Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

Is this investment-banker-hype week and nobody told me?

It certainly seems so from all the almost ridonkulous rumors about everyone and their mother being “imminently poised” to make a bid for Yahoo.

In fact, the process is only beginning to chug along with the Yahoo board, aided by Allen & Company and now Goldman Sachs.

At this point, it is lots of folks rubbernecking, books being prepared and all the other stuff bankers do to look like they are busy, busy, busy.

Among the most serious players: Silver Lake and a shifting group; and a consortium that includes former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners.

And, just slightly, News Corp. (which owns this Web site) is considering dipping a very small toe in as part of a larger group.

That has been copiously reported here and elsewhere a badillion times already.

But — and I have been clear on this, as have others — no one is near anything of substance, which has not stopped this really lame game of Clue being pumped up by bankers who should know better.

Yesterday, it was Silver Lake, DST Global and the Alibaba Group in the billiard room with foreign money. Nope, nope, nope. Silver Lake and DST are indeed looking hard and Alibaba is a player here, but there is no grand troika going at this moment.

In fact, Alibaba’s Jack Ma — after declaring he was “very interested” in buying Yahoo — has since backed off.

And today, it’s a thinly sourced and carefully worded report of Microsoft in the basement, interested in bidding with a pile of their own dough.

How can I put this delicately? How about: No.

According to my sources, throughout this entire process Microsoft execs have taken pains to make it clear that they are not going to be among the bidders in any significant manner.

In addition, the company has also been communicating with bidders that — while Microsoft is interested in a stable Yahoo, given their search and advertising partnership — it would not throw in with anyone in the process yet.

And, finally, if a winner eventually emerges, it might — and this is only might — consider making a token investment to help get the deal completed.

Certainly, Microsoft has been and is willing to talk to anyone interested, said sources, given their Yahoo business relationship. But this does not make it a bid of any shape or size. They are not even “considering” it, unless that means watching from a distance.

I suppose in some incredible shift Microsoft could change its mind, but most credible sources I spoke to said that is not happening now.

In fact, after its bruising and failed takeover attempt of Yahoo several years ago, said multiple sources, Microsoft now has the deal it wants with Yahoo.

“Why buy the cow when you can get the search and advertising deal for free,” joked one person close to the situation.

After his unusually enthusiastic declaration at a Silicon Valley event last week that “we are very, very interested” in buying the “whole” of Yahoo, you might imagine Alibaba Group co-founder and CEO Jack Ma running out of the speech looking for a giant pile of cash to pay for it immediately.

Instead, according to sources close to the situation, what the Chinese entrepreneur got was a cold dose of CFIUS — or Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the federal interagency review process for foreign investment deals.

Translation: If you are from China and want to buy our U.S. companies, we are going to have to give you a major look-see and it is not going to be pretty.

Perhaps that’s fair, but the prospect that even a purchase such as Yahoo, a consumer business that seems to have little in the way of national security concerns, might enter the buzzsaw of U.S. politics apparently surprised Ma.

Thus, sources said, that while it remains very interested, Alibaba is now at least a little concerned about the feasibility of the deal and that Ma is “perplexed” about why the U.S. has such restrictive rules against foreign ownership of a consumer business.

That said, he has been in touch with Yahoo co-founder and board member Jerry Yang and is likely to make a more official visit soon with others involved in Yahoo’s strategic review.

In addition, sources said, rumors of an imminent Yahoo bid hook-up with DST Global and Silver Lake — which recently invested in Alibaba — are overblown. While Ma did say last week at his much-noticed speech at Stanford University that he was talking to a lot of buyers, Alibaba is not closely aligned with anyone as yet.

Of course, given that Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, Ma will be a big player in any deal done.

That’s because of a 2005 agreement that stipulates that if there is a change of control, Yahoo must give Alibaba a 15-day chance to buy back its stake.

Still, after his effusive I-want-Yahoo-now speech that caught the Internet giant and its bidders off guard, dialing back the rhetoric a bit is probably no surprise given the delicate dancing now going on.

In other words, a case of wanna-be-buyer’s remorse.

As these companies are wont to do in the middle of the night, Yahoo, SoftBank and the Alibaba Group have reached an agreement in their nasty dispute around the Alipay payments unit, and they are ready to talk about it.

