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06-10-10, 08:51 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 9th, '10
Since 2002
  "Readers of e-books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers. Unless they bought “Fall of Giants” by Ken Follett." – Julie Bosman "Interestingly, I make less money now from eBooks than physical books." – John Graham-Cumming October 9th, 2010  Downloading Music Track is Not a Performance But a Stream is US Court Rules Paul Bicknell Yahoo and Real conceded that they owed monies in respect of licensing revenues when users made copies when they downloaded music tracks. However Real and Yahoo sought to dispute ASCAP's claim that downloading fell within the definition of a performance under US copyright law. The court found that "...we turn to section 101 of the Copyright Act, which states that to perform a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process...a download plainly is neither a dance nor an act. Thus, we must determine whether a download of a musical work falls within the meaning of the terms recite, render, or play." The court concluded that: "the downloads at issue in this appeal are not musical performances that are contemporaneously perceived by the listener...they are simply transfers of electronic files containing digital copies from an on-line server to a local hard drive. The downloaded songs are not performed in any perceptible manner during the transfers; the user must take some further action to play the songs after they are downloaded." The court went to on to draw a distinction between a download and a stream finding that: "...stream transmissions, which all parties agree constitute public performances, illustrate why a download is not a public performance. A stream is an electronic transmission that renders the musical work audible as it is received by the client-computer's temporary memory. This transmission, like a television or radio broadcast, is a performance because there is a playing of the song that is perceived simultaneously with the transmission". This clarification draws an importance distinction between what constitutes a performance under section 101 of the Copyright Act in the context of online peer to peer file sharing, with an increasing volume of handheld mediums being available to consumers at a relatively cheap price on to which users can download or stream as the case maybe users should be aware that streaming will constitute a performance within section 101. http://www.lawdit.co.uk/reading_room...le-sharing.htm  Countries Reach Tentative Anti-Counterfeiting Pact Nearly 40 nations reached agreement in principle on Saturday on an international trade pact aimed at reducing copyright and trademark theft that causes losses of billions of dollars annually. "Participants in the negotiations constructively resolved nearly all substantive issues ... (and) agreed to work expeditiously to resolve the small number of outstanding issues," the United States, Japan, the European Union and other participating countries said in a joint statement. In Washington, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said the negotiations that took place in Tokyo were "almost across the finish line." "In principle, we have found solutions, even on the most difficult issues. Nearly all of the parties embraced those solutions," Kirk said in a statement. A key feature of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will mandate that customs officials have authority to seize counterfeit goods without a request from the rights holders or a court order, according to statements from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The talks involved the United States, the European Union and its 27 member states, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland, and two developing countries -- Morocco and Mexico. The participating countries say their economies have suffered from a sharp increase in trade in fake and pirated goods. That has been aided by the Internet, which makes its easier for buyers and sellers of counterfeit goods to come together and also to distribute pirated music, movies and software. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has estimated that global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods rose from about $100 billion annually in 2000 to about $250 billion in 2007. U.S. movie, music, software and other copyright-based industries calculate they lose more than $16 billion in sales each year from pirated versions of their products sold around the world. China, the largest source of counterfeit goods found in international trade, has not been a party to the ACTA talks but founding members hope it will join in the future. 'Landmark Achievement' "We are on the threshold of a landmark achievement in the enforcement of intellectual property rights, and the international alliance we are forging with parties representing half of global trade will be critical to fighting the theft of American jobs through trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy," Kirk said. The United States and the EU have been at odds on one element of the pact: Europe's demand that it also include protection for its traditional food names like Parmesan cheese as well as for its fashion and car designs. The United States and some other countries appealed for a narrower agreement that would protect mainly copyright and trademarks, whose violation has ravaged profits in the U.S. entertainment industry. The joint statement did not address that issue. "We've come a long way but we must still close the remaining gaps without which there will be no agreement," said a senior European Union official close to the negotiations. Future topics include trying to expand the number of ACTA participants to include China, as well as the rest of Asia and other regions such as the Middle East. (Reporting by Elaine Lies in Tokyo, additional reporting by Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck in Brussels and Doug Palmer in Washington; editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Will Dunham) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6910AO20101002 ACTA Text Shows US Caved in on Internet Provisions Nate Anderson Talk about a cave-in. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been three years in the making, and at one point included language advocating "three strikes" regimes, ordering ISPs to develop anti-piracy plans, promoting tough DRM anticircumvention language, setting up a "takedown" notification system, and "secondary liability" for device makers. Europeans were demanding protection for their geographic marks (Champagne, etc). Other countries wanted patents in the mix. That's all gone in today's release of the "near-final" ACTA text (PDF). US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, whose office negotiated the US side of the deal, issued a statement this morning about the "tremendous progress in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy," but the real story here is the tremendous climbdown by US negotiators, who have largely failed in their attempts to push the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto the rest of the world. Apparently, a face-saving agreement is better than no agreement at all—but even the neutered ACTA we see today could run into problems. Mexico's Senate yesterday approved a nonbinding resolution asking for the country to suspend participation in ACTA, while key members of the European Parliament have also expressed skepticism about the deal. Even Public Knowledge, a DC advocacy group that has long opposed ACTA, said today that the new text is "a qualified victory for those who want to protect the digital rights of consumers around the world. Some of the most egregious provisions from earlier drafts have been removed on topics ranging from digital protection measures to the liability of intermediaries like Internet Service Providers and search engines." Let's see what's left. Internet piracy. In earlier drafts, ISPs were told that they must have a policy for disconnecting repeat infringers (something already in the DMCA) in order to steer clear of liability, and disconnecting users after "three strikes" was held up as a model. All of this is gone, reduced to a mere footnote saying that countries can do what they want to limit ISP liability. French group La Quadrature du Net remains unhappy about wording that "seeks to extend the scope of the 'digital chapter' to criminalize 'unlawful uses of means of widespread distribution.'" But that wording says nothing about "criminalizing" anything (the "enforcement" here refers to both civil and criminal enforcement, as the previous paragraph in the text makes clear). And the specific phrase "including the unlawful use of means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes" is one of the few in the document set off by a highlight and italics, which is to say that it has not been agreed upon. Cooperation. Instead, ACTA signatories agree to "promote cooperative efforts within the business community to effectively address copyright or related rights infringement while preserving legitimate competition and consistent with each Party’s law, preserving fundamental principles such as freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy." This has the potential to be worrying—will governments push ISPs to start disconnecting users without any judicial oversight? But it's also remarkably vague in what it requires, a far cry from the detailed ISP provisions in previous ACTA drafts. The RIAA has already sent out a statement confirming that it likes this bit a lot, since "it is estimated that as much as 95 percent of global Internet traffic in music is illegal." IP lookups. Each country does need to provide some way for rightsholders to turn an IP address into a name. Many countries have this already; in the US, it's a subpoena, while a "Norwich Pharmacal Order" in the UK accomplishes the same thing. DRM. The tough rules against DRM have been watered down. ACTA signatories have to outlaw DRM circumvention, but there's a huge caveat; this only applies to DRM which restricts acts not authorized by rightsholders "or permitted by law." That last caveat is huge, and aligns ACTA more with the older WIPO Internet Treaties than with the DMCA. This language would appear to allow DRM circumvention when the resulting use is a legal one. Sadly, when it comes to tools for doing the circumventing, these are broadly banned, even where some limited uses might be legal. This appears to set up a situation in which an ACTA signatory could allow people to bypass DRM to make backups or exercise fair use rights, but could not allow distribution of the tools to help them do it. Patents. Patents appear to be gone from much of the treaty (with the US pushing hard to keep them out of the "civil enforcement" section as well, though this remains contentious). Geographic indicators. Europe has already indicated that it may not support ACTA if its precious food marks are not protected worldwide (something that would force Wisconsin-produced "Parmesan" to change its name, for instance, since Parmiggiano-Reggiano is a protected geographic mark.) The new text does not mention such marks specifically, though Sean Flynn of American University worries that they could be snuck in through an ambiguous phrase in the border seizure section. iPod searches at the border? The "de minimis" provision remains. ACTA countries can "exclude from the application of this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travelers’ personal luggage." Green destruction. When customs officials do seize loads of counterfeit T-shirts, say, they can't just remove the labels and let the items enter the commerce stream. Instead, the good should be destroyed. When that happens, the bonfire must be a "green" one, as "the destruction of goods infringing intellectual property rights shall be done consistently with each Party’s laws and regulations on environmental matters." Camcording. Even the MPAA's beloved camcording rule, which has been in ACTA drafts for a long while, could be in trouble. The draft text makes clear that some countries still believe that criminalizing theater cammers should be optional, and the parties have yet to reach an agreement. Cave-in As Canadian law professor Michael Geist puts it, "one of the biggest stories over the three year negotiation of ACTA has been the willingness of the US to cave on the Internet provisions... The draft released today is a far cry from that proposal with the intermediary liability provisions largely removed and the DMCA digital lock provisions much closer to the [existing] WIPO Internet treaty model. "Taken together, the Internet chapter must be seen as failure by the US, which clearly envisioned using ACTA to export its DMCA-style approach." But there are plenty of other opportunities for mischief, especially when it comes to technical details or to items like statutory damages and how they might be calculated. This is especially true since ACTA negotiators have shown the usual preference for exporting intellectual property protections while leaving limitations and fair uses up for grabs. With no more negotiating sessions scheduled, this is close to a final draft, and something like it will probably be adopted unless countries start pulling out of the agreement altogether. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ure-for-us.ars Mexican Senate Unanimously Votes To Remove Mexico From ACTA Negotations Mike Masnick With the news that the EU Parliament is not happy with ACTA and threatening to reject it, now comes the news (via Jamie Love) that the Mexican Senate has voted unanimously to withdraw from ACTA negotiations. You can read the full resolution here (Google translation from the original Spanish). The resolution points out that access to information is a key point in helping to build a modern, information-based nation, and ACTA is about removing access to information and knowledge. They're not against ACTA entirely, but think that the process needs to be a lot more open and involve a lot more stakeholders, and say they won't agree to ACTA unless the process includes a much larger group in the discussions: Quote:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...otations.shtml Future of Music 2010: Copyright Czar Outlines File-Sharing Agenda at Odds with How Many Americans Consume Music Greg Kot An indication of just how urgent (or how out-of-hand, depending on your perspective) the concern has become over file-sharing was President Barack Obama's recent appointment of the first so-called copyright czar in the nation's history. The new czar -- Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement coordinator -- visited the Future of Music Policy Summit on Tuesday and offered a brief summation of what's on her agenda. She represents an administration that is showing troubling signs of skewing toward established corporate interests and 20th Century business models and legal practices at a time when technology has fundamentally changed the way fans consume music and interact with artists. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice approved a controversial merger between North America's largest concert promoter, Live Nation, and ticketing agency, Ticketmaster, creating a powerhouse with the potential to control every aspect of the music business. A few months ago, Espinel's office released a 33-point agenda after what she said was a thorough inventory of opinion on both sides of the file-sharing debate. In presenting the Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft, Espinel was joined by Vice President Joe Biden, who gave reporters a great sound bite even as he demonstrated an incredibly unnuanced understanding of how file-sharing works: "We used to have a problem in this town saying this," Biden said. "But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It's smash and grab. It ain't no different than smashing a window at Tiffany's and grabbing (merchandise)." The intellectual-property plan itself was a bit more balanced, and Espinel provided an overview at Future of Music. She said it's her job is "to protect the creativity of our citizens" because "the protection of innovation ... and creativity is essential for economic recovery." She zeroed in on music as a particular problem area because "95 percent of (music) downloads are illegal," a figure that is commonly linked to a 50 percent decline in music-industry revenue over the last decade. While embracing the notion of a "free and open Internet," she echoed policymakers in recent years by saying that such freedom can flourish only once "Illegal and infringing activity" has been cut back. She said her office received more than 1,600 public comments in coming up with its 33-point strategy, and suggested that the majority came from those interested in protecting their copyright -- artists, publishers, record companies and other license holders. But fair-use advocates were also heard, helping to create a distinction between infringers and artists who "build upon the work of others." That's an enlightened view. But her presentation at FMC was focused on violators. She said the government is starting to pressure the private sector, particularly Internet service providers, "to do more to reduce the flow of illegal content," echoing efforts in some European countries to reduce or even cut off Internet access to customers found to be engaging in illegal file sharing. She also said foreign Web sites pushing illegal content and "dangerous" products were being addressed, though it was unclear how, and that American law was under a comprehensive review "to keep pace with technology on the Internet." It all came off as sufficiently vague enough not to raise any alarms. But the policy in general sounded as if it was framed in such a way not to ruffle the feathers of established license holders, without acknowledging that if the vast majority of downloads are being considered "illegal," a lot of everyday Americans are engaging in "criminal" activity. In a brief question-and-answer session after her speech, I asked Espinel to address this fundamental disconnect between the government's agenda and the way many citizens interact with their computers and cellphones in their daily lives. They're sharing files, after all, which is what these devices were built to do. "I don't see an inherent conflict," she said. "The majority of consumers don't want to engage in illegal content." But, wait, didn't you just say that 95 percent of downloaders are doing exactly that? I didn't get a chance to ask that follow-up question, but Espinel did say that the administration would primarily focus its crackdown on "Web sites distributing illegal content for profit" or those that "mimic legal sites by charging a subscription fee or attracting advertisers." All well and good, but that's a small percentage of the "problem" as defined by the music industry. The real issue is with those tens of millions of everyday citizens doing something that the goverment says could cost them their Internet access, or worse. http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.c...-as-crimi.html BT Seeks Moratorium on Internet Piracy Cases Jonathan Fildes Royal Courts of Justice Lawyers want the details of customers at three ISPs BT is seeking a moratorium on legal applications to obtain details of its customers who are alleged to have illegally shared files online. The firm outlined its stance following a high-profile data breach at London law firm ACS:Law last week. The leak saw thousands of customers' details from various ISPs - including BT-owned PlusNet - published online. BT said that it wanted a temporary halt on all new and existing applications until a "test case" could be heard. It was originally to be heard today but was adjourned until 11 January 2011 following a hearing at London's High Court. "This will be a test case for ISPs," a legal representative of BT told BBC News. The case involves lawyers from law firm Gallant Macmillan, who are seeking a court order to obtain the names and addresses of a "large number" of broadband users from PlusNet, BSkyB and Be Internet suspected of illegally downloading and sharing music from the nightclub and record label Ministry of Sound. BSKyB were not represented at today's hearing. BT lawyers asked for the adjournment, saying that the firm needed to see details of the security system that would be used to store its customers' data before it could comply with any order. How are these lists compiled? * Anti-piracy firms partner with music and film rights holders * Firm uses software to track file-sharing sites and identifies the IP (internet protocol) addresses of the net connections used to share clients' content * Armed with the list of IP addresses, law firms can apply for a court order to obtain the physical address of suspected file-sharers from ISPs whose network has been used. BT seeks to put a temporary halt on this process * Law firms compile their own lists cross-referencing the content that is alleged to have been shared with the personal details of ISP customers * A letter is sent to the alleged pirate, asking them to either pay a one-off fee or face court * Many targeted by firms such as ACS:Law contend that IP addresses can be spoofed * Others say that the IP address does not identify a PC, merely a connection, which could be shared between many people, hijacked or used without the owner's knowledge if not secured PlusNet faced criticism last week after it emerged that it had sent the personal details of more than 500 customers in an unencrypted document to ACS:Law, following a court order. Experts have said it could put BT in breach of the Data Protection Act. The firm admitted that it had asked for the adjournment partly as a response to the leaks. However, it also said that it had gradually been "ramping up its requirements" of firms trying to obtain its customers' details. "The incident involving the ACS:Law data leak has further damaged people's confidence in the current process," a spokesman said. "We want to ensure broadband subscribers are adequately protected so that rights holders can pursue their claims for copyright infringement without causing unnecessary worry to innocent people. "We have not simply consented to these orders in the past, we have asked for stricter terms as public concern has risen. The data leak with ACS:Law prompted us to take further action today." The leak occurred after users of the notorious message board 4chan launched a targeted "denial of service" on ACS:Law for its anti-piracy activities. The company's e-mail database and a series of internal documents were published online in the process of restoring the website. Complaints The attack was the latest in a series of assaults aimed at crippling the websites of firms and organisations involved in anti-piracy efforts, known as Operation Payback. Over the weekend, the website of the Ministry of Sound was taken offline by the group. ACS:Law has made a business out of sending thousands of letters to alleged net pirates, asking them to pay compensation of about £300 per infringement or face court. The BBC has been contacted by a number of people saying they were wrongly accused by the firm. UK consumer group Which? also says it has also received a number of complaints. ACS:Law is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over its role in sending letters to alleged pirates. No case has ever come to court. Lawyers from Gallant Macmillan distanced themselves from ACS:Law and the data breaches. They said they intended to press ahead with their "legitimate attempts to enforce the legitimate rights" of the Ministry of Sound against alleged file-sharers. A representative of the firm told the hearing that it "fully intends to litigate" against alleged file-sharers if it is granted the court order forcing BT and other ISPs to hand over the details of their customers. It also asked for some details of the January case to be conducted in private to protect details of the security measures used to protect customer details, and because any revelations would "only give traction to the kind of attacks recently seen [on ACS:Law]". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11467347 Website 'WANTS to Kill TV' by Sharing 100,000 Live TV Channels Andrew Moran Tvongle.com is a company that is attempting to "conquer the world" with its innovative feature of sharing more than 100,000 live television channels through its website. The company's goal is "to kill TV." File-sharing services over the Internet have been controversial, which dates back to the early 2000s with the invention of Napster. This caused millions of dollars in lawsuits and forced legislators to re-examine copyrights and peer-to-peer networks. Tvongle.com is a small company that is attempting to redefine online television service by sharing more than 100,000 live television channels from all over the world. However, according to its latest press release, the company clearly states all the “responsibility is with the user.” How does it work? The company provides all of its users with a $24 USB TV dongle, which is then connected from the person’s television to a personal computer. From there on, more than 10,000 people can view live television channels. If you participate in this program, the service is free. However, if you do not want to share your live television channels then you pay a monthly fee of $9 plus the $24 software. “Napster did it with music. Skype did it with phone calls. We’re doing it with TV.” http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/298464 Pirates Ready to Cross Swords with ACS:Law Hayden Smith A law firm is facing a massive backlash over its heavy-handed and ‘bullying’ anti-piracy efforts. ACS:Law has attracted hundreds of complaints from people saying they have been asked to pay hundreds of pounds or face court action after being wrongly accused of illegal file-sharing. The firm was in the spotlight last week when the personal information of thousands of internet customers was leaked online by vigilantes trying to undermine wider anti-piracy efforts by the entertainment industry. And the war between the two groups escalated last night as The Ministry of Sound’s website was taken down in an attack by hackers. It was targeted as it is the client of anti-piracy lawyers Gallant Macmillan. The firm is due in the High Court today as it fights to get internet service provider PlusNet to hand over the personal details of many of its users. Its website was also disabled last night, possibly because of the threat of an attack by vigilantes. ‘They wanted to wage a war, now they have one and God help them is all I can say,’ a reader commented on the slyck.com website, which is not a fan of the tactics employed by anti-piracy lawyers. ‘Now welcome to the house of pain,’ they added. In the case of ACS:Law, elderly women were said to have received letters alleging they shared pornographic material and techno music, while some people said they paid up despite being innocent for fear of losing their jobs. ‘My 78 year-old father yesterday received a letter from ACS:Law demanding £500 for a porn file he is alleged to have downloaded,’ said one woman who did not want to be named. ‘He doesn’t even know what file-sharing is so has certainly not done this.’ ACS:Law, headed by Andrew Crossley, is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over its role in sending letters to alleged pirates, while the information commissioner could levy a fine of up to £500,000 over privacy breaches. The leaked files expose the lucrative business of anti-piracy efforts conducted on behalf of game, film and music firms. ACS:Law has fined file-sharers £600,000 to date, which is shared out between the firm, its clients and monitoring companies, according to online reports. Lawyers say initial letters typically demand between £300 and £700. The proportion of people who paid up ranged between 15 per cent and 40 per cent. Copyright lawyer Michael Coyle said in the last two years he had spoken to more than 1,000 people who had been accused of illegal file sharing. Around 70 per cent instructed him to fight the charges. ‘There has to be some form of injunction or temporary cessation to the misery that these letters are causing thousands of people,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘I’ve seen instances where ACS:Law have written five, six or seven letters to people.’ But only two of his cases have been taken to court by ACS:Law, which raises questions about the volume of court orders granted, Mr Coyle added. Politicians and music industry figures have joined in condemnation of methods used to chase pirates. http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/842880-p...s-with-acs-law ACS:Law Boss: I Feel Defeated And Could Go Bankrupt Enigmax After disgruntled letter recipients mailed off a barrage of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority against ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, he told his advisor that not only did he “feel defeated” but that in his long-term interests it might be better if he “shut up shop”. Doing so, he explained, would bankrupt him. Some people, particularly those of a resilient nature operating in the cut and thrust of big business, have a skill for letting nothing get to them. Or at least they give that impression. Up until recently ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley was one of those guys. Despite mounting criticism and the immense pressure of several hundred complaints about his company’s conduct delivered to the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority, in public Crossley has remained strong. Defending his position at every available opportunity through media interviews and self-penned pieces, one might be forgiven for thinking that nothing could shake this man from his ‘turn piracy into profit’ crusade. But behind closed doors, things were very different. “I am worried about the latest developments. Apparently there are presently over 500 complaints against me thanks to the internet campaign and Which,” Crossley wrote to his advisor just over a month ago. “Each complaint is essentially the same and they are borne out of a determination by some to stop legitimate steps being taken to curtail illegal file sharing. However, I do not know how I can avoid being found guilty of something, with 500 complaints to choose from,” he continued. The concern that Crossley shows for the complaints that have been made to the SRA will be very empowering for those who took the time to write to the solicitors’ watchdog. Some individuals had begun to air frustration that their efforts had been in vain, but even in advance of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal decision which is still some time off, it is clear those efforts have seriously got under Crossley’s skin. But the problems for ACS:Law go deeper than the SRA investigation. While turning alleged file-sharing infringements into settlement agreements, and in turn transforming those into hard cash may be a fairly new business model, it suffers from the same problems as any commercial operation. Despite Crossley pulling in huge amounts of money and leading the high-life, company emails reveal that he paid the bulk of his employees very little. Nevertheless, the costs of operating the business had been spiralling in recent months causing it to experience cash-flow and other financial problems. One long-running payment dispute involved UK ISP Entanet who had been supplying ACS with customer identities and charging for the service. In March this year, a series of emails between Entanet and ACS Law’s company-hopping Terence Tsang revealed that the law firm still had not paid an invoice from July 2009, some 8 months earlier, and several thousand pounds remained outstanding. After promising to pay but failing to do so, Entanet said they would no longer provide ACS with subscriber details and threatened to take the law firm to court for the debt. The company also had problems paying an O2 bill of more than £13,000. Even ACS:Law business partner Lee Bowden from Media CAT became irate in August after his emails demanding money owed went unanswered. “You seem to have ignored my previous e-mail, I am not happy and want some revenue in account,” he wrote to Crossley. “Everyone is getting [th]eir bit and I am owed £17k ffs.” Of course, financial frictions are a daily event for many companies. But for a firm already under pressure, with its owner seriously considering the future viability of the business, there were added pressures. As Crossley made clear to his advisor in August, ACS:Law’s entire future hangs on the success, or failure, of his Speculative Invoicing model. “If I stop this work my business will fold and my clients will be big losers, but if I carry on I fear that it will be worse for me in the long run,” he wrote to his advisor, prophetically. If Crossley was of the opinion that things could be worse in the “long run” even before the email leak, one can only imagine what he is thinking now. Even back then, just over a month ago, he was clearly disillusioned and on the verge of giving in. “Presently I feel defeated by it and feel I should shut up shop, which will cause me to go bankrupt for certain,” he explained. The prospect of ACS:Law stopping their activities will be music to the ears of many thousands of people, but what are the chances of that? Looking at the business chain, fairly high. Even if the various rights holders stick with the company and Crossley doesn’t decide to pull the plug voluntarily, it may prove difficult to service them. Apart from the fact that the ACS internal emails show significant amounts of friction between the company and their IP harvesting partners, before this fiasco only TalkTalk and Virgin Media refused to cooperate when ACS:Law went to court to request the handover of customer data. After the epic data leak of BSkyB, BT and Plusnet user data, all of these ISPs have said they will cease cooperation with the company. Furthermore, at this stage it seems unthinkable that any ISP would risk being seen to hand over data to ACS:Law. Furthermore, it would also seem reasonable to presume that Chief Master Winegarten will probably feel a little uncomfortable authorizing any more court orders until ACS can prove they have their house in order, and that could take a very long time indeed. Coupled with the cash-flow problems touched on above, that day might never come. So, with no ISP subscriber details handed over, there will be no names to connect to possible infringements. With no names and addresses to put on letters, there can be no cash settlements. With no cash settlements, there can be no more turning piracy into profit. There could hardly be a more bleak outlook. But of course, ACS still has all the IP addresses and identities from earlier court orders, maybe they’re hopeful that these could still yield some cash to bridge this period of uncertainty? That seems unlikely. Not even Crossley is confident. While bemoaning public perception that a complaint had already been upheld against him by his recent referral to the SDT, Crossley concluded: “Meanwhile, thanks to Which and their lawyer I doubt that the latest campaigns which we were out to run will have any meaningful recovery..” It is easy to blame (or credit, depending on your perspective) Which? for cutting off ACS:Law’s revenue stream (arguably BeingThreatened.com have made a greater contribution in this respect) but since the email leak and the absolute destruction of the company’s reputation, it would take a special kind of letter recipient who, despite the mountain of information available via a simple Google search, still chose to keep the company alive by paying them money. http://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-boss-...nkrupt-101003/ The ‘Legal Blackmail’ Business: Inside a P2P-Settlement Factory Nate Anderson British pornographer Jasper Feversham was fed up. The Internets were sharing his films, quality work like Catch Her in the Eye, Skin City, and MILF Magic 3. He wanted revenge—or at least a cut. So Feversham signed on to a relatively new scheme: track down BitTorrent infringers, convert their IP addresses into real names, and blast out warning letters threatening litigation if they didn’t cough up a few hundred quid. “Much looking forward to sending letters to these f—ers,” he wrote in an email earlier this year. The law firm he ended up with was ACS Law, run by middle-aged lawyer Andrew Crossley. ACS Law had, after a process of attrition, become one of the only UK firms to engage in such work. Unfortunately for Crossley, mainstream film studios had decided that suing file-sharers brought little apart from negative publicity, and so Crossley was left defending a heap of pornography, some video games, and a few musical tracks. Crossley parleyed the porn into national celebrity—or perhaps “infamy” would be a better word. Earlier this year, Crossley was excoriated in the House of Lords by Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall—yes, I know—for what “amounts to blackmail… The cost of defending one of these things is reckoned to be £10,000. You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt. It is straightforward legal blackmail.” Lord Lucas went on to offer an amendment to the (now-passed) Digital Economy Bill, titled “Remedy for groundless threats of copyright infringement proceedings.” But the Lords were just getting started. Lord Young of Norwood Green likened firms such as ACS Law to “rogue wheel-clampers, if I can use that analogy,” while the Earl of Erroll railed against the way that “ACS Law and others threaten people with huge costs in court unless they roll over and give lots of money up front, so that people end up settling out of court. The problem is the cost of justice, which is a huge block. We have to remember that.” Lord Clement-Jones also called out Crossley’s work. “Like many noble Lords, I have had an enormous postbag about the activities of this law firm. It is easy to say ‘of certain law firms,’ but this is the only one that I have been written to about… ACS seems to specialize in picking up bogus copyright claims and then harassing innocent householders and demanding £500, £650, or whatever—a round sum, in any event—in order to settle.” May go for a Lambo or Ferrari. I am so predictable! That was only the start of Crossley’s problems. In the last 12 months, Crossley has been targeted by the Blackpool municipal government, dogged by journalists, hounded by a major consumer group, and hauled up before the Solicitors Regulation Authority for disciplinary proceedings. Baffled, angry people write his office daily, denying any knowledge of his charges. He has blacklisted his own ex-wife in his e-mail client, demanding that she cut off all contact with him forever. Clients press him to pay up. His own data suppliers are, he fears, out to screw him, and Crossley harbors the suspicion that he could make far more money in America, where fat statutory damage awards mean he could demand even more cash from his targets. And, just to put a ridiculous cherry atop his plate of problems, the streets department in Westminster, London—where Crossley keeps his office—went after ACS Law because some of their office waste mysteriously “ended up in the public highway.” “We are a tightly resourced small firm,” Crossley complained as he wheedled the fine in half. But not that tightly resourced. Crossley bragged over e-mail earlier this year that he “spent much of the weekend looking for a new car. Finances are much better so can put £20-30k down. May go for a Lambo or Ferrari. I am so predictable!” He began looking at new homes, including a gated property with “five double bedrooms, three bathrooms, modern kitchen and four reception rooms.” Keeping track of all the details might not be Crossley’s strong suit. As he wrote (one assumes in jest) when a dispute about financial issues came up, “I am not an accountant, true. But I am a genius and everything I do is brilliant. You must understand that!” He’s also dogged. With all the hate, a lesser man might have buckled—as did other law firms like Tilly Bailey & Irvine, which dropped its own “settlement letter” business in April 2010 after “adverse publicity.” Instead, Crossley plows ahead, defending work like To the Manner Porn and Weapons of Mass Satisfaction; indeed, he seems rather philosophical about his lot in life. “Sorry to bombard you with more things to deal with,” he wrote recently to a colleague, “but this business seems to have its share of complications.” Indeed it does—and the complications get even more complicated when you anger the anonymous masses at 4chan, who promptly crash your website, expose your private e-mail, and in doing so shed a powerful and unflattering light on the real practice of P2P lawyering. Drawing on thousands of personal e-mails, Ars takes you inside the world of ACS Law, reveal its connections to the US Copyright Group, and discovers just what Andrew Crossley thinks of Godfather 3. Spoiler: “Godfather 3 is not quite as bad as I remember.” Operation Payback “This will be a calm, coordinated display of blood,” said the initial call to action. “We will not be merciful. We will not be newfags.” Users of the free-wheeling (to put it mildly) Internet community 4chan last week implemented “Operation Payback,” a distributed denial of service attack against various anti-piracy groups the chanologists didn’t like. The RIAA was hit. The MPAA was hit. But after some big targets, Operation Payback moved on to smaller firms, including ACS Law. I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish. After the group’s data flood knocked the ACS Law website offline for a few hours, UK tech site The Register called up Andrew Crossley to ask him about the attack. The site was “only down for a few hours,” Crossley said. “I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish.” He has something to be concerned about now. After these comments, Operation Payback hit ACS Law a second time, knocking out the site. In the process of bringing it back up, someone exposed the server’s directory structure through the Web instead of showing the website itself. Those conducting Operation Payback immediately moved in and grabbed a 350MB archive of ACS Law e-mails, then threw the entire mass up on sites like The Pirate Bay. This is more than a matter of mere embarrassment. The UK has tougher data protection laws than the US, and the country’s Information Commissioner has already made it clear that ACS Law could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds. That’s because, in addition to his iTunes receipts (“Hooray for iPads. I love mine,” Crossley says at one point) and Amazon purchase orders, the e-mails include numerous attachments filled with all manner of private information: names, addresses, payment details, passwords, revenue splits, business deals. All of which is horrible, terrible, awful news—unless you want to know how a firm like ACS Law actually works. Meet the Accused After reading through many hundreds of e-mails, one thing becomes clear: ACS Law operates a rather boring business. That is, there’s no juvenile gloating, no sinister cackling, no profanity-laced tirades (OK, there are a few tirades). The dominant picture is of a sober operation that spends most of its time in mind-numbing scanning and database work. They even reply personally to letters. Sure, all this work is in the service of dreck like Granny F—, but this is just a business, and Crossley is just a middle-aged solicitor trying to run an efficient operation. But the effects of this operation on those accused of infringement are remarkable. The e-mail trove is stuffed with anguished pleas like this: I was in total shock after receiving the letter I received from you today as explained in the telephone conversation. I will say that I was not the person responsible for this infringement. The only person who it could have been would be my son who is [name redacted]. I would never entertain the idea of downloading such a thing—in fact I do not even know how to download any type of software. I only use the internet for Ebay and emails. I also go on dating sites and facebook. This is where my knowledge of computers stops. I do not understand what P2P is…. At the time of the download, to my knowledge my son was visiting my home. I have no idea what he was looking at on my computer. I must add that I do not tolerate any such pornographic material. This letter has upset me greatly and I have spoken to my ex husband who also called yourself with regard to this matter. Most of the notices seem to have gone to parents, as one would expect from a program targeting ISP account holders. But many of the parents seem baffled: I have today received a legal notification from you that a pornographic film was downloaded from my internet connection in October 2009.I immediately phoned your contact number and was told to put my comments in writing. I am obviously shocked both at this alleged illegal activity and the fact that the title appears to be of an offensive nature. I can confirm that i have no knowledge of this download being carried out at my home address. I have checked my computer and my sons computer for any reference to this file (using windows search function) and have found no trace.I have spoken to my two sons about downloads (They are 8 and 12) but obviously not about the nature of this file and to be honest they know even less than me. My oldest child has used i tunes and downloaded games from a site called friv.com but these claim to be free. Is this true? or will it also result in copyright issues ? Others are offended at the titles they are accused of sharing: I am no prude and can see what type of material something entitled Granny F— is. I am the father of 5 children, 3 of these under the age of 7, and to suggest i would have such material on a computer is what i find offensive. May i also add that i am very anti pornography, having been abused as a child by someone who would use porn films before abusing me .this is why i am totally anti porn. Then come the “innocent infringers,” though some of these explanations can feel a bit… strained. on the date 16-11-2009 at 16.35 i was browsing the internet namely bt junkie ,without going into a long story i accidentely pressed the download button for the copyright protected file british granny f— 5@6 which then opened my bittorrent client on my pc which the torrent is sent to with the forementioned file is attached. It normally takes a few minutes for the file to start downloading and before it did i realised what i had done and canceled the file preventing any copyright infringement from taking place. just by starting the download process would have been enough to leave my ip address listed. I hereby appologise for any inconvienience i have caused yourself or your client and can swear at no time was any part of the forementioned copyright protected file downloaded onto my pc or shared with anyone else. (I mean, haven’t we all, at one time or another, accidentally been browsing BitTorrent sites and accidentally clicked on a film called Granny F—?) Others took responsibility for their actions: I am writing in response to the recent letter my father [name redacted] received on the 13.04.2010 based on the subject of infringement of copyright. I would firstly like to state that I am solely responsible for this and I [name redacted] take full responsibility. I have read through all the information that you have supplied and I understand how serious the matter is—since last year 2009 I have not downloaded any material as I understood how it was a bad thing to do and how it is killing out industry. I do take responsibility for this issue and I would very much like to ask if the required payment of £495 could somehow possibly be reduced. The reason i am asking this is because I am currently a student and money is a big factor and getting by generally is a hard thing to do. Indeed, many of the guilty appear to be kids. Some parents figured it out: “I would also like to also say that it was not my sons intention to fileshare this music and was unaware of how file sharing works as am I—I appreciate that this is no excuse but ask you to bear this in mind. As mentioned in previous correspondence from myself I am writing to again explain that my financial circumstances make it impossible for me to pay £400 in one go or even at £40 per month I am in extreme financial hardship with mounting debts and do not have any spare money – if you were to take this to court I would be unable to even pay the basic utility bills or even the necessary food bills. If there’s one great theme running through these letters, it’s the poverty of the respondents. One is a “a single mum living of state benefits who cannot afford to pay any kind of money my daughter is very sorry for any problems caused,” while another lives “in the hold of my bank overdraft my money is never my own. We at present find it very hard to make ends meet, at the moment I am trying to amass funds to pay our utility bills for this month and can not see any change in the near future.” Students plead hardship due to school fees; many people claim to be unemployed. But perhaps most creative are the letters that make no attempt at argument. These are sheer vitriol. One stands out among the rest: Go f— your mum you stupid pakistani black jew. You zimbabwean immigrant. So listen up fat f—, don’t send me another letter. If you do send me another f—ing letter, I will rape your mum against the wall and I will blow up your house and kill you all in a terrorist attack. In addition, I want a £3500 cheque written to me for the inconvinience [sic] you have caused me. *If you do not reply to this email with a confirmation that you will pay me, I will hunt you down and stab you in the back and blow your d— up.* Creative, in an unhinged way. If you had thoughts about going into P2P litigation, consider the sheer migraine-inducingness of getting such messages on a daily basis. Indeed, after reading the correspondence, it’s not hard to see why one paralegal who worked at ACS Law during the summer of 2010 told a friend there was “no chance in hell” she would go back. In Which Everyone Complains When you make people this angry, they tend to complain—and that’s just what happened to Crossley. Earlier this year, UK Consumer group Which? noted that it had “heard from more than 150 consumers who believed they had been wrongly accused.” One letter writer said, “My 78 year-old father yesterday received a letter from ACS law demanding £500 for a porn file he is alleged to have downloaded. He doesn’t even know what file sharing or bittorrent is so has certainly not done this himself or given anyone else permission to use his computer to do such a thing.” Reporters began following up on such stories. One reporter, from the Daily Echo in Bournemouth, e-mailed Crossley about a particular local case—an Aberdeen man who spent most of his time near Bournemouth caring for an ill relative. “He is accused of downloading the track ‘Evacuate the Dancefloor‘ on October 2 last year,” write the reporter. “Mr [name redacted] says he was in Dorset at the time, not in Aberdeen where his IP address is registered, and that he has airline tickets and medical appointment records to prove it. He says he leaves his internet connection switched off when he’s away and no one else has access to it. He has no interest in pop music.” There were other problems. One of the firms providing Crossley with data on infringers then began to get balky, wanting more money than Crossley wanted to pay before turning over its information. “This guy is stupid,” Crossley noted in an email to a colleague. “And he MUST release ALL data to us. It is ours. We have a deal. I will go to court this afternoon if he does not give it to us.” As if this wasn’t enough, Crossley was subject to repeated, probing questions from the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, which controls lawyers in England and Wales. The group had received 400+ complaints about his firm’s behavior. This was a big deal; the SRA could put Crossley out of business, and he had been in trouble with them before. Back in 2002 and 2006, Crossley was disciplined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, which ordered him to pay around £5,500 in fines and penalties. In both of these cases, Crossley had not submitted an accountant’s yearly report on his firm—needed under UK rules to show that a lawyer does not improperly hang on to client funds. The problem appeared to stem from a lack of cash. At one point, he told the tribunal handling his case that his lack of paperwork was “because he had been unable to raise the money to pay the accountant who retained the papers.” Crossley suffered “an extended period of clinical depression in 1999″ and then a stroke in 2000. “The effect of the stroke, which caused him to lose his sight altogether for a brief period, was that the Respondent could not work full-time for a period and as a consequence he quickly got into financial difficulties.” Any bundle of documents sent by a law ‘firm’ headed with the words ‘Letter of claim; Infringement of Copyright’ is likely to cause distress The new investigation wasn’t about accounting, but about claims that Crossley was shaking down his targets. Things were bad enough that one of his ACS Law employees noted, “We are constantly being reminded by infringers that we are under investigation by the SRA.” To defend himself, Crossley secured the services of another lawyer. “I am meeting with my retained lawyer today regarding the sra,” he wrote. “He is Andrew Hopper QC and he literally wrote the sra rules!” But Andrew Hopper, QC couldn’t save Crossley from the SRA, even if he did write their rules. On August 20, the SRA referred Crossley—once more—to the disciplinary tribunal. “Absolutely predictable political decision to ‘fast track’ and give the problem to someone else; therefore SRA is seen by Which etc to be ‘doing the right thing’ without them actually having to think at all or justify the decision,” sniffed Hopper. The Blackpool municipal government also objected to Crossley’s tactics. ACS Law was contacted by Blackpool, which complained that local citizens “have been significantly distressed by your letter and feel compelled to pay. You say that your letters are not demands but compromise agreements, but any bundle of documents sent by a law ‘firm’ headed with the words ‘Letter of claim; Infringement of Copyright’ is likely to cause distress and mislead the consumer into making a transactional decision they would not otherwise make… None of the complainants have any recollection of having downloaded the tracks in dispute.” The Blackpool official then notes that under UK law, damages are fixed at “economic loss, either realized or potential.” When it comes to music tracks, the loss equals “the approximate market value of the track as a single download—79p. Without further transparency as to the legal costs mentioned above, I would imagine that this would be sufficient to bring the matter to a close.” Meet the U.S. Copyright Group Indeed, the justice of this remark about damages haunts Crossley. One of his own legal advisers tells him that “establishing damages beyond the value of the gross profit of one copy of the work is problematic.” In other words, a few pence for music. The advisor goes on to note that the one court case which would seem to prove the opposite “has, in my opinion, about as much legal force as a Sun newspaper headline regarding the licentious behavior of a D list celebrity.” We should get to work on this, I have massive copyright in the US. And in the US there is minimum statutory damages “Therefore, it is my belief that the rights holder can only rely on the damage resulting from making a single copy of the work in infringement,” he concludes, because of the difficulty in proving just how much (if any) “sharing” of the material with others took place. Lawyers are of course free to ask the courts for huge awards, but this carries the risk “that, in a defended case with competent opposing expert witnesses, the court will reject the application.” In other words, actually going to court would net very little money. Sending out letters and collecting a few hundred pounds is a much better business, which may explain why Crossley doesn’t seem to sue people who refuse to settle. Yes, he promises to do so at some point, and the emails do show that he’s considering hiring a litigator, but the campaign has been going over for quite some time now with no court action. (This is a common theme in the complaints against him; Crossley insists he’s just trying to help everyone stay out of court.) If only Crossley lived in America! “What is interesting is that it is the US model I want,” he wrote earlier this year after hearing the news that the US Copyright Group was now filing mass Doe lawsuits against alleged movie pirates. “We should get to work on this, I have massive copyright in the US. And in the US there is minimum statutory damages.” Yes, statutory damages—under which copyright holders don’t need to prove actual economic harm at all. The idea was that some infringement was simply too hard to quantify, but a system designed for commercial use has now been turned against US college students, leading to $1.92 million judgments in one case and $675,000 in another. (Both were so egregious that the judges involved tossed out the monetary amounts.) This is the system Crossley wants to profit from. So he contacted Tom Dunlap of the Virginia law firm Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver (DGW). DGW helped put the “US Copyright Group” together and does all the litigation on its cases, which include films like The Hurt Locker and Far Cry. Crossley wanted some kind of partnership. “I own and operate the most prolific firm in the UK that identifies and pursues copyright infringements committed through peer to peer networks,” he bragged to Dunlap. “I have a growing number of clients, existing and potential, including US based copyright owners and are actively looking to expand our work into the US, especially because of the ability to receive statutory damages for infringement and jury-awarded assessments of damages. I note that you act for Guardaley, a client of the person who introduced the file sharing work previously carried out by Davenport Lyons in the UK to my firm. It is a small world! “I have substantial amounts of data, which I wish to exploit appropriately in the US and would very much like to speak with you with a view to exploring the possibility of an ongoing working relationship, to our mutual benefit. If this is of interest to you, please let me know.” The lawyers did a call. Later, they met up in Cannes, France at a conference. Crossley later booked a table at Le Baoli, which he described in another email to someone else as “the best club I have ever been in in my life! Le Baoli in Cannes! a million models in one place!” But the club was not serving dinner that night, and in the confusion over rescheduling, Crossley missed the DGW lawyers for dinner. But he did email later to say that “we are mailshotting all major uk film and music companies with the ucg [US Copyright Group] so you should get some calls soon.” He seems to have believed a partnership was in the offing. In a blog post soon after, Crossley announced his return from Cannes and said that “a new joint working relationship with US-based attorneys has opened up the North American region to our clients for identification and pursuit of illegal file sharing of their products.” He was going to begin “cooperation with a newly-formed organization, the United Copyright Group.” That reference was scrubbed from the post two days later; Crossley had apparently been a bit too exuberant. Tom Dunlap told Ars that his firm was not working with ACS Law. He also told CNET this week that “the IT company [which the law firm uses to track file sharers] does not do anything for ACS Law.” But is that true? The Mysterious “Guardaley” The “IT firm” Dunlap mentions appears to be Guardaley, the BitTorrent detection company cited in US Copyright Group court filings. Guardaley identifies the IP addresses of suspected infringers, logs all necessary data, and turns this information over the lawyers. But the firm is deeply implicated in the US Copyright Group, not just a mere contractor. Guardaley is based in Germany, where it is run by Bejamin Perino and Patrick Achache, though the firm has registered itself as a UK business, too, with an unlikely address in an Aldermaston office park. In a document filed with the White House’s new “IP Czar” earlier this year, Perino is listed