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Join Date: May 2001
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![]() ![]() "Every time you hear a helicopter, you automatically think, 'Oh, another raid.'" – Kim Dotcom "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron did not hack into that system. He accessed a system that MIT, by its own admission, intentionally made available to those connected with the school. You could download as much as you wanted." – Alex Stamos January 19th, 2013 ![]() Judge Grants New Adjournment in TekSavvy Illegal File Sharing Case Christine Dobby Another adjournment has been granted in Voltage Pictures LLC’s motion to compel TekSavvy Solutions Inc. to hand over the names of hundreds of customers in one of the most significant copyright infringement cases Canada has seen. Federal Court judge Leonard Mandamin made the order to allow enough time for a public interest group to have its own motion to intervene in the case to be heard before proceeding with the motion for disclosure on its merits. “Hearing a motion on a one-sided basis is risky,” Judge Mandamin said Monday. The latest adjournment in this case will allow the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) time to have its motion to intervene heard before Voltage’s motion to compel disclosure of the names returns to court to be heard in full. TekSavvy, an independent Internet service provider based in Chatham, Ont., has taken steps to provide notice to its affected customers to give them a chance to seek legal advice and attend court in person. Lawyer Nicholas McHaffie said Monday his client has also incurred about $190,000 in legal fees and other costs dealing with the motion for third-party disclosure brought by the California-based film studio Voltage. In December, TekSavvy sought its own adjournment of Voltage’s motion to give it more time to properly inform its affected customers. However, TekSavvy does not plan to oppose the substance of the motion for disclosure of the names. But, if granted status as an intervener in the case, CIPPIC, the public interest legal clinic based out of the University of Ottawa, does intend to challenge the evidence Voltage has provided. CIPPIC filed its materials to on the intervention motion in late December and Voltage has until Jan. 22 to respond. Although the judge made no comment on the merits of that motion Monday, he did suggest that it would be useful to have the opposing side of the case before the court in deciding Voltage’s motion for disclosure. Judge Mandamin also said that since the courts are still in the early stages of dealing with new copyright legislation (which just came into force in November), it is “important to get it right,” and a motion without representations from different points of view does not help. The judge also indicated that he was unclear on some of the factual matters at issue in the case based on the materials the court currently has before it. Voltage has provided affidavit evidence from the owner of a forensic software investigation firm that alleges it connected more than 2,000 Internet protocol (IP) addresses with illegally copying and distributing the film studio’s copyrighted content over the course of a two-month period. Judge Mandamin said this “needs careful explanation” and the court needs to be well informed of the connection between IP addresses and the information Voltage has on alleged infringers. The timing of the next court date is unclear at this point. If CIPPIC is granted intervener status, it has indicated it would like to cross-examine Voltage’s witnesses on their affidavit evidence. The judge Monday also suggested that the motion cannot return to court on a regular motion date but will need a special date and could require more than one day to hear. James Zibarras, lawyer for Voltage, opposed the adjournment request on several grounds. “The concern is that one way to fight a case where substantially there are no defences is to drag it out procedurally,” he said. He also argued that every delay further harms his client’s interests because the film studio is still unable to seek injunctive relief against the alleged illegal file sharers – whose identities it does not know – meaning the copyrighted content could still be out there available for other Internet users to download themselves. To address this concern in part, TekSavvy offered Monday to send follow-up notices to affected clients urging them to take down any copyrighted material in their possession to prevent distribution, an offer Mr. Zibarras accepted. http://business.financialpost.com/20...-sharing-case/ ![]() Norway Faces Site Blocking Measures in Anti-Filesharing Bill enigmax In common with many others around the world, the government of Norway see sites like The Pirate Bay as particularly responsible for the growth of file-sharing online but have had little success in stopping their activities. Following failed attempts by rightsholders to have the site censored by ISPs, this month the government will reveal its new proposals to tackle the problem. They are widely expected to include changes to copyright law to allow sites to be blocked, with The Pirate Bay at the top of the list. Back in March 2009, the IFPI and several local movie studios began putting pressure on Telenor, Norway’s largest Internet service provider. It was a familiar tale – stop your subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay, the ISP was told, or legal action will follow. Following Telenor’s refusal the rightsholders kept their word and took the case to court, but things didn’t go well. In November 2009 a court ruled that the ISP had no obligation to block the world’s most infamous torrent site. In February 2010 a subsequent rightsholder appeal was rejected as there was no basis under Norwegian law for the claim. IFPI and music rights outfit TONO said they appreciated the clarification of the law and together called for legislative change to “close the hole” in the country’s Copyright Act. A year later and steps towards this goal were taking shape. In May 2011 the Ministry of Culture announced that it had put forward proposals for amendments to the Copyright Act which would “..give licensees the tools they need to follow-up on copyright infringement on the Internet, while protecting privacy.” The key proposals included making it easier for rightsholders to identify infringers from their IP addresses and amendments to the law to allow ISP-level blocking of sites deemed to be infringing copyright. This month the Norwegian government will finally present its new anti-piracy plan and as expected opposition is mounting against what some net activists and technologists see as the seeds of increasing Internet censorship. “One of the greatest advantages of the internet is its openness. It concerns us if the government is willing to restrict this,” says Tore Tennøe of the Technology Council, an independent public body tasked with the promotion of debate on the opportunities and implications of new technologies. “If the measures are indeed as they have been outlined, it will be a step towards more heavy-handed control. It’s something we’re used to seeing in countries that we do not like to compare ourselves with,” Tennøe adds. Torgeir Waterhouse, Director of Internet and new media at IKT Norway, says that blocking measures will only enjoy short-term effectiveness and will be easily circumvented. Waterhouse also expresses concern about government plans to lift red tape enabling rightsholders to link harvested IP addresses to individuals more easily. “In practice, this means that everyone who has recorded a song or composed a text will have the opportunity to monitor other people online,” he told NRK.no. “If you include all the licensees, we quickly arrive at between 1 and 2 million people who will get this opportunity, says Waterhouse. “It is unrealistic to believe that the Data Protection Authority will have the capacity to conduct a thorough audit of all who are engaged in this business, and therefore this may soon threaten privacy,” he concludes. The Norwegian government declined to comment before the bill is presented, although it previously stated that will happen this month. http://torrentfreak.com/norway-faces...g-bill-130114/ ![]() Study Maps the Emerging Ethics of File Sharing and Copyright Enforcement Mike One of the most comprehensive studies into media sharing and consumption habits in the United States and Germany reveals that nearly half of the populations have copied, shared or downloaded music, movies, and TV shows. Sharing occurs both on- and offline, but the latter is seen as reasonable by most people. The report does, however, reveal that online file-sharers consume more music than their non-file-sharing counterparts. Today the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, published its long-awaited Copy Culture report. The study is based on thousands of telephone interviews conducted in the United States and Germany and provides a unique insight into copying habits in the two countries. “The study suggests that most people in the US and Germany recognize the constitutive dilemma of copyright as a set of tradeoffs between rightsholders and the public. And it provides a snapshot of where ‘most’ people are in trying to reconcile these tradeoffs with the digital age,” author Joe Karaganis told TorrentFreak. “Not surprisingly, it’s a conflicted picture,” he adds. One of the main conclusions of the report is that sharing and downloading are part of modern culture. Nearly half of the U.S. and German populations have copied, shared or downloaded music, movies, and TV shows. This “copy culture” is most prevalent among people between the age of 18 and 29, with around 70% for both countries. The data further shows that most of this copying is casual. Only 3% of the U.S. respondents say they got most of their media collection through copying, and in Germany the figure is even lower at 2%. For simplicity’s sake, the results below are limited to the U.S. sample. When people are asked about their attitudes toward copying, it appears that most seek a moral balance between “sharing” and “piracy.” Offline swapping with friends and family is seen as reasonable by the majority of the population, but online file-sharing is not. Among those who own music in the U.S., 80% believe it is reasonable to share it with family members and 60% have no objection to sharing with friends. However, this social acceptance quickly drops for public sharing, with only 15% saying it’s reasonable to upload files to public websites. Overall we see that compared to older generations, people under 30 believe that copying is more reasonable. The report also zooms in on online file-sharing habits and shows that across the whole population, 13% of all people with an Internet connection use P2P-services. Only 3% say they belong to a private P2P community and 2% of all Internet users say they have uploaded or seeded files. Again, we see that sharing is most common among people under 30, where 20% use P2P-services. As was revealed in a preview publication, the survey found that the group of self-confessed P2P file-sharers have larger music collections compared to the rest. Interestingly, the data also shows that these file-sharers buy more music legally than their non-sharing peers, about 30% more. With the six-strikes anti-piracy system coming up it’s interesting to see the general public’s views on punishments for file-sharers, a topic the respondents were also questioned on. The survey results show that more than half of the population (51%) support warnings. Support drops to 28% when users’ connections are throttled, and to 16% when people are at risk of being disconnected as can happen under the French system. Another topic high on the anti-piracy agenda is censorship, something the public is also divided on. The results show that most people are supportive of copyright enforcement in general, but not when it compromises free speech or privacy. In the U.S. more than half the population supports (61%) piracy filters on services such as Dropbox and Facebook, but only a small minority are in favor of active monitoring of Internet connections (26%). Lastly, the data shows that a small subgroup of the population take measures to hide their IP-addresses online. In part, this is a reaction to increasing copyright enforcement initiatives. In the U.S., 4% of Internet users use anonymizing services such as VPNs, and this percentage increases to 16% among those who share files online. The above is just a summary of the findings. The full report is available on the American Assembly website. http://torrentfreak.com/study-maps-t...cement-130115/ ![]() Dotcom to Unveil Megaupload Successor Amid U.S. Claims Joe Schneider Kim Dotcom, whose Megaupload.com website accounted for 4 percent of world Internet traffic before being shut down last year on U.S. copyright infringement charges, plans to unveil a new, encrypted file-sharing site in New Zealand in a snub to U.S. authorities. Dotcom has scheduled a news conference on Jan. 20 at his NZ$30 million ($25 million) rented home in an Auckland suburb, promising to introduce a way to securely store and transfer confidential information. “It is a little bit provocative,” Charles Alexander, a partner at Minter Ellison in Sydney, specializing in intellectual property law, said in a phone interview. “The U.S. may redouble their efforts to extradite him.” The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking Dotcom’s extradition from New Zealand to face racketeering, money laundering and copyright-infringement charges. Prosecutors say his Megaupload site generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds from the exchange of pirated films, music, book and software files. Dotcom, who has denied any wrongdoing, faces as long as 20 years in prison if convicted. Peter Carr, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, referred Bloomberg News to a statement Dotcom made in February to a New Zealand court, when he pledged not to resurrect the Megaupload site. Carr declined to comment further. Secure Files The German-born Dotcom, 38, who changed his name legally from Kim Schmitz, has suggested in postings on his personal website that his encryption will ensure the security of files in cloud storage and prevent governments from seeing any content. A screenshot of the new Mega site shows an encryption generator, known as a 2048-bit RSA public/private key, that creates a unique alpha-numeric code used to unlock a file or a message. According to DigiCert Inc., the Lindon, Utah-based provider of Internet Security Certificates, cracking a 2048-bit RSA SSL code using a standard desktop computer would take 500,000 times longer than the age of the universe, which is about 13 billion years old. The new site promises to allow users to encrypt and decrypt data in their Internet browser during uploads and downloads. “I had a cool dream,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter Jan. 1. “All nations that are being spied on by the US govt started using #Mega & I won the Nobel Encryption Prize.” Helicopter Raid The U.S. government sought court approval in June 2010 to search Megaupload’s servers at Carpathia Hosting