questions about his life as well as science. Asked by one Chinese student how he would describe himself, Hawking said: "Optimistic, romantic and stubborn."

"In the world there's only one like him. I very much respect his personality and strong spirit," said Liu Fei, 24-year-old doctoral candidate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics.

Hawking told the students that although he was very limited physically by his disability, his mind was "free to explore back to the origins of the universe and into black holes."

Retire? - Cracked Nest Eggs...

Will you ever be able to retire? - Cracked Nest Egg - MSNBC.com



Low savings, longer life spans increase odds of coming up short
By John W. Schoen
Senior Producer
MSNBC


Updated: 10:23 a.m. ET June 19, 2006

In 1972, when Krystyna Strozniak went to work for Western Electric, the former manufacturing arm of AT&T, saving for retirement was the last thing on her mind.

Intent on being a teacher, she soon found herself drawn to a career in telecommunications, a 31-year path that included a succession of technical jobs, the breakup of AT&T and her promotion to a management position in a piece of the company that eventually became part of Verizon. Through it all, she diligently participated in company-sponsored savings plans and enjoyed the security of knowing she would collect a monthly paycheck for life after 30 years of service.

“I never worried about retirement,” she said.

In 2003, Strozniak took the company up on a retirement buyout offer to devote herself full-time to the care of her 12-year-old son. But she opted for a lump-sum payment, which she then turned over to a professional financial adviser, in place of the security of a guaranteed monthly check.

“I don’t think it’s going to be secure and guaranteed,” she said, referring to the promised pension. “I think they may take it away some day. I see businesses now taking away health care benefits and businesses declaring bankruptcy, and they want to get rid of the pensions.”


For much of the last half of the 20th century, the idea of retirement for many Americans included a public or private pension that guaranteed income for life and provided for a period of “golden years,” usually after age 65, spent on leisure, volunteer work or other personal pursuits. But today, the financial security of American workers is more uncertain than it has been in decades. Once reasonably assured of a comfortable retirement, Americans are now watching private pensions collapse and public pensions come under pressure. And even those like Strozniak, whose retirement security was once all but guaranteed, are now finding they have to fend for themselves.

There is mounting research that most Americans are ill-prepared to cope with the task of creating a nest egg to rely on when they’re too old to continue working. They're also woefully unaware of the risks they face in retirement investing. And they're falling further behind in providing for their long-term financial security.

“I don’t think were going to see another generation that’s going to fully retire,” said Doug Lockwood, a financial planner who specializes in retirement at Harbor Lights Financial Group in New Jersey. “There's going to be a lot of people that are going to continue to work for the rest of their lives.”

Long list of risks
As traditional pensions fade into history, employers have shifted the financial risks of a secure retirement to individual workers through company-sponsored savings plans like 401(k)s. No matter how well you save and invest, the list of risks is a long one, according to Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research.

“We now have all the risks,” she said. “From the first day, the employee has to decide whether or not whether to join the plan, has to decide how much to contribute, has to decide how to invest those contributions, has to decide how to change those investments over time, has to decide what to do about company stock, has to decide what to do about cashing out when moving from one job to another. And then, at retirement, this person is going to get, if they’re lucky, $100,000 and be told goodbye and have to figure out what to do with that over an uncertain lifetime. So it’s an enormous challenge.”

As employers have shifted responsibility for retirement to their workers, they've also left them largely on their own when comes to learning how to managing their investments. Most individuals are poorly prepared to duplicate the professional investment management that is a critical component of traditional public and private pensions. So even those workers who do accumulate retirement savings are often frozen into inaction when it comes to the daunting task of actively managing their investments, according to Lockwood.

“What a lot of people do with their 401(k) — because they still treat it like a company-sponsored plan — they don’t treat it like their own money," he said. "They put it under the pillow and really don’t think about it.”


Many Americans aren’t even aware of the scope of the financial challenge they face. Surveys repeatedly have found that many Americans have woefully underfunded their personal retirement savings and remain largely clueless about how much more they will need to support themselves once they stop working. More than half of workers 55 and older have saved less than $50,000 toward retirement, according to an April survey by the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

The study also found that half of current workers expect to get by on 70 percent or less of their pre-retirement income. Yet among people who have already retired, two-thirds say the 70 percent level is inadequate. Nearly six in 10 workers haven’t even bothered to calculate how much they might need to live on, according to the EBRI.

