With this morning’s announcement of Conan O’Brien’s 30-city tour, the former late-night comedian is fully embracing his online fan base, “Team Coco.”
The official poster for the tour re-uses the image made famous on the Internet of a heroic Mr. O’Brien, orange hair aflame, in front of an American flag. The image was produced by Mike Mitchell, an artist in Los Angeles, as a show of support for Mr. O’Brien when NBC tried in January to move “The Tonight Show” to 12:05 a.m. Within days the image and its message, “I’m With Coco,” was a viral sensation, inspiring dozens of pro-Conan groups on Facebook. Several of Mr. O’Brien’s employees even made the image their Facebook profile photo.
Now they have formally adopted the image as their own. Days after Mr. O’Brien signed off of “The Tonight Show” on Jan. 22, one of the comedian’s producers contacted Mr. Mitchell and said that they wanted the “Coco” illustration to be the emblem of a nationwide tour they were planning.
“They wanted it to be the main image,” Mr. Mitchell recalled in an e-mail message Thursday. “They are all such fans of the ‘I’m with Coco’ poster and what it means to everyone.”
Mr. Mitchell met with Mr. O’Brien’s executive producer, Jeff Ross, about a month ago, to talk through a licensing deal.
“Apparently Conan wanted to get me on board for it – obviously I was honored,” Mr. Mitchell said. He said he retains the rights to the widely distributed image; Mr. O’Brien’s team will use it for the tour and for some merchandise sales.
Asked about compensation for the image, Mr. Mitchell said “a fair deal was made for both parties.”
Mr. Mitchell said Mr. O’Brien called to thank him for creating the image. He recalled Mr. O’Brien joking that “I love anything with my face on it, and CONAN in huge bold letters.”
Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines and Joshua Clottey of Ghana
attend a news conference in New York City to promote their upcoming fight
It is 7:13 a.m. in Los Angeles and Manny Pacquiao, the world's best pound-for-pound boxer, is jogging on a public high school track. There are palm trees in the distance, and the low hum of traffic on I-10 is starting to turn into a low roar as the Filipino boxer, clad in a red tracksuit, dashes around the dirt oval despite a painful shin splint. A handful of early-arriving students hang on the chain-link fence surrounding the track and watch him do his work. The Pac-Man is preparing for his March 13 fight against Joshua Clottey, a dangerous but relatively unknown welterweight from Ghana. The $49.95 pay-per-view fight is billed as "The Event" but could easily be called "The Letdown."
Just three months ago, boxing was preparing for its version of the Super Bowl. Fresh from his mega-fight win over Miguel Cotto, Pacquiao had begun negotiations with Floyd Mayweather Jr., a brash welterweight whom non-sports fans know best from his appearance on Dancing with the Stars. The proposed battle was being compared to some of the greatest matchups in boxing history. Even people who had given up on boxing or hadn't really thought about it much were talking about the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, which would probably earn each boxer $40 million, the most lucrative match ever.
But negotiations became so acrimonious that they descended to the level of bad soap opera. Mayweather insisted on Olympic-style random blood testing, which Pacquiao refused, saying that drug-testing rules should be decided by boxing commissions, not individual fighters. Though suspicions were raised that Pacquiao was on some sort of performance-enhancing drug, the Filipino boxer — who has won an unprecedented seven belts in seven weight classes, putting on 40 lb. throughout his career — has never tested positive for banned drugs. He says he is willing to submit to random urine testing.
Pacquiao's camp says the boxer refused the blood testing because he is superstitious and doesn't want to give blood so close to fight time. He was blood-tested a couple of days before his fight with Erik Morales, and lost. "It made me weak," says Pacquiao, who is suing Mayweather for sullying his reputation. There is speculation in some boxing gyms that Mayweather knew about Pacquiao's aversion to pre-fight blood testing and used it as a tactic to duck him. But Mayweather insists that he simply wants to reform the sport's drug policies. "I am taking a stand," he says, adding, "I should get to choose who I want to fight." But by allowing the negotiations to collapse, Pacquiao and Mayweather quickly became defined as the boxers who wouldn't fight each other. "I think Floyd is scared of Manny," says Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer. "I think the public is disgusted by the controversy, but they still want the fight to happen."
To fill the vacuum and assuage dissatisfaction, each boxer decided to take on formidable interim opponents. Pacquiao will fight Clottey, and Mayweather will battle "Sugar" Shane Mosley on May 1. The hope is that if Pacquiao and Mayweather both win their respective fights, they will work out their differences and fight in the fall. "My nails are going to be bitten down to the bone waiting until May 2," says Ross Greenburg, president of HBO Sports, which is hoping to televise the Pacquiao-Mayweather spectacle.