Well, not Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma (pictured here), Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz or SoftBank’s Masa Son, but their functionaries are all set to discuss the deal.

The issue has revolved around the spinning out of Alipay by the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, without the approval of large stakeholders Yahoo and Japan’s SoftBank, which the pair felt was a big no-no.

Much mishegas followed, but the trio has been hard at work on a settlement, which is here now.

Of course, had the three companies cooperated in the first place as joint owners and board members of Alibaba, this all would have been unnecessary.

5:48 am PT: The call starts without all kinds of regulatory info about what can and cannot be said, before being thrown to Yahoo CFO Tim Morse.

One interesting wrinkle is that SoftBank’s Ron Fisher cannot speak at all, due to some Japanese laws, which are unexplained. But, said Morse, he’s there to show his support.

Go, Ron!

Alibaba’s CFO Joe Tsai is up first to talk about the deal over Alipay, which he stresses does not really make much money now. As he says, it is “marginally profitable.”

Tsai walks through the facts that they have already outlined earlier today, including a variety of payments from Alipay to Alibaba, since — let’s be clear — it used to be part of Alibaba.

But Alibaba said it had to spin it out in order to get critical regulatory approvals from the Chinese government, which caused this mess.

Morse now comes on, noting the whole squabble really had “no direct impact” from a financial point of view on Yahoo or SoftBank at this time related to its Alibaba assets.

Well, shareholders of Yahoo might beg to differ, considering the huge hit the stock has taken due to the fight. Wall Street has long considered Yahoo’s Asian assets its most valuable part.

But Morse is pleased the complex agreement has finally been reached — I am guessing it was not easy to negotiate among three different countries with so much pressure.

5:59 am: Time for Q&A!

The first question is about more deets and also about the possibility of a liquidity event for Alibaba or its various units.

Tsai underscores that there might not be one or there might be one. In other words, the Chinese assets of Yahoo may or may not ever pay off.

The next question is about why Yahoo and SoftBank should have a cap on an asset they used to own 100 percent of. Good point!

Neither Morse or Tsai really answers the question, except for Tsai talking about how certain rules over foreign ownership of payment companies in China means it had to be like this.

“If you own 100 percent of the business that cannot operate, you own 100 percent of zero,” said Tsai.

Translation: That’s China, folks, so suck it up!

The next question is a promissory note, which Tsai says has value, even though it actually does not have value right now. China!

The analysts still are stuck on this fact that, under terms of the agreement, Yahoo will only get 37.5 percent of an IPO or other liquidity event, when it used to be owner of 100 percent of Alipay.

Good point: Will this happen to other Alibaba units, such as its Taobao commerce unit?

China is a good place to be, assures Tsai, which is cold comfort right now.

A lot of swirl around preferential terms in the deal for Alipay with Alibaba’s units, which seem to be the same as before. In other words, nothing has changed, except a lot of stock loss for Yahoo and less technical ownership of Alipay.

The Wall Street analysts on the line continue to be riveted to the idea of a liquidity event for Alipay and other Alibaba units, especially Taobao, and keep asking different versions of this question.

The last question is about more deets of the deal and new business ideas for Alibaba.

Tsai talks about a cloud-based system rolling out, for example.

The questioner moves to, you guessed it, a liquidity event.

“I don’t think we want to get into it at this point,” says Tsai.

Well, we do, but apparently Yahoo shareholders are not going to.

That said, the deal is finally settled, which has already given Yahoo shares a small bump today. And that’s not nothing.

Back in April of 2009, like all the rest of the parts of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, its Alipay unit was listed this way on its Web site: “Alipay is wholly owned by Alibaba Group.”

And right now, describing the online payments platform? (my italics): “Alipay is an affiliate of Alibaba Group.”

Memo to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: You might have noticed that critical change in Alipay’s corporate status, which happened last August, given the company you lead owns 43 percent of the Alibaba Group.

More to the point, Alipay accounted for $1.7 billion of Yahoo’s valuation.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo shares are down more than six percent in after-hours trading, likely in reaction to an unusual statement by Yahoo yesterday, in which the company said it had no idea until March 31 that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma had transferred ownership of the Alipay unit to a separate entity.