How long will you live?
The biggest risk of all — that you might outlive your savings — is all but impossible to predict. Traditional defined-benefit pensions spread that "longevity" risk among a large pool of workers, using actuarial research on predicted life spans. So an investment fund supporting pensioners might have to pay more to those who lived longer than average, but it would pay less to those who died sooner than expected. With individually managed plans, that longevity risk falls fully on each retiree.

Other forces are also chipping away at the financial well-being of future retirees. Changes in Social Security benefits have eroded the security provided by the world's largest government-sponsored retirement plan, as the age at which American workers qualify for full benefits has been gradually rising. Looming deficits in Social Security funding increase the odds of further benefit cuts.

Until recently, historically low interest rates have reduced the amount of income retirees can expect to generate from their nest eggs.

“There’s no silver bullet here,” said Munnell. The solution, she says, is simple but stark: “Work longer and save more.”

Are you at risk?
The risk of coming up short in retirement depends a lot on how old you are, according to a study released this month by the Center for Retirement Research. Older workers are more likely to enjoy the security of a regular monthly check in retirement. About a third of “early boomers” — those born between 1946 and 1954 — face the risk of not being able to maintain their living standard after retirement, according to the center's latest research. For Generation Xers — born between 1965 and 1972 — roughly half are at risk of not being able to retire.



Financing your own retirement is daunting for even the most sophisticated savers and investors. For starters, it means trying to determine how much you’ll need to set aside. For those in their 20s or 30s, the exercise involves the nearly impossible task of predicting the inflation rate for the next three decades. A prolonged period of high inflation like the 1970s will shred even the most conservative plan.

Then there’s the question of determining how fast you can expect your nest egg to grow. While historical returns of the stock market have averaged more than 12 percent over the past seven decades, that average hides the devastating impact of a rough patch in the financial markets, like the prolonged inflation of the 1970s or the raging bear market that followed the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000.

For example, a worker who invested $1,000 in stocks in 1964 and retired 35 years later in 1999 would have accumulated more than $60,000, adjusted for inflation, based on the return of the Standard and Poor's 500 index. But if that same worker started saving just three years later, investing $1,000 in stocks in 1967, that nest egg would be worth about half as much in 35 years — due largely to the heavy back-to-back stock market losses just before retirement. A lot of the success of your retirement plan rests on dumb luck.

For some workers, just setting aside the money to invest is an insurmountable hurdle. Dennis Mallum, a cement truck driver in central Illinois, began working when he was 13, washing dishes after school.

“I’ve never made enough money to put anything away,” he said. “I’ve made enough money to pay my bills, and that’s the ways it’s always been.”

His 50-hour workweek includes stints as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician. Now, at 51, Mallum said he suffers from arthritis that may eventually prevent him from working.

“I hope like hell that Social Security is going to be there when I retire,” he said. “Because that’s what I’m going to have to live on.”


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13322751/

Love for cute has Japan soul-searching

AP Wire 06/14/2006 Love for cute has Japan soul-searching:

Love for cute has Japan soul-searching
YURI KAGEYAMA
Associated Press

TOKYO - Cute is cool in Japan. Look anywhere and everywhere: Cartoon figures dangle from cell phones, waitresses bow in frilly maid outfits, cherries and bows adorn bags, even police departments boast cuddly mascots.

These days, Japan Inc., known in the past for more serious products like Toyota cars and the Sony Walkman, is busy exporting the epitome of cute - bubble-headed Hello Kitty, Pokemon video games, the Tamagotchi virtual pet, just to name a few.

But the prevalent obsession with things cute has the world's second biggest economy engaging in some serious soul-searching lately, wondering what exactly is making its people gravitate so frantically toward cuteness. A big reason for the emerging debate: Cute-worship is gaining such overseas acceptance it's rapidly becoming Japan's global image.

"Cute is a boom. This style has suddenly become a fashion element among youths around the world," said Shuri Fukunaga, managing director at Burson-Marsteller in Japan, who advises global companies about communication and marketing. "Marketers in Japan are seeing this and are adept at churning out products that incorporate this style for overseas."

Nintendo Co., which makes Super Mario and Pokemon video games, recorded $3.1 billion in U.S. and European sales in fiscal 2005. The entertainment content business in Japan totals some $116 billion, the equivalent of about two-thirds of Toyota's sales, according to the Digital Content Association of Japan.