Pacquiao doesn't seem to be taking his current opponent for a pushover. Clottey has a 35-3 win-loss record, and 21 of those wins were by knockout. He stands 5 ft. 8 in. tall to Pacquiao's 5 ft. 6 in. and has a strong chin and the muscled body of a boa constrictor. But Pacquiao came into his training camp in great shape, and his sparring at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood has been crisp and lively; Roach predicts a knockout. Still, it could be a tactically riveting duel, because Clottey likes to lean on the ropes, while Pacquiao will probably try to dive in close, hit him with combinations and then get out of the way of Clottey's uppercuts.
Mayweather (40-0, 25 KOs) also has a tough opponent. Mosley is a wily 38-year-old who twice defeated Oscar De La Hoya. (Both Mayweather and Mosley have agreed to random blood testing.) Richard Schaefer, CEO of Golden Boy, which is promoting the fight, predicts that HBO will sell 3 million pay-per-view buys to make it the biggest fight in boxing history. It will also be shown in theaters nationwide.
While waiting to meet in the ring, Pacquiao and Mayweather will compete at the box office. Pacquiao's last several fights have been at Las Vegas' MGM Grand, a 17,000-seat venue, against marquee opponents. His bout against Clottey will be held at Texas Stadium (45,000 seats for the event, and ticket sales have been brisk). But because Clottey was a last-minute replacement for Mayweather with no natural fanbase in the U.S., HBO declined to feature the fight in its popular 24/7 series (it did so for several of Pacquiao's previous matches), and the media tour was shortened to only two cities. Bob Arum, Pacquiao's promoter, chose not to sugarcoat it. "To be frank, we had to overcome disappointment," he says. "People were looking forward to a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight."
Mayweather's match will be staged in the smaller MGM Grand, but it will get the full buildup with a four-episode Mayweather-Mosley 24/7 series on HBO. Mayweather spent last week on a three-city media tour, generating interest in his bout with outlandish theatrics, which included a shoving match with Mosley. Some of the crowd at the Los Angeles event chanted, "Manny! Manny!," but they were drowned out by "Money! Money!," Mayweather's nickname.
Yet both fighters' handlers, as well as Mayweather and Pacquiao themselves, appear unwilling to compromise on the blood-testing issue. Meanwhile, fans descend upon Pacquiao's training gym every day in hopes of catching a glimpse of him. He has had to spend more time than he wanted answering questions about blood testing, steroids and Mayweather — a nemesis who has clearly gotten under his skin. "I have never seen him so angry," says Roach.
If a Pacquiao-Mayweather détente can somehow happen, it needs to be soon, while the men are still at their prime. Pacquiao, who is 31, is running for Congress in the Philippines and starting to hint at retirement. Mayweather, 33, has already come back from one retirement. If Pacquiao can beat Clottey and Mayweather is victorious over Mosley, then the fight for the two men's legacies will begin again — at the negotiating table.
Corey Haim, a 1980s teen heartthrob for his roles in Lucas and The Lost Boys whose career was blighted by drug abuse, has died. He was 38.
Haim died early Wednesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Cheryl MacWillie said.
"As he got out of bed, he felt a little weak and went down to the floor on his knees," Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said. His mother called paramedics.
An autopsy will determine Haim's cause of death. There was no evidence of foul play, police Sgt. Michael Kammert said.
Haim, who gained attention for his roles in "Lucas" and "The Lost Boys," had flulike symptoms before he died and was getting over-the-counter and prescription medications, police Sgt. William Mann said.
"He could have succumbed to whatever (illness) he had or it could have been drugs," Mann said. "He has had a drug problem in the past."
Haim was taken by ambulance to the hospital from an apartment in Los Angeles near Burbank. The enormous complex is known as Oakwood and is popular with young actors, Kammert said.
Haim acknowledged his struggle with drug abuse to The Sun in 2004.
"I was working on Lost Boys when I smoked my first joint," he told the British tabloid.
"I did cocaine for about a year and a half, then it led to crack," he said.
Haim said he went into rehabilitation and was put on prescription drugs. He took both stimulants and sedatives such as Valium.
"I started on the downers which were a hell of a lot better than the uppers because I was a nervous wreck," he said. "But one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it was about 85 a day."
In 2007, he told ABC's Nightline that drugs hurt his career.
"I feel like with myself I ruined myself to the point where I wasn't functional enough to work for anybody, even myself. I wasn't working," he said.
The Toronto-born actor got his start in television commercials at 10 and earned a good reputation for his work in such films as 1985's Murphy's Romance and his portrayal of Liza Minelli's dying son in the 1985 television film A Time to Live.
His career peaked and he became a teen heartthrob with his roles in the 1986 movie Lucas, and The Lost Boys, in which he battled vampires.
In later years, he made a few TV appearances and had several direct-to-video movies. He also had a handful of recent movies that have not yet been released.
But in 1997 he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing debts for medical expenses and more than $200,000 in state and federal taxes.
His assets included a few thousand dollars in cash, clothing and royalty rights.
In recent years, he appeared in the A&E reality TV show The Two Coreys with his friend Corey Feldman. It was canceled in 2008 after two seasons. Feldman later said Haim's drug abuse strained their working and personal relationships.