Sources said that apparently happened in a letter from Alibaba to Yahoo’s accounting department. Since then, the company said it has been trying to figure it all out.

Said Yahoo:

On March 31, 2011, Yahoo! and Softbank were notified by Alibaba Group of two transactions that occurred without the knowledge or approval of the Alibaba Group board of directors or shareholders. The first was the transfer of ownership of Alipay in August 2010. The second was the deconsolidation of Alipay effective in the first quarter of 2011.

Yahoo! disclosed this restructuring in its 10-Q after discussions with Alibaba Group and obtaining a better understanding of this complex situation.

Yahoo! continues to work closely with Alibaba and Softbank to protect economic value for all interested parties. We believe ongoing negotiations among all of the parties provide the best opportunity to achieve an outcome in the best interest of all stakeholders.

Translation: Alibaba’s Ma–who cites upcoming new rules about foreign ownership from People’s Bank of China related to operating its payment business–just snookered us and we need to play dumb until we decide whether a lawsuit will be one disaster too many for our much-beleaguered investors.

Really pissed off shareholders is more like it–BoomTown has been on the receiving end of an explosive series of calls from Yahoo’s investors today asking a variety of questions.

They include:

1. How could Alibaba have reported its results with Alipay consolidated in, even though it was a separate entity since last year? And does that spell trouble for Yahoo, since it used those numbers in its own regulatory filings in the U.S.?

2. How could Ma initiate such a transaction without approval from shareholders and its board, as Yahoo claims?

3. In any case, why weren’t Yahoo execs paying more attention to the swirling changes related to foreign ownership in China, especially since Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is on the Alibaba board, anticipating that there could be real problems ahead?

4. Why did Yahoo execs not tell shareholders about the situation immediately or even at its April earnings call? Or perhaps before David Einhorn’s hedge fund Greenlight Capital hedge fund took a big position in Yahoo last week, specifically noting the value of the company’s Asian assets as highly attractive.

5. Does this move mean that those pretty Chinese assets Yahoo has touted are not so pretty after all, given that these kinds of things can happen there?

6. Should U.S. investors remove themselves from that Chinese market, given that these kinds of things can happen there?

7. Is Bartz’s extraordinarily tense personal relationship with Ma a big part of the problem, creating a distasteful public feud over issues better left to quiet backroom negotiations?

There will be plenty more, of course, especially around Yahoo’s disclosures to investors.

Yahoo execs will argue that it did disclose in the proper manner from a filing point of view and that it did not reveal the fissure so as not to put its negotiations with Alibaba over the situation at risk.

But–especially given the myriad of continued missteps by Bartz that have worked investors’ last nerve–that probably is not going to fly.

In fact, that irked sentiment will surely be on display at Yahoo’s upcoming investor day on May 25.

Yahoo had hoped to show off its new team of execs and talk about some legitimate momentum the company is making.

Now, it will doubtlessly all be about China and what happened there.

So, Bartz has to have a better line than a take on a Hollywood classic: “Forget it, Wall Street. It’s China.”

Maybe so, but it’s her problem to solve now.

And here’s my favorite version of that line:

SnagFilms, the online video distribution site for professional documentaries, has nabbed $10 million in funding from Comcast’s investment arm and New Enterprise Associates, and will also now be distributing fictional independent film releases.

That and the new investment giving SnagFilms a valuation of $50 million should be big news at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, the famous independent film gathering opening in Park City, Utah, on Thursday.

And SnagFilms also announced that well-known industry exec Bingham Ray is joining the start-up to spearhead its distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films.

The service, unlike the subscription-based video giant Netflix, currently distributes free non-fiction documentary films with advertising, as well as offers rental streaming and purchase options.

And it is profitable, said Ted Leonsis, the former AOL exec who is the founder and has been the driving investor in SnagFilms.

“It was always my personal frustration as a backer of documentaries that you could not get distribution far and wide,” he said in an interview earlier today.

He noted that while Netflix is really now focused on big studio fare, “what we’ve discovered is a big supply of independent video that has never seen light of day, but that has a big audience.”

