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EVENT

New York Underground Film Festival - The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things


Dates:
Wed Mar 09, 2005 00:00 - Sat Mar 05, 2005

8pm, Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave @ 2nd Street
www.nyuff.com

"Asia Argento, woman director and star in her own new movie, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, does something remarkable— she doesn't try to look good. In fact, she looks like hell, and I know few directors, and fewer stars who are brave enough to show their unmitigated dark side, with all its swollen reddish green blemishes, splotchy skin, inability to love, desire to hurt— all that true to life ugly stuff that we usually prefer to hide from others and ourselves. Asia lets it all hang out." — Nina Menkes, Senses of Cinema

Based on JT LeRoy’s autobiographical novel of the same name, the screenplay is a close read of the original text. Argento adds a hard-edged beauty to LeRoy’s tale, while retaining the novel’s deft depiction of the inner world of a boy growing up in a brutal world.

After Jeremiah’s mother Sarah (Asia Argento) reclaims him from his loving foster family, he’s dragged kicking and screaming into her world of drugs, prostitution and narcissistic manipulation. Jeremiah (played early on by Jimmy Bennett, and later by both Dylan and Cole Spruce) quickly learns seduction as a survival skill, finding his self-preservation encased within an array of changing identities. Jeremiah faces a ceaseless string of aggressors, from abusive boyfriends (Marilyn Manson, Jeremy Sisto), to an unsympathetic evangelical grandfather (Peter Fonda), to a backward social worker (Winona Ryder).

Of all the adults who betray him, worst of all is his mother. Sarah convinces him at every turn that his fate is his own doing, and concocts cruel threats to keep him at her side. Convincing Jeremiah that nobody can help him, she creates a warped, paranoid reality, leaving him a defenseless accomplice to her dysfunctions.


OPPORTUNITY

New York Underground Film Festival Call For Entries


Deadline:
Fri Nov 12, 2004 21:10

New York Underground Film Festival

C A L L + F O R + E N T R I E S
DEADLINE: NOV. 15 (late deadline Dec. 1)

12th Annual New York Underground
March 9-15, 2005, Anthology Film Archives

For rules and regulations:
www.nyuff.com

or:
e n t e r + o n l i n e at:
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DISCUSSION

Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War


from NYTimes
By TIM WEINER, 11/12/04

The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."

The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said.

"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.

"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."

The American military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused," shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war.

Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."

Pentagon traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing more than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja and Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic cables and wireless connections.

But the biggest challenge in building a war net may be the military bureaucracy. For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built their own weapons and traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through those old ways.

The ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon's spending plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret, but billions have already been spent.

Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project.

Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost $25 billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions more. The Army's program for a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.

Over all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the war net's hardware and software in the next decade or so. "The question is one of cost and technology," said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"We want to know all things at all times everywhere in the world? Fine," Mr. Hamre said. "Do we know what this staring, all-seeing eye is that we're going to put in space is? Hell, no."

The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the time," in the words of Steven A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence. He has told Congress that military intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared with troops.

John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information Security Agency, now starting to build the war net, said: "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that."

Military contractors - and information-technology creators not usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before.

Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.

The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.

Then the world eclipsed them. The nation's military and intelligence services started falling behind when the Internet exploded onto the commercial scene a decade ago. The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Mr. Cerf said.

It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In 1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that "this monumental task will span a quarter-century or more." This year, the vision gained focus, and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are "critically dependent on the future network," the agency reported. "Despite enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts" like missile defense, "the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental transformation in the way military operations are conducted."

According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war."

Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming "the center of gravity" for war planners.

"The tenets are broadly accepted throughout the Defense Department," said Mr. Wells, who directs the Office of Networks and Information Integration. "Senior leadership can articulate them. We still have a way to go in terms of why we should spend X billion dollars on a certain program. In the fight between widgets and digits, widgets tend to win."

He said $24 billion would be spent in the next five years to build new war net connections. "No doubt these are expensive," Mr. Wells said. "Technology developments always are."