Skeptics here say Japan's pursuit of cute is a sign of an infantile mentality and worry that Japanese culture - historically praised for exquisite understatement as sparse rock gardens and ukiyoe woodblock prints - may be headed toward doom.

Osaka Shoin Women's University professor Hiroto Murasawa, an expert on the culture of beauty, believes cute is merely proof that Japanese simply don't want to grow up but feels they must change to articulate its views on the international stage.

"It's a mentality that breeds non-assertion," he said of the cute mind-set. "Individuals who choose to stand out get beaten down."

On the other side of the argument stands Tomoyuki Sugiyama, author of "Cool Japan," who believes cute is rooted in Japan's harmony-loving culture.

Collecting miniatures such as mementos for cell phones can be traced back 400 years to the Edo Period, when tiny carved "netsuke" charms were wildly popular, said Sugiyama, president of Digital Hollywood, a Tokyo school for computer-graphics designers, video artists and game creators.

"Japanese are seeking a spiritual peace and an escape from brutal reality through cute things," he said.

Model-cum-actress Yuri Ebihara, 26, widely viewed here as the personification of cute, commands such influence the clothes she sports in a fashion magazine, such as lacy pastel skirts, are instant sellouts.

"I make it a point never to forget to smile," said Ebihara, often seen in TV ads and on billboards. "If someone doesn't find me cute, I want to know why because then I'll work on it to get better at being cute."

Yutaka Onishi, editor in chief of CanCam, the 650,000-circulation magazine that propelled Ebihara to stardom, says the petite, girl-next-door Ebihara, is pioneering a look that's distinct from the tall sexy beauties of the West.

"Cute is that exclamation from the soul of Japan's younger generation," much like "soul" or "La Raza," Onishi said.

Ryoko Sato, a Japanese artist, shrugs off much of pop culture as empty fluff and seeks to delve deeper through works like "The Kiss." The photo of a skinned mouse next to its furry hide is a statement on how cute is as skin-deep as cruelty or ugliness.

"To me, cute always in my work couples with the grotesque," she said. "There's always a dark side to it."

Still, such naysayers are a minority.

"Japanese women see value in youth and want to combine childishness and cuteness with sexiness and glamour," says Sakae Nonomura, a researcher with the cosmetics company Kanebo. "Cute has now grown so widespread that various types of cute coexist."

Indeed, Japanese have come up with nuances of cute such as "erotic-cute" and "grotesque-cute," and use such phrases in everyday conversations.

Thirty-eight-year-old garbage collector Hideki Kojima is such a believer in cute he patronizes a "maid cafe," one of several that have sprung up in Tokyo, where waitresses don maid outfits and greet customers by squeaking: "Welcome home, master."

Sometimes Kojima goes three times a day to the cafe, which serves food and allows customers to take photos and play games with the maids, drops as much as $90 a visit for a chance to gawk at the maids.

"They're cute," Kojima says with conviction. "It can't really be explained in words."

Nobuyoshi Kurita, sociology professor at Musashi University in Tokyo, says cute is a "magic term" that encompasses everything that's acceptable and desirable - this nation's answer to the West.

Kurita thinks it's important to watch Japan's youngsters, who see the bustling streets of downtown Tokyo - where the cute aesthetic is born - as the center of their universe.

"Where cute goes determines the future of Japan," he said, adding that Japan's cute offerings may one day command the respect of luxury goods from Europe. "If it succeeds, Japan's future will be bright. If it doesn't, then Japan may disappear."

Oil dependance...

NPQ:


OIL DEPENDANCE MUST END TO DEFEAT GLOBAL JIHAD



Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-born Dutch legislator and women's rights activist who is co-author of the film "Submission," about women and Islam, which led to the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim radical. Leon de Winter is the Dutch novelist whose books include "About the World's Emptiness."

By By Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Leon de Winter

"Thanks be to God . . . oil is in the hands of the Muslims. So others should come and bow down before you, they should kiss your hands, kiss your feet and buy these reserves at the highest price. You shouldn't bow to them." - Ayatollah Khomeini, Nov. 14, 1965, at the Shaykh Ansari Mosque in Najaf, Iraq

AMSTERDAM — The radical jihadist threat cannot be resolved on the battlefield. And because distrust of Western ideas and values is deeply and widely felt across the Muslim world, with roots going back centuries, the war for hearts and minds cannot be won by satellite TV, radio broadcasts or public diplomacy. It can only be won when the Muslim world evolves its own civil society to displace the tribal mentalities that still rule today.

