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British Telecom sacks bitterly unpopular Phorm ad platform

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 10:25pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

In an announcement this morning, British Telecom said it has decided to halt BT Webwise, its prospective targeted advertising platform, calling the move a cost-cutting measure as the company invests £1.5 billion in improved broadband deployments. As a result, shares in the BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media joint Venture plummeted in value by some 40%.
In early 2008, BT, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media joined forces to build a single targeted ad platform for their respective subscribers. The service would provide the ISPs anonymized user search data so they could serve more appropriate advertisements. Unfortunately, after the service had been announced, BT admitted that it had already tested the service without telling users. This was naturally met with petitions and protest from angered users and privacy advocacy groups.
BT continued to test the service on an opt-in basis under the name "BT Webwise," but the public held a degree of skepticism about the platform's impact on privacy, which European Commission policymakers shared. By the time the second battery of tests rolled around, the EC had begun an investigation into the UK data protection laws which allowed the original Phorm tests to be conducted without customers' consent.
In her public address in April, European Commissioner Viviane Reding said, "European privacy rules are crystal clear: A person's information can only be used with their prior consent. We cannot give up this basic principle, and have all our exchanges monitored, surveyed and stored in exchange for a promise of 'more relevant' advertising! I will not shy away from taking action where an EU country falls short of this duty."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Don't wait for Microsoft's patch: Secure Windows now from Monday's 0-day

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 9:44pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

There's an old ActiveX control hanging around many Windows systems that's still accessible to Internet Explorer, whose original purpose was to tune into MPEG2 transport streams -- typically live video streams sent from a server using MPEG2 format. Yes, MPEG2 transport streams still exist, but any more, browsers including IE8 have appropriate plug-ins to handle them -- Windows Media Player is one, Apple's QuickTime is another.
But still there's this ActiveX control sitting there doing nothing, waiting to be leveraged for an attack. Earlier today, Microsoft acknowledged a SANS Internet Storm Center report saying that there's an active exploit of this disused bit of functionality published on Chinese Web sites. Apparently malicious users are utilizing it now in "drive-by" attacks that could result, say security experts including Sophos' Graham Cluley, in installation and execution of nearly any malicious payload.
This morning, Microsoft security engineer Chengyun Chu noted that in order for a Web site to use this exploit to deliver this payload, the user would need to click on a link that launches that Web site. That makes Outlook relatively safe if that link is embedded in the type of e-mail message that says, "Check this out!" just so long as the user doesn't click on that link. In other words, the code cannot be triggered automatically through Microsoft's e-mail client.
While Cluley and others are chiding Microsoft for not coming up with a patch, the sad fact is, it actually might not need to. In this morning's security advisory, the company admitted right up front that its current set of engineers have forgotten what this ActiveX control was ever needed for: "Our investigation has shown that there are no by-design uses for this ActiveX Control in Internet Explorer which includes all of the Class Identifiers within the msvidctl.dll that hosts this ActiveX Control," the security advisory reads. "For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers, Microsoft is recommending removing support for this ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer."
In the meantime, the company is recommending that users remove support for this control themselves. It's an easy process for anyone who's ever used REGEDIT before, although it's just a little arduous -- there are as many as 45 possible CLSID numbers for this single control (which shows you how ridiculous the ActiveX control management process was in its heyday). The security advisory lists them all, although you do not need to go through Microsoft's advised steps of cutting and pasting them all individually into Notepad (talk about making something more difficult than it has to be!).
Instead, you can use our much simpler method of making certain your Windows installation is safe by doing the following:
1. Open Security Advisory 972890 and scroll down to General Information. Open the Suggested Actions tier, followed by Workarounds, and scroll down until you see the long list marked Class Identifier.
2. Start the Windows Registry Editor (REGEDIT). (For Vista, you may need to click on Continue at the UAC prompt.)
3. In the left pane, open the folder corresponding to the Registry tier \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility. The good news here is that all the CLSIDs in this segment of the Registry, and all the CLSIDs in Microsoft's warning list, are in hexadecimal numerical order, so you won't have to search each one from top to bottom.
4. Scan the Registry to see if any of the CLSIDs correspond exactly to any of the 45 Registry items flagged by Microsoft. More than one may correspond. If none correspond, you are already safe from this exploit. Betanews was unable, for example, to find any of the 45 Registry entries on our Windows XP or Vista systems, and we don't expect to see it in Windows 7.
5. If you do find an offending CLSID, then do not delete it. That actually won't change anything at all, believe it or not. Instead, choose its entry from the left pane.
6. Check the right pane for a value named Compatibility Flags. If it does not yet exist, you'll need to create it. Right-click on the empty space in the right pane, and from the popup menu, select New, Binary Value. A new listing will be created that moment, which you'll need to rename. Type Compatibility Flags and Enter.
7. Right-click on Compatibility Flags and from the popup menu, select Modify. In the Edit DWORD Value dialog box, under Value data, type 400, leave the Base setting on Hexadecimal, then click on OK. Repeat this process for all the remaining CLSIDs in Microsoft's list.
What this does is set the kill bit for the control. It's still registered (and it's still taking up space on your hard drive, doing nothing), but now it's at least turned off, so it can't be leveraged in an attack.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
CBS is the last man standing against Hulu

