Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (93%); SMALL BUSINESS (90%); PERSONAL FINANCE (90%); FINANCIAL PLANNING (78%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (77%); PENSION & RETIREMENT PLANS (74%); RETIREMENT PLANNING (74%); WAGES & SALARIES (70%); INTERVIEWS (65%)
COMPANY: GOOGLE INC (53%)
TICKER: GOOG (NASDAQ) (53%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (53%)
LOAD-DATE: July 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

609 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 6, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Ancestral Journeys
BYLINE: By JONATHAN WILSON.

Jonathan Wilson is director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.

SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 1206 words
ORIGINS

By Amin Maalouf.

Translated by Catherine Temerson.

404 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

The attributes of Arab identity have proved quite a challenge for Americans in the last decade. Throughout the 20th century most United States citizens went along quite happily without expending a thought to, say, the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This was of a piece with a general climate of nonchalance about all things foreign. In a speech in Brasilia in 1982, Ronald Reagan infamously offered a toast to ''the people of Bolivia,'' a gaffe that probably did him more good than harm on his home turf. Since 9/11, the days of willful ignorance about the Arab world are gone forever, or at least there is a pretense they are. Now, just when it looked as if more or less everyone, politicians included, was close to getting the Sunni-Shiite thing down, along comes Amin Maalouf with his lovely, complex memoir, ''Origins,'' to remind us that Arab identity is as fluid, unsettled and ever-changing as the Mediterranean Sea where it kisses the shores of Lebanon, his country of origin, and France, where he has lived for the last 30 years.

Maalouf is a writer of historical fiction (his novel ''The Rock of Tanios'' won the 1993 Prix Goncourt), a sometime opera librettist and a quirky historian -- in ''The Crusades Through Arab Eyes,'' he brilliantly reconstituted a semi-documentary narrative from ''the other side.'' He is also a polemicist on behalf of the mongrel life. His 1998 book ''Les Identites Meurtrieres'' (translated into English two years later as ''In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong''), about the vagaries of identity and the dangers in cleaving too hard to the national model, took on a trenchant identity of its own after 9/11. Here was the clear, calm, cogent and persuasive voice from the Arab world that it seemed everyone in the West had been waiting for. In that book, Maalouf argued, like Primo Levi in ''The Periodic Table,'' for the salience of marginalized groups, ''frontier dwellers,'' to the societies they inhabit. By paying attention to the mix and match of minority life, majorities smugly entrenched in fixed identities might be encouraged to get a grip on their own, almost certainly diverse, selves. The dangers of not doing so are clear. ''Those who cannot accept their own diversity may be among the most virulent of those prepared to kill for the sake of identity, attacking those who embody that part of themselves which they would like to see forgotten,'' he wrote. In ''Origins,'' Maalouf puts theory into practice by charting the wayward journey of his own family.

The Maalouf family on the cusp and into the first decades of the 20th century is a challenging and charming blend of Catholics, Protestants, open thinkers and Freemasons, and sometimes a satisfyingly incongruent combination of two or more of these affiliations. There is even a Mormon branch in Utah. But the family's allegiance is first and foremost to the mountain villages of Lebanon, and from that unrolls a variety of commitments to place, family, religion, region, state, language, business, poetry and high thought. The Maaloufs are also somewhat taken with the idea of exile as an experience to broaden the mind rather than a loss of home to be endlessly lamented.

In ''Origins,'' Maalouf focuses mainly on his grandfather Botros, a schoolteacher who, having failed in business (he wanted to grow tobacco in the Bekaa plain), lives instead ''between notebooks and inkwells''; and on his more successfully entrepreneurial great uncle Gebrayel (his grandfather's younger brother), who left Lebanon in late 1895 for the United States and three years later for Cuba. They are a study in contrasts. Botros, a dandified intellectual determined to bring enlightenment to his corner of the mountains, scandalously refuses to have his children baptized, sets up a ''Universal School'' and roams his village bareheaded in a suit and cape, while Gebrayel establishes a successful retail business in Havana, only to die there under tragic circumstances.