Pakistani intelligence agents have arrested Adam Gadahn, the American-born spokesman for al-Qaeda, in an operation in the southern city of Karachi, two officers and a government official said Sunday.
The arrest of Gadahn is a major victory in the U.S.-led battle against al-Qaeda and will be taken as a sign that Pakistan is cooperating more fully with Washington. It follows the recent detentions of several Afghan Taliban commanders in Karachi.
Gadahn was arrested in the sprawling southern metropolis in recent days, two officers who took part in the operation said. A senior government official also confirmed the arrest.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
Gadahn, who is also known by various aliases, including Yahya Majadin Adams and Azzam al-Amriki, grew up on a goat farm in Riverside County, California, and converted to Islam at a mosque in nearby Orange County.
Gadahn moved to Pakistan in 1998, according to the FBI, and is said to have attended an al-Qaeda training camp six years later, serving as a translator and consultant for the group. He has been wanted by the FBI since 2004, and there is a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
He has posted videos and messages calling for the destruction of the West and for strikes against targets in the United States. The most recent was posted Sunday, praising the U.S. Army major charged with killing 13 people in Fort Hood, Texas.
A U.S. court charged Gadahn with treason in 2006, making him the first American to face such a charge in more than 50 years. He could face the death penalty if convicted. He was also charged with two counts of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
In the 25-minute video posted on militant websites Sunday, Gadahn described Maj. Nidal Hasan as a pioneer who should be a role model for other Muslims, especially those serving Western militaries.
"Brother Nidal is the ideal role-model for every repentant Muslim in the armies of the unbelievers and apostate regimes," he said.
Gadahn was dressed in white robes and wearing a white turban as he called for attacks on what he described as high-value targets.
"You shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that military bases are the only high-value targets in America and the West. On the contrary, there are countless other strategic places, institutions and installations which, by striking, the Muslim can do major damage," he said, an assault rifle leaning up against a wall next to him.
Hasan has been charged in the Nov. 5 shooting that killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist remains paralyzed from the chest down after being shot by two civilian members of Fort Hood's police force.
In the latest video, Gadahn said those planning attacks did not need to use only firearms. "As the blessed operations of September 11th showed, a little imagination and planning and a limited budget can turn almost anything into a deadly, effective and convenient weapon."
Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant.
The Snitch in Your Pocket
Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "
Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.
How many of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most "don't have a clue," says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey. The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)
The Justice Department doesn't keep statistics on requests for cell-phone data, according to the spokeswoman. So it's hard to gauge just how often these records are retrieved. But Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years. Sprint Nextel has even set up a dedicated Web site so that law-enforcement agents can access the records from their desks—a fact divulged by the company's "manager of electronic surveillance" at a private Washington security conference last October. "The tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," said the Sprint executive, according to a tape made by a privacy activist who sneaked into the event. (A Sprint spokesman acknowledged the company has created the Web "portal" but says that law-enforcement agents must be "authenticated" before they are given passwords to log on, and even then still must provide valid court orders for all nonemergency requests.)
There is little doubt that such records can be a powerful weapon for law enforcement. Jack Killorin, who directs a federal task force in Atlanta combating the drug trade, says cell-phone records have helped his agents crack many cases, such as the brutal slaying of a DeKalb County sheriff: agents got the cell-phone records of key suspects—and then showed that they were all within a one-mile area of the murder at the time it occurred, he said. In the fall of 2008, Killorin says, his agents were able to follow a Mexican drug-cartel truck carrying 2,200 kilograms of cocaine by watching in real time as the driver's cell phone "shook hands" with each cell-phone tower it passed on the highway. "It's a tremendous investigative tool," says Killorin. And not that unusual: "This is pretty workaday stuff for us."
But there is also plenty of reason to worry. Some abuse has already occurred at the local level, according to telecom lawyer Gidari. One of his clients, he says, was aghast a few years ago when an agitated Alabama sheriff called the company's employees. After shouting that his daughter had been kidnapped, the sheriff demanded they ping her cell phone every few minutes to identify her location. In fact, there was no kidnapping: the daughter had been out on the town all night. A potentially more sinister request came from some Michigan cops who, purportedly concerned about a possible "riot," pressed another telecom for information on all the cell phones that were congregating in an area where a labor-union protest was expected. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of abuse on this," says Gidari.
That was precisely what Smith and his fellow magistrates were worried about when they started refusing requests for cell-phone tracking data. (Smith balked only at requests for real-time information, while other magistrates have also objected to requests for historical data on cell-phone locations.) The grounds for such requests, says Smith, were often flimsy: almost all were being submitted as "2703(d)" orders—a reference to an obscure provision of a 1986 law called the Stored Communications Act, in which prosecutors only need to assert that records are "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. That's the lowest possible standard in federal criminal law, and one that, as a practical matter, magistrates can't really verify. But when Smith started turning down government requests, prosecutors went around him (or "judge shopping," in the jargon of lawyers), finding other magistrates in Texas who signed off with no questions asked, he told NEWSWEEK. Still, his stand—and that of another magistrate on Long Island—started getting noticed in the legal community. Facing a request for historical cell-phone tracking records in a drug-smuggling case, U.S. magistrate Lisa Pupo Lenihan in Pittsburgh wrote a 56-page opinion two years ago that turned prosecutors down, noting that the data they were seeking could easily be misused to collect information about sexual liaisons and other matters of an "extremely personal" nature. In an unusual show of solidarity—and to prevent judge shopping—Lenihan's opinion was signed by every other magistrate in western Pennsylvania.