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 9:15pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today marks the beginning of ABC's arrival on Hulu. Last April, Disney's ABC Enterprises jumped aboard NBC Universal and News Corp's increasingly popular video syndication site, and this morning, the first ABC program was rolled out for streaming.
The first ABC show available on Hulu is the drama "Grey's Anatomy," of which five episodes have been posted. For the next two weeks, more content will be added, including episodes of the network's biggest hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs." A month before Disney and ABC arrived at a deal with Hulu, the network agreed to first bring its content to YouTube, where it would supply clips of popular shows and short-form episodic content equipped with "different monetization options" than standard YouTube videos.
Hulu, which is accepted as a higher value site for professional content, now has a the lion's share of network support with content coming from NBC, Fox, ABC, and their subsidiaries, while CBS and The CW content is syndicated on CBS-owned TV.com. Though TV.com has posted significant gains in unique views and minute-by-minute engagement for five months straight, according to Nielsen Videocensus, CBS remains the last network standing unaffiliated with Hulu.
Additionally, erstwhile competitor Joost went through several format revisions before the death knell began to sound for that service last week.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Not just Vista: The operating system is dying, too

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 8:07pm CEST par Carmi Levy

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

Okay, so I raised a bit of a stink with last Friday's Wide Angle Zoom. So to make sure my position on Vista, operating systems, Microsoft and the future of the technological world under President Barack Obama's leadership are completely understood, I wanted to address some of the more...ah, pointed perspectives from the Comments section. I've paraphrased the wordings to protect the innocent. Here goes:
Vista is a great operating system. There's nothing wrong with it.
Technically, this is correct. Never did -- or would -- I say that Vista sucked. If it did, I wouldn't be using it on my primary laptop.
Microsoft continues to sell it, and will continue to provide support for it per its widely known schedule. But beyond the numbers, in a somewhat more spiritual context, Microsoft has already cut Vista out of the will. Marketing strategies that worked in 1999 don't work today as new form factors and ubiquitous wireless and broadband access have completely rewritten the OS landscape. The good old days, when Microsoft's dominance of the desktop was absolute, are over. We don't exclusively use desktops anymore, and the OS as we know it won't exist in a few years.
It's Vista's lousy timing to be the OS on sale when this process began to accelerate, but it's more than a little unfair to blame the product for this. Sometimes, the world just changes and nothing you can bake into a new-and-improved product can change that reality.
Microsoft messed up in releasing an OS that only ran properly on new PCs and ignored the needs of millions of existing customers.
By a show of hands, who runs out to the Best Buy at midnight and snaps up a shrink-wrapped box of a snazzy new OS? That may have been how we were introduced to Windows 95, but these days, we upgrade when we get new hardware.
I realize Betanews readers are infinitely more likely to have the technical chops to properly upgrade an existing machine. But the vast majority of the PC-buying consumers look more like my mother-in-law. They wouldn't know an OS from an S.O.S., and I'm going to guess you've never bumped into them in line at the big box store at midnight listening to the Rolling Stones croon "Start Me Up."
With the vast majority of operating systems delivered by OEM vendors on new machines, it's more than a bit silly to castigate Microsoft for ignoring its loyal base of millions of fans. Few of them really care that they're not running the latest and greatest version of Windows, and they'll be perfectly happy to upgrade when their existing computer gives up the ghost. When they go shopping, they're buying hardware, not operating systems. So forgive Microsoft for focusing its OS development efforts on something newer than a dust-covered Pentium II.
Microsoft is rushing Windows 7 out the door to recapture its OS leadership.