SnagFilms’ strategy is to give broader reach to these films, which often don’t even have a theatrical opening–or, if they do, are very small.

Along with its site, which digitizes the films and adds advertising to them, SnagFilms also encourages Web sites and others to grab films and create a “virtual movie theater.” (You can see my effort below.)

It also has video-on-demand deals with Comcast, Verizon and more, as well as purchase options with Apple’s iTunes and others.

Earlier this month, SnagFilms also launched an impressive and free iPad full-movie-watching app.

SnagFilms also owns a popular news site called indieWIRE, which covers the independent film market, and the new funding will also be used to expand it.

That market has been in need of a boost of some kind, since it has been struggling as financing has dried up for the production of quality documentaries and outside-the-Hollywood-machine movies.

It has long been hoped that the Internet would perhaps save and strengthen the genre, with its supposed long-tail magic.

But the going has been slow. Currently, SnagFilms has 2,000 films in its online library, although Leonsis said the aim is to use the new funds to get 10,000 films on the service as soon as possible.

“We’re trying to build a beachhead in the independent film world,” he said of SnagFilms, which currently has about 40 employees in Washington, D.C., and New York. “We think we have a niche and video is the killer app on Web now.”

Leonsis, who has backed such notable documentaries as “The Rape of Nanking,” said NEA’s Peter Barris will join the board, along with existing investor Steve Case.

Case and Leonsis, of course, were the dynamic duo of AOL’s glory days.

So, I am rooting for another win in an arena that needs it.

Thus, here’s my own movie palace online and also the official press release from SnagFilms:

Watch more free documentaries

Industry Powerhouses NEA and Comcast Invest in SnagFilms

$10 million in new funding to distribute documentaries and fictional independent films on all digital platforms and devices, globally

Washington D.C.–January 17, 2011 – SnagFilms announced today it has received $10 million in growth capital from new investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Comcast Interactive Capital (CIC). Existing investors, including Ted Leonsis (SnagFilms’ Founder) and Steve Case, also participated. The financing will be used to expand its distribution of independent films–including, for the first time, fictional independent releases–across all digital platforms and devices, and on a global basis.

SnagFilms is a leader in distributing free, ad-supported titles from a library of over 2,000 non-fiction films. Last year, SnagFilms entered the transactional world with launches of video on demand channels on Comcast and Verizon FiOS, as well as titles for sale through the Apple’s iTunes store. Earlier this month, SnagFilms debuted its iPad application with the largest collection of award-winning U.S. films offered free to iPad users.

“As a profitable company with substantial private investors, SnagFilms didn’t need to raise outside capital,” said company founder Ted Leonsis. “However, we saw overwhelming strategic value in involving NEA, a pioneer and leading venture capital firm, and CIC, the investment arm of Comcast. SnagFilms is very well-financed and uniquely positioned now to bring the full array of independent films–fiction and non-fiction, U.S. and foreign–to global audiences on all platforms and devices. We’ve amassed a library of 2,000 documentaries since our launch, and we’re now building distribution opportunities for tens of thousands of independent films in both categories. That’s great news for film fans and for filmmakers.”

“SnagFilms is perfectly positioned to fuse technology and content in a manner that has marked many of the transformational industry leaders we have helped build in the past,” said NEA Managing General Partner Peter Barris, who joins the Company’s Board of Directors. “New devices and digital platforms will allow consumers unprecedented access to quality content, and SnagFilms will be there to delight them. We are pleased to be able to invest in SnagFilms at this time, and to help them add fictional indie films to their expertise with documentaries–and to take both genres to the full swath of digital platforms and devices.” Among many other investments, Barris serves on the board of Groupon as its first VC investor.

“We are excited about the new opportunities SnagFilms creates, especially for independent filmmakers who historically could not get distribution,” said David Horowitz, Managing Director of Comcast Interactive Capital. “This investment reflects our view that consumers are demanding a diverse selection of high-quality content that can be watched on any platform or device.”

SnagFilms also announced that industry veteran Bingham Ray will join the Company to help guide its entry into distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films. Ray, former President of United Artists, October Films and Kimmel Entertainment, and honored for Lifetime Achievement by the Gotham Awards, has deep experience in the acquisition, marketing and distribution of motion pictures, including “Hotel Rwanda,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Secrets & Lies,” “War Room,” “High Art,” “Last Days” and “Breaking the Waves.”