as the “managing director” of Guardaley, and Dunlap called on the expertise of his subordinate Achache as an expert witness who swore to the accuracy of the company’s data in court filings. But then, in April of this year, another court filing appeared in the Far Cry case. Here, Perino declared that he was “one of four Managers of the US Copyright Group (USCG) which is a private company dedicated to anti-piracy efforts in the motion picture industry involving unlawful torrent downloading.” Virginia state records seen by Ars show that DGW set up “US Copyright Group” as a legal entity, though it appears to be some sort of partnership between the law firm and the techies at Guardaley. Here’s where it gets weird: this summer, after falling out with his detection company, Crossley turned to a young man named Terence, who is referenced above and who helped Crossley get into the settlement letter business. Terence then helped Crossley sign on with… Guardaley. Crossley writes about a “guy I know called Patrick who is good friends with Terence. Patrick is based in Germany with a high quality system. We get no hidden charges and I will drop my charges to fully absorb the extra cost.” He needed to rush the deal through, because the pornographer Jasper Feversham was upset that detection of his works had stopped; Crossley needed a new data supplier as soon as he could get one. The deal, for 15 percent gross, was done through Terence; no emails emerge from Guardaley at all. Even Crossley found the situation odd. “Also, I note that Guardaley in the UK is registered as a dormant company. That needs to be changed if that is the contracting company. And why is there a company in the UK and why its it registered in Aldermaston? What’s all that about? (as Peter Kay would say).” In response, Terence offers some intriguing details. “GL [Guardaley] has a number of companies for monitoring and different ones are used depending on content and jurisdiction. The data supplier for [ACS Law client] Mediacat will be a Swiss company to manage PR (you know how it is!).” Despite using the same tech, Guardaley apparently operates under numerous names. This means that each of the entities it creates needs a separate “expert’s report” verifying that the system is accurate. The one drafted for Guardaley itself wouldn’t work; a new expert must be found. “An independent expert’s report is in place for Guardaley, but your monitoring will be done through a different legal entity,” wrote Terence. “This will mean that we will need to get a new one created. There will be no problems, as the technology used will be exactly the same as Guardaley’s.” And later: “We are in correspondence with an expert and the report can be finalised fairly quickly, well in advance of the first court order.” So, while Tom Dunlap suggests that “Guardaley” doesn’t work for ACS Law, some other company with a new name and the same tech is. This gives Guardaley a hand in the two major “settlement letter” factories in the United States and Britain. Follow the Money Why bother with all these hassles, all the vitriol, all the criticism from the House of Lords? Money, for one. Despite Crossley’s claim that he runs a “tightly resourced small firm,” he appears to be doing alright for himself. After bragging about getting a “Lambo or Ferrari,” Crossley instead settled on a Jeep Compass 2.4CVT. He spent the summer looking for a new high-end home to rent; one property send over for his consideration was “a contemporary mansion with breath taking views in an elevated position on this exclusive gated estate. Arranged over three floors the accommodation comprises entrance hall, cloakroom, kitchen/breakfast room, utility room, large dining room, lounge with doors out onto patio and balcony and double bedroom suite. Stairs down to family room, four double bedrooms, shower room, family bathroom. Stairs down to indoor swimming pool, bar area/gym with doors out onto patio, double bedroom suite and storage room, double garage.” Such places go from £6,000 to £8,000 a month; not a modest sum. And he’s looking to buy a bulldog puppy. But despite the expenditures, there are also some signs that cash does not flow steadily in this business. “You seem to have ignored my previous e-mail, I am not happy and want some revenue in account,” demands one client. “Everyone is getting their bit and I am owed £17k ffs.” He also pleads with one of his data suppliers to do some work for him, and quickly. “We need to run that data to maintain cashflow,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, we have come under considerable pressure from [UK Internet provider] O2 to pay an outstanding invoice of £13,107.00 in respect of the supply of that data. As we have not been able to send any letters out we have not been able to collect any income from that data to meet ISP costs. This matter is very pressing as O2 have said that unless it is paid straight away they will release all their staff that they have retained to provide the data. This will have the effect of delaying very considerably the time for the provision of the finished data from the ISP. This will impact on al of us, most importantly for cashflow.” In an operation like this, the letters need to keep flowing out for the money to keep flowing in. As Crossley noted after seeing all the confusion among alleged infringers, “I have an idea. We should send a factsheet…. answering all the usual questions and dispelling some common misapprehensions as I think it will better inform people and increase revenue.” But that revenue comes from confused people like the accountant who wrote ACS Law, claiming utter bafflement and innocence. “Due to a lack of detail in your letter, I had to Google search the title to find information on what I’m being accused of downloading. I was astounded to find it to be PORN of pregnant women. Sick!” “I am an Accountant who works normal office hours. There is NO CHANCE I would be at home downloading porn at 11:43 in the morning. Furthermore, on the date stipulated, I was in Brighton for the day with a client. I am the owner of my home, I live alone and have being doing so at the current address for the past 4 years. No-one has access to my property unless I’m present.” But the attitude at ACS Law is, as one legal advisor put it, “I sometimes think that we try to be too nice. That is not our purpose. If our clients want nice then they are likely to go to a priest or social worker.” So the Lords can say what they like, the consumer groups can rail, and Westminster can levy fines for trash in the streets, but the letters for Pump Fiction will continue. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...mail-business/ Las Vegas Review-Journal Endorses The Same Candidate It's Suing For 'Stealing' From Them? Mike Masnick At the end of yet another good report by the Las Vegas Sun on a defendant in a Righthaven case fighting back (thanks to visual77 for sending this in), there's an interesting pointer to a blog post from Steve Friess, a Vegas-based writer (who has previously come out in support of Righthaven's lawsuits) noting that it appears that the Las Vegas Review-Journal really doesn't take copyright issues as seriously as it pretends in its sermons on the subject. After all, it keeps claiming that copyright infringement is no different than "stealing," and yet, Freiss notes, the LVRJ has now endorsed Sharron Angle for Senate, the same candidate that it (via Righthaven) has sued for copyright infringement: Quote:
Separately, as for the original Sun article highlighting another defense effort against Righthaven, two quick points. This is the first defense I've seen that calls out the judge's ruling in the Tenenbaum case, in which the judge called the statutory rates "constitutionally excessive," and a violation of due process. This defendant is claiming that the demands brought forth by Righthaven violate due process rights based on this. I have to say that's quite a stretch of a legal argument (and an awful lot of people fully expect that ruling in the Tenenbaum case to be overturned), but still interesting. The second point is that while a lot of the defenses against Righthaven suits seem to toss up new arguments, it appears they're starting to all focus in on a few key arguments. It will be interesting to see how the courts respond to these. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...rom-them.shtml Finland - Prison Sentence For P2P Hub Operator A Finnish District Court yesterday sentenced a peer-to-peer (P2P) hub operator to a four month suspended prison sentence. In addition the 33 year old man was ordered to pay €307,450 in compensation to right holders. The offender had established a network with a number of DirectConnect (DC) hubs. DC hubs are servers operated by one or more individuals using software to enable users of the DirectConnect P2P network to find and download files from other users connected to the same hub. His computers were originally seized in June 2007 and were found to contain a significant amount of infringing music. He later restarted the hubs with new computers which were also seized in October 2007 and records showed that up to 2000 people had been using the hub, sharing around 80 terabytes of content (equivalent to 1.2 million albums). CIAPC's Antti Kotilainen has welcomed the decision: "Imprisonment is the right penalty for this type of deliberate, planned and very harmful conduct in which the administrator facilitates widespread unauthorised file-sharing. " http://top40-charts.com/news/Music-I...tor/59942.html Gene Simmons Wants to “Sue Everyone” Over File Sharing Joe Marvilli Ah, Gene Simmons. Where would the world be without you? Just when we started to think that Axl Rose’s antics were the most fun to blog about, you come along with stories like this one. Speaking recently at the MIPCOM convention in Cannes, France, the KISS singer revealed his thoughts on file sharing. His solution: sue, sue, and sue some more. When he says lawsuit, he’s dead serious. “Make sure your brand is protected,” Simmons said (via ars technica). “Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line.” When it comes to incursions, the frontman takes that to mean every P2P file sharing kid out there. Like his stage persona The Demon, Simmons is pissed, and he’s pointing the finger at the music industry. “The music industry was asleep at the wheel,” he lamented, “and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.” Of course, KISS is still doing just fine profit-wise despite the lack of industry. The reason Simmons was there in the first place was to promote the 100th episode of his show, Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels. (Personal side note: the fact that this has 100 episodes and shows like Firefly only had 14 makes me want to scream.) Combined with the profits from both TV and music, the artist’s enterprise has about 3,000 items in total on the market. “Everything from KISS condoms to KISS caskets,” Simmons disclosed. “We’ll get you coming and we’ll get you going. We literally have everything from KISS Hi-Def television sets that are about to come on the market to KISS Motorcycles. Well, it’s Planet KISS. Oh, I’ve already trademarked that, I forgot that.” How lovely. Oh….wait…not lovely. The word I meant to use was legitimately insane. So, thanks, Gene Simmons. I’m glad to see people can get more mileage out of you than just laughing at your Cherry Dr. Pepper commercials. http://consequenceofsound.net/2010/1...-file-sharing/ Lily Allen's Website Hit by Piracy Campaigners Nicky Trup Outspoken pop star's site suffers DDoS attack Lily Allen’s website went down a number of times yesterday, in what appeared to be a co-ordinated attack against her vocal anti-piracy views. According to ZDNet, copyright activists launched the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the pop star as payback for her criticism of illegal file sharing. Allen recently shut down a blog of anti-piracy statements by fellow artists after heated public criticism, but has continued to condemn illegal file sharing publicly. The attack follows Allen taking legal action against Apple after her MacBook was hacked. http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/34828...cy-campaigners Ministry of Sound Downed by File-Sharing Vigilantes Barry Collins The Ministry of Sound and its lawyers have become the latest victims of a denial-of-service attack by file-sharing activists. Both the Ministry of Sound website and that of its lawyers, Gallant MacMillan, were down at the time of publication, following the planned attack. It's the second such attack in recent weeks. Last month, legal firm ACS:Law was targeted by a similar stunt, which resulted in the firm's confidential database leaking onto the internet. The database contained details of broadband customers accused of sharing pornographic material, as well as the personal correspondence of the firm's lawyers. It's now the subject of an investigation by the Information Commissioner. This latest attack was announced by the Anonymous hacking group on the notorious 4Chan forum before it took place. Gallant MacMillan has pursued alleged file-sharers for compensation on behalf of the Ministry of Sound, putting both organisations in the firing line. "Gallant MacMillian Law firm has committed many crimes recently, all of them ignored; ignored by everyone except us," the Anonymous hackers declared on the 4Chan forum before the attack, according to the Slyck website. "We, the people, will not allow this to continue. They have declared themselves our enemies by sending out thousands of blackmailing letters against innocents, seeking compensation for copyright infringements that don't exist." "Just with ACS:Law, these letters are being sent by a company that is guilty of crimes against intellectual property, as well as crimes against the people," the group added. "Indeed, even as they seek to 'protect' copyright through barbaric punishment, their hypocritical methods force ISPs to reveal the personal information of thousands without evidence of infringement." The attack was reportedly timed to coincide with a planned court appearance today, in which Gallant MacMillan was applying for ISPs to hand over details of hundreds more accused file-sharers. Neither the Ministry of Sound or Gallant MacMillan were available for comment at the time of publication. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/361618/m...ing-vigilantes Astronaut Sues Dido For Using His Photo In Album Cover Mike Masnick Ben alerts us to the news that astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing the musician Dido for her album cover on her 2008 album, "Safe Trip Home," which uses a NASA photo of McCandless in space. Now, it's notable that McCandless is not claiming copyright over the image -- which is good, because he almost certainly doesn't own the copyright. Either the photographer who shot the image does or (more likely) the photo is owned by NASA which should make it public domain (though, potentially not). It appears that instead, McCandless is claiming a violation of his publicity rights, which we've noted has become all too popular a legal strategy these days. It's quickly getting up there in popularity as a "new form" of intellectual property -- and one that is perhaps even more questionable than patents and copyrights. If this really is a publicity rights claim (and, if anyone has the actual filing, I'd love to see it, and post it here see update below), it's difficult to see how much of a claim he has. It's not as if he's identifiable in the image, or that anyone will see it and think: "Hey, I'll buy this album because I know astronaut Bruce McCandless endorsed it." That's ridiculous. Most people will have no idea who the astronaut is, nor will they even care. This seems like yet another blatant money grab, made possible due to the ever increasing (and dangerous) belief that we own "rights" to imaginary concepts. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...um-cover.shtml No Immediate Performance Royalty Vote Expected FMQB With the news that the House of Representatives is waiting to deal with the country's budget until November, it should come as no surprise that there will be no legislative decisions on radio's performance royalty issue in 2010. At the 2010 NAB-RAB Radio Show in Washington, D.C., Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) confirmed this at a Q&A panel. According to RBR-TVR.com, Bennett shot down a question about the PRA being passed in the "lame duck" interim before Election Day, saying, "No, you don't even have to finish the question." Bennett said that if top Democrats lose their positions come Election Day, things are "going to get really ugly" in Washington and the PRA will not be a priority. NAB President/CEO Gordon Smith added that "Ugly is good for our purposes," meaning that the PRA would be ignored in favor of bigger, hot-button issues in a "lame duck" session. http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1969949 Apple Accepts, Then Removes BitTorrent App From iTunes So yeah, Apple recently loosened up their developer guidelines in a big way. Not only does Apple now allow developers to code for the iPhone using cross platform development tools, but a number of previously rejected iPhone apps are now finding their way back into the iTunes App Store. But that’s all old news. What happened earlier this week, however, was a bit surprising. Earlier this week, Apple approved an iPhone app called IS Drive, which lets users check and manage downloads from ImageShack.us, while also offering users the option to use the company’s BitTorrent service to download files to their ImageShack account. MacWorld.UK reported earlier this week: Quote:
The app was temporarily available for $5 before Apple caught on and subsequently removed it. “Just got a call from Apple,” Kepner tweeted early on Tuesday. ”I’m seeing what I can do. I have a feeling I won’t be able to change their mind.” While Kepner is apparently trying to change Apple’s mind by pointing out that they don’t fully understand what the app is about, this isn’t Apple’s first rodeo with a BitTorrent style app. Back in May 2009, Apple removed a BitTorrent app called Drivetrain from iTunes. Drivetrain gave users the ability to remotely manage the BitTorrent client Transmission, and though the app never actually downloaded or uploaded any files itself, Apple wasn’t swayed. Explaining its position to the developer of Drivetrain, Apple wrote: Quote:
http://www.edibleapple.com/apple-acc...p-from-itunes/ Apple Fights $625 Million Patent Verdict Miguel Helft and John Schwartz Apple is challenging a jury verdict that could force it to pay as much as $625.5 million to a company founded by David Gelernter, a Yale University computer science professor, for infringing three patents related to how files are displayed on the iPod, the iPhone and Macintosh computers. A federal jury in Tyler, Tex., on Friday awarded the company, Mirror Worlds, $208.5 million in damages for each of the patents infringed. They include a patent related to Cover Flow, a central feature of Apple’s computers and mobile devices that allows users to scroll through album covers, photos and other files. The federal judge overseeing the case has yet to formally enter the verdict. In an emergency motion filed on Sunday, Apple asked the judge to stay the verdict because of a series of “outstanding issues” with two of the three patents it was found to have willfully infringed. Apple also said that it would be wrong for the court to award the plaintiff the full judgment for each of the patents, as it would amount to “triple dipping.” If Mirror Words is granted the full amount by the court, it would be one of the largest patent awards in United States history. The case was heard before Judge Leonard Davis of United States District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a venue favored by plaintiffs in patent cases because of the generosity of the juries’ awards. Apple said the that the court should consider its challenge to the verdict “in light of counsel for Mirror Worlds’ erroneous and objectionable suggestion that, among other things, damages should be cumulative while at the same time suggesting that Mirror Worlds was not ‘triple dipping,’ ” Apple wrote in its filing. Professor Gelernter, a renowned technology pioneer, sustained serious injuries to his right hand and eye after opening a package sent to him in 1993 by Theodore Kaczynski, the terrorist known as the Unabomber. His company, Mirror Worlds, sued Apple in 2008 claiming that Apple infringed its patents. In addition to Cover Flow, the case focused on features of the Macintosh called Spotlight, which allows users to search their hard drive, and Time Machine, which performs automatic backups. “The verdict is a clear victory for David and his visionary ideas,” said Joe Diamante, a layer who represented Mirror Worlds. Apple declined to comment. John Duffy, a professor at George Washington University law school and an expert on patent law, said he was surprised by the size of the verdict, but even more by the finding of willful infringement. “That’s a little jarring,” he said. Most juries find that infringement is unintentional. A finding that a defendant knew of a patent and decided to go ahead and create a similar product anyway is more rare, and patent law provides enhanced penalties for such conduct, Professor Duffy said, including treble damages in some cases. Jeanne C. Fromer, an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York, said that while the verdict is “clearly huge,” it concerns an extremely important part of what gives Apple products a unique look and feel. Professor Fromer noted that the Eastern District of Texas has a reputation for being generous even to so-called patent trolls, who hold on to patents that they do not commercialize in order to demand money off of another company’s success. But she said that Professor Gelernter does not fit the profile of a patent troll. “This is a very respectable computer scientist attacking a very visible and core technology of Apple,” she said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/te...y/05apple.html Verizon Wireless to Pay Up to $90 Million in Refunds Edward Wyatt Verizon Wireless said Sunday it will pay up to $90 million in refunds to 15 million cell phone customers who were wrongly charged for data sessions or Internet use, one of the largest-ever customer refunds by a telecommunications company. The company’s statement came as Verizon Wireless held talks with the Federal Communications Commission about complaints of unauthorized charges and after questions about a possible settlement of an F.C.C. investigation into the issue. Verizon said in its statement that 15 million customers either will receive either credits ranging from $2 to $6 on their October or November bills or, in the case of former customers, refund checks. In its statement, Verizon Wireless said that the charges affected customers who did not have data usage plans but who were nevertheless billed because of data exchanges initiated by software built into their phones or because of mistaken charges for inadvertent episodes of Web access. In the last three years, the F.C.C. has received hundreds of complaints from Verizon Wireless customers who said they were charged for data usage or Web access at times when their phones were not in use or when they mistakenly pushed a button that was preprogrammed to instantly active the phone’s Web browser. Beginning in 2009, The New York Times and The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, among other publications, reported that customers had been complaining of the charges but had often been ignored by Verizon Wireless. People close to the settlement talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they expected the refunds to total more than $50 million. “Verizon Wireless values our customer relationships and we always want to do the right thing for our customers,” Mary Coyne, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless, said in the statement. The announcement of the refunds might not end the issue for Verizon. People close to the talks said the F.C.C. had been pressing the company to enter into an agreement to pay a penalty for the unauthorized charges, which would serve as a deterrent for companies that might discover similar circumstances but fail to alert customers in a timely manner. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/te...4webphone.html 66% Of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP Wolfgang Gruener Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding the operating has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again. Windows 7 is gaining share, but cannot keep pace with the loss of Windows XP and Vista. Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft’s pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7. It is no secret that Windows users have learned that change is something Windows computers don’t like. Often, it is much easier to leave the Windows version that came with a PC as it was and avoid the pain of upgrading. Vista may have been an exception as the operating system itself was worth the extra pain (or not), while Windows XP was a solid software that works well for the majority of computer users worldwide even today. New market share data recently released by Net Applications puts XP’s market share at 60.03%, down from 60.89% in the month before. Windows Vista fell from 14.00% to 13.35%, while Windows 7 gained 1.25 points to 17.10%. It is interesting to see that Vista and XP lost a combined 1.51 points in September: The difference between the gain of 7 and the loss of Vista/XP represents 100% of the Windows market share loss, which was down 0.25 points to 91.08% in September. Since the launch of Windows 7 in October 2009, the operating system was able to post a net gain of market share in only three months, according to Net Applications, and was hit with a net market share loss of 1.44 points over the past 11 months. If we believe the data published by Net Applications, then Windows 7 has not been able to stop the market share bleeding of Windows, even if it has slowed a bit: In the past 9 months, Windows lost only 0.92 points, while Windows lost 1.14 points in the 9 nine months directly preceding the launch of Windows 7. Windows market share Windows XP has dropped in market share from 70.48% to 60.03% since the launch of Windows 7. When Windows 7 was introduced, Windows XP had a 76% share among all Windows users; now it is estimated at 66%. Windows 7 has already a 19% share among all Windows users and is likely to overtake Windows Vista in this discipline within the next two months: Windows Vista never had a greater share among Windows users than 20.35%, according to Net Applications. Vista had a share of 14.66% among all Windows systems that have been counted by Net Applications in September. Windows XP drops less than 1 point in overall market share every month. Given the fact that it still has about 60% of overall share it could take another year until the operating system will drop below 50%, unless some miracle happens or we are finally seeing ancient computer systems in business environments being replaced. It is simply amazing that an operating system that will celebrate its 10th birthday next year is still, by far, the most popular operating system worldwide. To be fair, I should mention that Windows XP is still actively sold and will be kicked to the curb, this time for real, this month: The deadline is October 22. It is unlikely that this will change something dramatically for the market share of Windows XP in the short term and the fact that Microsoft thoroughly screwed itself with a crappy Windows Vista release doesn’t help. You could always send Microsoft your ideas how to get rid of those stubborn Windows XP users and convince them to upgrade to Windows 7. I personally believe that it was a mistake to pitch Windows as a new operating system, as we know that it was simply a massive patch that finally brought up Windows 7 to the level it should have had in the first place. It was a brave move to sell Windows 7 as a new operating system release, but if Microsoft really wanted people to upgrade, it would have needed to offer Windows 7 as a free or nearly free update. Sort of a service pack. A smoother upgrade process would also help. Many users are just tired of upgrades that require a lot of effort and come with the notion that the computer may not boot after the upgrade. Net Applications’ data does not reveal who gains from Microsoft’s market share losses. Both MacOS X (5.03%) and Linux (0.85%) are stable and the only operating system that shows gains is Apple’s iOS, which is now at a share of 1.18%. http://www.conceivablytech.com/3227/...se-windows-xp/ Stephen Colbert-Inspired Site "Truthy" Is a Swift Boat Torpedo for Twitter Users David Zax In studying "the science of truthiness," Indiana University researchers crunch massive amounts of Twitter data and discover where memes get their start. With the click of a simple "Truthy" button, users can flag suspected misinformation. 