The issue came to a head this month in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia. A Justice Department lawyer, Mark Eckenwiler, asked a panel of appeals-court judges to overturn Lenihan's ruling, arguing that the Feds were only asking for what amounted to "routine business records." But he faced stiff questioning from one of the judges, Dolores Sloviter, who noted that there are some governments, like Iran's, that would like to use such records to identify political protesters. "Now, can the government assure us," she pressed Eckenwiler, that Justice would never use the provisions in the communications law to collect cell-phone data for such a purpose in the United States? Eckenwiler tried to deflect the question, saying he couldn't speak to "future hypotheticals," but finally acknowledged, "Yes, your honor. It can be used constitutionally for that purpose." For those concerned about what the government might do with the data in your pocket, that was not a comforting answer.
For the last few years, policy makers and netizens have been battling over net neutrality — the idea that the net is and should remain an open, fair platform where packets flow freely and web services just work, everywhere and without favoritism. And they’re trying to find the best way to guarantee that.
The problem is hardly new. ICANN, the little-understood, policy-setting body that’s in charge of the net’s address system, has grappled with it, mostly successfully, for years. Now the agency — and its energetic new leader, Rod Beckstrom — is gearing up for some of its biggest challenges yet, as new powers such as China come online in force, and the U.S. cedes some of its historical control.
“Some governments seem to think that ICANN should be engaged in regulating what kind of content is on the net,” said David Johnson, a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The whole point of ICANN was to keep the domain name system from being used in that way.”
Net neutrality is most commonly framed in terms of a commercial threat from service providers hoping to profit by privileging certain services and content over others. But an equal, if less discussed, neutrality problem is quickly rising to the fore in the form of governments seeking to control information inside their borders.
ICANN’s most epic battle started in 2003, when Verisign, which has the ICANN contract to run the business of selling and administering .com and .net, decided it would re-route users who typed in non-existent .com domain names to a search engine page with ads. The move was rightly criticized as a security threat and a violation of net protocols, and ICANN ordered Verisign to remove the “feature,” though Verisign later filed a federal lawsuit over it.
That battle cemented ICANN’s role as the defender of the net’s inner architecture from self-serving mega-corporations. Now, the group’s biggest challenge is trying to keep the internet, and all the countries that connect to it, united.
That responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Beckstrom.
Beckstrom might seem like just another a blond-haired, charming Silicon Valley entrepreneur who rides his bike to his office in Palo Alto, but his job isn’t to make millions for himself and venture capitalists. At least not anymore.
He’s now the guy who keeps the internet from forking into a collection of squabbling intranets. Asked what his job is, Beckstrom’s answer is concise: “We want to keep the internet global.”
That’s a tough mandate as countries that feel threatened by the internet continually make moves toward breaking it apart. Witness Iran banning Gmail in favor of a state-run service, or China’s firewall blocking of sites like Facebook.
The next logical step in that progression is deciding to break with the protocols that unite the net and turn, for example, China’s internet into a massive intranet.
ICANN is nominally in charge of the internet’s policy around site names and addresses. It sets the rules on who can sell domain names, what language domain names are in, whether a domain name violates someone’s trademark and how people find their way from those names to the numerically addressed servers that host them online. In a system that works by connecting the world’s computers together, ICANN is oddly both powerful and powerless.
Beckstrom is in many ways the online equivalent of the mayor of Switzerland, with an arsenal of peacekeeping tools pretty much limited to his reputation.
The agency was chartered as an independent corporation by the U.S. government in 1998, when it wrested the net’s root file from net pioneer Jon Postel. And the Commerce Department has kept close (some say too close) a watch over it ever since.
Beckstrom became a known quantity in D.C. after a year stint running the National Cyber Security Center in the Department of Homeland Security. He was hired as ICANN chief in July 2009, in no small part for his D.C. connections, which ICANN hoped would convince Washington to trust it.
That plan paid off on September 30, just months after his tenure started, when ICANN and the Commerce Department inked a new operating agreement that declared that “ICANN is independent and is not controlled by any one entity” and that reviews of its performance will be done by the global internet community, not just the Department of Commerce.
Until then, the agency was closely controlled by the U.S. government, to the point that it required daily federal sign-off on changes to the internet’s root file, which tells the world’s computers where to look to find authoritative addresses.
If Beckstrom has been instrumental in convincing the U.S. that ICANN won’t go rogue, he now needs to convince the rest of the world’s governments that the newly freed ICANN is a neutral body that makes decisions independently and fairly.