Amin Maalouf's forebears include a Melkite priest, Theodoros, and a tragic hunger artist, Botros's unnamed nephew, who starves himself to death because his father will not let him study literature. The memoir is also flecked with delicious family anecdotes: a young aunt unwinds her tresses on her way to bed when her excited father calls out from the kitchen where negotiations have been in progress, ''Zalfa, do up your hair again; we've married you off!''

Why look back? William Blake strongly advised driving your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead, and Maalouf is frequently tempted by the idea as he travels from his home in Paris to fill the gaps in his ancestors' stories. In Cuba, where he locates his great uncle Gebrayel's home and discovers newspaper reports of his death, Maalouf often gets that ''I should have stayed home and watched sports on TV'' feeling, but he persists in his research. The descriptions of his brief sojourn in Havana -- frustrations and impasses followed by an unexpected denouement involving a long-lost cousin -- are the most gripping and evocative chapters in the memoir. In Cuba, Maalouf feels home but not at home. He drinks local rum, invites the Caribbean breeze to caress his face and ruminates on what might have been if his grandfather Botros and not his great uncle Gebrayel had made his way to Havana. Yet in the end, Maalouf doesn't only want to illuminate family history or amplify stories barely whispered for a hundred years; instead, he strives to reveal the fecund variety of his own family, of Arab life and history, of history itself. In doing so, he offers a lesson in the value of impermanence and shifting sands. ''Barely a hundred years ago, Lebanese Christians readily proclaimed themselves Syrian, Syrians looked to Mecca for a king, Jews in the Holy Land called themselves Palestinian ... and my grandfather Botros liked to think of himself as an Ottoman citizen,'' he writes. ''None of the present-day Middle Eastern states existed, and even the term 'Middle East' hadn't been invented. The commonly used term was 'Asian Turkey.' Since then, scores of people have died for allegedly eternal homelands, and many more will die tomorrow.''

Identity is writ not in stone but on water. All the more absurd, then, when it is used -- in a manner increasingly common, especially among our hopeful politicians -- as a credential. Am I, for example, suitably qualified to represent the unemployed in contemporary Poland because my grandfather hailed from Piotrokow more than a century ago and never had a job in his life?

In her old age, Amin Maalouf's grandmother Nazeera knitted him a white winter scarf so long that on chilly Paris nights he has to wrap it around his shoulders ''several times so it won't drag on the floor.'' Maalouf wants nothing more than to unwind the long scarf of memory and history, not to make a claim, but in celebration of human dignity, endeavor and ''wanderers who have lost their way.'' He is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (92%); MUSLIMS & ISLAM (90%); HISTORY (89%); BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE (72%); RELIGION (71%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (70%); ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS AWARDS (65%)
COMPANY: FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX INC (58%)
PERSON: RONALD REAGAN (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: ATLANTIC OCEAN (70%); MEDITERRANEAN SEA (79%) UNITED STATES (94%); BRAZIL (92%); LEBANON (79%); MEDITERRANEAN (70%)
TITLE: Origins (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: July 6, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH FROM ''ORIGINS'')
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

610 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 6, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

File-Sharing Fetish
BYLINE: By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; Magazine Desk; THE MEDIUM; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 1500 words
In 1996, as Hollywood was lionizing the pornographer Larry Flynt as the author of the real sexual revolution, the Internet was trying to decide what to do about porn.

It was not an either-or question. After all, data could instantly be conveyed at low cost across vast distances, from traceless studios to private lairs. Pornography was bound to ride this network. Observers accepted it as axiomatic: technology and pornography -- from the printing press, to photography, magazines, film and videotape -- always evolve in tandem. ''Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation,'' John Tierney wrote in The Times in 1994. ''Virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.''

The Internet is for porn. Since I spend days and nights watching online video, people frequently remind me of this maxim from ''Avenue Q.'' A little too rapidly, I protest that YouTube, the Web's most comprehensive video site, where people watch around three billion videos a month -- fertile territory for pornography any way you look at it -- has somehow kept itself (relatively) clean and outstripped the video-sharing competition.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who founded the site, met at PayPal, the money-exchange company. Their ambition in developing YouTube was not to create entertainment but to build another safe, secure and trustworthy exchange site, this one for videos. To a great extent, they have succeeded.

