Coming soon: Facebook the movie?*

*(Post updated at 4:35 p.m. with confirmation from Sony Pictures.)

Is Aaron Sorkin getting his geek on?

The famous technophobe and Hollywood scribe apparently is trading the "West Wing" and "Studio 60" corridors for the graffiti-scrawled, software developer-mobbed corridors of social networking upstart Facebook.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company says it has not signed on to a Sorkin film about its inception, but New York Magazine reports that it has confirmed that Sorkin started a Facebook group (well, he says, his assistant did that) to gather color for a Facebook film he is writing for Sony and producer Scott Rudin.

Late this afternoon, a Sony Pictures spokesman confirmed that Sorkin was working on a movie about Facebook but wouldn't discuss any of the details. Through a publicist, Sorkin declined to comment.

Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker says: "We are routinely approached by writers and filmmakers interested in telling the Facebook story or the stories of the more than 100 million people who use Facebook to share and make the world more open and connected. At this point, we have not agreed to cooperate with any film project, but we are flattered by the interest."

The Facebook group (where Sorkin groupies have already congregated to write on Sorkin's wall) was first unearthed by Defamer.

Sorkin's Facebook group page reads:

Welcome. I'm Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name — which I find more flattering than creepy — but this is me. I don't know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.

I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)

(An earlier, apparently un-spellchecked version of that Facebook post said the movie was about "Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz — three sophmores at Harvard who, in order to meet girls, invented Facebook.")

So what will a movie about the messy beginnings of Facebook be called? "A Few Good Founders"? Or "Face Off," complete with tense courtroom scenes from the legal battle over the company's creation? (Note to Sorkin: Aaron Greenspan -- who attended Harvard with the founders, claims he came up with the idea for Facebook and recently penned a book on the subject -- would like to share his two cents). And just who will they find to play Mark Zuckerberg, the official Facebook founder and chief executive?

Poke me when you know.

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: via Facebook

Feds arrest man accused of posting unreleased Guns N' Roses songs*

(Post updated at 2:45 p.m. with comment from the Electronic Frontier Foundation)

How he got his hands on the goods, we don't yet know. But today, police visited the home of a Culver City man and arrested him on suspicion of violating federal copyright law by posting nine previously unreleased Guns N' Roses songs on a website, Scott Glover reports in this L.A. Times story.

In June, the nine songs, from the band's upcoming album "Chinese Democracy," ended up on the website Antiquiet, which drew the attention of the feds. The site received so much traffic that it crashed.

Kevin Cogill, 27, told the FBI that he had posted the songs, according to an arrest affidavit. (In other stories, Cogill has been quoted as Kevin Skwerl, who, according to Rolling Stone, operates Antiquiet and used to work in the distribution office of Universal Music. The Recording Industry Assn. of America says it's the same person.) "Leak or no leak, I said that the only way the album would be a net success would be if the music was good enough to move units for years to come," he wrote at the time on his blog.

For musicians, TV networks or movie studios, there is probably nothing worse than seeing their work available illegally online before it has even been released. The movie industry has put elaborate ...

The $2,367 cellphone roaming charge

Things are different in Montreal. They speak French. They talk about Canadian things. And sometimes your Blackberry hops on the Internet without you knowing, incurring roaming charges that make your phone bill skyrocket. That's what a Santa Monica resident found when she had a layover in Montreal last month. She made a few calls and, as best she remembers, didn't access the Internet, but T-Mobile saddled her with $2,367.40 in roaming charges. But wait, it gets better, according to Times columnist David Lazarus:

Thierry Foucaut, 43, works as chief operating officer for a Los Angeles soft-drink company and understands a thing or two about customer service. He said that when he first called T-Mobile, a service rep initially apologized for any misunderstanding and said she'd look into the matter.

"She came back on the line five minutes later and said the charge was valid," Foucaut recalled.

The Foucaut's headache-causing arguments with T-Mobile about explaining the data charges are detailed further here.

-- Alana Semuels

Photo by 22n via Flickr

Around the Web 8.27.08: Apple gets nailed over iPhone ad, Warner Bros. unveils its version of Hulu

-- The iPhone may be great but its ads say it is too great -- the UK's advertising watchdog bans an ad that it says misleads consumers. Maybe the ad said you could eat the iPhone? The Guardian

-- Maybe Steve Jobs wasn't feeling well when he approved the ad. Other ways a sick CEO might affect a company. Freakonomics

-- Pittsburgh teaches its citizens how to design edible robots and other useful toys. WSJ

-- Forget your password to log on to a website today? Who doesn't? But those password reminders may be the weakest link in Web security. MSNBC

-- Speaking of security, here's a way to fix a flaw that lets people break into your iPhone and access your personal information. Wired

-- Already six items down and we haven't mentioned the Democratic National Convention? Social media networks are blanketing the convention. Web Scout

-- Arianna Huffington may be a VIP at the convention, but she also may be spreading herself too thin. LAT

-- Amidst the gloom about the current advertising climate, Carat is still optimistic about online ad spending. Huzzah! PaidContent

-- But European venture capitalists are still gloomy, not investing as much as they had in the past. Will American VCs follow suit? NYT

-- Warner Bros. unveils TheWB.com today, a smaller version of Hulu. Err, as of the time of this writing, it still isn't live. Alley Insider

-- And finally, because it's Wednesday and you are probably hankering for a bad pun: It seems that lots of Russians are rushin' to the Internet. TechCrunch

-- Alana Semuels

Photo: TheWB.com will feature WB-produced shows such as "Friends." Credit: Warner Bros.