But CDT’s Johnson says Beckstrom’s challenge goes beyond proving ICANN’s independence.
“The need to convince governments that it is not an arm of the U.S. government is pretty well understood,” Johnson said. “His greater challenge is to keep it from being under the control of governments generally.”
In an interview with Wired.com, Beckstrom described the internet’s history as an arc — starting as a U.S. military research project to a decentralized, global network whose size and complexity can only be guessed at.
ICANN needs to follow the same path, according to Beckstrom.
It also needs to start becoming more innovative, he said. ICANN has moved glacially to approve new top-level domains, such as .aero, .post and .travel — something that Beckstom argues is holding the net back.
“One of the least innovative spaces in the internet is the global top-level domains,” Beckstrom said. “It’s an anomaly. When the internet opens up, then there is innovation.”
Beckstrom is moving to make the approval process for new TLDs faster. The idea is not without controversy — the Bush Administration threatened to block .XXX from entering the net’s root file after ICANN’s approval of a .XXX domain for pornographic sites led to a backlash from religious groups like Focus on the Family. ICANN subsequently canceled the application, giving in to the political pressure. That proposal is now likely to come back up for approval, after an independent review ruled in February that ICANN violated its own policies when it revoked the approval of .XXX.
While opening up new domains is sure to create other controversies, Beckstrom argues that a flowering of new TLDs will lead to innovations that we can’t predict.
That’s not a sentiment that’s universally shared. Some say there’s plenty of domains to choose from, given that every country has its own, in addition to the more commonly used .net, .com, .info. Domain names have also grown considerably cheaper and can be gotten for less than $10 a year.
“I don’t think that creates innovation,” said David Farber, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who has been closely watching ICANN since its creation. “I think that creates rapid confusion.”
Farber also said that ICANN needs to counter its reputation for holding meetings in fancy places, where members live the high life on fees paid to ICANN through domain registrations.
Some see echoes of that reputation in Beckstrom’s salary.
His leadership has not come cheaply to ICANN, which signed him to a three-part contract that pays him $750,000 a year, with the possibility of a bonus up to $195,000 annually. Beckstrom, an author and entrepreneur, agreed to set aside any conflicts of interest and forego lucrative speaking gigs related to his management book, The Starfish and the Spider.
So far however, ICANN’s progress has largely kept attention away from Beckstrom’s salary.
In October, ICANN announced it was finally going to allow top-level domains (e.g. .gov, .com, .uk) in non-Latin characters, so that domain names can be registered in languages that use characters other than A to Z. Such domain names will have to use the same character set (e.g. http://allgreekcharacters.greektopleveldomian, not cocacola.greektopleveldomain) for the full name. That ban on hybrid names should prevent most trademark owners from having to register “theircompanyname.everynewdomain”.
Officially, the move was intended to make it easier for people who speak Greek or one of India’s 22 officially recognized languages to get online. But just as critically, the move was meant to deaden the argument that ICANN is biased in favor of countries such as the United States, whose languages use Latin characters.
“It was a psychic move,” Beckstrom said. “It is offensive to be told you have to change your language to use the internet.”
Beckstrom belittles arguments that the net will Balkanize with the new names. As long as DNS and search engines continue to work, people will still be able to traverse the net — no matter what languages the URLs are in, he said.
Moreover, internationalized domains could help to preserve local cultures, even as it promotes global interconnection, Beckstrom argued. He pointed to the example of the top-level domain for speakers of Catalan. The domain name has created a cultural space for speakers to converge in and helped re-invigorate a culture that is geographically dispersed.
Beckstrom points to examples like that to explain why he’s pushing ICANN to radically open the process of introducing new gTLDs — essentially allowing .anything that anyone is willing to pay to sponsor. The logical new ones? Pretty much any of the top 100 internet destinations: .wikipedia, .google, .microsoft, .facebook.
That would mean you’d be able to type in just Google into your browser and be taken there immediately, or have a Facebook page at JoanSmith.facebook
There are other possibilities, too — think .paris and .nyc, where you could have smithsbakery.paris and smithsbakery.nyc owned by different businesses. Or you could have a .gay or a .news TLD.
The proposal has trademark owners howling that they will have to spend too much to buy domain names in each of the new TLDs.
But Beckstrom says ICANN has worked hard to craft protections and even build notifications for trademark users into the domain name system. Beyond that, it’s not ICANN’s job to pre-emptively police trademarks — which are fraught with jurisdictional issues.
“Go enforce your trademarks in court,” Beckstrom said.
Beckstrom points to the new .post TLD, controlled by the United Postal Union that’s intended to create a trusted home for postal services around the globe — and eventually as a possible way for people to create email addresses whose owners are verified by their local post office — e.g. john.citizen@marseille.french.post is only given out after John Citizen goes to his local post office and shows appropriate identity documents.
The equation is simple for the Silicon Valley-trained Beckstrom.