Inc. in Virginia, citing the existence of 39 infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures. In January 2011, the U.S. courts issued warrants for Dotcom’s arrest and the seizure of the websites. New Zealand police, cooperating with U.S. authorities, raided Dotcom’s rented mansion that month, using two helicopters and 27 officers, some armed with assault rifles and gas canisters. Officers seized 18 luxury vehicles at his home, including a 1959 pink Cadillac, while Megaupload sites were shut down worldwide and his banks accounts were frozen in Hong Kong. Dotcom spent four weeks in jail before winning his release on bail. Dotcom had filed a statement with the court before his release, pledging not to revive the file-sharing website. “I can assure the court that I have no intention and there is no risk of my reactivating the Megaupload.com website or establishing a similar Internet-based business during the period until the resolution of the extradition proceedings,” Dotcom said in a Feb. 15 affidavit. Lawful Business Neither Dotcom’s bail conditions nor U.S. law precludes him from engaging in a lawful business, according to his lawyer Ira Rothken. The court was informed of the new website and no legal objections were raised, Rothken said. The new site may antagonize U.S. prosecutors, Alexander said, although it won’t likely affect the extradition hearing. “That’ll be for a New Zealand court to decide,” Alexander said. “This isn’t a matter for U.S. courts.” Megaupload.com advertised that it had more than 1 billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors. U.S. prosecutors, in court filings, said the site accounted for 4 percent of Internet traffic. “Megaupload’s and the rest of the defendants’ earnings were from businesses providing lawful cloud storage services and not from criminal copyright infringement,” Dotcom said in a posting on his website. Hearing Postponed The extradition hearing in Auckland was postponed last month from March to August. New Zealand High Court Justice Helen Winkelmann ruled on June 28 that warrants police used to search Dotcom’s home, ahead of his arrest, were overly broad and invalid. In December, Winkelmann granted Dotcom permission to sue New Zealand’s spy agency for intercepting his communications. Megaupload is challenging the validity of the warrants that were used to search the Virginia servers, saying files were left there because the U.S. government told the company not to do anything to alert anyone of its investigation into the copyright infringement. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady hasn’t ruled on that challenge. The file-sharing company’s challenge is “based on unfounded assertions regarding imagined violations of its rights,” MacBride, the prosecutor, wrote in a court filing last week. “Megaupload does not cite a single communication between the government and Megaupload or a single instruction from any member of the government to Megaupload; there are none.” Criminal Behavior The defendants also personally uploaded infringing content and ignored takedown notices, MacBride said. The U.S. filing shows the government’s attempt to link Dotcom and Megaupload with criminal behavior, Adrian Lawrence, a partner at Baker & McKenzie in Sydney who advises on intellectual property and information technology, said in a phone interview. “The closer you are connected with that content, the more likely it is that you will be held responsible,” he said. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., held unanimously that file- sharing networks can be held liable for copyright infringement if they take “affirmative steps” to encourage breaking the rules. Dotcom has to determine if what he’s doing is legal in the country he’s operating from, Lawrence said. International Borders New Zealand’s copyright law indemnifies Internet service providers from liability if users infringe copyrights. Merely because a person uses the Internet and infringes a copyright the service provider “must not be taken to have authorized” the infringement, according to the law. “The U.S. imposes its laws further than its boundaries,” Lawrence said. MacBride has said international borders won’t stop him from pursuing lawbreakers. “I’m convinced that most e-mails in the world at some point transit through servers that sit somewhere in the Eastern District of Virginia,” MacBride said. “That gives us venue.” The New Zealand case is Between Kim Dotcom and Attorney General. CIV2012-404-001928. High Court of New Zealand (Auckland). The U.S. case is: USA v. Dotcom. 12-cr-00003. U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (Alexandria). http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...-s-claims.html ![]() US DOJ Did Not Entrap Megaupload, the Agency Says Megaupload's charges against the DOJ are 'baseless,' the agency says Grant Gross The U.S. Department of Justice did not mislead a court and attempt to entrap file storage site Megaupload on copyright infringement charges, the agency said in a new filing in the case. Megaupload's charges that the DOJ conspired to entrap the site on criminal copyright charges are "baseless," an official with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote in a court document filed Friday. Earlier this month, Megaupload filed court documents saying that in 2010 the DOJ asked the site, through its hosting vendor, to keep infringing files as part of a DOJ investigation, then later charged Megaupload with copyright infringement. But the search warrant contains no request for Megaupload to keep files, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Peterson wrote in the DOJ's Friday filing. "Megaupload does not cite a single communication between the government and Megaupload or a single instruction from any member of the government to Megaupload; there are none," Peterson wrote. The DOJ also did not mislead the district court by inserting new information into affidavits related to the Megaupload charges, as Megaupload has claimed, Peterson wrote. Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken pointed to a portion of the June 2010 search warrant targeting Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload's hosting provider. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked a judge to seal the search warrant affidavit because disclosure could "provide an opportunity to destroy evidence [and] change patterns of behavior." The search warrant also asked Carpathia and Megaupload to assist in the copyright infringement investigation. "The government cannot, on one hand, tell a U.S. court under penalty of perjury in seeking the cooperation of Megaupload in a search warrant they wanted to prevent evidence destruction of alleged infringing content files, and then, on the other hand, complain to a different court under penalty of perjury that Megaupload is a criminal for not destroying such files," Rothken said in an email. After ICE asked Megaupload to cooperate in an investigation, the site was obligated to keep evidence, Rothken added. "If the U.S. changed their mind at some point they could have written Megaupload a letter but they didn't," he added. "Instead the U.S. apparently used Megaupload's honorable compliance with the government's cooperation request to concoct a takedown of the entire Megaupload site by domain name seizure." The DOJ, in its Friday filing, opposed Megaupload's request to file a new brief regarding its accusations that the DOJ conducted an improper search of its servers. It also opposed Megaupload's request to file a motion to unseal the search warrant materials, with the DOJ saying the materials are already unsealed. https://www.computerworld.com.au/art...d_agency_says/ ![]() Lawmakers Slam DOJ Prosecution of Swartz as 'Ridiculous, Absurd' Brendan Sasso and Jennifer Martinez House lawmakers blasted federal prosecutors on Tuesday for pushing aggressive hacking charges against Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself on Friday. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) says his Oversight panel will look into whether federal prosecutors acted inappropriately. Meanwhile, two other members of the House Judiciary Committee said prosecutors acted too aggressively. “The charges were ridiculous and trumped-up,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) told The Hill. “It's absurd that he was made a scapegoat. I would hope that this doesn't happen to anyone else.” Polis called Swartz — a co-creator of Reddit who was accused of stealing articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a "martyr" for why Congress should limit the discretion of prosecutors. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the government's handling of the case was “pretty outrageous.” “Based on what I know, I think the Department of Justice was way out of line on the case,” she told The Hill. All three lawmakers serve on the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Justice Department. The lawmakers worked with Swartz and his group Demand Progress last year to defeat online piracy legislation backed by the entertainment industry. In 2011, federal prosecutors accused Swartz of breaking into a computer network at MIT and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, a subscription service for academic articles. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. His trial was scheduled to begin in April. In a statement on Saturday, Swartz's family blamed overzealous prosecutors for driving him to take his own life. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” the family said. Swartz struggled with depression for years, and had discussed as much publicly. The Justice Department has not commented on the case since Swartz's suicide, citing concern for his family's privacy. But in a statement last year, the DOJ defended bringing charges against Swartz. “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away,” U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a statement when Swartz was charged. Issa expressed sympathy with some of Swartz’s goals. While “cybercrime and hacking has to be taken seriously,” he said, Congress should take up Swartz's cause of making more information freely available to the public. “We're looking at the real question of open government,” Issa said. “Has the government or even MIT been holding back materials that the public has a right to know?” Issa said he wanted to make sure “that what is paid for is as widely available as possible to the American people.” Many materials on JSTOR are funded by public universities or government research grants. Subscriptions to JSTOR cost thousands of dollars. He also said “whether or not there was excessive prosecution is something we’ll look at.” Since Swartz's death, some advocates have called for Congress to re-examine the decades-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, arguing that it's written too vaguely and allows for draconian punishments. Polis said he is willing to consider changes to the law, and urged Attorney General Eric Holder to set guidelines curtailing the ability of prosecutors to seek overly harsh punishments. “Prosecutors shouldn't have the kind of discretion to seek absurd penalties for minor crimes,” Polis said. Lofgren said she isn't sure whether the Judiciary Committee will update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act this year, but she said it is “certainly something I am looking at.” http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...ernet-activist ![]() Aaron Swartz's Lawyer: MIT Refused Plea Deal Without Jail Time As family, friends and admirers mourn the death of Internet hacker-turned-activist Aaron Swartz, his lawyers have been speaking out about their negotiations with the Justice Department and MIT. When one former lawyer told prosecutors that Swartz might kill himself, "Their response was, 'Put him in jail. He’ll be safe there.'" Andy Good explained, "I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.” Swartz, who was 14 when he co-authored RSS 1.0 authentication and later help build Reddit, was found dead in his Crown Heights apartment last Friday morning, and the ME's office ruled the 26-year-old's death a suicide by hanging. His family blamed his death on Justice Department and MIT, for relentlessly pursuing charges against Swartz for downloading 4.8 million academic journals from JSTOR by sneaking into a network closet at MIT and tapping into the network, "Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Many have demanded that U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz resign, but her husband complained about the criticism his wife received by Tweeting, "Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6 month offer." The Guardian reports that Tom Dolan then deleted his account. The Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen has a column about the legal dealings: Swartz and his lawyers were not looking for a free pass. They had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if Swartz pulled a stunt like that again, he would end up in prison. Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from [initial lawyer Andy] Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not. “There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,” Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests. Elliot Peters, the San Francisco lawyer who took the case over from Weinberg last fall, could not persuade prosecutors to drop their demand that Swartz plead guilty to 13 felonies and spend six months in prison. Peters was preparing to go to trial and was confident of prevailing. However, Peters said, “There was such rigidity with the people we were dealing with. I couldn’t find anyone in that office to talk about proportionality and humanity. It was driven by a desire to turn this into a significant case, so that some prosecutor could put it in his portfolio." Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz's, characterized the prosecution's efforts as "bullying" and Alex Stamos, an Internet expert who was going to testify for Swartz, told the Post, "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron did not hack into that system. He accessed a system that MIT, by its own admission, intentionally made available to those connected with the school. You could download as much as you wanted." http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaro...refused_pl.php ![]() The Truth About Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” Alex Stamos I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron’s family during what must be the hardest time of their lives. If the good that men do is oft interred with their bones, so be it, but in the meantime I feel a responsibility to correct some of the erroneous information being posted as comments to otherwise informative discussions at Reddit, Hacker News and Boing Boing. Apparently some people feel the need to self-aggrandize by opining on the guilt of the recently departed, and I wanted to take this chance to speak on behalf of a man who can no longer defend himself. I had hoped to ask Aaron to discuss these issues on the Defcon stage once he was acquitted, but now that he has passed it is important that his memory not be besmirched by the ignorant and uninformed. I have confirmed with Aaron’s attorneys that I am free to discuss these issues now that the criminal case is moot. I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. Until Keker Van Nest called iSEC Partners I had very little knowledge of Aaron’s plight, and although we have spoken at or attended many of the same events we had never once met. Should you doubt my neutrality, let me establish my bona fides. I have led the investigation of dozens of computer crimes, from Latvian hackers blackmailing a stock brokerage to Chinese government-backed attacks against dozens of American enterprises. I have investigated small insider violations of corporate policy to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have responded to break-ins at social networks, e-tailers and large banks. While we are no stranger to pro bono work, having served as experts on EFF vs Sony BMG and Sony vs Hotz, our reports have also been used in the prosecution of at least a half dozen attackers. In short, I am no long-haired-hippy-anarchist who believes that anything goes on the Internet. I am much closer to the stereotypical capitalist-white-hat sellout that the antisec people like to rant about (and steal mail spools from) in the weeks before BlackHat. I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail. The facts: • MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open. • In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to. • MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices. At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader. • Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser. • Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi. • The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent. • I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case. In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery. If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi or to spider Wikipedia too quickly, but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence. Professor Lessig will always write more eloquently than I can on prosecutorial discretion and responsibility, but I certainly agree that Aaron’s death demands a great deal of soul searching by the US Attorney who decided to massively overcharge this young man and the MIT administrators who decided to involve Federal law enforcement. I cannot speak as to all of the problems that contributed to Aaron’s death, but I do strongly believe that he did not deserve the treatment he received while he was alive. It is incumbent on all of us to figure out how to create some positive change out of this unnecessary tragedy. I’ll write more on that later. First I need to spend some time hugging my kids. http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-...swartzs-crime/ ![]() I Conceal My Identity The Same Way Aaron Was Indicted For Robert David Graham According to his indictment, Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his "true identity". It sent chills down my back, because I do everything on that list (and more). To understand what I do, look at the screenshot below, and how evidence of my misbehavior shows up in my home router DHCP table: The first thing you'll notice is that I have a lot of MacBooks belonging to Martin. Actually, there is only one, but it randomizes its MAC address when it boots. Thus, every time I start it, it adds yet another entry in the DHCP table, appearing as another computer. And my name isn't "Martin". That's a name I made up. Notice the MAC address of the cell phone labeled "HTC One X". If you lookup the first three bytes, you'll find that it's not an HTC device but an Apple device. It's my iPhone 5. (Sadly, I don't know how to spoof the MAC address of my iPhone). On my last flight accross the country, I signed up with GoGo Inflight. I used a fake name, a fake email account (at mailinator.com), and a prepaid anonymous Visa card. My intent wasn't to defraud them -- I already know how to get GoGo Inflight for free using several techniques, such as spoofing the MAC address of another passenger. Because I'm an honest law abiding citizen, I paid for the WiFi -- I just did so while remaining anonymous. Remember the Stratfor hack from last year? One of the 800,000 accounts dumped on the Internet belongs to me. Only, you don't know it belongs to me because I didn't give my real name or my primary (well known) email address. I have a special email address reserved for accounts just like Stratfor. I also have a separate email account that I solely use for e-commerce, with a name unrelated to my real name, that I use for Amazon, PayPal, and so forth. I rarely give out my "real" email address. Why do I do all this? That's none of your business! I mean, all this has perfectly rational explanations in terms of cybersecurity, privacy, and anti-spam. You can probably guess most of the reasons. But explaining myself defeats the purpose. I shouldn't have to explain myself to you, to prosecutors, or to a jury. I have a human right to privacy, and guarding that right should not be cause for prosecution. That's what's scary about the Aaron Swartz indictment. He was indicted for wire-fraud for concealing his "true identity", for doing what I do. But at no time was he asked for his true identity. His true identity was not needed to access the JSTOR documents. JSTOR allowed anybody from the MIT network to access their documents, and MIT allowed anybody to access their network without requiring identity. Let me repeat that: nobody asked Aaron for his true identity, but he was indicted for wirefraud for concealing his true identity. He was indicted for doing the same things I do every day. It's around this time that people bring up how Aaron used MAC spoofing to get around blocks put in place by MIT. These people don't understand MAC addresses. MAC addresses are not a machine's true identity. They aren't a means of security or authorization. When somebody blocks your MAC address, it doesn't send the message "you are unauthorized", it's not clear precisely what message it sends. It's like saying if somebody blocks your phone number, then it's wirefraud calling from a different phone. Your phone number is not your true identity, and neither is your MAC address. MIT's own WiFi access-points spoof MAC addresses. For example, if you netstumble the MIT campus you'll find two access-points with the MAC addresses "00:21:d8:49:98:61" and "00:21:d8:49:98:62". These are actually the same access-point which is spoofing MAC addresses in order to appear as multiple networks ("MIT" and "MIT GUEST"). When Aaron spoofs, it's wire-fraud. When MIT spoofs, it's normal network operation. Besides taking the "civil liberty" angle, I'm trying to get to the "witchcraft" angle. As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Here is my corollary: "Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch". People fear magic they don't understand, and distrust those who wield that magic. Things that seem reasonable to technical geeks seem illegal to the non-technical. The non-technical think they understand MAC addresses and address blocking, but they don't. Thus, Aaron's indictment might seem a fair interpretation of the law, but it's a wholly unfair interpretation of technology. So, anyway, at the bottom of this post is the magic incantation you need to cast over your MacBook in order to randomize your MAC address. I recommend against you using it, though, because this may cause a bunch of villagers to come after you with torches and pitchforks. http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/0...way-aaron.html ![]() Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator Sets Public Domain Academic Articles Free "A tiny bit of civil disobedience," that with any luck, won't get folks in trouble. Cyrus Farivar In a matter of seconds, you too can "liberate" an old academic article from JSTOR. On Monday afternoon, a group of online archivists released the "Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator." The initiative is a JavaScript-based bookmarklet that lets Internet users "liberate" an article, already in the public domain, from the online academic archive JSTOR. By running the script—which is limited to once per browser—a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies. Swartz, who tragically committed suicide on January 11, 2013, was arrested and charged back in 2009 for having downloaded a massive cache of documents from the website. He faced criminal charges that could have lead to potentially months or years in a prison as a result (they were only dropped this morning). JSTOR did not immediately respond to requests for comment concerning this new tool. However, over the weekend, the organization did acknowledge it was "deeply saddened" over the Swartz tragedy. "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge," the organization wrote in an unsigned, undated statement. "At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011." "If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS." Jason Scott, of ArchiveTeam, developed the piece of code to provide a way for Swartz’ supporters to engage in a small act of digital civil disobedience. He said his organization had planned this tool last year, but decided not to release it so as not to interfere with then-pending Swartz’ case. "I would be really sad if I was indicted and sent to jail for this," he told Ars, noting that all the documents he and his supporters were "liberating" were already in the public domain. Scott argued that JSTOR had no right to impose additional restrictions on how these public domain articles were accessed, or what they were used for. "It is to remind people of the threshold [Swartz] crossed, he would do things that were a little bit questionable, for good reasons," Scott added. "He would make leaps that were a little farther beyond and he did it during his young life. If it brings a little attention to him and how he lived in the world, [then that’s a good thing]. Even if it's a very tiny [act of protest]—that's not meant to destroy or damage JSTOR or anything like that." JSTOR’s terms of service [TOS], for example, explicitly prohibit any "attempt to override, circumvent, or disable any encryption features or software protections employed in the JSTOR Platform;" and "undertake coordinated or systematic activity between or among two or more individuals and/or entities that, in the aggregate, constitutes downloading and/or distributing a significant portion of the Content," among other prohibitions. "We absolutely don't recommend that people do this—don't do it," Scott said. "If you don’t want to do this, don't do it. If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS." http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...articles-free/ ![]() IBM Exec Husband of Aaron Swartz Prosecutor Takes to Twitter to Defend His Wife "Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer." Jessica Roy In the wake of the suicide of hacker hero Aaron Swartz, his friends and family released a statement placing the onus for his death on “a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz was responsible for prosecuting Mr. Swartz, and has come under fire along with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann for what many see as overreach in cases against hackers. A petition immediately began circulating asking for Ms. Ortiz’s resignation following Mr. Swartz’s death. The petition has already received over 25,000 signatures, guaranteeing it a response from the White House. Now, Ms. Ortiz’s husband, an IBM executive named Tom Dolan, has taken to Twitter to defend his wife’s actions in the prosecution of Mr. Swartz. (As the account is not verified, Betabeat was unable to independently confirm that it is Mr. Dolan’s Twitter, but he possesses over 700 followers and has his account tied to a fleshed-out LinkedIn page.) In the tweets, Mr. Dolan responds to various public figures tweeting about Mr. Swartz and arguing that he was not facing life in prison, but instead refused to take a six month plea bargain. Many on Twitter are outraged by Mr. Dolan’s remarks, particularly after the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to make a statement regarding Mr. Swartz out of respect for his family’s privacy. “US attorney’s office won’t make public statement bc ‘respect’ to family’s privacy’. US a”s husband @tomjdolan criticises family on twitter,” tweeted one user. “Ortiz’s husband, @tomjdolan, thinks public anger is over potential prison time, not the fact the fed ruined his life over a TOS violation,” added Daily Dot writer Kevin Morris. http://betabeat.com/2013/01/tom-dola...wartz-twitter/ ![]() Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz Charles P. Pierce United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who still has political ambitions beyond her current station, and her husband, and some unfortunate media enablers, have finally organized a response to the torrent of criticism she and her office have received in regard to her breaking-a-butterfly-on-a-wheel prosecution of activist Aaron Swartz, whom Ortiz's office tried to throw in prison for the crime of stealing stuff the actual owners eventually said that they didn't care that much about. First, her husband, Tom Dolan, tweeted out his incredulity that his wife and her prosecutors were being blamed for Swartz's suicide, and criticized Swartz's parents for their belief that the prosecution was directly tied to their son's death: "Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month #offer." This argument proved so compelling that Dolan deleted his Twitter account. Then, last night, Ortiz released her own statement, which said, in part: "As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office's prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life. I must, however, make clear that this office's conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably." This is, of course, defending yourself with armed banality. Very few people are saying the prosecution itself was "unwarranted." Even Swartz's own lawyers say he was willing to accept probation and a fine. Nobody's accusing the prosecutors of violating their oaths. The problem is that, by the modern standards of how federal prosecutors behave generally, and how Ortiz's office has behaved in particular, she would see their actions as both appropriate and "reasonable." And the glibness with which her husband and her defenders toss off a "mere" six months in federal prison, low-security or not, is a further indication that something is seriously out of whack with the way our prosecutors think these days. Unfortunately, Joan Vennochi, a usually reasonable columnist at The Boston Globe, has stepped up as a primary defender of Ortiz's conduct in this case. (The Globe's been one of Ortiz's biggest boosters, although the paper's coverage of this incident has been extremely fair-minded.) The column's behind a paywall — Yeah, go figure. — but, through the miracle of home delivery and transcription, we find that Vennochi begins with the six-months-ain't-nothing argument and goes from there. But there are also questions for Swartz' lawyer, Eliot Peters. Why reject the government's offer of a four to six months prison sentence? That's