Advocates acknowledge that weaving American military and intelligence services into a unified system is a huge challenge.

The military is filled with "tribal representatives behind tribal workstations interpreting tribal hieroglyphics," in the words of Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff. "What if the machines talked to each other?" he asked.

That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies.

To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth.

Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work.

The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.

The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite plans to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with a tenth of the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its "lessons learned" report from Iraq, published in May, said "there will probably never be enough resources to establish a complete and functioning network of communications, sensors, and systems everywhere in the world."

The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line commanders and troops fight frequent software freezes. "To make net-centric warfare a reality," said Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information Security Agency's bandwidth expansion chief, "we will have to precipitously enhance bandwidth."

The military must also change its own culture.

For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built separate weapons, radios, frequencies and traditions. They guard their "rice bowls" - their turf - from rival services.

But Mr. Rumsfeld's vision depends on interoperability: warfare using all four services in joint operations.

In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines," but a unified force, said William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For the Pentagon's visionaries, Mr. Montemarano said, "the single biggest obstacle is a cultural one.''

"Breaking these rice bowls - that's a huge job.

DISCUSSION

Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried


from NYTIMES - 11/12/04
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved real voting anomalies in Florida and Ohio, the two states on which victory hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah.

"I love the process of democracy, and I think it's more important than the outcome," said Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp's analysis of the vote in Florida (she has a master's degree in mathematics) that set off a flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who were certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that were leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning handily, that something was amiss.

The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site, www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a "surprising pattern" in Florida's results showing inexplicable gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used optical-scan voting systems.

The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp's number crunching was hard to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own bar charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories - along with their visual aids - were distributed by e-mail messages containing links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where other eager readers diligently passed them along.

Within one day, the number of visits to Ms. Dopp's site jumped from 50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number tipped 17,000. Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three Democratic members of Congress - John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida - sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an investigation of voting machines. A link to Ms. Dopp's site was included in the letter.

But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.

Still, as visitors to Ms. Dopp's site approached 70,000 early this week, other election anomalies were gaining traction on the Internet. The elections department in Cleveland, for instance, set off a round of Web log hysteria when it posted turnout figures on its site that seemed to show more votes being cast in some communities than there were registered voters. That turned out to be an error in how the votes were reported by the department, not in the counting.

And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated.

But while authorities acknowledge that there were real problems on Election Day, including troubles with some electronic machines and intolerably long lines in some places, few have suggested that any of these could have changed the outcome.

"There are real problems to be addressed," said Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of election reform information, "and I'd hate for them to get lost in second-guessing of the result."

It is that second-guessing, however, that has largely characterized the blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have become frustrated by the rumor mill.

"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.

"Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation," he said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to know what really happened.' "

Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online pundits, however, is a matter of debate.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University, suggests that the online fact-finding machine has come unmoored, and that some bloggers simply "can't imagine any universe in which a fair count of the votes would result in George Bush being re-elected president."

But some denizens of the Web see it differently.

Jake White, the owner of the Web log primordium.org, argues that he and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely by partisan politics. "While there are no doubt large segments of this movement that are being driven by that," he said in an e-mail message, "I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the election was held."

Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.

John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid. "Of course you can say blogs are wrong," he said. "Blogs are wrong all the time."

For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.

"We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset," said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, "I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering."

A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."

Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.

"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite the past."

Ford Fessenden and John Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.

DISCUSSION

Index Spammers and Google bombing


SEARCH AND DESTROY
by James Surowiecki

From the New Yorker, Talk of the Town
Issue of 2004-05-31
Posted 2004-05-24

If you go to the Internet search engine Google, type in “miserable failure,” and click on the “I’m feeling lucky” icon, you will be directed not to an article about “Ishtar” or the 1962 Mets but, rather, to the White House Web site and the official biography of President George W. Bush. Congratulations. You’ve been Google-bombed.