“Adding more gTLDs will add innovation,” Beckstrom said.
CDT’s Johnson warns of other “innovation” that Beckstrom has to be sure not to create.
“I think ICANN has to be the conscience of the global community and resist the temptation to go beyond its core mission,” Johnson said. “It’s not just about them making governments happy. It’s about making sure they don’t get too happy.”
Retired Navy rabbi Maurice Kaprow and the USS Winston Churchill
Navy Cmdr. Maurice "Mo" Kaprow was stunned to watch then-Cmdr. Holly Graf in action. He saw her for the first time after arriving aboard her ship, the destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill, in Italy just before the Iraq war began in 2003. A Jewish rabbi and a Navy chaplain, he'd been sent to the Churchill on temporary assignment as the vessel readied for war. Usually pulling out of port is a methodical and precise process. "But I never in my life saw such chaos as there was on that bridge — Holly Graf began yelling and screaming rudder orders, engine orders, insulting people," Kaprow recalled Friday. "I'd never seen anything like this."
It got more bizarre as the ship pulled out of Sicily's Augusta harbor. "Just after clearing the breakwater the ship began to rumble and shake — now she's screaming even louder because nobody knows what's happening," Kaprow recalls. "I begin to hear young sailors' voices from the fantail and they're singing, `Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.'" Kaprow remembers being perplexed at the sudden song. "Then someone came up to me and said, `We've ran aground. She's finished" — assuming the accident would mean the end of their commander's career. "They were jumping for joy and singing on the fantail." Actually, one of the ship's props had broken, but the crew's reaction still amazes Kaprow. "I was flabbergasted."
Kaprow left the Navy last month after a 20-year career and visits to some 200 ships. Morale aboard the Churchill was the worst he says he ever saw — even on the eve of war with Saddam Hussein, where the Churchill launched Tomahawk missiles from the eastern Mediterranean toward Iraq. "I think the lady is mentally unbalanced," Kaprow says. "I don't believe she ever should have had command."
The Navy removed Graf from command of the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens in January for "cruelty and maltreatment" of her crew. But Kaprow's account makes clear that such conduct also occurred on the first ship Graf commanded. His tale is noteworthy because, unlike most others who witnessed Graf in command, Kaprow was an independent Navy outsider not subject to Graf's orders. Questions continue to swirl about how Graf not only retained her command, but kept getting promoted despite reports from eyewitnesses like Kaprow. Graf has declined interview requests, and there has been scant support offered for Graf by Navy colleagues on naval blogs or elsewhere. One admiral expressed concern Friday over what he called a "lynch mob" mentality about the case, as even conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh weighed in: "This woman sounds like a real Cruella de Vil."
The man known as the "combat rabbi" aboard the Churchill found the environment aboard the ship to be "weird, absolutely weird." Graf would talk to some of her officers but not to others. She would show up at the daily morning intelligence briefing in apparel Kaprow had never seen on a Navy warship before. "She'd be wearing black slippers," he says, "with one fuzzy ball on each one." Then there were the tirades. "She would argue with the briefers, belittling them," Kaprow says. "Just absolute vile stuff that I had never heard from a C.O. before."
After about 10 days aboard the Churchill, concerned about poor morale on the eve of war, Kaprow visited Graf in her stateroom. "I told her, `I'm getting some vibes — you're a nice lady and you have a hard job' — I'm telling her some of the junior officers are concerned and are really upset," Kaprow recalls. "I'm giving her the spiel and she just goes bonkers and cuts me off. She said she didn't want to talk about it."
For the rest of his time aboard, they didn't speak to each other. "I became a pariah and she just refused to talk to me," Kaprow says. "When she saw me eating in the wardroom she'd come in and grab her food and run away — she would not talk to me." Kaprow can't explain how Graf continued to rise up the Navy command ladder. "Certain people in the Navy are preselected for command, and no matter what happens the Navy will make sure that it happens," he says.
After more than a month on Graf's ship, Kaprow left for the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to tell Graf's superior what he had witnessed. He was the second senior officer from the ship to complain to superiors about Graf. "I told all of this to the commodore," Kaprow says, "but I don't know what happened to it from there." Back on the Churchill, officers — who knew that Kaprow was meeting with the commodore — waited anxiously for a change in the Churchill's command climate. It never came.
The construction site just off east London's Pudding Mill Lane is a hive of activity. To a sound track of saws, whirring engines and vehicle horns, workers are shifting earth, laying roads and scaling a cavernous steel-framed structure. On a viewing platform overlooking the site, a steady stream of people gather to watch the development take shape. Many linger: a dedicated coffee shop at one end of the platform offers hot drinks amid the crisp, wintry weather.
London's construction workers had better get used to the scrutiny. With the Vancouver Winter Games now concluded, attention will switch to the British capital — which was awarded the 2012 Summer Games five years ago — as it races to get ready. Learning from the last host city will be vital. While the sports on show in London will be different from those in Vancouver, the Canadian city's experience "gives us real food for thought," Sebastian Coe, chairman of London's organizing committee, told reporters ahead of the closing ceremony on Feb. 28. London, he said, would "use this information to ensure we stage a Games for everyone."