News flash: Microsoft still owns the OS market. Always has, and pretty much will for the next few years. As so many of you correctly pointed out, Vista was abnormally late to market. Microsoft usually follows a three-ish year cycle, and given Vista's abnormally long six-year gestation, Windows 7 more or less gets the company back on schedule. We can debate whether XP SP1 and SP2 merited "new OS" status until the cows come home, but the reality for Microsoft is we'll likely never see such big bang projects in OS-land again. Gradual evolution is the name of the game from here on out.
There are few other OS alternatives beyond Linux and Apple's Mac OS X.
Good point. One of the reasons why Windows has been as dominant as it is for as long as it has is because it combines a relatively easy-to-use UI with an ability to play nice with pretty much everyone's hardware. It's the biggest ecosystem out there, so developers and other third party vendors flock to it.
Is it technically better than anything else out there? We can debate that one until the cows leave home once again, but the answer is irrelevant. What matters is that it's good enough, and it has been good enough since Windows 3.1 finally relegated the command line-driven world of unfriendly DOS apps to the dustbin of history in 1992.
Vista isn't dead. It will live forever because some users just won't let go of it.
In a sense, every OS lives forever. In basements across the land, there are countless old machines running every form of DOS, Windows 3.X, 95, 98, and even Windows Me. The people who own these machines generally fall into two groups: enthusiasts who ardently love their old operating systems and can't bear to let them go, and regular folks like my mother-in-law who don't know the difference, and never saw the need to upgrade because it just worked. Generations of kids have grown up on supposedly obsolete hand-me-down PCs, and that won't change anytime soon.
But OS-huggers, mothers-in-law, and basement-dwelling kids don't make up the majority of the PC market. PC buyers do, and Microsoft, Apple, and every Linux vendor worth its salt will continue to focus on the folks with actual intentions of buying new hardware.
At the end of the day, most people just don't care about their OS. As long as it makes all the important things work reliably and invisibly, they're happy. And that's the thing with Vista: While the enthusiast community rages on about how great Vista is or how much it deserves to forever burn in effigy, the rest of the world has moved on. Barring evolutionary improvements, the OS as we know it is as good as it needs to get. Form factors are changing, new players (Google, anyone?) are hedging into Microsoft's turf, and it won't be long before the OS fades from its formerly starring role in your local electronics store.
But that's a discussion for another day, and a future column.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Bolt: the dark horse mobile browser

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 6:53pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

In the roughly six months since Bitstream's Bolt mobile browser debuted in beta at Mobile World Congress, it has been installed more than a million times, its developers said today. Like Skyfire, which also reached a million installs before RTM, this cross-platform mobile browser is designed to accelerate the browsing experience on resource-constrained devices.
Bolt is compatible with any mobile handset that supports the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0, the Java spec for embedded devices. Page rendering takes place outside of the phone on Bolt's servers, and content is heavily compressed for consumption, so even 2G freebie phones can handle full Web browsing. The app itself is only 140 Kb in size. Included in the huge list of supported devices are handsets from Research in Motion, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. There are versions specifically designed for BlackBerry and for entry-level phones.
One week ago, the browser's Beta 3 (version 1.04) was released, which welcomes the Webkit 4 rendering engine to the Bolt servers, and gives the user the ability to cut and paste, to upload files directly to sharing sites such as YouTube and Photobucket, and to enter text directly in online boxes without having to drop into a blank field (a problem that Skyfire similarly had in early releases.)
To become a Bolt tester, users must first register on Bitstream's site, where they are then given instructions on how to obtain the software.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Symantec goes live with Norton 2010 betas