RIAA nears win (by default) in Atlantic vs. Howell

So much for that one. A federal judge in Arizona has all but dispensed with an intriguing legal battle between the Recording Industry Assn. of America and an accused music infringer, ruling that the defendant acted in bad faith by destroying evidence (download a summary of the judge's action here). The typical sanction -- yet to be meted out by U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake -- is to decide the case summarily in favor of the side harmed by the loss of evidence, which in this instance would be the major record companies.

Wake had given defendant Jeffrey Howell a major victory in April, ruling (in a 180-degree reversal) that the labels hadn't provided adequate evidence that Howell had infringed their copyrights. It wasn't enough to show that Howell had 42 of their copyrighted songs in his Kazaa shared folder, Wake reasoned -- simply making files available online did not constitute infringement without proof that someone downloaded them without the labels' authorization. (Howell acted as his own attorney, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined him in arguing the "making available" point.) Better yet for Howell, Wake suggested that the defendant might not be liable for the 12 songs allegedly downloaded from Howell's shared folder by RIAA contractor MediaSentry. The key question, Wake wrote, was whether Howell had put the songs in his shared folder or Kazaa did it automatically without his knowledge.

According to Ars Technica, the case took a sudden turn after an expert hired by the RIAA persuaded Wake that someone had worked hard to erase the traces of Kazaa from Howell's hard drive, despite what the judge described as "repeated and explicit warnings about the obligation to preserve evidence." As a result, Howell probably won't get the chance to argue that the Kazaa software moved songs autonomously into his shared folder. That's too bad, because it's an interesting issue with all sorts of intriguing ramifications (e.g., if the software put songs into the shared folder on its own, would the makers of Kazaa be liable for the infringements?). Had Howell succeeded on that front, the RIAA could still have tried to prove that the songs in the shared folder had been downloaded illegally. But they would have been forced to make a circumstantial case -- I doubt there's any way MediaSentry could have watched Howell downloading files from a third party -- based on an argument that Howell's files matched other copies they'd found online. The technology for matching computer files isn't as precise as, say, DNA fingerprinting, so it's not clear how persuasive they could have been on that point.

Howell's situation is reminiscent of the Motion Picture Assn. of America's lawsuit against TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent index site that assembled copious links to bootlegged movies and other files. U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper summarily granted the MPAA's claims after finding that TorrentSpy had destroyed evidence. Come to think of it, Jammie Thomas, the first defendant to go to trial in the RIAA's campaign against file sharers, was also accused of destroying evidence. Thomas had her computer's hard drive replaced after the alleged infringements were detected but before she was sued. What is it with all these unreliable hard drives?!? Should file sharers be bringing a class action? But I digress. The EFF's Fred von Lohmann said in an e-mail that Howell's experience highlights "how difficult it is to defend these cases without a lawyer." The RIAA had lawyers and experts arguing that evidence was destroyed in bad faith, Von Lohmann wrote, while Howell was on his own -- and "he clearly wasn't able to adequately articulate his side of the story." On the other hand, if you're going to admit to using Kazaa, as Howell did, it's probably a good idea not to mess with your hard drive, even if it goes bad. Howell claimed he downloaded only porn, but hey, the porn guys sue too.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Obama's VP text message reached 2.9 million people, Nielsen reports; No data on how many were awake when it arrived

The Obama campaign's highly anticipated text message announcing Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee's running mate reached 2.9 million U.S. mobile subscribers last weekend, making it "one of the most important text messages" ever and "one of the most successful" branding efforts using mobile devices, according to Nic Covey, director of insights for research firm Nielsen Mobile.

Covey bestowed those superlatives despite some major problems with the Obama text message initiative, which promised people who signed up that they'd be the first to know the news.

It didn't quite work out that way.

First there were the fake text messages that started appearing late last week. Then, The Times and other major news organizations, led by CNN, broke the news late Friday night that Obama had chosen his Senate colleague, Biden. That forced the campaign to send out the text messages about five hours earlier than they had planned -- at about 3 a.m. EDT Saturday (midnight Pacific Time), when most supporters probably were sound asleep.

"Assuming you weren't in front of your computer, cellphone or television between midnight and 3 a.m. Saturday, you missed a lot. " Shane D'Aprile wrote for Campaigns & Elections Politics magazine. "Actually, you missed it all."