Coe, part of a 50-strong London delegation that studied the Winter Games firsthand, divides the lessons he and his colleagues learned into "four Ss" — sport, service, stadiums and sites. The team is set for a full debrief in the next few weeks. Ahead of that, here's a quick TIME guide for London:
Get the atmosphere right, and you're golden. Canadians bought into the Vancouver Games in a big way, and that played a key part in their success. London's organizers applauded Vancouver's party atmosphere, while International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge reckoned that locals had "embraced the Olympic Games like no other city in the world before."
Building such an atmosphere in London will be crucial. Plans are in place to put up dozens of big screens throughout the U.K. by 2012, mimicking the sites in and around Vancouver that offered people without tickets the chance to feel part of the action.
Locating about a quarter of the 2012 venues outside of London should also help stoke Britons' interest. Within the sprawling, densely populated capital, though, organizers "need to carefully plan how they're going to control, handle and manage the crowds to make sure everyone's safe and not gridlocked," says Ed Hula, editor of Around the Rings, a publication on the Olympics.
Give locals something to cheer about — but don't overdo it. Sports fans will doff their cap to a great performance by any competitor. In Vancouver, it was hard to see past American skier Lindsey Vonn or South Korean figure skater Kim Yu-na. But the sporting success of the home nation helps set the tone for an Olympics. Just ask Canada's rabid ice hockey fans. Canada topped the gold-medal count this winter, and the U.K. will be under pressure to deliver in 2012. Recent history is encouraging: Britain finished fourth in the medals table in Beijing and landed its biggest gold-medal haul in a century.
But the other lesson from Canada is that you can go too far. The country's "Own the Podium" initiative — a $110 million program designed to put Canada on top of the medals table — generated almost as much criticism as podium finishes. The plan limited rivals' access to facilities like the sliding and speedskating tracks, prompting protests from foreign competitors. Some even suggested that it contributed to the tragic death of Georgian luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili. Others claimed that it heaped too much pressure on the home nation's athletes. London chair Coe has defended the initiative in recent days; a two-time Olympic track champion, he knows all about high expectations. But managing expectations, and limiting the grumbles of others, will surely be in London's interest.
When you invite the world to a party, there are going to be glitches. Transport snarls, a lack of early snow and a mechanical snafu during the opening ceremony prompted one British newspaper to label Vancouver a contender for "worst Games ever." But minor hitches are inevitable. So too is a little criticism. What matters is how you react. "Success is measured in part or determined by how well you respond or how you cure inefficiencies early on," says Hula. And in that sense, "[Vancouver] did very well."
For London, as with any host, it underlines the need for "testing, testing, testing," as Rogge urged for the Vancouver Games. The message seems to have got through. "We have an entire year built in to make sure we test, test, test," says Joanna Manning-Cooper, spokeswoman for the London organizing committee. In 2011, organizers will try out all 26 of the Games' venues, mounting everything from "mass participation jamborees" to full-blown international meets in order to test catering, toilets, turnstiles and transport.
Selling more obscure sports cleverly can work. Demand for many of the 9 million tickets that London organizers plan to sell will be fierce. For some events, though — think handball — organizers know they may have to coax fans along. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Few Britons had ever heard of ski cross before the Vancouver Games, but the event, which pits four skiers simultaneously against one another over an undulating course, drew millions of television viewers. London organizers have been busy drawing up marketing plans to help push the lower-profile events. Vancouver may have given them some ideas.
Merchandising matters. O.K., so we've known that for a while. But ever since the over-commercialized Atlanta Games in 1996, host cities have made a big deal of being all about the sports while treating merchandising like a necessary evil. Vancouver proved it doesn't have to be that way. The enormous success of the red mittens — sales of the $10 gloves generated more than $12 million for Canadian sports — "helped us clarify our thinking around what could become the iconic collector's item of the Games," says Manning-Cooper. 2012 umbrella, anyone?
A spaceship lands. Humans become avatars. A man in a cape can fly. Special effects have made movies magical for decades. Big-dollar or ultralow-budget, the goal is the same: to frighten, fool or thrill the audience.
For a huge movie like Avatar, various special effects companies spent years on the project. One of them, Legacy Effects, had about 120 people working on the look of the inhabitants of the alien moon, Pandora.
But special effects happen on a smaller scale as well. In a cramped trailer in Van Nuys, Calif., two guys mix up fake blood for a slasher scene in C.L.A.S.S. (that stands for Criminal Law and Student Slayings). It's so low budget — $1 million — the filmmakers are shooting in producer Sheldon Robins' aunt's house for the film's final scene.
Robins put much of the little money he had toward special effects makeup. "The most important part was making sure my kills didn't look cheesy," he says.