“Bingham has been an advocate for filmmakers throughout his career,” noted Rick Allen, SnagFilms CEO. “His record of successful distribution on traditional platforms provides a strategic sense and depth of relationships that will be invaluable as we extend our model into a broader array of films. Bingham will be a key member of our large presence at the Sundance Film Festival this week and beyond.”

“I’ve been a big fan of SnagFilms from their earliest days, and am truly thrilled to be part of the team as they expand the service, bringing more filmmakers to bigger audiences on a wider array of platforms,” said Ray. “This is the future of our business.”

“SnagFilms plus Bingham Ray is a great combination,” said Tom Bernard, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics. “Bingham knows the indie world as well as anyone alive and is admired for his experience and for always delivering for filmmakers. He’ll be a big asset to SnagFilms’ expansion.”

In addition, SnagFilms intends to use its new growth capital to expand its indieWIRE unit, now in its 15th year as the leading web source of news, reviews and analysis of independent film.

“indieWIRE’s traffic is now ten times what it was when we purchased it two and a half years ago,” Allen said. “Before the Academy Awards are announced later this month, you’ll see new editor-in-chief Dana Harris add ongoing features to our coverage of the indie world, and exciting new blogs to our Network, like the recently-added blog The Playlist.”

About SnagFilms

SnagFilms features free ad-supported viewing of more than 2,000 award-winning titles from some of the greatest names in documentary film. All films are shareable across the web. Since its launch in July 2008, SnagFilms’ library has been featured on over 2 billion web pageviews, with more than 325 million minutes of SnagFilms titles streamed across over more than 100,000 affiliated sites and webpages, including through partners such as Aol, Comcast, Hulu, the Starbucks Digital Network, IMDb, the Miami Herald, hundreds of non-profits, special interest sites and blogs. SnagFilms also offers selected titles via VOD (with Comcast and FiOS), on iTunes and through a new free application for the iPad.

OVGuide has twice named SnagFilms a Top Site and MovieMaker Magazine named SnagFilms to its annual list of “50 Best Websites for Moviemakers.”

Palm-CEO-turned-HP-exec Jon Rubinstein and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs faced off with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital at a Churchill Club event last night in an entertaining discussion on the future of mobile tech.

If you missed the live video feed of the event, check back with us–we’re working to repost the video. For those who want to read text, here is my liveblog of the event.

6:48 pm PT: We’re just finishing dinner. It was a chicken in some sort of puff pastry. Nothing is happening onstage, as if that wasn’t clear by the fact I am describing the meal. I think they will get started around 7:15 or so.

7:10 pm: Just about ready to go, with intros going on now. (And I just stole Kara’s seat at the head table.)

Kara: They’re both guys. Paul is taller and they work in tech.

7:14 pm: The plan is to talk about the future, but the event begins with a trip down memory lane as Jacobs holds up the Qualcomm PDQ–arguably the first smartphone combining a cellphone and Palm Pilot. For those who don’t remember, it it was bigger than a Palm Pilot and a huge phone strapped together.

7:20 pm: Digital device history continues. We’ve traced the last decade in digital devices, from the iPod through the Treo and iPhone. Don’t forget ringtones and cellphone bowling, Jacobs reminds us, referring to the Brew operating environment that Qualcomm developed.

The iPhone changed everything, Jacobs says, because it showed that the phone makers just weren’t putting enough work into the phone’s user interface.

7:28 pm: Talk is shifting to where we are today. What are the key things that are shifting? User interfaces, touch, etc. “The other things we are seeing is all of our lives are moving into the cloud,” Rubinstein says. On the limitation side, Jacobs points to the limitations of bandwidth: “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” Jacobs says, adding that the industry and government are working on it. ‘We are just going to have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”

The other big limitation, Jacobs says, is battery life. You can do all this cool stuff on your phone, but then the battery dies three-quarters of the way through the day. He puts in a plug for Mirasol–Qualcomm’s low-power display technology.