So while pornography is no doubt culturally important and central to technological progress, I almost never run across it in my own online travels. Yes, I'm trying to seem relaxed and cosmopolitan. The truth is that pornography makes me feel tired and sulkily excluded, as if I were watching a long foreign-language play filled with hilarious jokes I'll never understand.

But almost everyone else seems to get it, and entrepreneurs in the mid-'90s saw dollar signs. Thanks to pro-sex feminism, the apotheosis of Flynt and nostalgia for the era of ''Boogie Nights,'' the entrepreneurs could even -- if in existential doubt -- wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes. Pornography -- or some kinds of it -- was cerebral, hip. In San Francisco, there was Kink.com, a supposedly humane fetish site started by someone who had been to Columbia University. In New York, Nerve.com, a press darling aimed at a literate and coed audience, opened its doors. Elsewhere on the Web, sexual connoisseurship of specific sorts thrived, with sites devoted to underwater scenes, latex, ''chunky angels'' and copulation with octopuses, among other fetishes.

The same radical eclecticism that characterizes today's pornography also is in evidence everywhere on YouTube, in different guises. On a recent Wednesday, the most-popular video showed a boy shrieking like a madman over a toy car, just as an earlier YouTube boy shrieked over a Nintendo Wii. A little farther down that list, after commercial music videos, soccer clips and an admittedly sexy montage of the MTV star Heidi Montag, a YouTube video blogger named PhillyD filed what he unpersuasively billed as his final video. The fake goodbye by an exhausted blogger -- who returns a little while later, unable to truly quit -- has also become something of a YouTube set piece.

YouTube's redefinition of broadcast success from having giant audiences for blockbuster content to having a giant inventory of videos that each satisfy arcane, niche interests may have come from online pornography. Users create microgenres and niches by posting answering images: the shrieking-kid-with-toy genre, the cats-being-mean genre, the speed-painting genre. Fans find one another, then break away to chat.

However uneasy it makes me, the influence of pornography on nonporn online video is hard to ignore. Among the people I know who learned their way around the Web early on, many were motivated by an interest in porn. My friend A., for example, passed hours at a boring reality-TV job staring at ''bear thumbs'': heavy, bearded, naked men rendered at thumbnail -- postage-stamp -- size. As A. talked about bear thumbs, and making do with them instead of paying to magnify the images, we marveled at the fact that the words ''bear'' and ''thumb'' had been united in this strange way, at

this strange time in history, at this particular moment in the diversification of sexual markets.

''How small are bear thumbs?'' I finally asked.

''Tiny. Like at my cubicle, right now, I am peering at a set of pixels that could be a badger or buffalo or just a brown-beige cube of light.''

''Does it hit the spot?'' I wondered.

''Yes, in a weird way. Not getting the chance to quite see porn is the story of anyone's life who grew up when the adult channels were scrambled. You learned to be turned on by partial views.''

A. was at the leading edge, but now I have also developed a taste for undersize, partial and blurry images. In YouTube's early days, the homepage often featured fuzzy clips of people in the middle of some ordinary action, seemingly shot and uploaded by accident. A seated, half-concealed kid would turn and say, ''What are y-- '' and that would be it. I watched every one I could find. They were otherworldly. Partly, too, I thought I didn't have much time to see them. One look at YouTube's eccentric offerings, and I figured its days as a free-for-all ''video-sharing site'' were numbered. Sooner or later it would become a porn depot.

But it did not. Chen and Hurley were committed to taking down videos that users objected to, and they maintained their own standards, too. Chief among the site's assets, in fact, were top-secret pattern-recognition technologies that block porn uploads. (I imagine a Galaga-like spaceship that shoots down constellations of flesh-colored pixels; YouTube's not telling how they do it.) Of course, there's plenty of suggestive and sexy stuff on YouTube, including raunchy near-nudity like ''Super Booty Webcam Dance,'' that's not suitable for work or children. But nothing I've ever seen would count as X-rated. And while other video sites that gave YouTube competition at the start -- like Gorilla Mask -- are now overrun with pornography, YouTube has managed to chasten porn-uploaders enough that they've been forced to create their own counterparts to YouTube, like Pornotube and Eroshare.

By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube's dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant.

On one recent day, YouTube's most popular videos were not highbrow, but they were eclectic. A kid wiped out on his skateboard. Shayla Worley walked the balance beam at the Olympic trials. A group of friends used their cellphones to pop corn.