much less than the 35 years and $1 million fine allowed under the federal law that Swartz was charged with violating. Peters told the Globe that Swartz didn't believe he was a felon; he was acting on the principle that information on the Internet should be free. But defending principle was not his lawyer's job. It was to provide Swartz with the best legal advice, given the charges. We move from there to an appalling misuse of Martin Luther King's Letter From The Birmingham Jail — Vennochi seems convinced that this was purely an act of civil disobedience and that civil disobedience must needs include jail time — but once we get to the condescension, the piece goes completely off the rails. An emotion-soaked perspective is understandable from those closest to Swartz. But the widespread revulsion directed at the U.S. Attorney's office is overreach by cyberbullies. Defense lawyers would love to see federal prosecutors back down from other criminal cases. Lord above, what a crock. I wouldn't have known Aaron Swartz if he'd sat in my lap. I had to have one of my children explain to me what Reddit was the other night. (Yes, I am an idiot. Please proceed.) But I've been around enough courthouses to recognize political ambition in a federal prosecutor when I see it. I've been around enough courthouses to recognize where the real power to bully someone comes from, and it doesn't come from law professors saying mean things about people on the Intertoobz. It comes from the FBI, and a couple dozen federal law-enforcement agencies, and the power to throw people — even for a "mere" six months — into the federal pokey. Every federal prosecution doesn't have to be balls-to-the-wall. You don't have to have known Aaron Swartz to conclude with good reason that the U.S. Attorney had an agenda here beyond simply keeping secure some JSTOR files, or maintaining the integrity of the broom closets at MIT. This is especially true when you examine the bill of particulars put together about Ortiz and her office by media critic Dan Kennedy on his blog the other day. Ortiz, whom Vennochi seems hellbent on protecting from the slings and arrows of cybermeanies, knows the political value of being "tough on crime." I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day. At the end of the column, though, Vennochi does get around to allowing that perhaps, maybe, Ortiz and her prosecutors might have gone a little easier, given that the law they were seeking to enforce is dubious even when applied appropriately, which it certainly wasn't here. She then goes on to superbly miss the point. Massachusetts is one of the high-tech capital of the world. This involved a major network breach at MIT, a major institution. Free information is a nice principle, but right now everyone is trying to bury it behind a paywall. Swartz ran up against the power of money. As smart as he was, he didn't know when to back downand it sounds like his lawyer didn't tell him. Let's leave aside the sad irony of a journalist accepting as axiomatic the idea that "free information" is simply a "nice principle." Rather, let's take a look around at our new-age banana republic, where "the power of money" decides who gets prosecuted, and how severely, and for what. "The power of money" isn't supposed to mean jack-shit in a courtroom. Every advance in progressive jurisprudence for over a century has at least in part been about lessening the influence of "the power of money" over the judicial process. I'm sorry Carmen Ortiz has had a bad week. I sympathize not at all. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politic...tz-case-011713 ![]() 25,000 People Sign Petition to Remove Aaron Swartz's Prosecutors Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai An online petition that asks the White House to remove the U.S. attorney in charge of the prosecution of Internet activist and hacker Aaron Swartz passed the 25,000 signature threshold Tuesday that should prompt an official response. Swartz committed suicide in New York City on Friday. At the time of his death, Swartz was accused of computer fraud and awaiting a trial expected to begin in the spring. He faced a maximum of 35 years of prison and up to $1 million in fines. The petition has now passed 25,000 signatures, which means the White House is supposed to answer it — although it's not legally bound to do so. A recent petition to build a Death Star was addressed, although others take more time and some go unanswered. Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, lamented Monday that a petition to grant open access to scholarly articles has been unanswered for more than seven months. "White House makes jokes about their beer recipe and building a death star, but they don't answer a real petition on open access," Higgins tweeted. Swartz was accused of sneaking into the Massachussets Institute of Technology's library, plugging his laptop into a network closet and illegally downloading millions of scholarly articles from the online publisher JSTOR. Swartz was reportedly depressed, but his family, supporters and legal experts such as Lawrence Lessig, have accused the prosecution led by assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann, working under Ortiz, of overreach that may have played a role in his suicide. Swartz's lawyer had seen his plea agreement rejected as recently as last Wednesday. According to Swartz's latest lawyer, Marty Weinberg, his last plea deal was accepted by JSTOR, but the deal fell through when the MIT refused to sign the deal. MIT's president already announced that the famed school will conduct an investigation to assess its eventual role in Swartz's death. The success of the petition will certainly keep stirring the controversy surrounding his death. Andrew Good, Swartz's former lawyer, told the San Francisco Gate Monday that last year he told federal prosecutors that his client was a suicide risk. "Put him in jail, he'll be safe there," they responded, according to Good. https://mashable.com/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-petition/ ![]() White House Raises Petition Signature Threshold to 100K We the People platform quadruples the number of signatures required on petitions before they merit the Obama Administration's attention. Steven Musil Future petitions to the White House to build a Death Star, have Piers Morgan deported, or fire Aaron Swartz's prosecutor will have to attract more support to merit the White House's attention. Beginning today, petitions filed on WhiteHouse.org's We the People platform will need to log 100,000 signatures in 30 days to receive an official response from the Obama Administration, quadrupling the previous minimum of 25,000. The higher threshold will "ensure we're able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve," Macon Phillips, the White House's director of digital strategy, wrote in a blog post today. "This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist." Activity on the petitions platform skyrocketed in late 2012, with the average time that petitions took to cross the 25,000-signature platform being slashed from 18 days during the first 10 months of the year to 9 days for the last two months. More than 60 percent of the petitions receiving 25,000 signatures last year did so in November and December. "It's wonderful to see so many people using We the People to add their voices to important policy debates here in Washington and bring attention to issues that might not get the attention they deserve," Phillips wrote. Launched in September 2011, the Obama Administration's online petition platform has become a venue for citizens to make serious policy suggestions, as well as air disapproval of recent events and enjoy a little whimsy. Recent petitions have sought to have the Westboro Baptist Church legally recognized as a hate group and persuade the government to build a Death Star -- a proposal that was met with an equally light-hearted response from the White House on Friday. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...shold-to-100k/ ![]() “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Affects Some Businesses, Public WiFi Forbidden Ernesto During the coming weeks the controversial “six-strikes” anti-piracy system will start in the U.S. The initiative is aimed at educating the public, but last week we uncovered from leaked documents that it also applies to businesses. Today CCI director Jill Lesser confirms that indeed some business accounts will be affected. However, she adds that this is not going to affect café owners who offer public WiFi, as this is already prohibited in the applicable Terms of Services. A week ago TorrentFreak had the honor to reveal the full details of Verizon’s implementation of the upcoming “copyright alerts” system. In short, the Internet provider will notify customers whose accounts are caught sharing pirated movies and music, and after four warnings these account will be temporarily throttled to 256kbps. Besides from the details, the leaked documents also revealed that business accounts will also be subject to the copyright alert system. This means that these companies will have to prevent their employees from pirating, and makes it impossible for coffee shops to share their WiFi with customers. Following up on this finding we asked the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), the group that’s responsible for the copyright alerts plan, whether Verizon perhaps made a mistake by applying it to business accounts. This is not the case. CCI Executive Director Jill Lesser told TorrentFreak in a comment that most alerts will go to private customers, but that some businesses are indeed affected. “The Copyright Alert System is targeted to residential customers, and the vast majority of alerts issued will be residential. There is a small pool of home office or home-business customers that may end up in the copyright alert system due to infrastructures in place at the member ISPs,” Lesser said. According to the CCI this is not a problem as these companies shouldn’t let employees share copyrighted material in the first place. “Importantly, the terms of service are essentially the same as residential accounts and if small businesses are allowing their employees to engage in copyright theft then they are violating their terms of service,” Lesser says. The same is true for public WiFi according to Lesser, as these business accounts are already forbidden to share their Internet access with customers. “In addition, the terms of service on such accounts do not allow them to be used to provide free WiFi or ‘hotspots’ so the hypothetical café owner offering public WiFi will not be subject to the CAS if they are following their terms of service.” Indeed, as we look at Verizon’s business TOS we read the following: “You may not provide Internet access to third parties through a wired or wireless connection or use the Service to facilitate public Internet access (such as through a Wi-Fi hotspot).” Previously these terms were hard to monitor and enforce, but with the copyright alert system this changes. We have no information on the number of small businesses that will be directly impacted, but expect that there are quite a few. So don’t be surprised to see the public WiFi disappear at your favorite coffee shop when the six-strikes scheme goes live. http://torrentfreak.com/six-strikes-...bidden-130118/ ![]() Malware Infects US Power Facilities Through USB Drives ICS-CERT recommends power plants adopt new USB practices Grant Gross Two U.S. power companies reported infections of malware during the past three months, with the bad software apparently brought in through tainted USB drives, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT). In one case, the industrial control system at a power generation facility was infected with "common and sophisticated malware" apparently through an employee's USB drive, according to the ICS-CERT Monitor for October to December 2012. The publication did not name the malware discovered. The tainted USB drive came in contact with a "handful of machines" at the power generation facility and investigators found sophisticated malware on two engineering workstations critical to the operation of the control environment, ICS-CERT said. Investigators didn't find malware on 11 other workstations examined, ICS-CERT said. ICS-CERT recommended that the power facility adopt new USB use guidelines, including the cleaning of a USB device before each use. In the second incident, a power company contacted ICS-CERT in early October to report a virus infection in a turbine control system. About 10 computers were affected, ICS-CERT said. An outside technician used a USB drive to upload software updates during equipment upgrades, ICS-CERT said. The malware delayed the plant's reopening by three weeks, the organization said. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...gh_usb_drives/ ![]() Dangerous Remote Linksys 0-Day Root Exploit Discovered Mirko Zorz DefenseCode researchers have uncovered a remote root access vulnerability in the default installation of Linksys routers. They contacted Cisco and shared a detailed vulnerability description along with the PoC exploit for the vulnerability. Cisco claimed that the vulnerability was already fixed in the latest firmware release, which turned out the be incorrect. The latest Linksys firmware (4.30.14) and all previous versions are still vulnerable. Leon Juranic, DefenseCode CEO, comments for Help Net Security: "According to numbers available on the Internet, Cisco Linksys is a very popular router with more than 70,000,000 routers sold. This creates an immense playground for anyone in possession of a 0-day exploit." The vulnerability itself was discovered during a Cisco Linksys product security evaluation for a client and it took the researchers 12 days to develop a fully working exploit. That includes hardware hacking for router debugging, vulnerability analysis, memory analysis and exploit development. After the researchers posted their findings online, Cisco finally got in touch again. They are expected to release a fix in time for the full advisory, which should see the light of day in about 10 days. https://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14234 ![]() Facebook’s Other Big Disruption Quentin Hardy A computer motherboard called Grouphug allows different manufacturers' chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine.Facebook A computer motherboard called Grouphug allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Facebook just made a potentially game-changing announcement. It got less fanfare than Tuesday’s announcement that it is going into the social search business, but this other announcement may have bigger long-term implications for the technology industry. Put simply, some of the world’s biggest computing systems just got a little cheaper, and a lot easier to configure. As a consequence, the companies that supply the hardware to these systems may have to scramble to remain as profitable. The reason is a Facebook-led open source project. In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. At a user summit on Wednesday Intel, another key member of the Open Compute Project, announced it would release to the group a silicon-based