Rubinstein concurs that battery and bandwidth are the two biggest issues. “Battery technology has not progressed at the same rate as all of the other things we are trying to do,” Rubinstein says.

7:38 pm: What about all the operating systems out there, Kara asks. Rubinstein: “There’s plenty of room in the market for multiple systems,” he says, adding it won’t be like PCs, where one operating system dominates. “It’s just different today.”

Rubinstein says it’s still the infancy of the major transition. Put on the spot to rank the operating systems, Rubinstein says that clearly Apple and Android are going gangbusters. The battle, he says, is for who is going to be No. 3. “We’d sure like to be that.”

Jacobs: “I agree. It’s very early days to be calling winners and losers.” He sees pretty wide diversity of operating systems, at least for the next five years, unless the operators really clamp down. Even then, there are some alternate distribution channels emerging. Either way, Qualcomm’s in good shape as an arms dealer, he points out.

7:45 pm: Discussion of carriers. While they are immensely powerful, Rubinstein says they won’t be the only distribution channel for every wireless device. “They are not all going to go through the carriers,” Rubinstein says.

More and more screens will emerge, Rubinstein says. If I fast-forward enough years, he says, the walls are going to be big displays capable of talking to other devices.

Jacobs notes that people will be able to use their device with any tool they have access to, from a big screen to a headset to a wireless keyboard. He says Qualcomm is working on a technology that would allow wireless headsets that could work in-ear like a hearing aid.

7:50 pm: Talk about some outlandish things. Rubinstein has already thrown out the idea of a headset in your pillow. Rubinstein points out that there will be a lot of sensors, pointing to the Nike+iPod as a really early example of what we can expect a lot more of.

7:55 pm: Augmented reality is also going to be big, the panelists agree. “The (StarTrek) tricorder is going to happen,” Jacobs says. Health care will also tap mobile technology, particularly in emerging countries where there is less regulation, carriers are trusted and there are fewer skilled health care providers available. “It’s a very efficient way to manage health,” he says. “Over the next few years we will see this happen,” he says. Eventually it will come back to developed markets, but today there is too much legacy and too much regulation in places like the U.S.

8:10 pm: Sorry for the delay–we were fixing some issues with the video coding, which hopefully should be solved now. Anyway, Rubinstein and Jacobs have been throwing out things that they expect in the next five years.

Jacobs’s list includes digital networked textbooks, cellphones as gateways for health care, as well as using augmented reality to translate all the signs and menus in a foreign country.

Rubinstein and Jacobs both see a digital wallet becoming a reality, with Jacobs throwing out the idea of an end to checkout lines as the phone could pay and the store could electronically disable the security on goods, allowing the whole transaction to take place without interaction with store personnel.

“Legal shoplifting, that’s interesting.” Kara says.

The technical hurdles aren’t that big, Rubinstein says. “Clearly NFC (near-field communications) is coming.” It’s more of a social problem than a technical one, Rubinstein says.

8:21 pm: Some good audience questions. One, on what does it take to deliver an Apple-like experience. Rubinstein, who has experience as part of Apple and trying to “out-Apple” Apple, says he thinks that the key is delivering an intergrated experience.

“I don’t think Apple is the only one that can do it, but I do think it is important to have all the elements,” he says.

Another question is on the future of mobile TV–a question that prompts Jacobs to cover his face (Qualcomm spent a bundle on its MediaFlo mobile TV service that saw very limited consumer uptake and Qualcomm is now evaluating what to do with it).

Too few people liked what the service had to offer, Jacobs says, referring to limits on content, screen size, etc. Jacobs said it appears that probably broadcast makes sense for live events, while streaming with TiVo-like controls makes sense for everything else.

“I actually believe strongly in mobile TV, still,” he says.

8:30 pm: Okay. That’s a wrap from me. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to hear more from Rubinstein, he will be speaking at next week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

“If this were happening with physical trade, we’d all be saying this violates trade agreements,” Drummond said. “If you want to be part of the community of free trade, you have to let the Internet be open.”

So what’s to be done? Drummond says the U.S. government needs to respond to foreign nations who censor the Internet in the same way it would to those that restrict free trade. “We have great opportunities now with pending trade agreements to start putting some pressure on countries to recognize that internet freedom not only is a core value–that we should be holding them to account from a human rights standpoint,” he said. “But also that if you want to be part of the community of free trade, you are going to have to find a way to allow the internet to be open.”