'Tis the season, sadly, for misinformation. With elections coming up on November 2nd, we can pretty much expect the Internet to be clogged with falsehoods, outright lies, and general wrongness. But the Internet is supposedly getting smarter, right? Shouldn't there be a way to flag spurious claims that Candidate X is a Zoroastrian, that Candidate Y hates puppies, and that Candidate Z was born on the moon? Researchers at Indiana University have just launched Truthy.indiana.edu, which they humbly declare a "a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections." What the Truthy team does is sift through thousands of tweets to figure out how a certain meme was born and how it grew. Drilling down through statistics helps Truthy draw a picture of a meme's history. "The diffusion networks are calculated, and the images are generated automatically for every meme that we track. Memes are tracked based on criteria including whether we think they are relevant to a theme (currently the elections), whether they are gathering a significant share of the volume of tweets (attention), and whether we observe a burst in volume of tweets about the meme," Indiana's Filippo Menczer, who specializes in the modeling of meme explosions, tells Fast Company. "All of these decisions are done algorithmically, in real time, based on data from the Twitter streaming API." The Truthy website also offers "diffusion network images" to help visualize the data they crunch, graphically representing the size and flow of the meme. Below, for instance, an animation of the diffusion network for Lady Gaga. Truthy.indiana.edu should be a particularly useful tool to spot so-called "astroturfing," i.e., when PR teams inject memes into the discourse by disguising them as genuine "grassroots" behavior. With the simple click of a button "Truthy" button, users can call BS on claims that smell fishy. The Truthy team seems to have plans of their own for how to make their information-purity campaign take off in popularity. They named their site, after all, after a word coined by Stephen Colbert. A recent tweet from Truthy was directed at the comedian: "@StephenAtHome check out http//truthy.indiana.edu for the science of #truthiness." Did it get through? "That would be fun," Menczer says. "Actually I just heard that the university has been in contact with the Colbert show." http://www.fastcompany.com/1692072/t...ter-swift-boat The Secret Sponsors Mike McIntire IT was the wisecracking baby who caught my attention. Sitting on a living room carpet and addressing the camera in a dubbed voice that growls like a Vegas bookie, he tells viewers, “Gramps is sad — Obama cut $455 billion from his Medicare.” He warns of dire consequences from the health insurance overhaul if voters do not take action in November. “I don’t know what smells worse,” the little guy huffs, “my diaper or this new bill.” A sign-off informs the television audience that this high-minded piece of issue advocacy was paid for by the “Coalition to Protect Seniors.” Hmmm. Who are the members of the coalition? Where do they get their money? And why are they spending hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking candidates for Congress around the country? Obvious questions, and yet they are difficult to answer, given the increased use of tax-exempt organizations as vehicles for campaign spending. Nonprofits can raise unlimited amounts, and spend a good percentage of that on political activities. But they are generally not required to publicly disclose their donors, making them appealing to moneyed interests who prefer to stay in the shadows. A recent report by Public Citizen found that in the 2004 elections, 98 percent of outside groups disclosed the names of donors who paid for their political ads; this time around, only 32 percent have done so. The report suggested that groups were taking advantage of a loosening of disclosure requirements and loopholes. Meanwhile, the amount of money spent by these groups skyrocketed to more than $100 million as of last week, more than twice that of the midterms four years ago. Corporations and unions can now spend freely in elections, under a recent Supreme Court ruling, but they still must disclose their activities. That’s why an intermediary that is not required to disclose its donors is attractive to politically active businesses that might want to conceal their activity. “Corporations are reluctant to be associated with specific ad campaigns,” said Paul Ryan, an election law expert at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “I expect more money to go to intermediary groups.” Reporters are paid to try to get around these barriers, and we have resources at our disposal that the average person does not. I’ll get on a plane if necessary to go confront someone, meet a source or check out an address. News organizations subscribe to public records databases, and go to court to try to force disclosure of important information. To see just how hard it is to crack the secrecy that shrouds the vaguely named groups bombarding the airwaves, I went looking for one that seemed typical of the trend. The Coalition to Protect Seniors, with its attention-grabbing ads and middle-of-the-pack spending — about $400,000 as of last week — fit the bill. I also decided to limit myself to the tools that an average voter might have: the Internet and a telephone. My first stop was the coalition’s Web site, which featured an image of two glum-looking old people and lots of facts and figures asserting that the elderly are at risk from “Obamacare.” There was no phone number. No names of anyone involved with it. An address listed there turned out to belong to a Mail Boxes Etc. store in Wilmington, Del. Clicking on the “contact us” tab, I sent off an e-mail to the coalition, with all the confidence of tossing a bottled note into the ocean. (I never heard back.) I called a few political consultants, both Republicans and Democrats. All right, I’ll admit your average voter does not have numbers for Washington political operatives programmed into their cellphones, but I needed to start somewhere. As it happened, none of them knew anything about this group. “Is that the one with the talking baby?” one of them said. I went a little deeper. A check of incorporation filings showed that the coalition was formed as a nonprofit in June, around the same time its Web site went up. It listed a registered service agent — someone who accepts legal papers on a company’s behalf — as its official address; a hosting service held its Internet domain name, further masking its actual location and the people behind it. No in-depth news stories had been done about it. A search for lawsuits, tax filings, liens, property records — any sort of public document I could think of — yielded nothing. Maybe the spending reports it files with the Federal Election Commission would provide a clue. As with other so-called independent groups that support or oppose candidates, the coalition must disclose its expenditures, although it does not need to reveal the sources of its cash. The filings showed that it had been busy running TV ads and sending out mailers opposing candidates who supported the health care bill. It reported spending $108,000 in the first few weeks of September to campaign against eight Democrats, including Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader; Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado; and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Like its Web site, the coalition’s F.E.C. filings also gave its address as Delaware, where many corporations are registered in name only because of the state’s business-friendly tax and disclosure laws. The address on the coalition’s filings was a suite in a large office building in Wilmington that seemed to be shared by an array of other businesses involved in the health care, financial services and energy industries. Calls to several of them turned up none that acknowledged knowing anything about the coalition. One last clue emerged from the filings. They showed that much of its money had gone to a Florida consulting firm, the Fenwick Group, a two-person outfit whose Web site listed other clients that included health care and technology companies. I called the phone number for Fenwick. A man answered. “K & M Insurance,” he said. “I’m looking to speak to somebody with the Fenwick Group,” I said. “Oh, that would be Jay.” I was sent to the voice mailbox of someone named Jay Handline. I hung up without leaving a message and pondered this latest development. Why, I wondered, did the number for the coalition’s campaign consultant ring at an insurance company? Looking at K M’s Web site, I saw that it is a broker for seven large health insurance providers, including Aetna, Blue Cross, Humana and United Healthcare. Mr. Handline, it turns out, also serves as the chief marketing officer of Convergence Health, a health care technology company. That is, when he is not running Dance Trance, a dance fitness studio where he is known as a “nationally acclaimed jazz funk fusion choreographer,” according to its Web site. “People of all ages are welcome to come and groove to the thumpin’ music!” it says. I tried the Fenwick number again, and this time Mr. Handline picked up. He said he was not a member of the coalition and only placed its television ads, adding that he got the job through someone in the health care field for whom he had done similar work in the past. He would not name the person “But they’re not a member of the coalition either,” he said. So who are the members? “I really can’t give you any details.” He took down my number and said he would see if anyone in the coalition wanted to talk about it. No one did. I suppose I could keep nosing around by traveling to Delaware, or better yet, Florida (I haven’t grooved to the music in a long time). It may yet come to that. At any rate, it is clearly going to take a lot more work to see through an organization that is about as transparent as a dirty diaper. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/we...3mcintire.html Politically Motivated Cyber Attacks According to a new report, 53 percent of critical infrastructure providers report that their networks have experienced what they perceived as politically motivated cyber attacks. Participants of the Symantec survey claimed to have experienced such an attack on an average of 10 times in the past five years, incurring an average cost of $850,000 during a period of five years to their businesses. Participants from the energy industry reported that they were best prepared for such an attack, while participants from the communications industry reported that they were the least prepared. Critical infrastructure providers represent industries that are of such importance either to a nation’s economy or society that if their cyber networks were successfully attacked and damaged, the result would threaten national security. Recommendations to ensure resiliency against critical infrastructure cyber attacks: * Develop and enforce IT policies and automate compliance processes. By prioritizing risks and defining policies that span across all locations, organizations can enforce policies through built-in automation and workflow and not only identify threats but remediate incidents as they occur or anticipate them before they happen. * Protect information proactively by taking an information-centric approach. Taking a content-aware approach to protecting information is key in knowing who owns the information, where sensitive information resides, who has access, and how to protect it as it is coming in or leaving your organization. Utilize encryption to secure sensitive information and prohibit access by unauthorized individuals. * Authenticate identities by leveraging solutions that allow businesses to ensure only authorized personnel have access to systems. Authentication also enables organizations to protect public facing assets by ensuring the true identity of a device, system, or application is authentic. This prevents individuals from accidentally disclosing credentials to an attack site and from attaching unauthorized devices to the infrastructure. * Manage systems by implementing secure operating environments, distributing and enforcing patch levels, automating processes to streamline efficiency, and monitoring and reporting on system status. * Protect the infrastructure by securing endpoints, messaging and Web environments. In addition, defending critical internal servers and implementing the ability to back up and recover data should be priorities. Organizations also need the visibility and security intelligence to respond to threats rapidly. * Ensure 24x7 availability. Organizations should implement testing methods that are non-disruptive and they can reduce complexity by automating failover. Virtual environments should be treated the same as a physical environment, showing the need for organizations to adopt more cross-platform and cross-environment tools, or standardize on fewer platforms. * Develop an information management strategy that includes an information retention plan and policies. Organizations need to stop using backup for archiving and legal holds, implement deduplication everywhere to free resources, use a full-featured archive system and deploy data loss prevention technologies. http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=9957 Official: Syria Accuses Teenage Blogger of Spying AP Syria accuses a 19-year-old detained blogger of being a spy, a Syrian official said Monday, the first comment from the authorities in a case that sparked calls by the New York-based Human Rights Watch for the young woman's release. Tal al-Mallohi was taken into custody last December. Her blog, known for poetry and social commentary, focuses mostly on Palestinian issues and suffering. "She was detained on accusation of spying for a foreign country," the Syrian official said. "Her spying led to an attack against a Syrian army officer by the agents of this foreign country." The official did not specify which country al-Mallohi allegedly spied for or elaborate on the attack on the Syrian officer. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media. It was not clear whether al-Mallohi's arrest was connected to the blog. Her father, Dosar al-Mallohi, told The Associated Press that he and his wife visited their daughter at Doma prison last Thursday and that she was in good health. It was the first time they had seen their daughter or told of her whereabouts in nine months, he said, but declined to comment further. Last month, Human Rights Watch called for al-Mallohi's release. "Detaining a high school student for nine months without charge is typical of the cruel, arbitrary behavior of Syria's security services," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said at the time. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...n-Blogger.html Can 'Friends' Sign You Up for Offensive Facebook Groups? Chloe Albanesius Facebook's new Groups function lets you commiserate with a smaller clique of "friends" on a particular topic. The idea is to free your main news feed of random musings about topics that the majority of your friends care nothing about. Want to chat about running, "Twilight," or your favorite brand of clothing? Invite a few friends and take it to a Group. About that invite function. The people you invite to an open Group are automatically members; they don't have to accept. That's fine if you are creating Groups in good faith, but what about the inevitable pranksters who create questionable Groups and automatically enroll some of their (sometimes famous) friends? That trick was outlined in a recent blog post from Sophos' Chester Wisniewski, who found that someone had created a Group for NAMBLA (essentially a pro-pedophile group), and added their "friend," TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. Arrington then allegedly added Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. And the whole thing showed up in the public news feed. Wisniewski also posted a screen shot that said one of his friends had unwittingly been added to a Group called "What about all the good things Hitler did?" "Not only [has Facebook] not improved privacy they have created a somewhat gaping hole," Wisniewski wrote. "This could be abused in a very nasty way. Imagine you are traveling to the United States from overseas and your friends find it amusing to add you to a group that looks terrorist related. You might find a welcoming committee from the border patrol that you weren't expecting." Wisniewski said the feature highlights the fact that Facebook believes the "ability to connect trumps your ability to decide what should be done with your identity." A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that users can add any of their friends to a Group. But she likened its Groups policy to its photo-tagging policy or the ability to send Facebook messages. "We made the decision to allow Group members to add others to the Group in order to make the product simple, and because it resembles something we all understand: adding one of your contacts to an e-mail thread," she said via e-mail. "Similarly to the controls in place for photo tagging, you can remove yourself from a Group at anytime. If you remove yourself from a Group, you can't be added back by a member." Facebook suggested that if you have friends who will add you to offensive Groups, maybe they shouldn't be your friend anymore. "If you have a friend that is adding you to Groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend – and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any Group," the spokeswoman said. "If you don't trust someone to look out for you when making these types of decisions on the site, we'd suggest that you shouldn't be friends on Facebook." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370436,00.asp New Class of Malware Will Steal Behavioural Patterns Computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people's private patterns of behavior. It's not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares. But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behaviour in the network--how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on. Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news. This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping. Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems. "There is no reason to think that developers of malicious applications will not implement the same method and algorithms into future malware, or that they have not already started doing so," they say. The idea would be to release some kind of malware that records the patterns of links in a network. This kind of malware will be very hard to detect, say Altshuler and co. They've studied the strategies that best mine behavioural pattern data from a real mobile phone network consisting of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. (They call this type of attack "Stealing Reality".) In conventional attacks, malware spreads most efficiently when the infection rate is high, and this maximises the amount of information it can steal. But it also makes the malware relatively easy to spot. In a behavioural pattern attack, their surprising conclusion is that the most effective way of mining data is to have a low infection rate, so the malware spreads slowly. That's because it takes time to collect good information about an individual's behaviour patterns. Also, a slow spread is less likely to be picked up by network administrators and antivirus software. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this new kind of theft is its potential impact. If malware steals your credit card details or online banking passwords, you can easily change them and this limits the damage. But if a malicious attacker steals your behavioural patterns, there's almost nothing you can do. You can't change your network of friends or family, for example. What's more, once this information is released, it is more or less impossible to contain--how would you ensure that every copy had been deleted? The prospects for avoiding this new threat look bleak. As Altshuler and co point out: "History has shown that whenever something has a tangible value associated with it, there will always be those who try to malevolently 'game' the system for profit." We'll almost certainly have to deal with this one sooner or later. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25859/ WNY: High Tech, High Hopes Yahoo’s new data center in Lockport is already paying dividends for Western New York….and not just the jobs it created. The ripple effect could be just what the doctor ordered for our region. Just a week after Yahoo opened its doors, came word that Verizon is considering an even bigger data center….also in Niagara County. They’re looking at a site in Somerset. And right now it’s just talk, but the talk is pretty impressive. A facility that could cost up to $1.9 billion. At least 200 employees. They’re also reportedly looking at a site in Orleans County. And two other states are also being considered….so this might not happen, or could end up happening on a much smaller scale. But people in the IT industry are paying attention…and that could pay off big time. Want proof? Check out Networkworld.com, a news and information site for Network and IT executives. Last week they reported on the opening of Yahoo’s state-of-the-art energy-efficient site. This week they followed up with an article with this headline: Buffalo: Data center capital of America? The Chamber of Commerce dreams of articles like that. After talking about Yahoo and Verizon, the article points out our area’s pluses: low-cost electric power, tax incentives, plenty of shovel-ready sites, etc. They even make our weather a plus….pointing out that we don’t worry about things like earthquakes or hurricanes, and how the cooler climate helps lower the operating costs of a data center. The cool breezes coming off Lake Ontario play a big role in the high-tech chicken coop design of the Yahoo facility, which will have dramatically lower energy costs. Take that, Silicon Valley! Here's a link to the Networkworld article. And here's a similar one in the Data Center Journal, which has an even better headline: "Buffalo as Data Center Mecca". No question mark, either. Needless to say, that site is read by lots of people in the data center world. Not to mention the fact that hundreds of news and technology sites posted lengthy articles about the unique chicken coop design of the Yahoo facility. Articles which had to be noticed by cost-conscious executives in the computer industry. And while so far there have only been about 100 jobs created, the potential is there for a lot more....and they're the kind of jobs any area would want to create. So the next time you hear about some national magazine putting Buffalo on its list of dead, dying, or shrinking cities….and refers to our rust-belt history….maybe this whole high-tech thing provides hope after all. http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=3288 "Social Network" Passes First Test with Oscar Voters Borys Kit and Jay A. Fernandez Columbia Pictures' fall hopeful "The Social Network" passed two crucial hurdles during the weekend. The first was opening No. 1 at the domestic box office. The other was a smaller but no less telling test: pleasing an early audience of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote for the Academy Awards. As general audiences sampled director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's take on the origins of Facebook, a large group of Academy voters -- including actors Angie Dickinson and Robert Forster and "Little Miss Sunshine" producer Ron Yerxa -- settled into an 8 p.m. screening Saturday at the lush Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy's Beverly Hills headquarters. The 1,012-seat theater was packed with members and their guests, many, but not all, playing on the back nine of life -- all of which made the screening notable. Critics' takes on the film so far have been almost universally positive (some extremely so), with encouraging predictions about the movie's Oscar prospects. But while younger audiences were expected to show up to get a peek at the movie's zeitgeist-y content, a Hollywood-sign-size question mark has hung over the reactions from older voters unlikely to connect as readily to the material. If Saturday's early look is any indication, the movie has made quite a few friends in that demographic, too."I love it," said one older person, who described the film as "a story of winning at all costs and its consequences." A woman in her 80s echoed the sentiment. "It broke my heart," she said. "It's a story of friendship and betrayal." Their connection to the material seemed to bypass the real-life historical context of Facebook's creation and instead centered on the tragic universality of the shattered friendship at its center. "If you haven't been betrayed, you haven't lived, they say," another viewer said. A Few Grumbles Those with a less positive view of the film grumbled about its two-hour length, and others griped about having "trouble with the postmodern structure." Younger audiences growing up with film in the post-"Pulp Fiction" era tend to find that kind of forward-and-back rhythm more energizing than challenging. In general, the dreaded generational split was not in evidence. From the whirlwind first scene, in which Jesse Eisenberg, as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, jousts with Rooney Mara, as his besieged college girlfriend in a campus bar, the crowd was laughing right along. And the majority of the people in the audience stayed through the credits. One multigenerational family in the lobby after the screening consisted of a woman in her 30s, her father and her grandmother. They all gave the movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up, with the grandmother saying, "I don't think it's a generational question at all." Also drawing positive comments were the performances of Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin ("Did you know he is English? You can't take your eyes off him," one viewer said). The jury was more split on Timberlake. Even as the film's first-weekend gross came in under many watchers' predictions, its opening haul represents about half the project's production budget. Long legs at theaters not only will throw the studio's bottom line into the black, but it could keep awards momentum going for what is shaping up to be one of the strongest contenders for this year's biggest prizes. And it will need it, if this crowd was representative of the awards struggle ahead. "The King's Speech," the Weinstein Company drama starring Colin Firth that has been drawing raves since its first festival screenings a month ago in Telluride and Toronto, was on the audience's mind even Saturday night. One Academy veteran admitted that "Speech's" traditional elements -- it's a British period drama about a royal overcoming a personal obstacle at a time of war -- "hits the sweet spot of Oscar voters." When approached about the film, one woman exclaimed, "Oh, 'King's Speech!' That's the one that's going to win the Oscar!" She hadn't seen it yet. (Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters.) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69015Z20101004 Sorkin vs. Zuckerberg ‘The Social Network’ is wonderful entertainment, but its message is actually kind of evil. Lawrence Lessig In 2004, a Harvard undergraduate got an idea (yes, that is ambiguous) for a new kind of social network. Here’s the important point: He built it. He had a bunch of extremely clever clues for opening up a social space that every kid (anyone younger than I am) would love. He architected that social space around the social life of the kids he knew. And he worked ferociously hard to make sure the system was stable and functioning at all times. The undergraduate then spread it to other schools, then other communities, and now to anyone. Today, with more than 500,000,000 users, it is one of the fastest growing networks in the history of man. That undergraduate is now a billionaire, multiple times over. He is the youngest billionaire in the world. In 2009, Aaron Sorkin (“Sports Night,” “The West Wing”) got (yes, the same word) the idea to write a script for a movie about this new social network. Here’s the important point: He made it. As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field. But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.” Not every account of a new world suffers like this. Alexis de Tocqueville showed the old world there was more here than there. But Sorkin is no Tocqueville. Indeed, he simply hasn’t a clue to the real secret sauce in the story he is trying to tell. And the ramifications of this misunderstanding go well beyond the multiplex. Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out of the company by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. These cases function as a kind of Greek chorus, setting the standards of right, throughout the film. It is against the high ideals they represent that everything else gets judged. And indeed, the lawyers are the only truly respectable or honorable characters in the film. When they’re ridiculed or insulted by Zuckerberg, their responses are more mature, and better, than Zuckerberg’s. (If you remember the scene in “The Wire” where Omar uses his wit to cut the lawyer to bits, that’s not this film.) The lawyers here rise above the pokes, regardless of the brilliance in Zuckerberg’s charge. This is kindergarten. They are the teachers. We’re all meant to share a knowing wink, or smirk, as we watch the silliness of children at play. In Sorkin’s world—which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture—this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened. The case for Zuckerberg’s former partner is stronger, and more sensible and sad. But here again, the villains are not even named. Sorkin makes the autodidact Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the evil one. (No copyright-industry bad blood there.) I know Parker. This is not him. The nastiest people in this story (at least if Sorkin tells this part accurately) were the Facebook lawyers who show up in poorly fitting suits and let Saverin believe that they were in this, as in everything else they had done, representing Saverin as well. If that’s what actually happened, it was plainly unethical. No doubt, Saverin was stupid to trust them, but the absurdity here is a world where it is stupid to trust members of an elite and regulated profession. Again, an absurdity one could well miss in this film between all the cocaine and practically naked twentysomethings. But the most frustrating bit of The Social Network is not its obliviousness to the silliness of modern American law. It is its failure to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story. In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows. This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite. Instead, we’re just shown a big explosion ($25 billion in market capitalization—that’s a lot of dynamite!) and expected to grok (the word us geek-wannabes use to show you we know of what we speak) the world of difference this innovation in bombs entails. What is important in Zuckerberg’s story is not that he’s a boy genius. He plainly is, but many are. It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is. And it’s not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history, told with different technologies at different times and places. Instead, what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn’t invent that platform. He was a hacker (a term of praise) who built for it. And as much as Zuckerberg deserves endless respect from every decent soul for his success, the real hero in this story doesn’t even get a credit. It’s something Sorkin doesn’t even notice. For comparison’s sake, consider another pair of Massachusetts entrepreneurs, Tom First and Tom Scott. After graduating from Brown in 1989, they started a delivery service to boats on Nantucket Sound. During their first winter, they invented a juice drink. People liked their juice. Slowly, it dawned on First and Scott that maybe there was a business here. Nantucket Nectars was born. The two Toms started the long slog of getting distribution. Ocean Spray bought the company. It later sold the business to Cadbury Schweppes. At each step after the first, along the way to giving their customers what they wanted, the two Toms had to ask permission from someone. They needed permission from a manufacturer to get into his plant. Permission from a distributor to get into her network. And permission from stores to get before the customer. Each step between the idea and the customer was a slog. They made the slog, and succeeded. But many try to make that slog and fail. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes not. Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere. This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible—and it was on the Facebook platform resting on that Internet platform that another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, organized the most important digital movement for Obama, and that the film’s petty villain, Sean Parker, organized Causes, one of the most important tools to support nonprofit social missions. The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea. I had always hoped (naively, no doubt) that this point would be obvious to the creators of film. No field of innovation is more burdened by the judgments of idiots in the middle than film. Scores of directors have watched in horror as their creativity gets maimed by suits-carrying-focus-groups. I had thought that if only these creators would let themselves understand the ethic of Internet creativity—where the creator gets to speak directly to an audience, where an audience is brought on stage, and talks back—they would get it. And if they did, that there might actually be a chance for this understanding to be shown in one of the only ways this culture understands anymore—through film. Indeed, as I walked into this film unprimed by early reviews, I had hoped, “West Wing” fan-boy that I am, that of all the storytellers in Hollywood, Sorkin was most likely to get it. He didn’t. His film doesn’t show it. What it shows is worth watching. But what it doesn’t show is an understanding of the most important social and economic platform for innovation in our history. Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him. To his credit, Sorkin gives him the only lines of true insight in the film: In response to the twins’ lawsuit, he asks, does “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?” And to his partner who signed away his ownership in Facebook: “You’re gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Friends who know Zuckerberg say such insight is common. No doubt his handlers are panicked that the film will tarnish the brand. He should listen less to these handlers. As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish. http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and...social-network Toshiba to Sell 3-D TV That Requires No Glasses Hiroko Tabuchi Toshiba, the Japanese electronics maker, said Monday that it would be the first on the market with a TV that displays images in 3-D without requiring viewers to don dedicated glasses. The clunky and expensive glasses — which viewers must wear to watch 3-D movies at theaters and 3-D images on TVs currently on sale from the likes of Samsung, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba itself — have been one big obstacle to a wider adoption of 3-D technology. Toshiba says its new 3-D liquid crystal display TVs, which will go on sale in Japan in December, use a high-definition screen backlit with LEDs, a special sheet placed on top of the screen and Toshiba’s Cell chip technology to display information from nine images created in real time from a single frame. The TVs can convert standard 2-D images into 3-D, Masaaki Oosumi, president of Toshiba Visual Products, said at a product unveiling on the eve of an electronics trade show in Chiba, a Tokyo suburb. The TVs, which will initially come in 20-inch and 12-inch models, carry price tags of ¥240,000 and ¥120,000, or $2,880 and $1,440, respectively. He said Toshiba currently had no plans to sell the TVs overseas. “A dream TV is now a reality,” Mr. Oosumi said. “It’s obviously more natural to watch TV without glasses. That is the natural technological progression.” A 20-inch model shown to reporters displayed crisp images in 3-D: a close-up shot of a pink flower, a school of blue and yellow fish. Viewing the screen from a wide angle, however, the image seemed to blur: The school of fish looked like a blurry mass. Making a TV that properly displays 3-D images even when viewed from wider angles has been another technological challenge facing TV makers. Toshiba says its 3-D TVs work best when viewed from within a 40-degree zone. Toshiba also showed a prototype 56-inch version of the 3-D TV. Bringing out models in bigger sizes would be crucial in marketing the TVs in the U.S. and European markets, Mr. Oosumi said. In the meantime, Toshiba will continue to sell larger-model 3-D TVs that require dedicated glasses. The company just released its first 3-D TV, complete with glasses, in August. All of Toshiba’s 3-D TVs can also display images in 2-D. In current 3-D TV technology, images for each eye are displayed one after the other in rapid succession. Filters in the dedicated glasses flash on and off in sync with the TV, so that the right eye sees one image, then the left eye sees the next image. Toshiba’s TVs get around that problem by drawing on the Cell imaging processor to display nine different images for each frame and placing a special sheet on the screen that angles each image to ensure that the right eye sees only images meant for the right eye, and the left eye sees only images meant for the left eye. Toshiba and other TV makers hope that the emerging 3-D technology drives consumers to upgrade their TVs. They also hope that the new technology will enable them to place a price premium on TVs, helping to stem a precipitous drop in flat-panel TV prices in recent years. While video game enthusiasts and other early technology adapters had been receptive to wearing glasses to view images in 3-D, analysts had said TV makers had to eliminate the glasses to appeal to a wider audience. The additional price of the glasses was another obstacle. But with the technology still evolving, TV makers may have a tough time convincing consumers that they should buy the early models on the market. Toshiba said it initially hoped to sell 1,000 units of the glasses-free 3-D TVs a month. Separately, the company has said it hopes that over half of its annual TV sales target of 15 million units would come from sales of the bigger TVs that require glasses. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/te...05toshiba.html Apple TV's Netflix Service Is Missing the Gay and Lesbian Category? Apple TV's Netflix Service Is Missing the Gay and Lesbian Category?Back when the Netflix app for iPhone became available, there were complaints that the gay and lesbian category was missing. With Apple TV deliveries trickling in, there are reports that the Netflix service there isn't displaying the category either. What's going on? Is Apple pulling an Amazon? We know they're fairly prudish when it comes to boobies and racy apps, but I shouldn't have to spell out how ridiculous it is that they could disregard an entire slice of the North American population like that. Apple's forum user Brendan5 pointed out the omission on Saturday, saying that he can find the category by searching for a film he knows should be in there (such as Newcastle), but otherwise the category does not appear in the main feed. The same category was missing from the iPhone's Netflix app when it launched in August, but it sounds as though it's now present. If anyone in the US with a brand new Apple TV can confirm this by checking their hockey pucks, please do. My antiquated Apple TV and non-US zipcode mean I'm in the dark here. [Apple forums — Thanks, BrodySF!] http://gizmodo.com/5654822/apple-tvs...bian-category/ P2P Backed Film Platform to Reward Influencers Ernesto Supported by a conglomerate of file-sharing sites and applications, the VODO project offers a novel distribution platform for indie filmmakers. The model has already proven itself as all major releases have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. However, to really tap into the core of peer-to-peer distribution, the focus will now shift to peer-to-peer promotion. In an attempt to connect filmmakers with the distribution power of the file-sharing community, Steal This Film director Jamie King launched VODO last year. The project taps into this powerful capability to promote works of independent filmmakers. VODO, short for voluntary donation, has been a great success thus far. With support from several torrent sites including EZTV, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, all of VODO’s major releases have been downloaded several hundred thousand times. In addition, downloaders have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the filmmakers. Thus far, most of the buzz has been created by a small coalition of file-sharing sites. But with the the release of VODO 2.1 which rolled out this week, the founders of the project hope to get the average peer more engaged in promoting VODO films. With this strategy the promotional power should shift towards a swarm of real people and influencers, instead of the large sites. The site added the VO.DO domain to the existing VODO.net one this week and introduced several new features at the same time. One of the new features is meant to increase user engagement. To motivate the public to share and promote films that are released through VODO, the project has introduced a reward system. “We’ve created an internal currency, the Do, with which we’ll reward Influencers,” VODO founder Jamie King explains. “Every time someone downloads a release because of you, visits an artist’s VODO page, signs up or sponsors an artist, you’ll receive a few Do.” VODO users who have an account can link to films on their blogs, or post download links on Facebook and Twitter. The VODO site then keeps track of all incoming links and how many people sign up and donate through their influence. “There are two ways to look at Do: as a reputation currency that allows people to compare how much value they have produced for VODO creators; and as an exchange currency that has actual value in the world. In time, you’ll be able to trade Do for all sorts of offers, prizes and merchandise,” King says. Of course, a lot of individuals have already helped to promote VODO releases such as Pioneer One and The Yes Men Fix The World. But through the new features the VODO team wants to reward those people and emphasize that the real power of peer-to-peer promotion lies with the people. Another major change in VODO 2.1 aside from Do is the open submission process. Previously, VODO would carefully select which films were allowed to be distributed via the site, but as of now submissions are open. Everyone who wants to share video content can create a publisher account, connect with fans, and set up sponsorship incentives. Every month VODO will continue to select one film that will be promoted and featured by the leading file-sharing sites and applications. Today, VODO begins promoting another high-quality film: Person Of Interest. As with all VODO releases it can be downloaded via BitTorrent for free. http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-backed-f...encers-101003/ Japan Recycles Minerals From Used Electronics Hiroko Tabuchi Two decades after global competition drove the mines in this corner of Japan to extinction, Kosaka is again abuzz with talk of new riches. The treasures are not copper or coal. They are rare-earth elements and other minerals that are crucial to many Japanese technologies and have so far come almost exclusively from China, the global leader in rare earth mining. Recent problems with Chinese supplies of rare earths have sent Japanese traders and companies in search of alternative sources, creating opportunities for Kosaka. This town’s hopes for a mining comeback lie not underground, but in what Japan refers to as urban mining — recycling the valuable metals and minerals from the country’s huge stockpiles of used electronics like cellphones and computers. “We’ve literally discovered gold in cellphones,” said Tetsuzo Fuyushiba, a former land minister and now opposition party member, who visited here recently to survey Kosaka’s recycling plant. Kosaka’s pursuits have become especially important for Japan in recent weeks. Late last month, amid a diplomatic spat with Tokyo, China started to block exports of certain rare earths to Japan. The shipping ban was still in effect on Monday evening in Japan, an industry official said, though a trickle of shipments seemed to be seeping out as a result of uneven enforcement of the ban by customs officers at various ports. China has allowed exports of Chinese-made rare earth magnets and other rare earth products to Japan, but not semi-processed rare earth ores that would enable Japanese companies to make products. The cutoff has caused hand-wringing at Japanese manufacturers, from giants like Toyota to tiny electronics makers, because the raw materials are crucial to products as diverse as hybrid electric cars, wind turbines and computer display screens. Late last week, Japan’s trade minister, Akihiro Ohata, said he would ask the government to include a “rare earth strategy” in its supplementary budget for this year. In Kosaka, Dowa Holdings, the company that mined here for over a century, has built a recycling plant whose 200-foot-tall furnace renders old electronics parts into a molten stew from which valuable metals and other minerals can be extracted. The salvaged parts come from around Japan and overseas, including the United States. Besides gold, Dowa’s subsidiary, Kosaka Smelting and Refining, has so far successfully reclaimed rare metals like indium, used in liquid-crystal display screens, and antimony, used in silicon wafers for semiconductors. The company is trying to develop ways to reclaim the harder-to-mine minerals included among the rare earths — like neodymium, a vital element in industrial batteries used in electric motors, and dysprosium, used in laser materials. Although Japan is poor in natural resources, the National Institute for Materials Science, a government-affiliated research group, says that used electronics in Japan hold an estimated 300,000 tons of rare earths. Though that amount is tiny compared to reserves in China, which mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, tapping these urban mines could help reduce Japan’s dependence on its neighbor, analysts say. The global rare earth market is small by mining standards — just $1.5 billion last year, although its value is rising as prices have surged in response to Chinese restrictions on exports. Concern over China’s hoarding of rare earths has also been spreading to the United States. Although China has not specifically blocked shipments to any place but Japan, it had already tightened its overall export quotas of the minerals, announcing in July that it would reduce them by 72 percent for the rest of the year. Last Wednesday in Washington, the House of Representatives approved a bill authorizing research to address the supply of rare earths, saying the minerals were critical to energy, military and manufacturing technologies. Japanese companies generally avoid discussing their mineral holdings. But experts say that some manufacturers have been stockpiling rare earths, building inventories ranging from a few months’ to a year’s worth. Last Friday, Mr. Ohata, the trade minister, said the government was considering starting a stockpile of rare earths as a buffer against trade interruptions. Heightened interest in alternative sources has also been an impetus to plans to reopen or establish new rare earth mines in a handful of countries around the world, including South Africa, Australia and Canada, along with the United States, where Molycorp intends to expand a mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. The Japanese trading company Sojitz is negotiating the rights to a rare earth mine in Vietnam, while the industrial conglomerate Sumitomo plans to work with Kazakhstan’s government to recover rare earth elements from uranium ore residues. Japan is also pushing for new manufacturing processes that do not require rare earths. Last week, the government-affiliated New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, or N.E.D.O., announced that it had developed a motor for hybrid vehicles that used cheap and readily available ferrite magnets, instead of the rare earth magnets typically required. Hitachi Metals, meanwhile, is working on a magnet that minimizes the use of rare earths by employing copper alloys. “Japanese companies have become painfully aware of the risks of relying so greatly on China for strategic metals,” said Akio Shibata, chief representative at the Marubeni Research Institute in Tokyo. He said Japanese industry might benefit from researching alternatives to rare earths and developing recycling methods, noting how the oil shocks of the 1970s helped eventually make Japan a leader in fuel-efficiency technologies. Various players have tried to recycle rare earths and metals in Japan. Last year, Hitachi began to experiment to extract rare earths from magnets in old computer hard drives, though the company said the project was not expected to go into operation until 2013. But it is Dowa, the company that has mined in Kosaka since 1884, that has emerged as the field’s early leader. And it could not come a moment too soon for this town of 6,000, which is littered with the remnants of its old ore mines: tunnels overgrown with weeds, old railroad tracks, and an abandoned bathhouse where miners once sponged off the grime from their long days underground. The mines operated up to 1990, until a surging yen and international competition drove operations out of business. Now, portions of the old red-brick ore processing factories serve as part of Dowa’s recycling plant, which started fully operating two years ago. “It is important for Japan to actively tap its urban mines,” said Kohmei Harada, a managing director at the National Institute of Materials Science, and an enthusiastic supporter of recycling efforts like the one in Kosaka. Apart from rare metals and earths, Mr. Harada estimates that about 6,800 tons of gold, or the equivalent of about 16 percent of the total reserves in the world’s gold mines, lie in used electronics in Japan. “Japan’s economy has grown by gathering resources from around the world, and those resources are still with us, in one form or another,” he said. But this form of recycling is an expensive and technically difficult process that is still being perfected. At Dowa’s plant, computer chips and other vital parts from electronics are hacked into two-centimeter squares. This feedstock then must be smelted in a furnace that reaches 1,400 degrees Celsius before various minerals can be extracted. The factory processes 300 tons of materials a day, and each ton yields only about 150 grams of rare metals. Though Dowa does not disclose the finances of its Kosaka recycling operations, the company says that after a year of operating at a low capacity, the factory now turns a profit. Over all, net income at Dowa Holdings, which deals in industrial metals and electronic materials, almost tripled in the quarter ending June 30, to 6.52 billion yen, or $78.2 million, as global industrial production rebounded. As Dowa has turned its attention to rare earths, a priority is developing ways to render neodymium, which is used in powerful magnets. Its extraction has proved costly. Neodymium is found only in tiny quantities in parts used in the speakers of cellphones, for example, making it a challenge to collect meaningful amounts, said Utaro Sekiya, the manager of Dowa’s recycling plant. Finding enough electronics parts to recycle has also grown more difficult for Dowa, which procures used gadgets from around the world. A growing number of countries, including the United States, are recognizing the value of holding onto old electronics. And China already bans the export of used computer motherboards and other discarded electronics parts. “It’s about time Japan started paying more attention to recycling rare earths,” Mr. Sekiya said. “If we can become a leader in this field,” he said, “perhaps China will be the one coming to us to buy our technology.” Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/bu...05recycle.html FAA: Cargo Holds Can Get Too Hot for Lithium Batteries AP U.S. aviation officials are warning air carriers that new research shows lithium batteries are sensitive to heat and can ignite in-flight if transported in cargo compartments that get too hot. The Federal Aviation Administration also acknowledged publicly for the first time Friday that a United Parcel Service 747-400 plane that crashed in Dubai last month killing both pilots was carrying a large quantity of lithium batteries. Since the early 1990s, there have been dozens of incidents of batteries igniting in flight. But it has not been known what triggered many of the fires. FAA now says recent research has identified heat as the trigger and is offering air carriers advice on how to reduce the risk of fire. http://chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2...batteries.html As Charlie Brown, Lucy Turn 60, Family of Creator Charles Schulz Plans for the Gang's Future Brett Zongker Good grief, Charlie Brown. The world has certainly changed since the Peanuts were born. In 60 years, the U.S. sent a man to the moon, survived the Cold War and now has one of the worst economic funks in decades. All that time, Charles Schulz's imaginary gang has been a fixture of newspaper funny pages and grainy holiday TV specials. Now, his family is working to keep Snoopy, Lucy and the rest alive for generations to come. A handful of new projects is in the works. The first new animated film in five years is set for release next spring called "Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown." ABC just signed on for five more years of airing Charlie Brown holiday specials. A new social media game began on Facebook and Twitter last month to "Countdown to the Great Pumpkin," and the comic strip has made its way to a popular gaming website for millions of children. The enduring appeal is no surprise, said Lee Mendelson, who produced the Peanuts films with Schulz for more than 40 years. Schulz had said "there's always going to be a market for innocence in this country," Mendelson said Friday as a photograph of Schulz at his drawing board was hung at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in recognition of his impact on the nation. Schulz died in 2000. "The innocence and the humor that he brought, I think, helped us as a nation through many bad times," Mendelson said. Peanuts comics, which first appeared in 1950 in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, still appear in 2,200 newspapers in 75 different countries. Newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps Co. sold the licensing unit that controls "Peanuts" and other comics in April to Iconix Brand Group Inc. — a licensing company partially owned by the Schulz family — for $175 million. Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist's widow, said she often hears from people at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., about how well the characters reflect their own feelings. That may be a key to the Peanuts' longevity, she said. "Reading Peanuts got people through really tough times in their childhoods," she said. "I think it's mirroring their feelings that life is tough, knowing somebody else is in the same boat as they — and yet having hope." A new book out later this month called "The Peanuts Collection" will trace the comic strip's history and how it evolved over time. Jeannie Schulz said the genius came from her husband's commonsense, Midwest upbringing as the son of a barber in Minnesota who learned to tell stories in his own way. Schulz taught Sunday school and was proud to be a dad. He had an introverted take on the world, and yet was observant of everything around him, she said. "Until people change. Until they take a pill to become perfect people and all have perfectly balanced personalities ... I think he's given them a touchstone," she said. "He's given them something to let them know that they're all right." Fantagraphics Books Inc. is producing a series of volumes — each with two years worth of Peanuts comics — to let fans read the strip every day. On Oct. 14, the Peanuts cast also will launch a new "Great Pumpkin Island" on Poptropica, a popular game website for millions of tweens who may be less familiar with Charlie Brown and his friends. And the Peanuts gang has come to life online with Flash-animated comics. Next year's film will feature new animations created by a team involving Charles Schulz's son, Craig, and "Pearls Before Swine" cartoonist Stephan Pastis. Even with the more modern trappings, though, the animations have maintained their simplistic roots. Jeannie Schulz has said in the past that computer-generated "Peanuts" characters just wouldn't quite look right. Before establishing a permanent place in Washington with the portrait unveiled last week, Schulz brought his characters to the Smithsonian in 1985 for a visit for a TV series called "This is America, Charlie Brown." Lucy marveled at seeing a comic strip with their names on a museum wall, and Charlie Brown found his name and Snoopy's on the Apollo 10 capsules at the space museum. Schulz was a history buff and considered himself an Eisenhower Republican, but he mostly stayed away from politics in his cartoons. He included timely issues, though, such as the environment, race, bullying and other themes. But if he visited Washington today, Mendelson said, Schulz would be taken aback by the bitter political tone. "I think he would be appalled," Mendelson said, "and I think he would have poked fun at it in the comic strip." http://www.courant.com/news/nation-w...0,555789.story New Fuel for Local Papers: Medical Marijuana Ads Jeremy W. Peters  When it hit the streets here last week, the latest issue of ReLeaf, a pullout supplement to The Colorado Springs Independent devoted to medical marijuana, landed with a satisfying thud. Forty-eight pages in all, it was stuffed with advertisements for businesses with names like Mile High Mike’s, Happy Buddah and the Healthy Connections (which enticed potential customers with promises of “naughty nurses” to tend to patients’ needs). A full-page ad in ReLeaf costs about $1,100, making the publication a cash cow for The Independent, which has used its bounty from medical marijuana ads this year to hire one new reporter and promote three staff members to full time. The paper has also added a column called CannaBiz that follows news from across the country; its author is the new marijuana beat writer. What would happen in the many communities now allowing medical marijuana had been a subject of much hand-wringing. But few predicted this: that it would be a boon for local newspapers looking for ways to cope with the effects of the recession and the flight of advertising — especially classified listings — to Web sites like Craigslist. But in states like Colorado, California and Montana where use of the drug for health purposes is legal, newspapers — particularly alternative weeklies — have rushed to woo marijuana providers. Many of these enterprises are flush with cash and eager to get the word out about their fledgling businesses. “Medical marijuana has been a revenue blessing over and above what we anticipated,” said John Weiss, the founder and publisher of The Independent, a free weekly. “This wasn’t in our marketing plan a year ago, and now it is about 10 percent of our paper’s revenue.” It is hard to measure what share of the overall market they account for, but ads for medical marijuana providers and the businesses that have sprouted up to service them — tax lawyers, real estate agents, security specialists — have bulked up papers in large metropolitan news markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver. “This is certainly one of the fastest growing industries we’ve ever seen come in,” said Scott Tobias, president and chief operating officer of Village Voice Media, which publishes alternative weeklies across the country. Alternative weeklies are not the only publications raking in medical marijuana lucre. Dailies like The Denver Post and The Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana are taking advantage of the boom and making no apologies. “My point of view is, for the moment at least, it’s legal,” said Stephanie Pressly, publisher of The Daily Chronicle, adding that the paper generates about $7,500 a month in advertising from medical marijuana businesses. “The joke around here is that it’s a budding business.” Newspaper publishers saw an opening for medical marijuana advertising after the Obama administration said last fall that it would not prosecute users and suppliers of the drug as long as they complied with state laws. Though many states have made legal allowances for medical marijuana for nearly a decade (the total now is 14 and the District of Columbia), that decision freed more people to market and sell it as a medical product. Advertising demand for the drug grew so quickly in Village Voice Media’s Western markets that the company started publishing supplements late last year. It gave them cheeky names like “Chronic-le” in Denver and “The Rolling Paper” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County. The tag line in Denver displayed underneath a smiling, sauntering, sandal-wearing cartoon joint reads, “Your Guide to Medical Marijuana. Enjoy.” In Colorado, where people have likened the explosion of medical marijuana to the state’s 19th-century gold rush, the market for ads and information about the drug has been especially strong. The summer 2010 issue of The Chronic-le, at 48 shiny pages, included features like “Toke of the Town,” a summary of the latest marijuana-related news, and a roster of the nearly 250 stores in the Denver area that sell marijuana. Mr. Tobias said that in Denver money from advertising for marijuana-related businesses has totaled 15 percent of the weekly Westword’s revenue this year and nearly 40 percent of its classified advertising revenue. A small, eighth-page display ad on one of the paper’s glossy inside pages can cost $550. As other advertisers pulled back, spending by marijuana-related businesses has filled the gaps, Mr. Tobias said. “There were less jobs, so there was less employment advertising. The rentals and real estate market collapsed to some degree, so there were less ads for those,” he said. Medical marijuana, he added, “is a welcome revenue stream.” In the California papers, marijuana revenue is smaller, but it still provides a boost. It totals 8 percent of The OC Weekly’s revenue; at The SF Weekly it is 5 percent. But the drug is more than just a profit center for Westword. It has become a journalistic staple for the paper. Westword’s editor, Patricia Calhoun, has attended public hearings on marijuana laws and live-blogged about them herself. Articles about marijuana on the paper’s Web site remain one of its biggest draws. “I said the industry is growing faster than the coverage is,” Ms. Calhoun recalled. “So we really ramped it up.” Last year Westword hired a part-time marijuana critic who goes by the pseudonym William Breathes. The paper insists on keeping his identity a secret. Mr. Breathes, 29, a graduate student who was a reporter for a daily paper in the Denver area before being laid off, proudly claims to be a living, breathing (and smoking) example of the economic benefits of medical marijuana. “It’s created journalism jobs — well, at least one,” Mr. Breathes said. His work, published in Westword’s “Mile Highs and Lows” column, now includes more than just smoking marijuana, which he said he uses medically for chronic stomach problems. He also reports on services, like a video chat forum for marijuana smokers who want company when they light up, and he blogs about marijuana-related news. The explosive growth of the medical marijuana business has some worried about the ultimate buzz kill: that the bubble is about to burst. In Colorado Springs, where liberal marijuana policy has run head on into the city’s active community of social conservatives, voters will decide next month on a ballot initiative that would ban medical marijuana sellers in unincorporated areas of El Paso County. In Montana the Legislature is expected to take up proposals to more strictly regulate medical marijuana use, including limiting the amount of the drug a patient can buy each month. At The Missoula Independent, where medical marijuana advertising now makes up about 10 percent of the paper’s revenue, there is concern that the spigot may soon tighten. Matt Gibson, The Independent’s president, said marijuana businesses have helped carry the paper through a rough recession. “It’s been stressful for us for several years,” he said. “There’s no question that they’ve been good for our business. And we’re worried about 2011, if the state revises the statute, which it appears is all but certain.” Indeed, in the latest issue of ReLeaf, many of the ads have a fire-sale quality to them. One medical marijuana provider offers five free joints to new customers, another promises buyers a free pipe packed with marijuana and a free week of yoga, making the headline on an article a few pages later all the more foreboding: “Tightening regulations, crowded market make for dicey days.