Jerry Constantine will commit the makeup murders. Constantine did special effects makeup work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Watchmen and Van Helsing. Usually, for bloody scenes, Constantine attaches plastic tubing to the actor's back, and with a syringe, fires fake blood through the tubing during the live scene. But not on this budget.
"They don't have time for the two-hour makeup for me to pull the actor, glue the appliance on, and then spurt the blood," Constantine explains. "So we fake it out."
Viewers will see the actor after the throat's been slit. (Sorry, but it's all make-believe, remember.) First, Constantine takes a superthin, neck-sized piece of latex foam and cuts a horizontal slit in the middle. Constantine's assistant is Mike Measimer — they've been working on films together for 11 years. Constantine holds the piece up to the actress' neck and proclaims that it will work perfectly, so they glue it on. The two men work in tandem, like surgeons in reverse (wearing black surgical gloves.)
Constantine powders the line where the foam meets skin. With a sponge dipped in makeup, he dabs various pinks onto the fake flesh, then sprays on some pale brown freckles. It looks just like the woman's natural neck, but with a big empty slit in the middle. And now, the slashing begins. Before it gets too gory, we're going to cut away (as it were) to some of the special effects folks who worked on Avatar.
The Big Leagues
Legacy Effects, the special effects company for Avatar, is the offspring of the Stan Winston Studio. Winston worked with Avatar director James Cameron on his Terminator films, creating the menacing bots from the future. (Winston also did Aliens and the groundbreaking dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.) Winston's studio started working with Cameron on Avatar in 2006, but Winston died of cancer in 2008.
John Rosengrant, Winston's protege of 25 years, and a few others at the studio started Legacy Effects, a name in honor of their friend and mentor. They carried on the work in Avatar, creating the specialty props such as the enormous Armored Mobile Platform (AMP) suit, which looks like a tank on legs. The AMP is on display in Legacy Effects' warehouse, where all their movie, TV and commercial props and makeup effects are made. The AMP stands 13.5 feet high, and it's made of 200 distinct pieces — hand-detailed to suggest a metal texture.
"It's like Apache helicopter meets power loader from Alien," says Rosengrant, who worked on all three Terminator movies. Standing nearby the AMP suit in the warehouse is a rogues' gallery of specialty props: the Avatar Scorpion cockpit; the T-600 robot and two-gun turret tank from Termination Salvation; and the Iron Monger from Iron Man.
Rosengrant and his team also created the prosthetic legs actor Sam Worthington wore in Avatar. They found a Sam-sized young man — whose paralysis didn't stop him from playing basketball — and made a cast of his legs.
"We finished them off in silicon and punched individual hairs into them. [The prosthetic legs] would get strapped onto Sam, and his legs would go down into holes in the wheelchair," explains Rosengrant. "I think it was important to make sure that this was convincing, because it really sells the idea of Jake in his freedom as an avatar versus how he was trapped on Earth."
Rosengrant's team also conceived the look of Pandora's Na'avi people — with their enormous eyes. The team selected snow leopard eyes as inspiration and played with the color, turning them more golden and less green.
"You always draw from nature," says Rosengrant, "because you're trying to make the unbelievable believable."
Now, Back To Slashing
Making the unbelievable believable is a tall order on a small budget, but special effects makeup artists Jerry Constantine and Mike Measimer are still working on wreaking murderous mayhem on an actress' neck in C.L.A.S.S. So far, they've made the prosthetic to look completely natural with the actress' skin.
Constantine adds cotton to the horizontal slit area. He's creating what he delicately calls the "meat." The cotton will give dimension to the wound area after red coloring is applied to look like blood. Then, with a tiny spatula, Constantine spreads what looks like raspberry jelly on top. And ick — it suddenly looks like thickened blood.
"This where it starts to look like what it is," says Constantine. And it does. It looks so real, you want to turn away.
With all the advanced special effects on movies these days, it's hard to believe that Constantine and Measimer are still doing it the old-fashioned way. But even at a big studio like Legacy Effects, "slashing" is alive and well. Alan Scott, one of the co-owners of Legacy and a Stan Winston protege, stands by the old methods.
"The technologies that have been used in special makeup effects that worked for nearly 100 years still work," Scott says.
He says digital blood is not as messy, but you don't have actors reacting to something visually horrible, either.
"If you just have a tennis ball that you're playing to, it's hard to understand that there's a 30-foot creature trying to eat you," Scott says.
Scott and Rosengrant were inspired by all the old, great classic horror films — Frankenstein, The Mummy — and actors like Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney. In fact, Scott says, he'd love to do a full-on zombie movie.
"That's part of our roots," he says. "We love horror. My wife doesn't understand it, but that's my whole Netflix library
Corey Haim, a 1980s teen heartthrob for his roles in Lucas and The Lost Boys whose career was blighted by drug abuse, has died. He was 38.
The Toronto-born actor got his start in television commercials at 10 and earned a good reputation for his work in such films as 1985's Murphy's Romance and his portrayal of Liza Minelli's dying son in the 1985 television film A Time to Live.