optical system that enables the data and computing elements in a rack of computer servers to communicate at 100 gigabits a second. That is significantly faster than conventional wire-based methods, and uses about half the power. More important, it means that elements of memory and processing that now must be fixed closely together can be separated within a rack, and used as needed for different kinds of tasks. There is a lot of waste in data centers today simply because, when there is an upgrade in servers, lots of other associated data-processing hardware has to be changed, too. There were other announcements, like a computer motherboard called Grouphug that allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Before, they were custom made. Put together, such innovations potentially lower the cost and complexity of running big and small data centers to an extent that works for a lot of companies. “Who wouldn’t want a cheaper, more efficient server?” said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook, and the chairman of Open Compute. “The problem we’re solving is much larger than Facebook’s own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly.” To be sure, it’s in Facebook’s interest to attack expensive hardware. The company makes money from a service that requires hundreds of thousands of computer servers distributed in big centers around the world. Google and Amazon.com, which are not members of the project, maintain proprietary systems which they apparently felt gave them a competitive edge. For Facebook, the difference seems to be more in the software. To the extent hardware costs drop, that’s great for them. Mr. Frankovsky argued that, while “this puts challenges on the incumbents” in hardware, “it also helps them. They have a finite number of engineering resources, and this way they hear from a community about whether there is an interest for a product.” Intel may hope to benefit from its open-source release, since it could see an overall rise in demand for its chips with the move toward cheaper computing. The real test is whether Facebook can increase the number of potential buyers for Open Compute equipment. “The question is, can they extend this beyond a few Web businesses like Facebook and Rackspace, or a few financial exercises at Goldman, and bring this to industries like oil or aerospace?” said Matt Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm. “That will take it from 20 or 30 companies to hundreds of companies.” The issue isn’t so much a technical one, he argues, as it is one of getting corporate information technology professionals interested in radical design changes. Mr. Frankovsky is aware of the problem. Recently he and his colleagues led a seminar in Texas for BP, Shell and other oil giants on how they could use Open Compute hardware in their data centers. This will not change things dramatically this year, and possibly even next, but over the long haul it could remake a lot of businesses. Linux, remember, was around for several years as a minor player, but eventually undid Sun Microsystems and others. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...ig-disruption/ ![]() If You Lose Your Cellphone, Don't Blame Wayne Dobson Lawrence Mower Wayne Dobson doesn't have your cellphone. Even if it looks like he might. In the past two years the 59-year-old retiree has been pestered by people showing up at all hours of the day and night at his house, demanding their phones. They've yelled, shown him evidence, called the police - sworn that their phone is in his house. But he's no thief. "It's very difficult to say, 'I don't have your phone,' in any other way other than, 'I don't have your phone,' " Dobson said. What has become a powerful tool for police hunting down bad guys and people who lose their phones or who call 911 has backfired on Dobson. An unexplained glitch with at least one cellphone company is directing people with missing phones to his North Las Vegas home. And the glitch is also affecting police, who have twice been wrongly directed to his house on domestic violence calls. That has forced Dobson to post a sign on the front of his house telling people he doesn't have their phone. The situation is one that has puzzled experts. "That's crazy," said John B. Minor, a communications expert who specializes in cellphone tracking. "This sort of thing I've not seen." The problem appears to be limited to some owners of Sprint phones. Company officials said they are researching the problem, which has forced Dobson to sleep near his front door on weekends so he can answer the door quickly at all hours. "It's a hell of a problem," he said. "It would be nice to be able to get a good night's sleep." 'I HAD A PROBLEM' Dobson's misadventure started in 2011, with a knock on the door around midnight on a weekend. He opened the door and found an upset young couple demanding that he turn over their phone. Dobson was confused. "I'm standing there and I'm thinking, 'What are they talking about?' " he said. "They might as well have said, 'Give me my horse back.' " After debating back and forth, both sides called police. When officers arrived at his home, near Craig Road and Donna Street, Dobson expressed his confusion. "I just said, 'I don't know these people; I don't go where they go.' I'm 59 years old. I don't care about these technology pets they have." The couple left without their phone, and he never heard from them again. It wasn't long before he realized he had a bigger problem on his hands. He saw a woman wandering through his backyard. But before he could talk to her, she jumped over the wall. A few minutes later he heard a knock on the door. "Please give me my phone," she said. When he explained that he didn't have it, she became insistent. "I've got pictures of my grandchildren," she said. "I can't replace them. I need them. All I want are my pictures." He told her to call the police and invited her to come inside and search. In the meantime, he called the woman's cellphone provider, Sprint. A technician there explained the problem, but didn't provide a solution, he said. Dobson was told that cellphone GPS systems don't provide exact locations - they give a general location of where to start your search. And for some reason his house is that location for his area. "I knew then I had a problem," he said. AN IMPERFECT SYSTEM All cellphones today have a form of location-tracking, often using a combination of satellite GPS and "triangulating" a signal between nearby cell towers. For most smartphone users, that allows turn-by-turn driving directions, a list of nearby restaurants and real-time weather updates. Those are all convenient services, but location-tracking has a more important purpose. In 1997, cellphone users were roughly one in three callers to 911 dispatchers. And dispatchers didn't know what to do in situations where the person couldn't, or didn't, provide their location. For land lines, dispatchers automatically knew where they were. If you were in Chicago calling from a cellphone with a 702 area code, for example, Chicago dispatchers would forward the call to Las Vegas police. That was unhelpful at the least and dangerous at the worst, said Ben Levitan, who spent 30 years designing cellphone networks and holds dozens of patents on the technology. "There were some horrible situations which prompted the FCC to go, 'Look, you've gotta fix this,' " Levitan said. Cellphone companies came up with a way to locate the phones and instantly transmit their coordinates to dispatchers. Today, as 70 percent of phone calls to 911 are made by cellphones, dispatchers can see where they are calling from. The information must be accurate to within 50 to 300 meters, depending on the type of technology used. The system has since spawned a host of other uses. Companies like Apple, Microsoft and various third parties all provide ways to track missing phones from a computer or tablet. When New York Times technology columnist David Pogue lost his iPhone last year, he used Apple's software to track it to the backyard of a Maryland home. Police picked up the phone and returned it. It's also been useful for police. They have used it to solve crimes by showing a suspect's phone was at the crime scene, although they have also been criticized for using the technology without a warrant. Experts say the systems are not completely reliable. You don't need to tell that to Dobson. 'LUCKY ME' It wasn't until December that Dobson felt the situation had gone from a nuisance to a danger. Four different groups of people had showed up at his house in the two years before. And North Las Vegas police showed up to his home once, in error, responding to a domestic dispute call. But on Dec. 18, four young men banged on his door at 2:30 a.m., yelling for him to open up and give up a phone. The phone's owner had an application on a tablet computer that showed his phone was in Dobson's house. "He was ... literally proving to me that I had his cellphone," Dobson said. About two weeks later he was awakened at 4 a.m. by a person prowling along the side of his house. Dobson followed a flashlight beam to his bathroom window. When he looked out, the person flashed the light in his face. "I screamed at him, 'Who are you? Get out of my yard!' " Dobson said. "And he said, 'We're the police, open the door.' " North Las Vegas cops had received a 911 call from a woman on a cellphone who was arguing with a man. The argument was escalating, but dispatchers weren't able to get a location from the woman. They looked at the location of the phone and sent officers, who arrived minutes later at Dobson's house. He was taken outside to his front yard and searched. When officers realized the mistake, they apologized. Dobson said he is grateful that he didn't confront the officers with a weapon. "I would have been on the losing end, and it would have been because of that issue," he said. He now has a sign next to his front door telling people that he doesn't have their phone and advising them to call police. North Las Vegas police spokesman Chrissie Coon said the department rarely dispatches officers to locations based on cellphone GPS coordinates. It's even rarer that those coordinates are wrong. And she had never heard of a situation like Dobson's. "We're relying on the accuracy of the information that's given to us by the carrier," she said. "It's just not a perfect technology." Coon confirmed that police have responded four times to Dobson's house - twice for people who believed their phone was there. Each time the phone was a Sprint phone. They now are going to flag any calls to Dobson's home, but they will still send officers to the scene unless they can confirm that there isn't actually a problem there. Coon said Dobson's example is a good reason why people should have land lines in their homes. A Sprint spokeswoman said the company is researching the problem. "We will research the issue thoroughly and try to get to the bottom of what is going on and if it has anything to do with our company," spokeswoman Rachael Crocker wrote in an email. Minor and Levitan, who both testify as expert witnesses in civil and criminal cases, said they don't believe the problem is with the cell tower, which is close to Dobson's home. They both said the problem is more likely to be at Sprint's switchboard. A software problem is incorrectly translating coordinates to Dobson's house. And because there is clearly a problem with the 911 system, the issue is serious, they said. "This isn't the kind of error you would just shrug off," Minor said. "They should be very diligent in preventing these types of problems." Dobson just wants the problem fixed. He is worried about potentially dangerous future encounters with angry cellphone owners. "It's like Pavlov's response now; I dread the thought when I hear a car drive by that they're going to be pulling in and knocking on my door," he said. Levitan said he has seen a lot of strange things in the cellular world, but, "I've never seen this specific problem come up." That's little comfort to Dobson. "Lucky me, huh. I couldn't be the multimillion-dollar winner. No. I'd rather have that problem." http://www.lvrj.com/news/if-you-lose...186670171.html ![]() PlusNet Tests IP Address-Sharing As IPv6 Fails To Take Off IPv4 addresses are running out so PlusNet wants more customers to try using the same IP address Peter Judge and Tom Brewster PlusNet, the Sheffield-based ISP owned by BT, is testing a controversial scheme in which all its customers could share one IP address through Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT). The move, made necessary by the slow progress of the new protocol IPv6, could limit customers’ Internet actions and cause problems with tracking abuse or criminal action. IP addresses were never meant to be shared but the current version of the Internet protocol (IPv4) does not allow enough different addresses to go around. A new version of the protocol (IPv6) with vastly more addresses, has been ready for use for the last 20 years but has been implemented disastrously slowly. In December, the UK’s IPv6 promotion body 6UK closed down in despair, and CGNAT is widely lamented as an admission of IPv6′s ongoing failure. IPv4 addresses have been shared for many years: most home networks and business networks hide their complexity behind a single gateway connected to the Internet, with a single IP address. The gateway uses network address translation (NAT), to translate between addresses on the local network and those on the wider Internet so that, for instance, each person sees the web pages and emails they ask for. Now that the last few blocks of IPv4 addresses have been issued, bigger groups are having to share and PlusNet is applying NAT at the service provider level, sharing one IP address between all its users, which will have to go through a network translator box buried in PlusNet’s network, to access any services on the Internet. PlusNet does the maths Critics have said that this will mean users cannot host content within PlusNet and it could cause problems with any end-to-end Internet services. PlusNet’s Matt Taylor defended the decision in a forum posting, saying: “Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is similar to the NAT that people use on their home routers. For most people they will never notice, most mobile operators already use CGNAT and so most applications will just work.” Despite PlusNet’s efforts to reassure users, this is ringing alarm bells with some. It is true that mobile operators have adopted CGNAT, because they have connected many millions of users in an era when IPv4 addresses have been growing scarce. ISP Review points out that these mobile operators “are notorious for being very restrictive and that’s often in stark contrast to the otherwise flexible nature of fixed line internet connectivity”. In its defence, PlusNet points out that users would find IPv6 addresses did not suit them: “Even if the world switched on IPv6 today, there would still be people and applications that don’t work under IPv6, some games consoles, for example. As such everyone will still need an IPv4 address for the foreseeable future.” ISPs will have to operate a “dual stack” approach, supporting both protocols, but this is made difficult by the shortage of IPv4 addresses, so some sort of sharing is inevitable, PlusNet argued. Just testing The ISP also said this is just a test for now: “We’re just about to test and evaluate a CGNAT system to see if it’s suitable and see what kind of applications and services work and don’t work, as such we’d like a bit of help from people to try out and see. We’re doing testing internally too but with so many devices, applications, games, VPNs, etcetera, we’ll never test everything. Volunteer testers will get a special username and are being asked to “do what you would normally do” and record what works and what does not. If they find CGNAT does not support things they need, they will be allowed to switch back to non-CGNAT addresses. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this became common among bigger/cheaper ISPs,” said ISP Review’s Mark Jackson. “We view it as controversial because of the potential for a poor implementation of CGNAT, which would leave consumers with a distinctly less-flexible, fixed-line broadband service and yet they’d probably still end up paying the same as they do today.” Ironically, PlusNet’s parent BT has a very large stock of IPv4 addresses and is unlikely to adopt CGNAT any time soon. The PlusNet team did not give specifics on when the trial would start but it should kick off towards the end of the month and last for three weeks. http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...working-104349 ![]() AT&T Exempts Itself From Its Data Cap, Violates (at least) the Spirit of Net Neutrality Michael Weinberg Last year, Comcast started exempting its own online video service from the data cap it imposed on consumers. When consumers streamed online video (say, because they were thinking about cutting the cord and replacing their Comcast cable subscription with an online competitor), that video counted against their cap. Unless, of course, that online video came from Comcast. Online video coming from Comcast was exempted from Comcast’s own data cap, giving consumers a disincentive to watch video from a competitor. We urged the FCC to investigate this anticompetitive use of data caps, and are still waiting for a resolution. Today, while we continue to wait for the FCC to investigate data cap abuse, AT&T has decided to follow suit and exempt data from its own services from the data cap it imposes on its DSL and U-verse customers. Unlike every other type of data on those connections, data from an AT&T wireless phone does not count against the DSL/U-verse cap. The Details Microcells (also known as femtocells) act like little cell phone towers in your home. If you can’t get a signal from your cell phone provider, you can buy a little box that connects to your home internet connection. Your cell phone connects to the box, which connects to the internet, which connects to your carrier’s network, allowing you to make calls, send texts, and transmit data even when you can’t connect to a “real” cell phone tower. AT&T has decided that the data from AT&T wireless microcells will not count against the data caps on AT&T DSL or U-verse home broadband connections.* This sets AT&T microcell data apart from every other type of data on those connections, including data from a Verizon or Sprint microcell. The message to AT&T DSL and U-verse consumers is clear: if your cell signal is weak and you are worried about your data cap, better get a phone from AT&T wireless. Simply put, this is an abuse of data caps. The Impact We have raised a number of concerns about data caps over the years (in fact, we wrote a whole whitepaper about them). Some of those concerns are easier to understand or more controversial than others. However, there is one easy-to-understand concern about data caps that everyone should be able to agree on: ISPs should not be able to use data caps anticompetitively. The company that connects you to the internet should not be able to abuse its control of that connection in order to make its unrelated services more attractive. That is precisely what Comcast did in the Xbox case and what AT&T is doing here. It is also one of the core concerns driving the net neutrality debate. If the FCC is unwilling or unable to protect consumers from data cap abuse, then Congress needs to step in. Click here to tell the FCC to investigate data caps. * Yes, AT&T Wireless does count data flowing from your phone to the Microcell to your own home internet connection against your wireless data cap. This means that data that never touches AT&T's wireless network still counts against your wireless data cap, regardless of your ISP. While it is not direclty connected to the issue in this post, it is hard to think of a legitimate justificaiton for this type of accounting. http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/...-violates-leas ![]() Orange Boasts: We Made Google PAY US for Traffic Some packets are more neutral than others ... Bill Ray & Anna Leach France Telecom-Orange is making a wad of cash from Google, the company's CEO boasted in an interview with French media yesterday. Talking to BFM Business TV, CEO Stephane Richard didn't give an exact figure on the payments made to France Telecom-Orange by the search giant for delivery of its content, beyond admitting that its not "hundreds of millions". However, he admits that the the telco is being paid to deliver traffic for the search giant and claims that the dominance of Orange in Africa has provided leverage for the the firm to negotiate the best financial arrangement with the Chocolate Factory. Companies such as Google routinely get involved in telecoms infrastructure, running their own private networks which tap directly into ISPs, so someone viewing a YouTube clip is very unlikely to be touching the public internet at all - the data will be coming over Google's private network and into their ISP to the benefit of everyone, except alternative video providers whose content will arrive later. Even Amazon has its own network these days - AWS Direct Connect plugs the Amazon cloud directly into your office. Meanwhile companies like Akamai cache internet content all over the world for their paying customers. All of this makes a mockery of net neutrality, but that's old news, what's interesting here is Google paying actual money to France Telecom-Orange for the delivery of its data, which apparently now constitutes half of that consumed France Telecom-Orange customers around the world. "They pay us for the traffic that they send," the company reaffirmed to El Reg when we checked, saying that the deal had been in place for at least a year and that the money is spent maintaining the network, implicitly ensuring that customers get quick access to Google content. Telcos have long said that Google and its ilk should be paying them to expedite delivery, and in the US Google managed to get (net neutrality) legislation passed, making it illegal to prioritise traffic, but Europe has been slower to jump to the Googleplex tune, so paying for access is easier. We've asked Google how this fits in with the public campaign that all packets be treated equal, but haven't had a response yet, so it seems that equality is great just as long as some packets are more equal than others. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/17/google_orange/ ![]() Cable Companies Called ‘Monopolies that Stifle Competition and Innovation’ Brad Reed If you’re unhappy with your cable service, you aren’t alone. And according to Susan Crawford, a communications policy expert and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, America’s cable companies aren’t just guilty of charging higher prices for sub par service, but also of stifling competition and innovation in the United States broadband market. In an interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm, Crawford makes the case that “a handful of cable companies have become monopolies that stifle competition and innovation,” which is a major reason “why Americans pay more money for worse Internet service than consumers in most other developed nations.” In Crawford’s view, most major ISPs are very similar to the railroad and steel monopolies of the 19th century, in that the providers face minimal competition in areas where they operate and benefit from high barriers to entry for prospective new providers. “If you’ve got a commodity that everybody needs as an input into their businesses, like take railroads for example, and it costs a lot to initially build that network so it’s hard for someone else to enter, and you can cooperate with your colleagues who are also providing that service, and you can divide up markets, you’ve got a monopoly business,” Crawford explained. “We’ve seen this happen with wired Internet access in the United States.” Crawford pointed to Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) as the nation’s two most powerful cable providers that have carved out regional monopolies for themselves in several areas of the United States where consumers have little to no choice for their Internet services. “If you’re in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, really your only choice for wired high-speed Internet access at home is Comcast,” she said. “If you move into an apartment in Seoul [South Korea], you have a choice of three different providers, they show up in a day because there’s so much competition, and they charge you $30 for TV and everything. Koreans when they come to the United States… actually laugh at us for how expensive and how slow [American Internet service] is.” Crawford appeared on Rehm’s show as part of her publicity tour for her new book Captive Audience that is described as an exposé on “how telecommunications monopolies have affected the daily lives of consumers and America’s global economic standing..” http://bgr.com/2013/01/12/cable-indu...awford-289586/ ![]() To Get Movies Into China, Hollywood Gives Censors a Preview Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes When “Kung Fu Panda 3” kicks its way into China’s theaters in 2016, the country’s vigilant film censors will find no nasty surprises. After all, they have already dropped in to monitor the movie at the DreamWorks Animation campus here. And the story line, production art and other creative elements have met their approval. The lure of access to China’s fast-growing film market — now the world’s second largest, behind that of the United States — is entangling studios and moviemakers with the state censors of a country in which American notions of free expression simply do not apply. Whether studios are seeking to distribute a completed film in China or join with a Chinese company for a co-production shot partly in that country, they have discovered that navigating the murky, often shifting terrain of censorship is part of the process. Billions of dollars ride on whether they get it right. International box-office revenue is the driving force behind many of Hollywood’s biggest films, and often plays a deciding role in whether a movie is made. Studios rely on consultants and past experience — and increasingly on informal advance nods from foreign officials — to help gauge whether a film will pass censorship; if there are problems they can sometimes be addressed through appeal and subsequent negotiations. But Paramount Pictures just learned the hard way that some things won’t pass muster — like American fighter pilots in dogfights with MIGs. The studio months ago submitted a new 3-D version of “Top Gun” to Chinese censors. The ensuing silence was finally recognized as rejection. Problems more often affect films that touch the Chinese directly. “Any movie about China made by outsiders is going to be very sensitive,” said Rob Cohen, who directed “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” among the first in a wave of co-productions between American studios — in this case, Universal Pictures — and Chinese companies. One production currently facing scrutiny is Disney and Marvel’s “Iron Man 3,” parts of which were filmed in Beijing in the last month. It proceeded under the watchful eye of Chinese bureaucrats, who were invited to the set and asked to advise on creative decisions, according to people briefed on the production who asked for anonymity to avoid conflict with government or company officials. Marvel and Disney had no comment. Another prominent film, Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” which was nominated last week for 11 Academy Awards, made it through the process mostly unscathed, but got some pushback over a line in which a character declared that “religion is darkness.” “They modified the translation a little, for fear of provoking religious people,” Mr. Lee said. Hollywood as a whole is shifting toward China-friendly fantasies that will fit comfortably within a revised quota system, which allows more international films to be distributed in China, where 3-D and large-format Imax pictures are particularly favored. At the same time, it is avoiding subject matter and situations that are likely to cause conflict with the roughly three dozen members of a censorship board run by China’s powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or S.A.R.F.T. In addition, some studios are quietly asking Chinese officials for assurance that planned films, even when they do not have a Chinese theme, will have no major censorship problems. The censorship bureau did not respond to a list of questions submitted by The New York Times seeking information about its process and guidelines. Studios are quickly discovering that a key to access in China is the inclusion of Chinese actors, story lines and locations. But the more closely a film examines China, the more likely it is to collide with shifting standards, unwritten rules and unfamiliar political powers who hold sway over what can be seen on the country’s roughly 12,000 movie screens. Mr. Cohen’s “Mummy” film, which was shot throughout China in 2007, was a historical fantasy about an evil emperor who is magically resurrected by foreign adventurers in 1946. The script was preapproved by China’s censorship board with only token changes — the emperor’s name had to be fictionalized, for instance. The censors also cautioned that the ancient ruler should not resemble Mao Zedong. On reviewing the finished film, however, they found a deeper problem that “we didn’t have any way of seeing, or any way of fixing,” Mr. Cohen said: “White Westerners were saving China.” The picture was approved, he said, but its release was delayed until it had played elsewhere in the world, and pirated versions took a bite out of the Chinese box-office receipts. For Americans, dealings with the Chinese censors are mostly a distant and secondhand business. Films are normally submitted by their Chinese partners, while various consultants in China handle the bureaucratic communications that lead to approval or rejection. But those who shoot in China often assume that censorship officials have eyes and ears on the set. “There were points where we were shooting with a crew of 500 people,” said Mr. Cohen of his movie. “I’m not sure who was who or what, but knowing the way the system works, it’s completely clear that had we deviated from the script, it would not have gone unnoticed.” In a 2011 Web