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 5:59pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Download Norton Internet Security 2010 beta from Fileforum now.
Download Norton Antivirus 2010 Beta from FileForum now.
Last year's update to Norton Antivirus focused on creating the lightest and fastest desktop antivirus offering, although it stuck to tried and true detection and prevention methods. With the threat landscape rapidly changing, and new malware techniques being widely used (server-side polymorphism, sandbox/VM detection, etc) the old signature-based antivirus methods have been rendered inadequate just no longer effective enough. In 2008, for example, there were 1.8 new threat definitions. Not even halfway through 2009, there were already 1.25 million and more being added every day.
It doesn't mean signatures absolutely do not work, but viruses are changing so rapidly that recognition software is struggling to keep its head above water. This is why Symantec is taking a new three-pronged approach to virus protection with Norton 2010. The three additional methods are: application reputation, behavioral malware detection, and increased user education.
An application's reputation is determined by millions of Norton community users who contribute their application data, statistically determining whether a piece of software is trustworthy or not. Sort of like a reverse signature, the most commonly installed applications have credibility and are therefore not classified as threats.
Behavioral malware detection is performed by SONAR 2, Norton 2010's heuristic engine that watches the behavior of the PC and rates every file and every process according to its activity. This develops a sort of running checklist of the reliability of everything on a system at any given time.
Since the user is often the weakest link in a system's defenses, social engineering threats continue to be a major problem. If a system has been infected, Norton 2010's updated gauges describe "in plain English" what happened so novices can quickly understand what went wrong, with enough granularity for more tech savvy users to find out the origin of their infection and what activities it performed.
"This time, we said we wouldn't mess around with the main UI." Dave Cole, Symantec's Senior Director of Product Management told Betanews. "But we introduced a new side, which is not just about apps being good or bad, it's for helping users manage their resources in a visual environment. If someone's just downloaded an app, we'll make all the data we have available to them that is visible. That means reputation data or performance data is exposed for people to self-diagnose."
Norton Internet Security 2010 has finally been endowed with the Brightmail corporate anti-spam engine, which is not based simply on training a system which senders are trustworthy, but is heuristics-based. Additionally, NIS 2010's traditional parental control system can be replaced with a free subscription to onlinefamily.norton.com, the Web-based access control system which Symantec debuted earlier this year.
"Is the parental control software market so small because people don't care, or because the existing software is just no good?" Cole posited, "When we debuted Online Family, we didn't want to use the model based on spyware or restrictions or keyloggers, we wanted a product based on trust. Parents want house rules and transparency, where they are the decision-makers, not the software."
In its availability announcement today, Symantec boasted about one key feature: "Performance: We are determined never to take our eye off that particular ball again." Let's see if it means what it says. Symantec's betas are now available for Windows XP SP2, Vista, and Windows 7 RC.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Nokia: Android? Are you crazy?

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 4:59pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Adding to the swollen category of "rumored Android device makers," Nokia was briefly rumored to be readying a touchscreen smartphone based on the Android mobile OS for Nokia World in September.
But rather than say it doesn't comment on rumors as companies often do, Nokia flatly denied the rumor, citing the "well known fact" that Symbian is its platform of choice.
And a well known fact it is. Nokia's attachment to Symbian has given that family of mobile OS over half of the market's share. However, the mobile phone market is expected to shrink by 10% overall this year while the smartphone becomes the dominant device profile; and in March, NPD found that Symbian is actually losing its dominant position quite rapidly.
Still, it seems that any company without a dominant touchphone has become the subject of similar Android rumors. LG, Motorola, Acer, and others have all been tapped to wheel out the next big Android device, yet only HTC and Samsung have completed products. Sony Ericsson, too, has joined the rumor pool with leaked mockups of "Racheal," an Android-based XPERIA device which is supposed to be equipped with a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 8.1 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, this potentially impressive device is still at the early phases of rumor and exists only in pictures.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
What's Now: Drenched with 'Purple Ra1n,' iPhone users caught eating 'redsn0w'

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 3:00pm CEST par Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff, Betanews