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/bu...dia/05pot.html 2 E-Books Cost More Than Amazon Hardcovers Julie Bosman Readers of e-books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers. Unless they bought “Fall of Giants” by Ken Follett, which was published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, last week. On Amazon.com, the price for the e-book was $19.99; the hardcover edition was $19.39. Or “Don’t Blink,” by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, whose publisher, Little, Brown & Company, charged $14.99 for the e-book. Amazon priced the hardcover at $14. Customers, unaccustomed to seeing a digital edition more expensive than the hardcover, howled at the price discrepancy, and promptly voiced their outrage with negative comments and one-star reviews on Amazon. “Really, James Patterson?” wrote one reader from Elgin, Ill. “Why would it possibly cost more for a digital download than printed and bound ink on paper?” Other customers directed their anger at the publishers. “They aren’t penguins,” a Web commenter from Paradise, Calif., wrote about Mr. Follett’s book. “They are pigs.” Several major publishers said those two books were the first they knew of that cost more as e-books than in hardcover on Amazon. The skirmish over prices is possible because of deals that publishers negotiated with Amazon this year that allowed the publishers to set their own prices on e-books, while Amazon continues to choose the discount from the list price on hardcovers. That upended a previous understanding by Kindle customers, who were used to paying only $9.99 for an e-book. “Amazon’s bait-and-switched us here,” said Janice Dinse, 63, a medical transcriptionist in Gastonia, N.C., who complained about the price on the novel by Mr. Patterson. “When I first got my Kindle, all the books were $9.99. I’m not going to pay for a book on my Kindle that’s more than $9.99. I just refuse to do it. I could buy the hardcover for that if I go to Sam’s or Wal-Mart.” Amazon has tried to direct customer wrath over e-book prices at the publishers. After prices began to rise this year, routinely landing at $12.99 to $14.99, Amazon alerted readers by adding a line in italics below the Kindle price: “This price was set by the publisher.” Publishers argue that Amazon charges too little for hardcovers and is intent on monopolizing the book market. Even as hardcover and e-book prices inch closer together, it is rare that an e-book reaches the $19.99 mark. But “Fall of Giants” is a 1,008-page novel, and Mr. Follett is a best-selling author who commands handsome advances from his publisher. Marilyn Ducksworth, a spokeswoman for Penguin, said only that sales had been strong since the Sept. 28 publication date. “It’s a long and wonderful book, of which we have sold over 20,000 e-books in the last seven days,” Ms. Ducksworth said. Sophie Cottrell, a spokeswoman for the Hachette Book Group, the parent of Little, Brown, which published “Don’t Blink” last week, pointed out that the e-book was steeply discounted from the suggested list price on the book. She said the e-book price would be $12.99 if the book made the New York Times best-seller list. Russ Grandinetti, the vice president of Kindle content for Amazon, suggested that the publishers should lower their e-book prices in response to consumer complaints. “Setting a price for a Kindle book that is higher than its print counterpart makes no sense,” Mr. Grandinetti said in a statement, although it was not clear who was the chicken and who the egg in this instance. “It’s bad for readers and authors, and is illogical given the cost savings of digital. We’ve seen publishers do this in a few cases, and we’ve been urging them to stop.” But many readers seemed willing to pay nearly $20 for an e-book. On Monday evening, “Fall of Giants” remained at No. 7 on the Kindle best-seller list, which is updated hourly. “What we are seeing is a sorting-out period as a new, very vibrant market for book content begins to develop with multiple platforms, multiple formats and multiple retailers,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “Ultimately as the competitive market develops and e-books go mainstream, pricing norms will develop. But that really hasn’t happened yet.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/bu...05follett.html A Year of Geek Atlas Sales (or some facts about book royalties) John Graham-Cumming So it's been over a year now that I've been collecting royalty statements from O'Reilly for The Geek Atlas, and the other day someone commented to the effect that I must be living large off book royalties. Clearly, this person either mistook me for J. K. Rowling or knows nothing about books. Here's how book sales work using The Geek Atlas as an example. The cover price is $29.99. O'Reilly sells the book to the retailer for much less than that: the publisher is getting around 60% of the cover price (numbers below). That, by the way, is roughly how Amazon.com sells you books for so little: they didn't pay the cover price for the book in the first place. I get 10% of what O'Reilly gets. So if the book sells for $29.99 and O'Reilly gets 60% ($18) then I'd get $1.80 per copy. In practice, the actual amount I get per copy is around $1.25 because different retailers have different discounts, and because my book might be sold in bundles of other books with different discounts. Now, lest you think I'm complaining: I'm not. It was a great privilege to write that book and I'm happy whenever I do get some money back from it. But if you are thinking of writing a book bear that in mind. I spent 6 months writing The Geek Atlas: I didn't do it for the money! Interestingly, I make less money now from eBooks than physical books. Two other important factors play into the money I receive: the advance and reserves. O'Reilly were kind enough to pay me an advance while I was working on the book. It's not called an advance for no reason: the author pays that money back from the royalties. Basically my first few royalty statements were all negative because the royalties I was receiving were going to paying the 'debt' to O'Reilly. The other factor is the reserve. I get paid when a book shop buys the book (not the consumer). But that creates a problem for the publisher since the book shop can return the book as unsold after a certain period of time. So from each royalty statement O'Reilly reserves money to offset any returns of the book. They actually reserve 20% of the royalties on physical books. I then get that money back (if the book is selling!) 6 months later. http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/year-of-...ome-facts.html BitTorrent Etiquette: How To Avoid Getting Banned From Private Trackers Tim Brookes Many of you will have used BitTorrent in the past to obtain files with varying degrees of legality. I’m not going to tell you what you should and shouldn’t download, you probably know that already. A majority of you will have downloaded torrents in the past from public sources such as The Pirate Bay. There’s also a whole world of private trackers out there, and a lot of rules to go with each. For the survival of the community, and to preserve your account, you will need to adhere to their rules. If you’re looking for some private trackers to get you started, try TrackerChecker and check out our article about finding open trackers. Ratio Watch Data transfer on private trackers is monitored per user and more often than not, you will have to maintain a sensible ratio to avoid losing your download privileges. Your ratio is determined by the amount of data downloaded and uploaded. A ratio of 1 indicates that you have downloaded and uploaded in equal amounts, and this is enough to keep any private tracker happy. Don’t worry though, most trackers won’t expect you to keep a pristine ratio – just enough to ensure you’re contributing to the community. Many trackers will also monitor for hit and runs, whereby a user downloads a torrent without sufficiently seeding it. It is not uncommon for a tracker to demand a minimum seeding time after your download has completed, so make sure you check the rules. Torrent Clients Certain trackers will take a stand against known “bad” clients, and users can be banned if they are found using them. Nearly every private tracker I have had the pleasure of using has accepted uTorrent, though this is often version-specific. Clients with known bugs and exploits, such as BitTyrant which give you an advantage over other users are frowned upon, so it’s always worth checking before you change client. If you’re not fond of uTorrent and are looking for a cracking client that’s not likely to get you banned, check out Deluge (Windows/Linux/Mac) and Transmission (Linux). Multiple Accounts If you think you’re going to download the whole internet by registering a couple of accounts at a time then you’re going to run into problems. Multiple accounts on most private trackers are a strict no-no. This also applies to multiple accounts on the same IP. Those of you who live with other like-minded geeky torrent freaks might have to come to some sort of arrangement. In order to minimize abuse, many trackers will enforce this one. So if you’re a student or living in shared-accommodation, bear this in mind. Uploading Torrents If you think you’ve got something awesome that the whole world absolutely has to see then maybe you should create a new torrent. If you’ve never done this before we’ve got an excellent guide about doing it using Transmission, and the process is fairly uniform regardless of client. Be sure to provide enough information and create a decent description for your new torrent. Adding screenshots, links to reviews, embedding YouTube videos and providing technical details and logs are all likely to encourage people to download. Once you’ve created your torrent, you should download it and point your client to the files on your computer. After the files have been checked, you should be the only seed. Don’t forget that the more people that download your torrent, the better your ratio will get. Just be sure to keep seeding! Common Sense Some private trackers are super-secret, others have a user limit imposed and most are just trying to stay out of trouble. Remember that it’s never a great idea to go shouting about your arsenal of resources. Be especially careful when using services like Delicious and iGoogle. Lastly, don’t be a dick. If someone uploads something you happen to like, click the thanks button. If there’s a forum, say hi. If a tracker has a list of requests to fill then see how you can help out. You’ll be a highly respected torrent master in no time. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/bittorr...vate-trackers/ Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself Steve Lohr Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence. Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day. Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself. “For all the advances in computer science, we still don’t have a computer that can learn as humans do, cumulatively, over the long term,” said the team’s leader, Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist and chairman of the machine learning department. The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.” NELL also learns facts that are relations between members of two categories. For example, Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts — even if it has never read that Mr. Manning plays for the Colts. “Plays for” is a relation, and there are 280 kinds of relations. The number of categories and relations has more than doubled since earlier this year, and will steadily expand. The learned facts are continuously added to NELL’s growing database, which the researchers call a “knowledge base.” A larger pool of facts, Dr. Mitchell says, will help refine NELL’s learning algorithms so that it finds facts on the Web more accurately and more efficiently over time. NELL is one project in a widening field of research and investment aimed at enabling computers to better understand the meaning of language. Many of these efforts tap the Web as a rich trove of text to assemble structured ontologies — formal descriptions of concepts and relationships — to help computers mimic human understanding. The ideal has been discussed for years, and more than a decade ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the underlying software for the World Wide Web, sketched his vision of a “semantic Web.” Today, ever-faster computers, an explosion of Web data and improved software techniques are opening the door to rapid progress. Scientists at universities, government labs, Google, Microsoft, I.B.M. and elsewhere are pursuing breakthroughs, along somewhat different paths. For example, I.B.M.’s “question answering” machine, Watson, shows remarkable semantic understanding in fields like history, literature and sports as it plays the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Google Squared, a research project at the Internet search giant, demonstrates ample grasp of semantic categories as it finds and presents information from around the Web on search topics like “U.S. presidents” and “cheeses.” Still, artificial intelligence experts agree that the Carnegie Mellon approach is innovative. Many semantic learning systems, they note, are more passive learners, largely hand-crafted by human programmers, while NELL is highly automated. “What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who leads a project called TextRunner, which reads the Web to extract facts. Computers that understand language, experts say, promise a big payoff someday. The potential applications range from smarter search (supplying natural-language answers to search queries, not just links to Web pages) to virtual personal assistants that can reply to questions in specific disciplines or activities like health, education, travel and shopping. “The technology is really maturing, and will increasingly be used to gain understanding,” said Alfred Spector, vice president of research for Google. “We’re on the verge now in this semantic world.” With NELL, the researchers built a base of knowledge, seeding each kind of category or relation with 10 to 15 examples that are true. In the category for emotions, for example: “Anger is an emotion.” “Bliss is an emotion.” And about a dozen more. Then NELL gets to work. Its tools include programs that extract and classify text phrases from the Web, programs that look for patterns and correlations, and programs that learn rules. For example, when the computer system reads the phrase “Pikes Peak,” it studies the structure — two words, each beginning with a capital letter, and the last word is Peak. That structure alone might make it probable that Pikes Peak is a mountain. But NELL also reads in several ways. It will mine for text phrases that surround Pikes Peak and similar noun phrases repeatedly. For example, “I climbed XXX.” NELL, Dr. Mitchell explains, is designed to be able to grapple with words in different contexts, by deploying a hierarchy of rules to resolve ambiguity. This kind of nuanced judgment tends to flummox computers. “But as it turns out, a system like this works much better if you force it to learn many things, hundreds at once,” he said. For example, the text-phrase structure “I climbed XXX” very often occurs with a mountain. But when NELL reads, “I climbed stairs,” it has previously learned with great certainty that “stairs” belongs to the category “building part.” “It self-corrects when it has more information, as it learns more,” Dr. Mitchell explained. NELL, he says, is just getting under way, and its growing knowledge base of facts and relations is intended as a foundation for improving machine intelligence. Dr. Mitchell offers an example of the kind of knowledge NELL cannot manage today, but may someday. Take two similar sentences, he said. “The girl caught the butterfly with the spots.” And, “The girl caught the butterfly with the net.” A human reader, he noted, inherently understands that girls hold nets, and girls are not usually spotted. So, in the first sentence, “spots” is associated with “butterfly,” and in the second, “net” with “girl.” “That’s obvious to a person, but it’s not obvious to a computer,” Dr. Mitchell said. “So much of human language is background knowledge, knowledge accumulated over time. That’s where NELL is headed, and the challenge is how to get that knowledge.” A helping hand from humans, occasionally, will be part of the answer. For the first six months, NELL ran unassisted. But the research team noticed that while it did well with most categories and relations, its accuracy on about one-fourth of them trailed well behind. Starting in June, the researchers began scanning each category and relation for about five minutes every two weeks. When they find blatant errors, they label and correct them, putting NELL’s learning engine back on track. When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.) NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education. His ideal, Dr. Mitchell said, was a computer system that could learn continuously with no need for human assistance. “We’re not there yet,” he said. “But you and I don’t learn in isolation either.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/sc...05compute.html Android Invasion Daniel Lyons How a tiny piece of software created by a few Google engineers is ushering in the mobile revolution and reshaping the fortunes of the world's biggest tech companies. Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off–not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it. Five years ago Rubin was leading a startup that had just been acquired by Google and was trying to develop software that could power a smart phone. Two years ago the first Android phone hit the market and, frankly, it was a bit of a dud. But the software kept getting better, and top handset makers like HTC, Motorola, and Samsung jumped on board, rolling out dozens of Android-based devices. What began as a trickle now has turned into a tidal wave. In August Google announced it was activating 200,000 Android phones each day. On at least one day since then, that number surged to more than 250,000, Rubin says. Android now has leapt past Apple to become the biggest smart-phone platform in the United States, the third-biggest worldwide, and by far the fastest growing. Android is the kind of runaway smash hit that techies spend their careers dreaming about. Rubin, a 47-year-old über nerd–he has a retina scanner on the front door of his house and robotic helicopters cruise his backyard–has helped build a string of tech companies over the past two decades. But nothing he’s done so far compares to what’s happening with Android. “This,” he says, “is the most fun I’ve ever had.” The software was written by a small team of engineers tucked away in a nondescript building on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. While it contains 11 million lines of code, the whole program takes up only 200 megabytes of space, about as much as 40 MP3 songs. Yet despite its tiny size, Android is changing the mobile industry in profound ways, shifting the balance of power from Europe and Asia, the previous leaders, to Silicon Valley and reshaping the fortunes of the world’s biggest tech companies. Android has also transformed Google and its longtime ally Apple into fierce rivals. Until recently, Apple seemed destined to rule the mobile Internet, thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, which was introduced in 2007 and quickly began grabbing market share. But Android has enabled handset makers like Motorola and Samsung to develop credible rivals to the iPhone. This year, as those companies have gained traction, Apple’s momentum has stalled. Rubin credits the fact that Android is an open-source program used by dozens of phone makers, while Apple goes it alone, developing its own proprietary hardware and software. In September Apple CEO Steve Jobs got a little hot under the collar of his mock turtleneck and told reporters he didn’t believe Google’s sales figures. He claimed that if you added together sales of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, Apple is “ahead of everybody.” But by 2014 Android will have 25 percent market share in smart phones, more than double Apple’s 11 percent share, according to high-tech researcher IDC. And the first Android-based tablets will begin to ship later this year. (Apple declined to comment for this article.) This is no mere squabble. The mobile revolution may be the biggest wave ever to hit the world of computing. Just as mainframes gave way to minicomputers, which in turn gave way to personal computers, the PC now is being displaced by smart phones and tablets. By 2013, a decade after smart phones were launched, there will be 1Êbillion of them in the world–roughly the number of PCs that exist today, three decades after that machine’s introduction. These devices will reach into the furthest corners of the world. By next year 5 billion mobile phones will be in service, out of a total world population of about 7 billion, according to Yankee Group, a high-tech research firm. Most of those will be “feature phones” with limited capabilities. But over the next decade the technologies will become so cheap that virtually every phone sold will be what we, today, would call a smart phone. “This is a battle for literally every person on the planet. That’s why these markets are worth fighting for,” says Carl Howe, a research director at Yankee Group. Most important, every one of those smart phones will be constantly connected to the Internet. If you own a smart phone, you know how extraordinary that linkage can be. Scott Adams, the author and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, last year argued in an essay that smart phones represent a kind of “exobrain” that augments our regular brain, giving us the ability to store and retrieve mountains of information and to perform tasks like navigating unfamiliar terrain. So what happens when most of the residents of planet Earth carry a device that gives them instant access to pretty much all of the world’s information? The implications–for politics, for education, for global economics–are dizzying. In theory, the mobile revolution could enable citizens to demand greater openness and accountability from their governments. The reverse might also be true: governments could more easily spy on citizens. “You also have the prospect of having 5 billion surveillance points,” says Jonathan Zittrain, codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The proliferation of low-cost handhelds will enable people in developing economies to see the rest of the world–and join it. “I can’t imagine anything since the invention of the spinning jenny that will so profoundly change the lives of people in the deepest rural parts of the emerging market. This is the knowledge revolution coming to them, finally,” says Sanjay Jha, the co-CEO of Motorola. Jha credits the return to profitability of Motorola’s mobile devices–after three years of losing money–to an early bet on Android-based phones. Geeks like Rubin aren’t spending a lot of time mulling the philosophical implications of the mobile revolution. For them the excitement comes from building the coolest devices they can imagine–and tapping into what may be the biggest technology market that has ever existed. Sales of Apple’s iPad tablet have already cut into sales of traditional notebook computers. By 2013 the mobile Internet ecosystem–money spent on access fees, online commerce, paid services, and advertising–will be worth more than half a trillion dollars per year, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker. As users keep downloading services and apps, every device sold generates an ongoing revenue stream. The top companies in desktop computing–Apple, Google, and Microsoft–must shift their focus to mobile devices to remain competitive. But that pits them against traditional phone makers like Nokia and Research in Motion. Nokia, which has developed its own smart-phone software called Symbian, remains the industry gorilla. There are already 1.3 billion Nokia phones in use, and 200 million of them are smart phones. The huge customer base is a big advantage, according to Tero Ojanpera, an executive vice president at Nokia. By collecting location information from mobile phones, for example, Nokia can make traffic predictions. “There is a huge opportunity for us to create a feedback loop and provide data to consumers,” Ojanpera says. But Google has a few advantages of its own. Instead of trying to modernize an older system originally created for voice-centric phones, Rubin and his engineers started with a clean slate, developing a modern mobile operating system for a new kind of device–a small computer that happens to make phone calls. Unlike older operating systems, Android was created to be good at rendering Web pages and to run many applications at the same time. Google also counts the very nature of Android as a strength. The company does not make money from Android directly. It gives the software away to hardware partners. Google reckons that Android gets more people onto the Internet, where Google can show them ads. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Android-based phones already generate enough new advertising revenue to cover the cost of the software’s development. Google could make money in other ways too, for example, by opening an online store to sell music and videos to Android users. Schmidt envisions a day when there are 1 billion Android phones in the world and notes that if Google could get just $10 from each user per year, it would be a $10 billion business. That’s real money even for Google, whose revenues this year will be $21 billion. In addition to making Android available for free, Google also lets phone makers change the code and customize it so that an Android phone made by, say, Samsung has a different user interface than an Android phone from Motorola. Rubin believes this open-source model gives Google an advantage over rivals selling closed systems, like Apple, which also operates its own online stores. Apple’s tight control enables it to deliver an exceptionally smooth user experience, where everything works seamlessly together. The Android model is messier, but by putting Android into so many hands at so many companies, Rubin believes he has created an accelerated form of evolution, where the species diversifies and improves at hyperspeed. The struggle between Google and Apple today looks a lot like the battle between Apple and Microsoft in the PC era. Back then, Apple leapt out to an early lead with the Macintosh, whose revolutionary operating system ran only on Apple machines. But Microsoft came up with a version of Windows that could compete with the Mac. Because Microsoft licensed its software to all of the world’s computer makers, it eventually controlled 90 percent of the market. “The industry is repeating itself,” Rubin says. Oddly enough, Rubin worked at Apple from 1989 to 1992, the years when Apple was losing its edge to Microsoft. He later cofounded a company called Danger, which developed the Sidekick smart phone. Rubin was CEO of Danger but resigned in 2004 after agreeing with the board that the company needed new leadership. He was hanging out on a beach in the Cayman Islands when he came up with the idea of creating an open-source operating system for mobile phones. Back in Silicon Valley, he was looking to raise venture funding when Google cofounder Larry Page heard about Android, loved the idea, and acquired the company. At Google, Rubin has access to virtually unlimited resources from one of the richest companies on the planet, and no need to generate revenue, at least not in the conventional sense. Rubin won’t say how many engineers work on Android, only that “it’s much smaller than you would think.” Some of the work is done by HTC, Motorola, and Samsung engineers, who work alongside Google engineers. One of the top priorities right now is to improve the user interface to catch up with the iPhone. A bigger challenge is making sure that the same open-source model that has led to Android’s rapid growth does not also become its undoing. If phone makers do too much tinkering and customization, Android could splinter into many different versions, none of them completely compatible with the others. Such fragmentation has been the Achilles’ heel of every open-source project. To counter it, Rubin and his team have created a compatibility test suite, a list of things a phone must have in order to carry the Android brand and to run Google applications like Google Maps. Rubin believes this will induce phone makers to keep all Android phones fundamentally compatible. Microsoft, meanwhile, is hoping such fragmentation will be the undoing of Android. It is betting that phone makers will prefer its own new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, which is due to arrive in the next month or so. Phone makers must pay license fees to use Windows Phone 7, and they can’t tinker much with the code. Microsoft is pitching it to the same companies that have embraced Android, claiming that Windows Phone 7 is more polished and will give phone makers a better tool for competing against Apple. Also, Microsoft last week sued Motorola, alleging its Android phones violate Microsoft patents. Similarly, Apple has sued HTC over its Android phones, and Oracle has sued Google, alleging Android itself violates Oracle patents. If nothing else, the lawsuits demonstrate that rivals recognize Android has become a serious threat. Right now Rubin’s engineers are putting the finishing touches on the next version of Android, code-named Gingerbread, which is scheduled to ship before the end of this year. They’re also developing a version of Android called Honeycomb, which is designed to run on tablet computers and will follow on the heels of Gingerbread. For now, Rubin is enjoying the geeky thrill of being out in public and hearing the sound of an Android phone when it starts up and says “Droid,” in its little robotic voice. “Every time it happens, it makes me smile,” he says. Sure, nobody knows how this will play out. But who can blame Rubin for that crazy grin on his face? http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/03/h...computing.html Comcast Pushes Bot Alert Program Nationwide Brian Krebs Comcast, the nation’s largest residential Internet service provider, announced last week that it is expanding an initiative to contact customers whose PCs appear to be infected with a malicious bot program. The Philadelphia-based cable Internet company is expanding nationwide a pilot program that began in Denver last year, which automatically informs affected customers with an e-mail urging them to visit the company’s security page. The system also sends the customer’s browser a so-called “service notice,” a semi-transparent banner that overlays a portion of whatever page is being displayed in the user’s Web browser. Customers can then either move or close the alert, or click Go to Anti-Virus Center, for recommended next-steps, which for Windows customers includes: * Downloading any missing Microsoft security updates. * Making sure the customer has some kind of up-to-date anti-virus software running. * Downloading and running Microsoft’s malicious software removal tool. * Downloading and installing Secunia‘s free Personal Software Inspector tool, a program that periodically scans the user’s computer for missing security updates for commonly used third party applications, such as Adobe Reader, Flash, and Java, and QuickTime. Comcast also is offering free subscriptions to Norton Security Suite for up to 7 computers per customer — including Mac versions of the Symantec suite. For customers who receive a notice but are running a wireless router behind their cable modem, however, figuring out which computer is infected may not be so easy. That’s because while wireless routers plug directly into high-speed Internet modems — and allow multiple computers to use the same Internet address and connection — Comcast’s Constant Guard cannot isolate the infection beyond the Internet address assigned to the customer’s modem. Comcast users who have trouble with that are steered toward the option of paying for help from Norton Live. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas declined to offer statistics on the number of customers who responded to alerts generated during the company’s pilot version of Constant Guard, but said the response has been “very positive.” He said customers who chose to ignore or close the service notice without taking action will be re-notified every few days until the problem is resolved. Douglas said the bot intelligence is coming from Damballa, an Atlanta-based security company that monitors botnet activity and identifies botnet control networks. If Damballa spots a Comcast Internet address that is phoning home to one of these botnet command centers, Comcast’s system flags that customer’s address for a service notice. “When we see instructions are being sent from that known evil [Internet address] to one of our customer addresses, we know the instructions from that address cannot be good and that there’s something not good happening on your network,” Douglas said. Comcast has started rolling the system out on a market-by-market basis, and expects to have it deployed to most of its 16 million customers by the first quarter of 2011, Douglas said. http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/10/c...am-nationwide/ Man Jailed Over Computer Password Refusal A teenager has been jailed for 16 weeks after he refused to give police the password to his computer. Oliver Drage, 19, of Liverpool, was arrested in May 2009 by police tackling child sexual exploitation. Police seized his computer but could not access material on it as it had a 50-character encryption password. Drage was convicted of failing to disclose an encryption key in September. He was sentenced at Preston Crown Court on Monday. Drage, was arrested when he was living in Freckleton, Lancashire, but later moved to Liverpool. He was formally asked to disclose his password but failed to do so, which is an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, police said. 'Robust message' Officers are still trying to crack the code on the computer to examine its contents. Det Sgt Neil Fowler, of Lancashire police, said: "Drage was previously of good character so the immediate custodial sentence handed down by the judge in this case shows just how seriously the courts take this kind of offence. "Computer systems are constantly advancing and the legislation used here was specifically brought in to deal with those who are using the internet to commit crime. "It sends a robust message out to those intent on trying to mask their online criminal activities that they will be taken before the courts with the ultimate sanction, as in this case, being a custodial sentence." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831 Hacker Infiltration Ends D.C. Online Voting Trial Mike DeBonis Last week, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics opened a new Internet-based voting system for a weeklong test period, inviting computer experts from all corners to prod its vulnerabilities in the spirit of "give it your best shot." Well, the hackers gave it their best shot -- and midday Friday, the trial period was suspended, with the board citing "usability issues brought to our attention." Here's one of those issues: After casting a vote, according to test observers, the Web site played "Hail to the Victors" -- the University of Michigan fight song. "The integrity of the system had been violated," said Paul Stenbjorn, the board's chief technology officer. Stenbjorn said a Michigan professor whom the board has been working with on the project had "unleashed his students" during the test period, and one succeeded in infiltrating the system. The fight song is a symptom of deeper vulnerabilities, says Jeremy Epstein, a computer scientist working with the Common Cause good-government nonprofit on online voting issues. "In order to do that, they had to be able to change anything they wanted on the Web site," Epstein said. Because of the hack, Stenbjorn said Monday, a portion of the Internet voting pilot -- which was expected to be rolled out this month -- is being temporarily scrapped. The program, called "digital vote by mail," is intended to allow military or overseas voters to cast secure absentee ballots without having to worry whether the mail would get them back to elections officials before final counting. Those voters, about 900 of them, still will be able to receive blank ballots via the Internet for the Nov. 2 general election, but they will not be allowed to submit their completed ballots via the DVM system, Stenbjorn says. Instead, they'll have to put them in the mail or send them unsecured via e-mail or fax. The security hole that allowed the playing of the fight song has been identified, Stenbjorn said, but it raised deeper concerns about the system's vulnerabilities. "We've closed the hole they opened, but we want to put it though more robust testing," he said. "I don't want there to be any doubt. ... This is an abundance-of-caution sort of thing." Last week, Common Cause and a group of computer scientists and election-law experts warned city officials that the Internet voting trial posed an unacceptable security risk that "imperils the overall accuracy of every election on the ballot." But board officials said the system provides security and privacy upgrades over a method of Internet voting that's already legal: filling out a paper ballot, then scanning it and attaching it to an e-mail. Stenbjorn says he hopes that the Web-voting system's security vulnerabilities will be addressed in time for a D.C. Council special election expected next spring. The board has spent about $300,000 in federal grant money on the project. A D.C. Council hearing on elections issues, which will include the Internet voting test, is set for Friday. UPDATE, 5:30 P.M. Verified Voting, another nonprofit concerned with election integrity, has released a statement that "applauds" BOEE's decision to cancel the digital vote return. The release details the hack: "The test pilot was apparently attacked successfully shortly after it began by a team of academic experts led by Prof. J. Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan. The attack caused the University of Michigan fight song to be played for test voters when they completed the balloting process." The group promises "[f]ull details of the hack and its impact on submitted test ballots ... in the coming days." The group also identifies a separate issue, which it calls a "very serious vote loss problem that caused voters to inadvertently return blank ballots while believing that they had submitted complete ballots." This affected users of "at least two widely used computer/browser configurations." Stenbjorn said Monday that the problem had been identified as affecting certain browsers using the Macintosh operating system, which do not support inline PDF forms. Mac users, he said, can download the file and open it in a standalone PDF reader instead. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/deb...nds_dc_on.html Whistleblower Site Cryptome Hacked, Defaced, All Files Deleted Darlene Storm The whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome was hacked and defaced this weekend. All 54,000 Cryptome hosted files were deleted. According to Cryptome, "A person wrote claiming to know who did the hack. No way to know if this claim is true. Hackers, like spies, often blame one another to cover their tracks. Blocking attacks is nearly impossible due to the purposefully weak security of the Internet. Nearly all security methods are bogus. A competent hacker or spy, or the two working together, can penetrate easily. We monitor and keep back-ups ready. And do not trust our ISP, email provider and officials to tell the truth or protect us." After its site was restored and Cryptome could view emailed notifications, Cryptome posted the steps of the hack. First, its EarthLink email account was "accessed by unknown means and its access password changed." Using that email address, the hacker then requested information about Cryptome's multiple accounts. The Cryptome.org management account was accessed at Network Solutions (NSI) and all "54,000 files (some 7GB) were deleted and the account password changed." Cryptome discovered it had been hacked after it could not gain access to email or its NSI account. After placing a call to NSI, Cryptome had all files restored except for the previous two days. After chatting with EarthLink online support, email access was restored and NSI emails were received about the management account changes. Cryptome stated that its email is not stored at EarthLink, so it is unknown if the hacker deleted any email. The other Cryptome accounts hosted by Network Solutions did not seem to have been affected. Other Cryptome sites include: Cryptome.org (mirror mirror mirror), Cryptome.info, Cryptout - Recent listings of Cryptome.org, Cartome.org, Eyeball-Series.org and Cryptome CN which publishes information, documents and opinions banned by the People's Republic of China. According to Wikipedia, "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance-open, secret and classified documents-but not limited to those." Another anonymous tipster alerted Cryptome of a WikiLeaks IRC chat that happened a few hours before Cryptome was hacked. The tipster thought the IRC chat might be related to the hack. A person in the chat claimed to have uploaded a file to WikiLeaks and it still was not published two weeks later. Since the WikiLeaks site was down, the secret-document leaker was advised to upload it to Cryptome. Within the chat, a person stated, "[18:59] <ReleaseItAlready> Dont trust pgpboard. And Cryptome has poor security. Call your local paper and release it to them." This was the second time that Cryptome was shutdown by a hack in 14 years. In February of this year, after Cryptome published Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide, Microsoft cried a DMCA foul and had Network Solutions take down Cryptome. Microsoft later withdrew its copyright complaint. http://blogs.computerworld.com/17096..._files_deleted A Phone Application that Threatens Security A cheap mobile phone application that can track the precise location of passenger aircraft in the sky can be a serious terrorist threat, security experts have claimed and called for its immediate ban. The Plane Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google's Android, allows users to point their phone at the sky and see the position, height and speed of nearby aircraft. It also shows the airline, flight number, departure point, destination and even the likely course-the features which could be used to target an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, or to direct another plane on to a collision course, the 'Daily Mail' reported. The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners. The new application works by intercepting the so-called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcasts (ADS-B) transmitted by most passenger aircraft to a new satellite tracking system that supplements or, in some countries, replaces radar. British and European air traffic control systems have not yet adopted the technology but it is being fitted in all new aircraft, which now constantly broadcast their positions. After the September 11 attacks in America in 2001, a senior Federal Aviation Administration official warned that ADS-B technology could be used by terrorists. He wrote: "Broadcasting the identity and location of aircraft... would open the door for a terrorist to attack a specific aircraft or airline." The firm behind the app, Pinkfroot, uses a network of aircraft enthusiasts in Britain and abroad, who are equipped with ADS-B receivers costing around 200 pounds to intercept the information from aircraft and send it to a central database. Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, former chairman of the Parliamentary Counter Terrorism sub-committee, said: "Anything that makes it easier for our enemies to find targets is madness. The Government must look at outlawing the marketing of such equipment." However, the Hampshire-based firm has gone one step further, marketing a so-called 'Augmented Reality' application because users can point a phones camera at the sky and see the precise position of aircraft superimposed on the horizon. The firm claims more than 2,000 people have downloaded Plane Finder AR from iTunes since its launch last month. http://www.ndtv.com/article/technolo...security-56673 Special Report: The Pentagon's New Cyber Warriors Jim Wolf Guarding water wells and granaries from enemy raids is as old as war itself. In the Middle Ages, vital resources were hoarded behind castle walls, protected by moats, drawbridges and knights with double-edged swords. Today, U.S. national security planners are proposing that the 21st century's critical infrastructure -- power grids, communications, water utilities, financial networks -- be similarly shielded from cyber marauders and other foes. The ramparts would be virtual, their perimeters policed by the Pentagon and backed by digital weapons capable of circling the globe in milliseconds to knock out targets. An examination by Reuters, including dozens of interviews with military officers, government officials and outside experts, shows that the U.S. military is preparing for digital combat even more extensively than has been made public. And how to keep the nation's lifeblood industries safe is a big, if controversial, aspect of it. "The best-laid defenses on military networks will matter little unless our civilian critical infrastructure is also able to withstand attacks," says Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary William Lynn, who has been reshaping military capabilities for an emerging digital battlefield. Any major future conflict, he says, inevitably will involve cyber warfare that could knock out power, transport and banks, causing "massive" economic disruption. But not everyone agrees that the military should or even can take on the job of shielding such networks. In fact, some in the private sector fear that shifting responsibility to the Pentagon is technologically difficult -- and could prove counterproductive. For the moment, however, proponents of the change seem to have the upper hand. Their case has been helped by the recent emergence of Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm of unknown origin that attacks command modules for industrial equipment. Experts describe the code as a first-of-its-kind guided cyber missile. Stuxnet has hit Iran especially hard, possibly slowing progress on Tehran's nuclear program, as well as causing problems elsewhere. Stuxnet was a cyber shot heard around the world. Russia, China, Israel and other nations are racing to plug network gaps. They also are building digital arsenals of bits, bytes and logic bombs -- code designed to interfere with a computer's operation if a specific condition is met, according to experts inside and outside the U.S. government. The Worms Are Coming! In some ways, the U.S. military-industrial complex -- as President Dwight Eisenhower called ties among policymakers, the armed forces and arms makers -- is turning into more of a military-cyber-intelligence mash-up. The Pentagon's biggest suppliers -- including Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co , Northrop Grumman Corp, BAE Systems Plc and Raytheon Co -- each have big and growing cyber-related product and service lines for a market that has been estimated at $80 billion to $140 billion a year worldwide, depending on how broadly it is defined. U.S. officials have shown increasing concern about alleged Chinese and Russian penetrations of the electricity grid, which depends on the Internet to function. Beijing, at odds with the United States over Taiwan arms sales and other thorny issues, has "laced U.S. infrastructure with logic bombs," former National Security Council official Richard Clarke writes in his 2010 book "Cyber War," a charge China denies. Such concerns explain the Pentagon's push to put civilian infrastructure under its wing by creating a cyber realm walled off from the rest of the Internet. It would feature "active" perimeter defenses, including intrusion monitoring and scanning technology, at its interface with the public Internet, much like the Pentagon's "dot.mil" domain with its more than 15,000 Defense Department networks. The head of the military's new Cyber Command, Army General Keith Alexander, says setting it up would be straightforward technically. He calls it a "secure zone, a protected zone." Others have dubbed the idea "dot.secure." "The hard part is now working through and ensuring everybody's satisfied with what we're going to do," Alexander, 58, told reporters gathered recently near his headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. Alexander also heads the National Security Agency, or NSA, the super-secretive Defense Department arm that shields national security information and networks, and intercepts foreign communications. The Pentagon is already putting in place a pilot program to boost its suppliers' network defenses after break-ins that have compromised weapons blueprints, among other things. Lynn told Alexander to submit plans, in his NSA role, for guarding the so-called defense industrial base, or DIB, that sells the Pentagon $400 billion in goods and services a year. "The DIB represents a growing repository of government information and intellectual property on unclassified networks," Lynn said in a June 4 memo obtained by Reuters. He gave the general 60 days to develop the plan, with the Homeland Security Department, to provide "active perimeter" defenses to an undisclosed number of Pentagon contractors. "We must develop additional initiatives that will rapidly increase the level of cybersecurity protection for the DIB to a level equivalent to the (Department of Defense's) unclassified network," Lynn wrote. The Pentagon, along with the Homeland Security department, is now consulting volunteer "industry partners" on the challenges private sector companies envision, said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rene White, a Pentagon spokeswoman, in a status report. Throwback? Some see the Pentagon's proposed new ring around certain critical services as a throwback almost to the dark ages. "Dot.secure becomes new Target One," says Richard Bejtlich, General Electric Co's director of incident response. "I can't think of an easier way to help an adversary target the most critical information on industry computers." Bejtlich and others say such an arrangement would only be as strong as its weakest link, vulnerable to compromise in many ways. "I guarantee users will want to and need to transfer information between their normal company Internet-connected computers and 'dot.secure'," he says. "Separation is a fool's goal." Utilities already use encrypted, password-controlled systems to handle communication between power plants and large-scale distribution systems. Trying to move that traffic off the existing Internet onto an independent computer network would be expensive, and would not necessarily guarantee security. "Even a private network is only so secure," said Dan Sheflin, a vice president at Honeywell International Inc who works on grid-control technology. "A big threat is employees walk in, unknowingly or knowingly, with (an infected) thumb drive, plug it in, put their kids' pictures on their PC and, oh boy, something's on the network. Those are things that even a private network could be subject to." Rather than building a new network, a more practical solution could be improving the security of existing systems. "The real issue is not letting people in and having layers of defense if they do get in to isolate them and eradicate them," said Sheflin, of Honeywell, which makes grid components ranging from home thermostats to automation systems to run power plants. "This is a very difficult problem. We are up against well-funded groups who can employ many people who spend their time trying to do this." Greg Neichin of San Francisco-based Cleantech Group LLC, a research firm, says utility companies already are well aware of the need to guard their infrastructure, which can represent billions of dollars of investment. "Private industry is throwing huge sums at this already," he says. "What is the gain from government involvement?" Companies ranging from Honeywell to General Electric Co -- whose chief executive, Jeff Immelt, called the U.S. energy grid a relic last month -- are pushing the drive toward a "smart grid." That model would permit two-way communication between power producers and consumers, so a utility could avoid a blackout during a peak demand time by sending a signal to users' thermostats to turn down air conditioning, for instance. Such a system could also allow variable pricing -- lowering prices during off-peak demand times, which would encourage homeowners to run major appliances like dishwashers and washing machines in the evenings, when industrial demand declines. Neichin is worried that efforts to wall off grid-related communication could stifle that kind of innovation. But even Sheflin of Honeywell argues that private companies are not likely to solve a problem of this magnitude on their own. "The government needs to be involved in this," he said. "There is going to have to be someone that says, 'Wait a minute, this is of paramount importance.' I don't think it's going to be private industry that will raise the red flag." A Pentagon spokesman said he could not address industry concerns right now, but the Defense Department would do so before long. Still, the military's proposal faces other complications. Who's In Charge? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security now leads efforts to secure federal non-military systems, often described as the Internet's "dot.gov" domain. It also has the lead in protecting critical infrastructure. NSA and Cyber Command lend a hand when asked to do so, including by U.S. companies seeking to button up their networks. The idea of letting the Defense Department wall off certain private-sector networks is highly tricky for policymakers, industry and Pentagon planners. Among the issues: what to protect, who should be in charge, how to respond to any attack and whether the advent of a military gateway could hurt U.S. business's dealings overseas, for instance for fear of Pentagon snooping. In addition, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act generally bars federal military personnel from acting in a law-enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Congress. Alexander says the White House is considering whether to ask Congress for new authorities as part of a revised team approach to cyber threats that would also involve the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department. There are persistent signs of strains between Cyber Command and the Homeland Security Department over how to enhance the U.S. cybersecurity posture. "To achieve this, we have to depart from the romantic notion of cyberspace as the Wild Wild West," Homeland Deputy Secretary Jane Lute told the annual Black Hat computer hackers' conference in Las Vegas in July. "Or the scary notion of cyberspace as a combat zone. The goal here is not control, it's confidence." Alexander made a reference to tensions during certain meetings ahead of Cyber Storm III, a three-day exercise mounted by U.S. Homeland Security last week with 12 other countries plus thousands of participants across government and industry. It simulated a major cyber attack on critical infrastructure. "Defense Department issues versus Homeland Security issues," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on September 23. "And that's probably where you'll see more friction. So how much of each do you play? How radical do you make the exercise?" President Barack Obama's cybersecurity coordinator, Howard Schmidt, is working with Congress and within the administration to develop policies and programs to improve U.S. cybersecurity, says a White House spokesman, Nicholas Shapiro. Obama, proclaiming October National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, said protecting digital infrastructure is a "national security priority." "We must continue to work closely with a broad array of partners -- from federal, state, local and tribal governments to foreign governments, academia, law enforcement and the private sector -- to reduce risk and build resilience in our shared critical information and communications infrastructure," he said. Virtual Castle Walls Active defenses of the type the military would use to shield a "dot.secure" zone represent a fundamental shift in the U.S. approach to network defense, Lynn says. They depend on warnings from communications intercepts gathered by U.S. intelligence. Establishing this link was a key reasons for the creation of Cyber Command, ordered in June 2009 by Defense Secretary Robert Gates after he concluded that the cyber threat had outgrown the military's existing structures. "Policymakers need to consider, among other things, applying the National Security Agency's defense capabilities beyond the ".gov" domain, such as to domains that undergird the commercial defense industry," Lynn wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. "The Pentagon is therefore working with the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector to look for innovative ways to use the military's cyber defense capabilities to protect the defense industry," he said. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who led a Senate Intelligence Committee cyber task force that submitted a classified report to the panel in July, has floated a similar idea, drawing an analogy to medieval fortresses. "Can certain critical private infrastructure networks be protected now within virtual castle walls in secure domains where those pre-positioned offenses could be both lawful and effective?" he asked in a July 27 floor speech. "This would obviously have to be done in a transparent manner, subject to very strict oversight. But with the risks as grave as they are, this question cannot be overlooked," said the Rhode Island Democrat. "There is a concerted and systematic effort under way by national states to steal our cutting-edge technologies." The "dot.secure" idea may be slow in getting a full congressional airing. More than 40 bills on cyber security are currently pending. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, told Reuters he was not ready to pass judgment on possible new powers for Cyber Command. Cyber Warriors Cyber Command leads day-to-day protection for the more than 15,000 U.S. defense networks and is designed to mount offensive strikes if ordered to do so. The command has already lined up more than 40,000 military personnel, civilians and contractors under Alexander's control, nearly half the total involved in operating the Defense Department's sprawling information technology base. It is still putting capabilities in place from across the military as it rushes to reach full operational capability by the end of this month. Reuters has pinned down the numbers involved for each service. The Air Force component, the 24th Air Force, will align about 5,300 personnel to conduct or support round-the-clock operations, including roughly 3,500 military, 900 civilian and 900 contractors, said spokeswoman Captain Christine Millette. The unit was declared fully operational on October 1, including its 561st Network Operations Squadron based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, where it operates, maintains and defends Air Force networks. The Navy adds about 14,000 active duty military and civilian employees serving at information operations, network defense, space and telecommunication facilities around the world. They are now aligned operationally under the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, said spokesman Commander Steve Mavica. The Army contributes more than 21,000 soldiers and civilians, including the Army Intelligence and Security Command, for cyber-related actions, said Lieutenant Colonel David Patterson, an Army spokesman. The Marine Corps will assign roughly 800 of its forces to "pure" cyber work, according to Lieutenant General George Flynn, deputy commandant for combat development. Cyber Command's headquarters staff will total about 1,100, mostly military, under a budget request of about $150 million for the fiscal year that started October 1, up from about $120 million the year before. Beside guarding Defense Department computers, the nation's cyber warriors could carry out computer-network attacks overseas with weapons never known to have been used before. "You can turn a computer or a power plant into a useless lump of metal," says a former U.S. national security official familiar with the development of U.S. cyber warfare capabilities. "We could do all kind of things that would be useful adjuncts to a balanced military campaign." Such weapons could blow up, say, a chemical plant by instructing computers to raise the temperature in a combustion chamber, or shut a hydro-electric power plant for months by sabotaging its turbines. Scant official information is available on the development of U.S. cyber weapons, which are typically "black" programs classified secret. They are built from binary 1s and 0s -- bits and bytes. They may be aimed at blinding, jamming, deceiving, overloading and intruding into a foe's information and communications circuits. An unclassified May 2009 U.S. Air Force budget-justification document for Congress lifted the veil on one U.S. cyber weapon program. It described "Project Suter" software, apparently designed to invade enemy communication networks and computer systems, including those used to track and help shoot down enemy warplanes. "Exercises provide an opportunity to train personnel in combined, distributed operations focused on the 'Find, Fix and Finish' process for high-value targets," says the request for research, development, test and evaluation funds. The U.S. Air Force Space Command has proposed the creation of a graduate-level course for "network warfare operations." The proposed five-and-a-half-month class would produce officers to lead weapons and tactics development "and provide in-depth expertise throughout the air, space and cyberspace domains focused on the application of network defense, exploitation and attack," Lieutenant Colonel Chad Riden, the space command's Weapons and Tactics branch chief, said in an emailed reply to Reuters. Georgia On Their Mind The world got a glimpse of what lower-level cyber warfare might look like in Estonia in 2007 and in Georgia in 2008 when cyber attacks disrupted networks amid conflicts with Russia. Now, the Stuxnet computer virus is taking worries about cyber warfare to new heights as the first reported case of malicious software designed to sabotage industrial controls. "Stuxnet is a working and fearsome prototype of a cyber-weapon that will lead to a new arms race in the world," said Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based security software vendor. "This time it will be a cyber arms race." The program specifically targets control systems built by Siemens AG, a German equipment maker. Iran, the target of U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program, has been hit hardest of any country by the worm, according to experts such as the U.S. technology company Symantec. Asked about Stuxnet, U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Bernard McCullough, head of Cyber Command's Navy component, told Reuters: "It has some capabilities we haven't seen before." Discovered in June, Stuxnet -- named for parts of its embedded code -- is capable of reprogramming software that controls such things as robot arms, elevator doors and HVAC climate control systems, said Sean McGurk, who has studied it for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at an Idaho lab that grabs live viruses from the Internet and serves as a kind of digital Petri dish. "We're not looking right now to try to attribute where it came from," McGurk told reporters at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center that he runs in Arlington, Virginia. "What we're focusing on now is how to mitigate and prevent the spread," he said on September 24. And then there is China. Its cyber clout has been a growing concern to U.S. officials amid bilateral strains over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Beijing's currency policies, its territorial claims in the South China Sea and other irritants. Beijing appears to have thoroughly pierced unclassified U.S. government networks, said Dmitri Alperovitch, who heads Internet-threat intelligence analysis and correlation for McAfee, a software and security vendor that counts the Pentagon among its clients. "In the U.S. when you're sending an email over an unclassified system you might as well copy the Chinese on that email because they'll probably read it anyway because of their pretty thorough penetration of our network," he says. Still, Chinese cyber capabilities lag those of the United States, Russia, Israel and France in that order, adds Alperovitch. He headed McAfee's investigation into Aurora, a codename for a cyber espionage blitz on high-tech Western companies that led Google to recast its relationship with China earlier this year. Cyber arms entail "high reward, low risk" says Jeffrey Carr, a consultant to the United States and allied governments on Russian and Chinese cyber warfare strategy and tactics. Lynn, the deputy defense secretary steering the military's cyber overhaul, went to Brussels on September 14 to brief NATO allies on U.S. cyber defense initiatives. He encouraged them to take action to secure NATO networks, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. Some U.S. computer defenses are already linked with those of its allies, notably through existing intelligence-sharing partnerships with Britain, Canada, Australia and NATO. But "far greater levels of cooperation" are needed to stay ahead of the threat, Lynn says. NATO's secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, "believes that this is a growing problem and that it can reach levels that can threaten the fundamental security interests of the alliance," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said. A Rasmussen-compiled draft of a new NATO vision statement is due to be approved by NATO states at a November 19-20 summit in Lisbon and will endorse a more prominent cyber defense role for the alliance. They all agree that castle walls alone are no longer an option. (Additional reporting by Jim Finkle and Scott Malone in Boston; David Brunnstrom in Brussels; editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69433120101005 CCTV Site Internet Eyes Hopes to Help Catch Criminals Dhruti Shah A website which pays the public to monitor live commercial CCTV footage online has been launched in Devon. Internet Eyes will pay up to £1,000 to subscribers who regularly report suspicious activity such as shoplifting. Managing director Tony Morgan said the scheme would reduce crime and help prevent other anti-social behaviour. But civil liberties campaigners say the idea is "distasteful" and encourages private citizens to spy on each other. The private company intends to stream live footage to subscribers' home computers from CCTV cameras installed in shops and other businesses. 'Deterrent' Mr Morgan said: "The subscribers will have access to four screens at the same time and if they see anything suspicious, they can press the 'alert' button. This then sends an instant text and picture message to the shop assistant or manager - who then makes the decision about what action to take." He said people have no choice over what CCTV footage they are able to watch for the 20 minutes they have access to, and they would be banned from viewing footage in their local area. He added: "The cameras are already there - we just link to them so people can watch them. All you see is the tops of people's heads. "The whole point of this is that it is a deterrent. People watch Crimewatch and that's not entertainment. We just want it to help people out." He said more than 13,000 people had indicated their interest in the project but he expected more people to join "once they had something to watch". The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has allowed the company to launch its beta site after it agreed to a number of changes, including only allowing subscribers aged 18 and over to access the site. The ICO also requested the company, which had planned to offer the service for free, make people pay £12.99 or £1.99 to use it so their details could be checked and to prevent any voyeurism and misuse of the system. Although the CCTV cameras are based in stores across the UK, the rewards are open to anyone from the European Union who is registered with the site. A spokesman for the watchdog said: "Our CCTV code of practice makes it clear that CCTV operators should use appropriately trained staff to monitor images. "We have provided advice to Internet Eyes on its own data protection compliance. We will be checking to ensure it has followed this and investigate any complaints we receive. Campaign organisations No CCTV and Privacy International ,which joined forces to oppose the scheme, say they still have major concerns about it. No CCTV's Charles Farrier called the scheme a "profit-making gimmick" and told the BBC: "[The subscribers] are not going to spot crime - these are shops and businesses under surveillance, not crime dens." He said he feared that people would take copies of the livestream and upload them to file-sharing networks. "There are not enough checks and balances in place. We will be looking for instances where they may potentially breach the data protection act." He added: "This is encouraging a growing trend of citizen spies. If people are so concerned about crime, they should contact the police. "They are hiding behind computer screens and willing crime to happen so they get a prize. It is a game." Mr Morgan said that posters would warn people the business was taking part in the scheme. One subscriber, Paul from Hammersmith, told the BBC News website he thought it was his civic duty to sign up. "We're in a time of austerity and there has been a reduction in the budgets of police and local authorities but by doing this, I feel I can help. "It will help people feel safe and secure and it's not like putting a camera in your house. These are in public places. I hate criminality and if I can help stop it, I will." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11460897 New Haven Police Chief Says Public Has The Right To Videotape Police Actions Investigation underway after raid of New Haven night club involving arrests of Yale students Kathleen Megan Following allegations this weekend that New Haven police harshly treated Yale students during a nightclub raid, Police Chief Frank Limon said Monday that officers will be trained to be sure they understand that it is legal for people to use cellphones and cameras to record police actions in public. Students have alleged police brutality during the raid Saturday morning at Elevate lounge at Alchemy nightclub in New Haven, and complained that police ordered students not to use their cellphones or cameras during the action. "Absolutely they have a right to use their cellphones," Limon said in an interview. "In no way are we saying that people don't have a right to videotape police officers while they are conducting any type of contact with the public." See video of Elevate raid on www.yaledailynews.com In interviews with the Yale Daily News, students said police were harsh in their treatment of those who tried to use their cellpones. Also under investigation, Limon said, is a Sept. 25 incident involving the arrests of Quinnipiac University students outside Toad's Place, another New Haven night club. A student used a cellphone camera to film police arresting his friend. Caught on videotape is an officer swearing at the student and ordering him to put away his phone and leave the area. The student doing the filming also was arrested. Limon said there was more involved in that situation than is shown in the student's video. He said the student with the camera was standing very close to the officer and was interfering with the arrest. "The videotaping was part of the behavior which was interfering with what the officers were trying to accomplish," Limon said. However, he added, the police officer "probably should have never said, 'Turn off your video.' " See video of the Toad's Place raid at www.quchronicle.com. Limon said he has been telling his department to "assume you're being videotaped every time you are out on the street." He said he is considering having New Haven police wear tiny video cameras that would record arrests or other actions from the officers' point of view, because short videos taken by a witnesses may not tell the entire story. He said that police officers in Cincinnati are using such a system. Mary Miller, dean of Yale College, sent an e-mail to students Saturday saying that university officials were aware that students have "serious concerns about the reported behavior of the New Haven Police as the dance at Elevate was drawing to an end. We take these reports seriously." Thomas Conroy, a spokesman for Yale, said the college has made space available on campus for the police department to conduct interviews with students for their investigation. Limon said this setup will make it easy and convenient for students who want to file affidavits alleging police misconduct. In another e-mail to students, Miller said the college will address "some of the issues raised by students, such as whether students should have the right to use their cellphones while a police action is being conducted." Limon said the use of cellphones and cameras at times can interfere with a police action. For example, he said, in the case of the raid at Elevate, police wanted to get students to sit down and provide their identification cards. Limon said the officers might have felt that students who were on the phone or recording the action would not heed their orders. Limon also said police might have been concerned that students would warn their friends at other bars that police were conducting raids. The recent raids of bars and clubs in New Haven are part of the department's "Operation Night Life," which went into effect after a shooting in the city two weeks ago. As part of that effort, police have been entering bars and clubs with liquor agents and looking for underage drinkers, overcrowding and other violations. http://www.courant.com/community/new...,1432540.story US Offenders Unmonitored as Tagging System Fails AP Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold - more than two billion records - on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders' movement for about 12 hours. BI increased its data storage capacity to avoid a repeat of the problem. Prisons and other corrections agencies were blocked from getting notifications on about 16,000 people, BI Incorporated spokesman Jock Waldo said on Wednesday. "At 0729 Mountain Time [1429 GMT] on 5 October, BI Incorporated experienced a problem with one of its offender monitoring servers that caused this server's automatic notification system to be temporarily disabled, resulting in delayed notifications to customers. The issue was resolved approximately 12 hours later at 1925 [0229 GMT Wednesday]," BI said in a statement. Tracking devices continued to record movement and gather information, but corrections agencies could not immediately view the data, BI said. In Wisconsin, local police and probation agents held about 140 sex offenders at local jails until the GPS tracking system was restored. The offenders - about 300 in the state, most of them sex offenders - were never aware they were not being tracked, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Linda Eggert said. "In retrospect, we should have been able to catch this," Mr Waldo is quoted as saying by the AP news agency. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11491937 Piracy Badges All Around: Boy Scouts Take Stand Against Illegal File Sharing Allie Townsend The Boy Scouts are taking a preliminary stance against piracy. But is it overly cautious? It may not surprise you to hear that when asked as part of a recent survey, 69% of 15 to 19 year-olds don't believe they should pay for music, but according to a recent article in Scouting Magazine, the official publication of The Boy Scouts Of America, even legal file sharing contributes to the younger generation's casual approval of Internet piracy. "If you play CDs that you've burned—even if they're legal—your Scouts may not recognize the difference between those and the pirated CDs friends have given them," claims the article which goes on to point fingers at bands like Radiohead, who according to the Scouts "have further complicated the situation by giving their music away or offering it on a “pay what you want” basis." The issue is murky. Though illegal downloads run rampant through the Web, a move toward cloud-based entertainment libraries will produce less physical evidence of purchase when played externally in devices non-compatible with those files, specifically, like Scouting mentions, in cars. But does that call for the eradication of all non-purchased CDs? Last week, a column by Techdirt's Mike Masnick attacked the Scouts' recommendations on the subject, calling them "ridiculous," and suggesting that children are smart enough to distinguish the difference between legal and illegal file sharing even with the presence of burned CDs. "The internet is the real world too. And bands like Radiohead haven't "further complicated the situation." They've helped make it clear that there are smart business models that can be embraced while not turning your fans into criminals." http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/05/...-file-sharing/ Has Online Sharing Spurred a New Offline Sharing Economy? Audrey Watters "Sharing" may be one of the key elements of our digital world - sharing files, sharing links, sharing content. But has the emphasis on sharing online changed the way in which we share offline? Results of a study by Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research contend that indeed it has. A survey of over 500 Web users finds that people who share online are more apt to share offline, in part the study argues, because they've learned to trust each other online. And the impetus behind this sharing isn't simply a matter of saving money. The same number of respondents claimed they share in order to make the world a better place as said they share to save money (although two-thirds did say they were more likely to share if they could make money from doing so). It's part of a move the authors of the research trace from an ownership economy to an access economy. In this new economy, a variety of new services have been developed in order to allow people use of an asset without having to actually buy or own it. Share and Share Alike Sharing was defined by participants as "borrowing or lending an item for free, seconded by co-owning something with others: essentially, exchanges that involved no monetary gain, as well as synchronous access or collaborative efforts toward a shared goal." Over half the respondents identified renting and buying and selling used items as a form of sharing. Some of the other findings include: • Sharing online is a good predictor that someone is likely to share off line too. 78% of participants felt that their online experiences make them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. • 85% of all participants believe that Web and mobile technologies will play a critical role in building large-scale sharing communities for the future. • Age did not seem to make a difference in the propensity to share. And respondents age 40 and over were more likely to feel comfortable sharing with anyone at all who joins a sharing community, whereas younger respondents preferred to share among smaller social circles • 3 out of 4 participants currently share personal or informational content through social networking platforms. 70% share digital media, and 68% share physical media like books and DVDs. • Of those who share information and media online, two-thirds use other people's creations licensed under Creative Commons. Opportunities for Social Startups The report also looks at opportunities for entrepreneurs in building startups around social sharing. And those opportunities look good, considering that 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase over the next 5 years. The report notes in particular the opportunities in sharing transportation and physical spaces. Even though many of these services are not Internet-based, the report emphasizes the importance of the web in building the peer-to-peer networks to facilitate sharing. "The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where 'access' trumps 'ownership'; social value becomes the new currency; 'exchanges' replace 'purchases'; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences," says Neela Sakaria, SVP of Latitude. Even though author Malcolm Gladwell recently contended that social media would not bring about revolution, the "New Sharing Economy" study does seem to indicate that our online interactions are having a substantial impact beyond just the realm of communication and culture. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._sharing_e.php The Dream Is Over: Music Labels Have Killed Their Digital Future Wayne Rosso John Lennon would have been 70 years old this week. It got me thinking about one of his most famous lyrics, a line from ‘God’: “The dream is over.” Lennon may have been reflecting on the demise of the Beatles, but it seems to also apply to the once enthusiastic promise of digital music services… The hope of pioneering the music industry’s most profound transformation, that inspired entrepreneurs over 10 years ago, has finally been snuffed out by the very people who would have profited the most—the music industry. The table is now set. There will be no new players of significance to enter the business. Investors don’t want to entertain the remotest possibility of funding any start-up that deals with music, no matter how clever and innovative. As one major media venture firm told me a few months ago, they’re tired of writing cheques for big advances to record labels. Not to mention the huge legal fees that start-ups have to spend in order to get licensed, a process that takes at least a year (for no apparent reason, I might add). What’s most ironic is that the record labels have now put themselves in the position of having to depend on the bulk of their digital sales from companies that actually couldn’t care less about selling music: Apple (NSDQ:AAPL - News), Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN - News), and now Google (NSDQ:GOOG - News). These behemoths have huge revenues, 99.9% of which are not related to digital music sales. Remember when the industry was screaming “never again” when they finally figured out that Apple was making a fortune from iPods? They would never let another hardware manufacturer get away without forking over a piece of their sales. Then Doug Morris brilliantly delivered on that promise. He got $1 for every Zune sold. Good work, Doug. You should be slicing pastrami at Nate n’ Al’s. The money you made from that deal would pay for your lunch. One senior digital music executive told me “they (major labels) are despicable scum. They fly out to Cupertino and let Steve Jobs smack them around and then fly home and try to take every dime they can get out of start-ups in order to make them feel better about themselves.” The fact that Google is now interested in getting serious about a music play has gotten every record company lawyer wet in the pants. They think that this is going to be a game changer. It won’t be. People forget that, just because it’s Google, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a hit. They’ve had plenty of bombs. Remember Google Wave and Buzz? The record labels are counting on Google rescuing them from Apple’s death grip. Not going to happen. Google may suck up some market share, but not at Apple’s expense. This has been the pattern with Amazon’s digital download store. From what has been reported, Google is not pitching anything particularly innovative either. Basically an iTunes clone with a paid locker service. It’s looking like nothing that hasn’t been done better by others. Nobody’s going to pay Google $25 a year to store their music in a cloud. The labels are counting on half of that revenue. On top of that, some of the names that have been floated in the media as potential Google music heads are downright ludicrous. What the industry has accomplished is exactly what they didn’t need. They killed competition. Brilliant. The dream is over. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/The-Dr....html?x=0&.v=1 Free Lesson "All About Copying (Burning) CD's" Alexander Cohen Computer users are invited to learn how to save data or music by copying onto a CD at a free open-to-the-public lesson on Monday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m., in the community auditorium of the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St., West Hartford. A computer professional Dennis Halnon of Biznuzz IT Services will explain in everyday terms and demonstrate how to use your computer's ability to make inexpensive copies of valuable material for external storage. Mr. Halnon who lives in Barkhamsted is a 20-year veteran of the computer business and works for Biznuzz IT Services in Winsted. He will demystify the jargon of CD readers, writers (burners) and the alphabet soup of CD-RW, CD-R, CD, DVD and more. His listeners will leave with new-found knowledge that will serve them well for long afterwards. Admission is free. No RSVP is needed. This event is part of an ongoing series of free public instructional meetings held on the third Monday of each month except August by the public service computer help society BPMUG (Business & Professional Microcomputer Users Group www.bpmug.org), a regional Not-For-Profit club of computer experts and lay persons who offer help to every audience and to each other. Prior to each program, listeners can ask for help for computer problems from the organization's experts. Free refreshments and networking follow each program. For directions or information, call Paul Silversmith 860-561-8511. http://www.courant.com/community/hc-...?Query=36651HC Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - October 2nd, September 25th, September 18th, September11th 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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