As our colleague Jon Healey wrote on the Opinion LA blog, "the so-last-century mainstream media" beat "shiny new technology." In Olympics parlance, you could say TV and newspaper websites took gold and silver in this race, while the trendy newcomer, texting, got the bronze.

Some tech-savvy Republicans said Obama blew it by waiting too long to release the news. But as Covey and others have pointed out, breaking the vice presidential announcement wasn't the only point of the Obama campaign's texting tactic.

"The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients," Covey said in a news release. "Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his VP pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cellphone numbers."

Covey predicted that it would inspire U.S. companies to experiment more with text-message-based campaigns. Though probably not ones that land in the dead of night.

-- Jim Puzzanghera

Photo: Obama's VP text message, by adria.richards, via Flickr

Around the Web 8.26.08: Facebook copyright fears, Wii Fit hacks and X-ray photography

-- Facebook blocks Japanese writer Hiroko Yoda. Reason? Seems some Jedi dude copyrighted her last name. Curious, this is. BoingBoing

-- In more Facebook news, the social networking site, fearing further copyright fallout, has blocked Scrabulous outside North America. AP via LAT

-- Free ride on FasTrak? Hacker finds the way. MIT Technology Review

-- Social networking on the go? Hi5 hits handsets in the U.S. CNet

-- PlayStation 3 "tabulator" provides handy dandy chart for six versions of the game console. JoyStiq

-- Garage hacker uses the Wii Fit Balance Board to control Roomba. Why, you ask? Why not? Engadget

-- Artist practices peek-a-boo photography, using X-rays. Wired

-- Alex Pham

Photo: Yoda in "Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Siths." Credit: Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox

IPhone App Store encourages new affliction: Appiphilia

For the last few weeks, I've been staying up late glued to my screen, and frankly it has been wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns. No, not watching the Olympics or the nonstop political gabfest on 24/7 news channels.

I have been obsessively logging in to iTunes.

It's not about the songs, audiobooks, TV shows or movies. It's all about the apps.

As an early adopter of the iPhone -- yeah, I paid full price last year; what of it? -- the one thing I really missed in retiring my Palm PDA was having all of the many applications that entertained and aided me in living my life. Apple didn't let developers create programs for the iPhone when it launched (only its Web browser, which is a huge difference). So I couldn't track my expenses, calculate my calories and get my game on, like I could through those programs I downloaded for my Palm. I mourned the loss of those conveniences daily, though I was comforted (and distracted) by getting the real Internet at the touch of a finger.

But all of that changed when Apple opened the App Store last month.

I was so elated that the night the store opened I was there downloading applications I couldn't even use yet. (We had to wait for the free software upgrade to iPhone 2.0 the next day.)

Which all leads me to this: I'm addicted to apps. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

My problem started gently with the free apps. They're free, right? So a Mobile Banking and Pandora Radio app here, a Facebook and AIM app there. Shazam, Truveo, Mobile News Network. Download as many as you want. Maybe browse through some of the other App Store offerings while the phone is syncing. What's the harm?

That's how appiphilia starts. The free apps were a wonderful appetizer. But ...

(Are you app-addicted too? Share your virtues on this vice in comments below.)

Public, private sector at odds over cyber security

Three very big and very different computer security breaches that have dominated recent headlines did more than show how badly the Internet needs major repairs. They also exposed the huge rift between corporate America and the federal government over who should fix it, cyber-security experts say.

In the last few months, law enforcement officials cracked an international ring that tapped customer databases and trafficked in tens of millions of credit card numbers; a researcher uncovered a major flaw that permits hackers to steer some Web surfers to fake versions of popular websites filled with malicious software; and computer assaults, which some researchers said they had traced back to Russia's state-run telecommunications firms, crippled websites belonging to the country of Georgia.

Yet the episodes did little to boost cyber security higher on the agendas of the federal government or the two major presidential candidates.

"Nothing is happening," said Jerry Dixon, the former director of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security. "This has got to be in the top five national security priorities."

Read the full story for details on why there has been such a rift between the public and private sectors over Internet security and what experts say the next president should do to tackle the problem.

-- Joseph Menn

Networking, Hollywood style, through Xbox Live

Lots of parents don't like their kids to play violent video games. Some are even more concerned about their kids playing Grand Theft Auto than they are about their kids watching porn or drinking beer.

But what they don't know is that video games may help their kids get jobs. As screenwriters. And agents.

Well, kind of. A group of young Hollywood execs started playing Gears of War together on Xbox Live so they wouldn't get mocked by teenagers who were better at the game than they were. They dubbed their group Nerd Poker, and it has grown to nearly 100 members. It also has led to networking opportunities (including some elusive Hollywood "meetings") between players who barely knew each other before they started blowing each others' heads off. See, Mom? Games are good for you.

You can check out the full story about Nerd Poker here.

-- Alana Semuels

Photo: From left, Nerd Poker founders Derek Douglas, Ben Fritz, Kevin Chang and Justin Marks. Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu / For the Times