Drenched with "Purple Ra1n," iPhone users caught eating "redsn0w"
Afternoon of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • If you're a Mac user and you're wondering where those fruit-punch-looking stains on your keyboard are coming from, well, it must be an outbreak of "Purple Ra1n." Last Friday, independent developer GeoHot gave iPhone 3G S users a shower of sorts with his pwnage tool for Windows, enabling iPhone users to install their own apps outside of AT&T's control. Yesterday collaborator Ari Weinstein ported that tool to the Mac, although he also acknowledged that for the "full freedom experience," users should turn to the Dev-Team's "redsn0w" tool, for unlocking their 3G S units from the AT&T network.
Andreessen co-launching new venture-cap firm
Evening of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • The founder of Netscape and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz have looked at those other Valley VC firms and figured out a fresh angle: Two general partners, one approval process. Andreessen Horowitz will launch with $300 million and is prepared to address companies at any stage along the launch continuum.
In a statement this morning, the partnership said it is willing to commit up to $50 million at a time, to any entrepreneurial venture at any stage of its development -- in other words, not necessarily fresh startups. This could be a boon for any venture looking to make a second or third try at a good idea.
Om Malik takes a look at the firm's wide net and streamlined process, while Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch got some quality time with the ever-quotable Mr. Andreessen and pulls out five points guaranteed to stir up conversation. (Guess how many VC firms Andreessen expects will go out of business in the next decade?) And those around long enough to hear "Andreessen and Horowitz" and think wait, didn't those guys hate each other? will enjoy Kevin Maney's take for Fortune.
Browser trends amuse nerds throughout holiday weekend
July 2008 - July 2009 • StatCounter's got a lovely batch of browser-adoption stats posted to its site, and since not everyone enjoys fireworks, an assorted of tech folk poked and prodded at the numbers throughout the weekend.
There's fun for everyone in there. Your reporter, for instance, is impressed by BlackBerry's massive jump in share over the past four months, from 4.74% in March to 20.83% this month, making it a close third-place finisher behind the iTouch. (Equally impressive is Android's drop during the same period, from 6.12% to .07%. Ow.) Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, on the other hand, notices that IE has lost 11.4% of share in that period to Firefox, Safari and Chrome. At Technologizer, Harry McCracken notes that such numbers probably aren't cheerful for Microsoft, which will have to convince folks to switch (back) to IE to rebuild market share -- something that, according to his Twitter followers, isn't likely.
ABC shows start to appear on Hulu
Over the weekend • So you missed the final episode of Scrubs? As of Saturday night, that and various other ABC shows are popping up on Hulu, the happy result of the deal announced back in April.

LucasArts to spill "awesome news for our old school fans"
Sometime Monday, July 6 > LucasArts spent Sunday whipping up excitement on the Twitter concerning the announcement of... something. One of their old-school titles is getting a fresh release. If George Lucas wishes to atone for the sins of Star Wars 1-3, it will be a DS release of Grim Fandango.
Flounder-flat CrunchPad nears launch
In a few weeks > CrunchPad, a Michael Arrington project, has announced that working prototypes of its much-awaited Linux-based Web tablet are on the way to their offices, and he'll have more to say about it at a press-and-user gathering in the Valley later this month. There's no keyboard and no hard drive, though scrutiny of images at the link above seems to reveal at least one USB port as well as something that looks a lot like a memory-card slot. (You can see plenty of the browser and the onscreen keyboard, as well as the onboard camera, in the YouTube video below.) The apparently-final prototype both slimmed down and plumped up slightly, with body depth down to a willowy 18mm and the price up a bit to around $300 (estimated).
Web 2.0-related horror film on the way for Halloween
October 13, 2009 > Like Charles Durning? Of course you do. About six years ago, he and Billy Dee Williams and some other actors made a movie called iMurders, concerning a "Facespace chat room" and the murders of various participants thereon. We know that movies with Internet hooks are generally so bad they're... well, bad. This one is going straight to DVD now. Based on the trailer I believe the words we're after are "delightfully sleazy."
Monday's tech headlines (special legal-affairs edition)
Technology & Marketing Law Blog
• Eric Goldman's fine blog has a couple of interesting case in the spotlight. First, he looks at Satterfield v Simon & Shuster, in which a plaintiff who signed up for "free ringtones from Firm A ended up having her phone number sold and resold repeatedly, and getting a bunch of unwanted text spam as a result.
• Meanwhile, it has apparently been a banner year for trials concerning one of the few bits of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that survive to this day. 47 USC 230 in a sense codifies the old "you own your own words" attitude of the Net; specifically, protecting Web sites and such from being liable as "the publishers" of content posted by someone else (generally speaking, users). In the courts, this has been working out to a lot of cases of people suing sites (eg., MySpace) for bad things that happened when users met other users offline. Fascinating stuff.
The Legal Satyricon
• The Satyricon -- known to you perhaps for its strong language as well as its great analysis -- is remarkably restrained in its coverage of last week's Lori Drew decision, choosing mainly to link back to its previous reporting on the matter, in which they fairly accurately predicted Judge Wu's assessment of the situation.
• In a similar vein, Marc Randazza has a barn-burner of a post on why the Nikki Catsouras situation is, like the Lori Drew case, one in which one's gut reaction -- eagerness to suppress some horrible, horrible photos -- is at odds with what makes for good law. If you're still furious at Drew (and if you caught her self-satisfied smirking over the weekend, I'll just bet you are), read Randazza's essay and see how you feel by the end.
New York Times
• What's Micron got to be cheerful about after ten consecutive quarterly losses? Maybe more than you realize, says Brooke Crothers.
• Symantec? McAfee? Are you running either of the two leading anti-malware packages? Ashlee vance thinks you may or may not have noticed that the two firms are in a heated competition for end users -- and that sometimes companies in battles like that do things that aren't so nice.
Engadget
• Is Sony aiming to go Nintendo's Wii one (or more) better? Paul Miller has an overview (and a diagram!) of a Sony patent application for tech that can detect ordinary objects -- not merely controllers -- and store data about them for future use.
• Is your workplace sufficiently dehumanizing? No? Talk to your boss about new technology from Japan that'll let him/her strap cameras and ankle sensors to the employees for surveillance purposes. There, fixed it for you.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
IE8 WSUS update push to begin August 25