What?! I was skimming thumbnails as usual when the popcorn video arrested my attention. I watched four times, transfixed. Before my eyes, popcorn on a coffee table popped, triggered (it seemed) by nothing more than ringing phones aimed at kernels. Whoa. Were the videomakers really allowed to suggest that cellphones emit so much radiation that they speed food preparation? Related cellphone-popcorn videos came up, including some videos that seemed to demonstrate that the popping was a fraud. Then still other videos appeared to reproduce the popping. I frantically tried to solve the mystery, eager to find out once and for all whether cellphones are hazardous.

Who knew so many people shared this twisted curiosity? As I kept clicking and watching, I began to feel excited, even turned on.

Points of Entry

THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS

DIGNIFY IT: Put Walter Kendrick's readable, scholarly and caseclosing 1987 book, ''The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture,'' on your desk, and suddenly the whole thing doesn't feel so sordid. With an afterword from 1996.

GET NERVOUS: One of the few Web 1.0 sites from New York still in business, Nerve no longer calls its content ''literate smut,'' but the site still offers 24/7 sex news, pictures and tales for ladies and gentlemen who consider themselves ''mature'' adults with ''discretion.'' Its personal ads also get high marks. A recent headline: ''There's one thing I've never done in bed, and I'm saving it for my future husband.'' If you're tantalized, see Nerve.com.

OTHER PERVERSIONS: Though Wired featured a physicist who debunked them, and the first one may be an ad for headphones, the cellphone-popcorn videos are thrilling, if you're into that kind of thing. Go to YouTube.com and perform a search for ''cellphone'' and ''popcorn.'' Watch the debunking videos. Then watch again. And you decide. Pop.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: FILM (90%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (90%); INTERNET & WWW (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (86%); INTERNET VIDEO (78%)
COMPANY: PAYPAL INC (54%)
TICKER: PYPL (NASDAQ) (54%)
GEOGRAPHIC: CALIFORNIA, USA (78%); NEW YORK, USA (70%) UNITED STATES (78%)
LOAD-DATE: July 6, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN VAN AELST)

DRAWING (DRAWING BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

611 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 6, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll
BYLINE: By BRAD STONE
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 964 words
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?

In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, ''Down for everyone, or just me?'' It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether the problem is with their own connection.

''I had seen that question posed so often,'' said Mr. Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime. ''Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.''

There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical problems in the last few months.

About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Mr. Payne's site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than a million dollars an hour in sales.

The Web, like any technology or medium, has always been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark.

But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were much lower. Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it.

Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That data is supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the office computer or filing cabinet.

The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock -- and even the Internet's biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen.

Last holiday season, Yahoo's system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline.

The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.

''It was prolonged torture,'' said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business.

Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.

The volatile emotions around Web downtime are perhaps most prevalent in the discussion around Twitter, on which users post updates on who they are with, where they are, and what they are doing.

According to Pingdom, a Web monitoring firm, Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April -- by far more than any other major social networking Web site.

Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of rancor, creating ''Is Twitter Down?'' T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube parodies, and posting copies of Twitter's various artfully designed error messages.

''This is a free service. It's not like anyone's life is depending on Twitter,'' said Laura Fitton, a consultant and self-described passionate Twitter user.

''Twitter is all about the things we discover we have in common, so right there, Twitter failing is a huge thing we have in common,'' she said. ''It's fun to complain to each other and commiserate.''

Twitter has said its downtime is the result of rapidly growing demand and fundamental mistakes in its original architecture.

Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, says the outcries over failures are understandable.

''When these sites go away, it's a sudden loss. It's like you are standing in the middle of Macy's and the power goes out,'' he said. ''When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it's trauma.''

He says Web services should be held to the same standard of reliability as the older services they aim to replace. ''These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won't suddenly collapse.''

By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is performing better than ever.

''There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world,'' said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors companies' Web performance. ''These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.''

But perhaps they are not rare enough. One morning last month, Google App Engine, a service that lets people run interactive Web applications, was unavailable for several hours.

Among those affected was Mr. Payne, who had just shifted downforeveryoneorjustme.com over to Google's servers. It was inaccessible as well.