Until then, the West must fight radicalism with radicalism — radically reducing its reliance on the Arab oil that fuels the global jihad.

The essential condition for the rise of civil society anywhere is the establishment of a culture of meritocracy in which skills and qualities of individuals are more highly valued than ethnic or religious affiliations. In modern civil societies, the separation of powers and the stability of government institutions guarantee continuity under the rule of man-made law, upheld by an independent judiciary, even when power changes hands between ruling parties.

Unlike countries in the West, Iraq and Afghanistan are relatively young nation-states in which individuals are part of ancient tribes and clans that still look to God for their laws. There have been elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the courage of the voters has been astounding. Nevertheless, one must ask: What does democracy mean when people vote as members of tribes or religious sects and not as individuals, as has been the reality in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Civil and tribal value systems deeply conflict: The transformation from a tribal to a civil society implies the subjugation of tribal decision-making processes and the suppression of cultural patterns that have functioned for centuries. What today’s democratic leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan are asking of their people is nothing less than to negate their tribal identities. No one can tell how many generations it will take for that to succeed, or if it is even possible.

Unfortunately, until civil societies are firmly established, clan loyalties, strengthened by religious sentiment, will be the driving factors in much of the Arab-Islamic world. In such conditions, the fragile democratic institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot resist the pressure of radicalism. Also, unfortunately, changing these realities are beyond the reach of external Western influence. That kind of change must come from within.

Western powers have shown that they can topple tyrannies like those of Saddam or the Taliban. But apart from the victims of the tyrants, many in the Arab-Islamic world see these acts of liberation as nothing more than arrogant Western imperialism. Any Western involvement is considered by many only as an act of humiliation.

Absent the development of a vigorous civil society — which we in the West can try to spur but cannot dictate the pace of — what effective course can we take?

The ideology of radical Islam cannot be defeated by Western military power, but it can be defeated by another power: by the power of creative and inventive Western minds.

In his State of the Union speech earlier this year, President George Bush properly noted America’s oil addiction, but he left the essential point unsaid: This addiction is financing the roadside bombs in Iraq, the development of the Iranian A-bomb, the suppression of women and the proliferation of radical mosques.

With the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb becoming an ever closer reality, the countries of the free world have to urgently set an ambitious goal: In five years they need to devise a way to cut off dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Just as John F. Kennedy had his goal of man in space, just as the Manhattan Project led within three years to the defeat of Japan with the invention of an unprecedented weapon, so, too, the Western nations must initiate an urgent program to develop an effective, affordable oil-free energy source.

It is up to the West to take the initiative where it has the most advantage: in finding technological solutions to concrete problems.

There are already many alternatives to fossil fuels — solar and wind energy, clean-burning coal, bio-fuel such as ethanol, hybrid cars, hydrogen engines. It is true that it may take decades to transform the global energy system, but a technological breakthrough would dramatically lower oil prices and strangle Osama bin Laden’s vision of a wealthy Islamic Caliphate based upon oil income.

For bin Laden, only when Muslims, Shiite and Sunni alike, are united within the Ummah (the entire Islamic community) will they be able to withstand the West’s seductions. Like Ayatollah Khomeini before him, he knows that only controlling the world’s oil reserves will give the Muslim Ummah the power to triumph over its infidel enemies. Saudi Arabia is the central target of bin Laden’s revolt because it hosts not only Islam’s holiest sites, but also the world’s largest Allah-given oil reserves.

Only the rapid deployment of new technologies and the resolve of car manufacturers, oil companies, energy suppliers and Western governments can in turn ultimately put down the revolt of the mullahs and al-Qaida.

If the West is prepared to make the effort, oil will have outlived its usefulness for the tyrannies and dictatorships in the Arab and Muslim world. Oil is the oxygen of the radical Muslims; without it, their ideology will suffocate.

In the West, reduction of Middle Eastern oil imports will unite both progressives and conservatives. Both environmental concerns and security concerns will be equally addressed. New technologies will produce less pollution and may reduce the greenhouse effect while at the same time undercutting tyrannical Arab and Islamic regimes and ideologies.

In other words, it’s the oil, stupid. If you want to defeat bin Laden and themullahs, start by driving a hybrid.