A wonderful idea in theory, but one that’s certainly not going to go over well in places like China, where an “open Internet” is by defininition a restricted one.

Foreign companies have few possible paths into China’s telecom sector, which is dominated by the giant state-owned parents of China Mobile, China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. Investing in those Hong Kong-listed units, like Vodafone and others have done, grants little influence over the operation of their parent companies and doesn’t license a foreign company to offer telecom services in China.

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Anonymous sources close to the investigation into the attacks, which targeted dozens of American corporations, tell the New York Times they originated at Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School. The former boasts one of China’s top computer science programs; the latter has been known to train computer scientists for the Chinese military and reportedly has ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China.

While the implications of these findings seem obvious, insiders differ on what they really mean. Some suspect the schools are being used as a cover for Chinese government operations. Others speculate that they’re being used to hide intelligence operations run by a third country. Still others wonder if there’s no government involvement here at all, speculating that the attacks are criminal in origin and were intended to steal intellectual property from American tech firms.

Regardless of which scenario seems most plausible, it’s important to remember that just because the attacks have been linked to IP addresses at these schools’ networks doesn’t mean they necessarily began there.

Asked about the possibility the attacks originated at his school, a professor of Web security at Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said it was certainly possible.

“I’m not surprised,” the source told the Times. “Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal. I believe there’s two kinds of situations. One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Nearly a Month After Debut, Google’s “New” Approach to China Still a Lot Like the Old One
• Google CEO: Ask Not What Google Can Do for China–Ask What China Can Do for Google
• China on “Google Farce”: Our Internet Is Open
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

[Image Credit: China Security Blog]

The company, which has been in invitation-only beta for months, riffs on the standard Twitter interface by automatically displaying tweeted images in line with the standard 140 characters and relengthens all those pesky shortened urls.

In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, Brizzly is offering an on-the-fly translation tool (based on Google Translate) for foreign tweets, which it says will help users discover new information and gain context.

AllThingsD.com has learned that besides opening the front door to the public, the innovative start-up just grabbed former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell for the team. Ben was an early Google (GOOG) employee and worked on the Google Reader team with Thing Labs founders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell.

Here are two screenshots–one off Brizzly’s new public beta offering and one of the translation feature:

This week I tested Jaman.com, a Web site that gives users the chance to download independent and international movies from the Web directly to their computers. It also serves as a social networking forum where movie watchers can read one another’s reviews, write their own comments that run alongside the film, and join groups with people who have similar tastes in movies. Jaman (pronounced jah-mahn), has 1,800 titles. It charges $1.99 for rentals, which can be watched for up to seven days, and $4.99 to buy a movie outright.

Jaman.com’s home page (above) suggests movies for downloading, such as ‘Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories,’ and comments can be seen in a side panel while the film is being watched (below).

Jaman isn’t alone in the online movie downloading business, and its competitors boast bigger selections. Just this year Netflix Inc., known for popularizing DVD rentals through the mail, started offering its own movie downloads. So as to encourage this new method, Netflix builds movie-watching hours into its monthly plans, which range from $5 to $24 and include a certain number of hours during which downloaded movies can be watched. Of the 85,000 DVD titles available on Netflix.com, 4,000 titles can be downloaded.

Blockbuster Inc., which followed Netflix into the DVD mailing business, showed an interest in the online downloading method last month when it acquired Movielink LLC, a movie downloading service previously owned by Hollywood’s major studios.

And Apple Inc., which began selling films for $10 to $15 a year ago on its iTunes Store, offers over 500 movies. Amazon is in the game, too, as is Microsoft.

But Jaman hopes its niche films and viewer-comments system will set it apart.

I took a close look at Jaman, downloading movies from various countries, posting comments about them on the Jaman.com site and reading what others thought of the films. I used a Mac and two Windows computers running Microsoft’s Vista and XP operating systems, and tried Jaman on all three major Web browsers. The site itself can feel a bit overwhelming, jumbling a lot of text together on pages that lack a clean central place where every element comes together. More than once, films blacked out in midplay, and Jaman’s community aspect didn’t seem as well-organized or integrated as I had hoped.