A Google bomb goes off when people conspire to have a particular phrase (in this case, “miserable failure”) link to a given Web page, effectively tying the phrase to the page. Other famous Google bombs include one linking “more evil than Satan himself” to Microsoft’s home page and, currently, one that links “weapons of mass destruction” to a page that reads, “The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. . . . Click the Regime Change button, or try again later.”

Google bombing may be a party trick, something to amuse office workers as they trudge through the day, but it exemplifies one of the biggest challenges that Google faces as it heads toward its multibillion-dollar I.P.O. Google is as much a ranking system as a search engine. It is more efficient than any other site at analyzing information and making decisions about its importance. Google is successful not because if you search for “Enron” it will return 1.75 million pages that contain the word but because, of those 1.75 million, the most relevant are right at the top. In large part, Google does this by relying on the collective intelligence of the Web itself. At the core of Google’s technology is a voting system. Every link from one Web site to another is treated as a vote; sites that get more votes are considered more valuable and, in Google’s system, are weighted to have more influence. Google also takes hundreds of other factors into consideration, such as font size and the location of words on the page. But, fundamentally, the Web pages that Google says are best are the pages that the Web as a whole thinks are best.

Google’s success has created a problem, though: if you have a voting system, people are going to try to manipulate it. Google bombing is the innocent face of this. Less innocent is the industry dedicated to helping Web sites maximize their Google rankings—the racket known as “search engine optimization.” Some American companies have armies of programmers toiling away in Bangalore solely to boost their Google rankings. Much of what the “optimizers” do is reasonable, helping companies do a better job of presenting content, using keywords, and building pages to which others will want to link. (These are termed “white hat” tactics.) But there are also plenty of black hats—known as “index spammers”—who have simply adapted the methods and tricks of the old political machines.

In the days of Boss Tweed, people were encouraged to vote early and often, dead men were placed on the voting rolls, and citizens were paid for their votes. On the Web, companies “cloak,” which means, among other things, that they disguise the real content of their sites, in an attempt to fool Google into thinking that a page is relevant to a search. Deep-pocketed players pay other sites to link to their sites, to foster an illusion of popularity. Some companies set up “link farms”—a host of interconnected Web sites that exist primarily to link to each other. A big company with a major Internet presence, for instance, can buy thousands of domain names, set up Web sites, and effectively create thousands of links out of nothing.

Google, of course, knows about all this. In its recent I.P.O. filing, it said that the threat from index spammers was “ongoing and increasing,” and so it has embarked on a campaign to outsmart them. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, it essentially banned a company called WhenU because of its cloaking tactics. (WhenU’s web site will no longer appear if you search for the company on Google.) To stymie the cheaters, Google issues periodic revisions to its algorithm, and companies breathlessly await the subsequent changes in their rankings. (They call this “the Google dance.”) These revisions are so important to Web sites that, like hurricanes, they are given names. Web masters still marvel at the havoc wreaked by the Florida revision, last November: “Denial, then anger, gradually changing to acceptance, and, finally, healing,” one wrote.

Google’s efforts to keep its rankings honest have not always been popular. Some people who run Web sites that depend on the traffic that Google sends their way have accused the company of being capricious and unjust. There have even been calls from critics for it to be regulated as a public utility. But attacks on Google are shortsighted. Google is treating index spammers the way Olympic officials treat athletes who use steroids. Think of the Web as a track meet. When the other runners are juiced, it’s hard to keep up with them unless you are, too. Likewise, when people start cloaking or link-farming, those who wish to remain competitive have to consider doing so themselves. This winds up hurting everyone; if Web users think Google isn’t a clean game, eventually they’ll stop playing.

Google works best when no one knows it’s there—when people are making their own decisions about which sites are useful or good. The more important Google becomes, the harder its job gets, because more and more people find themselves trying to game the system, and wind up undermining it instead. When Google purges dubious Web sites and rejects links from link farms, it is, in a sense, counteracting the consequences of its own success. Collective intelligence relies on a certain degree of innocence. Google is using guile to re-create a guileless world, under the assumption that what we don’t know should help us.