post, Robert Cain, a producer and consultant who guides filmmakers through China’s system, described having worked in Shanghai on a romantic comedy that went off script; the director included a take in which an extra, holding a camcorder, pretended to be a theater patron taping a movie on a screen. The next day, Mr. Cain and others involved with the film were summoned to the office of a Communist Party member who told them the film was being shut down for its “naïve” and “untruthful” portrayal of film piracy. Assuming they had been reported by a spy on their crew, the producers apologized and managed to keep the film on track. Studios are seeking out official co-productions, in which a Chinese company works with an American studio in financing and creating a film, because they can bypass the Chinese quota system and bring their distributors a 43 percent share of ticket sales, rather than the 25 percent allotted to foreign-made films. Co-productions like “Kung Fu Panda 3” draw close monitoring by the censors at every step. Scripts are submitted in advance. Representatives of S.A.R.F.T., according to Mr. Cohen and others, may be present on the set to guard against any deviation. And there is an unofficial expectation that the government’s approved version of the film will be seen both in China and elsewhere, though in practice it is not unusual for co-productions to slip through the system with differing versions, one for China, one for elsewhere in the world. Questions about how Chinese forces are shaping American movies are now playing out in the making of “Iron Man 3,” which is set for release on May 3. Disney and its Marvel unit want “Iron Man 3” to gain co-production status, partly because the previous two “Iron Man” movies performed well in China. To work toward that distinction, Disney and Marvel made a deal last year for Beijing-based DMG Entertainment to join in producing and financing the film. But they have taken a middle-of-the-road approach that appears intended to limit Chinese meddling in the creative process. A finished script was not submitted for approval and the companies have not yet made an application for official designation as a co-production. Rather, they are trying to show a heightened sense of cooperation in hopes the government will approve the status once that application is formally made in the spring. The producers made a presentation to censors early in the process, describing broad strokes of the story, the history of other Marvel and Disney movies, and plans to integrate Chinese characters into the movie. That won a conceptual sign-off for the film, which is being directed by Shane Black. Next, bureaucrats were invited to the set and were able to meet the star, Robert Downey Jr. Hollywood executives are only now becoming familiar with the censorship board and its workings. A recent count by one of their advisers found that the board has 37 members, including representatives from government agencies and interest groups, like the Communist Youth League and the Women’s Federation, along with filmmakers, academics and professional bureaucrats. At the top of S.A.R.F.T. is Cai Fuchao, a recent member of the Communist Party Central Committee. In a previous municipal post in Beijing, he was widely reported to have policed Web sites for banned material with the help of 10,000 volunteers, and to have joined in a roundup of a million illegally published books in 2004. In 2008, after an uproar over the release of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution,” whose story of wartime love and collaboration caused unease even after sex scenes were deleted, written censorship guidelines were circulated in China, in what filmmakers there took to be a crackdown. Some of the prohibitions were broad, barring violations of the fundamental principles of the Constitution and the harming of social morality. Others were more pointed. Disparagement of the People’s Liberation Army and the police were banned, as were “murder, violence, horrors, ghosts, demons and supernaturalism.” In all, the standards would appear to clash with almost any American film, other than, perhaps, the PG-rated animated fare of a DreamWorks Animation. (Even “Kung Fu Panda” provoked objections by some Chinese, who saw the lead character as profaning a nationally revered animal.) But some who have dealt with S.A.R.F.T. say the censors are often pragmatic, and appear to walk a line between the demands of viewers, who want more global fare, and those of politicians, who are out to protect the status quo. For example, 20th Century Fox managed to get “Life of Pi” through with only the modification of the “religion is darkness” line, despite the movie’s spiritual themes — which tread close to a prohibition against the preaching of cult beliefs and superstitions — and the earlier trouble over “Lust, Caution.” For Americans, the hard part is knowing what might suddenly cause trouble — initial approvals notwithstanding. In 2009, Sony Pictures and its partner, the China Film Group, submitted their script for “The Karate Kid” to China’s censors, and dutifully changed parts of the story to suit them. But the finished film was rejected, according to people who were briefed on the process, essentially because film bureaucrats were unhappy that its villain was Chinese. After negotiation, 12 minutes of the film were cut, and it was released in China, though later than intended. Some filmmakers here suggest that impositions by the China censors are similar to the restrictions imposed by a ratings system administered by the Motion Picture Association of America. But Joan Graves, the chairwoman of Hollywood’s ratings board, insists otherwise. “We’re the only major country with a ratings system that does it on a voluntary basis,” she said. Steven Soderbergh, whose film “Contagion” was shot partly in Hong Kong, said the participation of China’s censors simply added to the chorus of input that surrounds every big-budget filmmaker. “I’m not morally offended or outraged,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “It’s fascinating to listen to people’s interpretations of your story.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/b...ant-a-say.html ![]() Disney World Horror Fantasy Raises Knotty Copyright Issues Brooks Barnes Is Randy Moore’s new movie about a father going insane at Walt Disney World simply cinematic art? Or is Mickey Mouse about to get very, very mad at Mr. Moore? A betting person would put some chips on anger. Mr. Moore — without permission from Disney — filmed “Escape From Tomorrow” inside the company’s own theme parks in Florida and California. If that wasn’t gutsy enough, his film is a horror fantasy that harshly critiques Disney’s style of mass entertainment. It’s not the Happiest Place on Earth in his movie. Not by a long shot. The movie, while careful to leave out certain copyrighted material (like the It’s a Small World song), would seem to test the limits of fair use in copyright law. There is a lot of Disney iconography in the movie: Mr. Moore, a first-time director, filmed inside at least eight rides and a lengthy sequence involves the line for a Buzz Lightyear attraction. How did Mr. Moore get away with it? After all, his cast and crew went on the It’s a Small World ride at least 12 times, filming all the way with high-tech (albeit small) video recorders. “I was surprised the ride operators weren’t a little more savvy,” he said after his movie’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival here on Friday night. “Escape From Tomorrow” underscores the difficulties that Disney, a company intensely vigilant about its intellectual property, faces at controlling the imagery flowing from its parks at a time when people are shooting increasing amounts of video with their smartphones. A Disney spokeswoman had no comment. The company undoubtedly knows it is in a sticky position. A strong reaction could only play into Mr. Moore’s hand, giving the movie free publicity and helping it find a larger audience. “How are you going to release this? Disney is one of the most litigious companies on Earth,” a reporter (not this one) said after the premiere to John Sloss, a sales agent working to find a distributor for the movie. “Bring it on,” Mr. Sloss responded. (He later said his statement was in jest.) “Escape From Tomorrow,” shot in black and white, is about a family of four setting out to spend a fun day at Disney World. They ride the teacups and pose for pictures at Cinderella’s Castle, but dad (Roy Abramsohn) starts to go bonkers after receiving a phone call from his boss. He drools over underage girls, thinks animatronic figures are evil and coming to life and pretends to shoot himself with a fake Frontierland rifle. There is a gruesome vomiting scene, a creepy obese guy on a motorized scooter and a sequence at Disney’s Epcot theme park where Mr. Abramsohn’s character gets Tasered in the crotch. He is then taken to a secret room underneath Epcot’s Spaceship Earth sphere — referred to in the film as “the giant testicle” — and brainwashed. Ultimately, he suffers a bloody death at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. “You can’t be happy all the time,” one character says near the film’s ending. “It’s just not possible.” Is Mr. Moore worried about Disney’s reaction? “Yes,” he said. This kind of tiny and arty Sundance movie never used to have much chance at seeing the light of day beyond the festival, which attracts about 47,000 people. But the rise of video-on-demand services, both on the Web and through cable and satellite providers, means that independent film audiences around the world will likely have an opportunity to see “Escape From Tomorrow.” Social media and instant online reviews are already spreading the word. “A daring attempt to literally assail Disney World from the inside out,” said IndieWire.com in its review. Introducing “Escape From Tomorrow” before its premiere, Trevor Groth, the festival’s programming chief, called the film “wildly imaginative” and labeled the young writer-director as a “visionary.” Mr. Groth in an interview compared Mr. Moore to the avant-garde director David Lynch. “‘Escape From Tomorrow’ perfectly embodies what we try to celebrate here, which is a truly distinctive singular vision,” Mr. Groth said. His cast and crew spent about 10 days filming at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and two weeks at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., he said. The end credits cite the involvement of over 200 cast and crew members, although only small groups entered the Disney parks at one time to avoid drawing attention. Still, there were moments during filming that Disney clearly knew something was up, Mr. Moore said. “I think they probably just thought we were crazy fans making a YouTube video, which is something that happens a fair amount,” he said. He added, “Look, I have amazing memories as a kid from going to the parks. I think Walt Disney was a genius. I just wish his vision hadn’t grown into something quite so corporate.” It may be cold comfort, but Disney is not the only theme park operation on which Sundance is casting a harsh spotlight this year. “Blackfish,” a documentary by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, looks at the 2010 killing of a trainer by an orca at Shamu Stadium in Orlando. It has its premiere on Saturday night and is billed by Sundance in a catalog as exposing “the species’ cruel treatment in captivity” and the “growing disillusionment of workers who were misled and endangered by the highly profitable sea-park industry.” Fred Jacobs, a SeaWorld spokesman, said in an email: “Until we see the film for ourselves we won’t be able to comment. I will say, however, that we set the highest standards for the care of our animals.” http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.co...yright-issues/ ![]() News Outlets Improperly Used Photos Posted to Twitter: Judge Erin Geiger Smith A judge has found that two news organizations improperly used images that a photojournalist had posted to Twitter in one of the first big tests of intellectual property law involving social media. Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post infringed on the copyrights of photographer Daniel Morel in using pictures he took in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan ruled. While AFP had argued that once the pictures appeared on Twitter they were freely available, the judge said that Twitter's terms of service did not give the news agency a license to publish the images without Morel's permission. The judge, in a decision released late Monday, partially granted Morel's summary judgment motion but also limited damages he could potentially recover. Several other issues in the case were left to be decided at trial. A trial date has not been set. The case has garnered wide interest because it is one of the first to address how images that users make available to the public through social media can be used by third parties for commercial purposes. Though this case began in 2010, ownership of content on social media continues to be a hot-button issue. Last month, Facebook Inc's photo sharing site, Instagram, became the subject of public outcry after users interpreted changes in its terms of service to mean Instagram could sell their pictures without permission. Within days, Instagram backed away from some of the planned changes. TERMS OF SERVICE In the Morel case, the photographer put the Haiti images on Twitter, and they were then disseminated widely after an AFP editor discovered them through another Twitter user's account, according to the ruling. AFP distributed several of the pictures to Getty Images, the ruling said. The Washington Post, a Getty client, published four of the images on its website, according to the ruling. Getty is part of the litigation but the judge did not make any determination on the photographer's allegations of copyright infringement against it, noting that there were other issues yet to be resolved. AFP had argued that Twitter's terms of service granted it the right to use Morel's images. The judge, though, said that while the service terms do allow the reposting and rebroadcasting of users' images in certain circumstances, such as "retweeting" them, it does not grant a license for commercial use. Attorneys for AFP were not immediately available for comment. The Washington Post, a unit of The Washington Post Co, and Getty also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Joseph Baio, a partner at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher who represents Morel, said the ruling proves that images taken from Twitter without permission cannot be used for commercial purposes and that the trial will determine the consequences for doing so. Twitter was not a party in the case. "As has always been our policy, Twitter users own their photos," a Twitter spokesman said. In the ruling, Nathan narrowed what Morel can recover from AFP and Getty for distributing the images. While Morel had requested what the court said would amount to "tens or hundreds of millions of dollars" in statutory damages based on awards for each subscriber that used the images, the judge said AFP and Getty would only be liable, at most, for a single statutory