Jaman has another major downside: It forces every user to designate some of his or her bandwidth to distribute movies for the company, using a peer-to-peer program. Community network setups like this aren’t unheard of; Skype and many others use such setups. But these other companies are often free, while Jaman is charging users for movies while simultaneously using their bandwidth to reduce strain on its own servers. Participation in the peer-to-peer network is required while downloading a movie but can be stopped at all other times. Even so, this is a real chink in Jaman’s armor.

Jaman.com drops users into a site where five movies are showcased, showing their trailers one after another. Other titles can be searched according to region, categories and genres, top movies or films made and submitted by users. I skimmed through flicks from Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, North America, Europe and Latin America. A useful feature displayed details about a movie when I held my cursor over its title including a description, the movie’s Jaman rating (out of five stars), duration and genre. Jaman doesn’t sort movies by duration, which would have saved me time while I was looking for a short film to download for a cross-country flight.

I was surprised to notice that none of the movies prominently displayed Motion Picture Association of America ratings. Jaman explained that these data are buried within a sub-menu of details about a movie, but many films didn’t list ratings — even those with MPAA ratings.

Three rentals come included with each Jaman membership, which was free and quickly obtained in my experience, though a friend of mine had trouble when he didn’t receive Jaman’s email verification with two different addresses. I downloaded and watched movies from Mexico, the United Kingdom and North America, and watched a 21-minute Japanese short film that streamed directly from the site and didn’t require downloading. Community comments and reviews helped me pick movies, especially Jaman’s own one-line summary that it calls “Our Take.”

To download and watch movies from Jaman, users must first download the Jaman player. But this player doesn’t work with the Web site as smoothly as it should. For example, after reading various reviews of movies, I found a comedy from the U.K. called “Nobody The Great,” and opted to rent it. I downloaded the Jaman player but it didn’t recognize that I already signed in and chose the movie to rent on the Web site. I started over by signing in, finding the film and choosing the rental option, this time using the player.

“Nobody The Great” turned out to be an amusing story about two English guys who find supposed terrorists in their home but are more concerned about not ruining an evening planned with two women. The film is only 47 minutes long and 753 megabytes, but it took about two hours to download using a broadband connection. The most maddening thing about downloading the movie using Jaman was that the estimated time until completion kept changing dramatically — one moment it read 224 minutes, the next 69 minutes, then 22, 40 and 17. Other downloads followed this same wacky pattern, some worse than others.

After watching a movie, I was prompted by Jaman to rate the movie or to write a review about it. Jaman uses email messages with links to join discussions with others who saw the same movie. These discussions groups are more like blogs, with each person’s comment listed as a different post. Some of the movies that I watched hadn’t been reviewed in a while, so I wasn’t as inspired to add my comments as I might have been if there was a live discussion taking place.

This staleness was experienced again in one of my favorite Jaman features: comments that run on-screen during a film if you’re online. These can be hidden so as not to distract the viewer, but I found some of the comments really interesting. For example, while watching a subtitled Mexican movie from 1995 called “El Callejon De Los Milagros” starring Salma Hayek, comments appeared roughly every 10 minutes from a user named Cinequest. I later learned that Cinequest represented the Northern California motion picture institute of the same name and that the comments left weren’t live but were stuck to the movie so that anyone watching it could see them. I was free to leave my own comments, but I didn’t have quite as much to say about camera angles as Cinequest. The film director’s comments can also be seen here.

Jaman says that its road map includes plans for live comments, which would encourage more interaction with others as if watching a movie with friends.

Though I didn’t spend a majority of my time there, Jaman’s Community section seemed a little weak. Groups like “Bollywood 101″ and “Cult Movies” had members and comments left by these members, but still seemed somewhat disconnected from films. For example, preview clips of certain movies were posted to share with the group, but most of the comments made by the group weren’t related to the clips.

Jaman introduced me to new films that I wouldn’t otherwise have found. But its peer-to-peer system and its overall lack of real-time comments were frustrating. I’d also like to see Jaman reorganize the look of its site so it doesn’t feel so cluttered.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com