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 2:53pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

After months of availability to users willing to seek it out, Internet Explorer 8 will be rolled into Windows Server Update Services starting August 25. The change will affect those versions of Windows currently relying on WSUS -- in other words, not Windows 7 RC.
Microsoft's IEBlog has the details for those administrators who use WSUS but prefer not to make the IE8 switch just yet, or wish to make that switch on their own calendar.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
In New York, online booze loses a Circuit Court decision

Publié: juillet 6, 2009, 2:41pm CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

Wine drinkers in the Empire State still can't buy wine directly from out of state, in a decision released July 1 by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The ancient NY regulatory system was allegedly designed to guard against the interference of organized crime in the booze business, which ought to confuse the heck out of anyone who just wants to pick up a few nice bottles from wine.woot.com.
Arnold's Wines v. Boyle, as the case is known, pitted two New Yorkers and an Indiana wine retailer against the New York State Liquor Authority. (Daniel Boyle is the chairman of the Board and is listed as the lead defendant in that official capacity.) They were jointly suing to have the sections of the Alcohol Beverage Control Law barring direct-to-consumer sales ruled unconstitutional.
However, the court didn't see it that way (PDF available here), citing the second section of the 21st Amendment (the one that concluded Prohibition). That clause states that "The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited" -- in other words, whatever laws may apply to other commerce, booze remains an exception until the legislature decides otherwise.
Other states have lately taken a more enlightened opinion. Kansas and Tennessee have both changed their laws to allow direct sales from wineries to consumers. Both new laws went into effect last Wednesday. Interestingly, a federal appeals court had ruled earlier this year that Tennessee's previous rules banning direct shipment of wine were unfair to out-of-state competitors. Under the new Tennessee rules, any winery with a $300 license can ship up to three cases per year to a given consumer; in Kansas, the limit per consumer is 12 cases; wineries must register with the Secretary of State for $36, pay $100 in license and applications fees, and post a $750 bond.
All this confusion -- Kansas and Tennessee's move to a limited direct-buying structure leave just over a dozen states still putting up absolute obstacles to direct wine sales -- may eventually cause higher laws to feel compelled to revisit such liquor laws. R. Corbin Houchins, writing for the ShipCompliant blog, says, "Divergent interpretations at the intermediate level slowly increase the probability of high court review" of Granholm v. Heald, a 2005 decision that affirmed each state's right to control alcohol distribution.
On the other hand, says Mitch Frank (writing for WineSpectator.com), it's quite possible that that bird has flown. "For New York wine lovers," he writes, "Wednesday's ruling may mean very little. Many out-of-state retailers continue to ship to consumers despite the law, which has proved hard to enforce." Students of history who remember the disastrous effect the 18th Amendment had on social perceptions of the law -- including the glamorization of bootleggers and other organized crime -- a result like that is as bitter as a bottle of cheap chardonnay.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009