damage award per image infringed. AFP initiated the lawsuit in March 2010 to get a ruling that it wasn't infringing on copyrights after Morel had accused AFP of improper use of his pictures. Morel countersued AFP, Getty and The Washington Post. The judge refused to grant Morel's motion for summary judgment on whether AFP, Getty and The Washington Post acted willfully, as well as whether the media companies violated Morel's rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The act prohibits providing or distributing false copyright information in order to conceal copyright infringement. The case is Agence France Presse v. Morel, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-02730. (Reporting By Erin Geiger Smith; Editing by Martha Graybow and Kenneth Barry) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90E11P20130115 ![]() A Digital Public Library Without Paper Books San Antonio public officials explore creating smaller public libraries that offer patrons only e-readers and digital materials. Thomas Claburn The next library in San Antonio, Texas, may not have any paper books for its patrons. Nelson Wolff, a judge in Bexar County, Texas, where San Antonio is located, and Sergio Rodriguez, commissioner for the county's first precinct, have proposed a plan to create a library called BiblioTech that offers electronic media exclusively. Though there are bookless academic libraries, at the University of Texas at San Antonio for example, Wolff said in a phone interview that he believes that BiblioTech will be first public library without paper books. "We think with a clean slate we can do it in a cost effective way," Wolff said. He anticipates savings not only through lower costs for books, maintenance and staff, but through reduced real estate requirements. "Most libraries are in big buildings," he said. "We're able to do this in about 4,000 square feet. If this works right, we'll be able to go into shopping centers." On Tuesday, the Bexar County Commissioners Court will consider proposals for e-book providers -- the plan is for BiblioTech to deal with integrated library systems vendors like Polaris Library Systems and 3M rather than with publishers or e-book retailers like Amazon. The court will also consider a project budget, construction services and the creation of a seven-member advisory board. BiblioTech intends to start with 100 e-readers that can be loaned out, 50 pre-loaded e-readers for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops and 25 tablets, with additional accommodations planned for the visually impaired. Wolff said that while reaction to his proposal has been positive, those with an affinity for paper books have expressed reservations. As someone with a substantial collection of first-edition printed books, he counts himself among those who still appreciate printed matter. To reassure book lovers, he said that BiblioTech will supplement traditional libraries, not replace them. But it may not be long before libraries with books seem as unusual as garages with horses. "When you go into a public library today, people are gathered around computer terminals," Wolff observed. Patricia Tuohy, executive director of the Central Texas Library System, said in a phone interview that while she hadn't reviewed the specifics of the proposal, she wasn't surprised. "Many libraries are moving toward electronic materials," she said. What may be surprising is that libraries are thriving even as the public's appetite for paper books is dwindling. Tuohy says that while she's seen circulation dropping, library visits are up. "People want human interaction in a place that's neutral," she explained. Public libraries have always responded to the public, said Tuohy, and if the public wants electronic media, public libraries will respond. "I look at electronic books as just the next format," said Tuohy. "It was a big deal when vinyl records were put into collections in the '40s. Libraries have always added formats to serve the public." But Tuohy cautions that the economics have yet to be ironed out. A typical library branch might circulate 10,000 titles a month, she said. To do that electronically would be cost-prohibitive -- most libraries can't afford to supply that many patrons with e-reading devices at one time. And expecting library visitors to bring their own devices may be expecting too much. Tuohy said that in Texas, a large portion of the population doesn't have Internet access or a computer at home. "Unless you have a lot of money or a population where everyone has an iPad, it's too expensive," she said. https://www.informationweek.com/educ...er-b/240146262 ![]() Internet Freedom Day “One year ago today we stopped #SOPA. Celebrate #InternetFreedomDay by posting something you love about the net http://thndr.it/W4nTD0” When SOPA and PIPA were first introduced in Congress, things looked grim for the internet. Widespread censorship seemed imminent, and Internet supporters everywhere were worried about the massive blow that was about to be dealt to freedom. But then something amazing happened. Internet users around the globe started to fight back. Pro-freedom groups both large and small created ways to show their support for an open and uncensored web. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, and major websites like Google, Reddit, and Tumblr joined the cause. When January 18th, 2012 rolled around, the stage was set. January 18th was unreal. Tech companies and users teamed up. Over 100 thousand websites blacked themselves out in protest, including major sites like Wikipedia, Wordpress, and Wired Magazine. Geeks took to the streets. Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms. Millions of calls and e-mails were sent to Congress. The network defended itself. Within 48 hours, SOPA was shelved, and its sister bill PIPA disappeared not soon after. This year, we celebrate our victory and remind Internet users everywhere that the fight continues by declaring January 18th Internet Freedom Day. Support this Thunderclap so that we can spread the word about our new holiday far and wide. https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/...et-freedom-day ![]() Dotcom Says New Site Legal, No Revenge for Megaupload Saga Naomi Tajitsu Kim Dotcom, founder of outlawed file-sharing website Megaupload, said his new "cyberlocker" was not revenge on U.S. authorities who planned a raid on his home, closed Megaupload and charged him with online piracy for which he faces jail if found guilty. Dotcom said his new offering, Mega.co.nz, which will launch on Sunday even as he and three colleagues await extradition from New Zealand to the United States, complied with the law and warned that attempts to take it down would be futile. "This is not some kind of finger to the U.S. government or to Hollywood," Dotcom told Reuters at his sprawling estate in the bucolic hills of Coatesville, just outside Auckland, New Zealand, a country known more for sheep, rugby and the Hobbit than flamboyant tech tycoons. "Legally, there's just nothing there that could be used to shut us down. This site is just as legitimate and has the right to exist as Dropbox, Boxnet and other competitors," he said, referring to other popular cloud storage services. His lawyer, Ira Rothken, added that launching the site was compliant with the terms of Dotcom's bail conditions. U.S. prosecutors argue that Dotcom in a statement said he had no intention of starting a new internet business until his extradition was resolved. CODES AND KEYS Dotcom said Mega was a different beast to Megaupload, as the new site enables users to control exactly which users can access uploaded files, in contrast to its predecessor, which allowed users to search files, some of which contained copyrighted content allegedly without permission. A sophisticated encryption system will allow users to encode their files before they upload them on to the site's servers, which Dotcom said were located in New Zealand and overseas. Each file will then be issued a unique, sophisticated decryption key which only the file holder will control, allowing them to share the file as they choose. As a result, the site's operators would have no access to the files, which they say would strip them from any possible liability for knowingly enabling users to distribute copyright-infringing content, which Washington says is illegal. "Even if we wanted to, we can't go into your file and snoop and see what you have in there," the burly Dotcom said. Dotcom said Mega would comply with orders from copyright holders to remove infringing material, which will afford it the "safe harbor" legal provision, which minimizes liability on the condition that a party acted in good faith to comply. But some legal experts say it may be difficult to claim the protection if they do not know what users have stored. The Motion Pictures Association of America said encrypting files alone would not protect Dotcom from liability. "We'll reserve final judgment until we have a chance to analyze the new project," a spokesman told Reuters. "But given Kim Dotcom's history, count us as skeptical." The German national, who also goes by Kim Schmitz, expects huge interest in its first month of operation, which would be a far cry from when Megaupload went live in 2005. "I would be surprised if we had less than one million users," Dotcom said. A YEAR ON Mega's launch starts the next chapter of the Dotcom narrative, dotted with previous cyber crime-related arrests and whose twists and turns have been scrutinized by all facets of the entertainment industry, from film studios and record labels to internet service companies and teenage gamers. The copyright infringement case, billed as the largest to date given that Megaupload in its heyday commanded around four percent of global online traffic, could set a precedent for internet liability laws and depending on its outcome, may force entertainment companies to rethink their distribution methods. A year on, the extradition hearing has been delayed until August, complicated by illegal arrest warrants and the New Zealand government's admission that it had illegally spied on Dotcom, who has residency status in the country. Last January, New Zealand's elite special tactics forces landed by helicopter at dawn in the grounds of Dotcom's mansion, worth roughly NZ$30 million ($25.05 million) and featuring a servants' wing, hedge maze and life-size statues of giraffes and a rhinoceros, to arrest him and his colleagues at the request of the FBI. Police armed with semi-automatic weapons found Dotcom cowering alone in a panic room in the attic, while outside, a convoy of police cars and vans pulled up in the driveway. Around 70 officers took part in the raid. They left with computers, files and some of Dotcom's fleet of Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and a vintage pink Cadillac tricked with personalized license plates screaming "HACKER", "EVIL", and "MAFIA". "Every time you hear a helicopter, you automatically think, 'Oh, another raid', so it's something that stays with you for a long time," said Dotcom, who says he and his wife still panic when they hear sudden, loud noises in the house. Dotcom was coy about the details of the launch party as builders put the finishing touches to a festival-sized concert stage in the mansion's grounds, while two helicopters circled overhead. But if the impromptu, Willy Wonka-styled ice cream social he threw in Auckland earlier in the week is any indication, the party could be a more wholesome affair compared with the well-documented soirees of Dotcom's past, where nightclubs, hot tubs and scantily clad women were a common fixture. "I had to grow up, you know, I was a big baby," he said. "Big baby with too much money usually leads to baby craziness. "I am going to be more of a person that wants to help to make things better and help internet innovation to take off without all these restrictions by governments. That is going to be my primary goal if this business is successful." ($1 = NZ$1.2) (Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Nick Macfie) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90I05P20130119 Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - January 12th, January 5th, December 29th, December 22nd Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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#2 |
yea, it's me.
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: usa
Posts: 2,093
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![]() Good seeing you!
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#3 |
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,024
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![]() ah goldie, you're sight for sore eyes. who'dve thought back in those morpheus days we'd still be at it in 2013? you know, today's 21 year olds have never really known a world without filesharing. we did it kid, and what a run it's been.
- js.
__________________
Thanks For Sharing |
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#4 | |
yea, it's me.
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: usa
Posts: 2,093
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![]() Quote:
One really amazing thing I'm eternally grateful for; I'd never have learned to put a computer together from scratch, diagnosis hardware and software issues, in fact, anything to do with a pc, I've learned from the good folks right here. It's so quiet now - where's everyone? Scattered to the 4 corners I suppose. Still - Nice to see the Nappi board is still here and am extremely happy that you are too! |
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#5 |
my name is Ranking Fullstop
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
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#6 |
yea, it's me.
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: usa
Posts: 2,093
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![]() Hey knifey
![]() House burnt down in Thanksgiving night of '05, chose not to rebuild in the city so we went over one county, more rural but seems many have found our spot and times are a'changing LOL! Still surfing? I remember you were a demon on a surfboard! |
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#7 | |
my name is Ranking Fullstop
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
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![]() me, i'm in still in CB, still surfing after all these years. went and had a new young 'un at age 50 and he's about to turn 4 - he has prevented me from becoming a complete curmudgeon, here in my sunset years. life is good, generally, and i'm a very fortunate fellow, all things considered. and yes, i still check in here regularly, for no apparent reason. nice to see you about - hope all is well in your world ![]() |
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#8 | |
my name is Ranking Fullstop
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
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i'm particularly interested in seeing how this will fit into the file sharing scene, which, let's face it, is seriously in need of an innovation injection, as the vise tightens on the established methods. |
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