Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 8th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1982 would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2011." – James Boyle


"The Intel Insider chip is NOT a DRM technology. It’s content protection." – Intel Insider


"Shutting down peer-to-peer networks is like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months. It just leads to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down." – Tom McInerney


"I don’t know if we would be together without Skype. Seeing his face makes our relationship even stronger." – Lisa Hoeynck


"We are not talking about a national ID card. We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities." – Gary Locke


"The government cannot create that identity infrastructure. If it tried to, it wouldn't be trusted." – Jim Dempsey



































January 8th, 2011




Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans
Declan McCullagh

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it's calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

"We are not talking about a national ID card," Locke said at the Stanford event. "We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities."

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the "trusted identity" project are remarkably scarce. Last year's announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.

Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, who spoke later at the event, said any Internet ID must be created by the private sector--and also voluntary and competitive.

"The government cannot create that identity infrastructure," Dempsey said. "If it tried to, it wouldn't be trusted."

Inter-agency rivalries to claim authority over cybersecurity have existed ever since many responsibilities were centralized in the Department of Homeland Security as part of its creation nine years ago. Three years ago, proposals were circulating in Washington to transfer authority to the secretive NSA, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department.

In March 2009, Rod Beckström, director of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center, resigned through a letter that gave a rare public glimpse into the competition for budgetary dollars and cybersecurity authority. Beckstrom said at the time that the NSA "effectively controls DHS cyberefforts through detailees, technology insertions," and has proposed moving some functions to the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

One of the NSA's missions is, of course, information assurance. But its normally lustrous star in the political firmament has dimmed a bit due to Wikileaks-related revelations.

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who is accused of liberating hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents from military networks and sending them to Wikileaks, apparently joked about the NSA's incompetence in an online chat last spring.

"I even asked the NSA guy if he could find any suspicious activity coming out of local networks," Manning reportedly said in a chat transcript provided by ex-hacker Adrian Lamo. "He shrugged and said, 'It's not a priority.'"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027800-281.html





What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1954

Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1954 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2011.

What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? How about William Golding's Lord of the Flies? Golding first published Lord of the Flies in 1954. If we were still under the copyright laws that were in effect until 1978, Lord of the Flies would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2011 (even assuming that Golding or his publisher had renewed the copyright). Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2050. This is because the copyright term for works published between 1950 and 1963 was extended to 95 years from the date of publication, so long as the works were published with a copyright notice and the term renewed (which is generally the case with famous works such as this). All of these works from 1954 will enter the public domain in 2050.

What other works would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.

* The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
* Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
* Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim
* Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception
* Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
* Pauline Réage's Histoire d'O
* Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today's youth"
* Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
* Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
* Alan Le May’s The Searchers
* C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
* Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7–10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater.

The 1950s were also the peak of popular science fiction writing. 1954 saw the publication of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (filmed three times in the last half century by Hollywood), Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow!, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast, and the Hugo Award-winning They’d Rather Be Right by Frank Riley and Mark Clifton. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2011, we will have to wait until 2050 – a date that, itself, seems the stuff of science fiction.

Pieces of history, too, remain locked up. The first issue of Sports Illustrated – which featured on its cover the then Milwaukee Braves’ Eddie Matthews at bat with the then New York Giants catcher Wes Westrum – would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2011. (Time Inc., owner of Sports Illustrated, retains the copyright through 2050.)

Think of the movies from 1954 that would have become available this year. You could have showed clips from them. You could have showed all of them. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. (You could have been a contender!) Instead, here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years:

* On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan; starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb
* Director Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr, and Thelma Ritter
* The original Japanese-language release of Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurasawa; starring Takashi Shimura and Toshirō Mifune
* Dial M for Murder, directed by Hitchcock; starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, and Robert Cummings
* Walt Disney's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason
* The cult horror classic, Creature from the Black Lagoon
* The enduring holiday chestnut, White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Allen, featuring songs by Irving Berlin
* The Barefoot Contessa, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, and Edmond O’Brien
* Brigadoon, with Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, and Cyd Charisse; from the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical

If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music or record your own version of some of the great music of the early 1950s, January 1, 2011, would have been a happy day for you under the old copyright laws. I Got a Woman (Ray Charles and Renald Richard), Mambo Italiano (Bob Merrill), Mister Sandman (Pat Ballard), Misty (Erroll Garner), Only You (and You Alone) (Buck Ram), Shake, Rattle and Roll (Jesse Stone, under his songwriting name, Charles E. Calhoun) – they would have all become available.

What if you were interested in scientific research from 1954? Many copyrighted scientific journal articles about, for example, quantum theory remain behind paywalls. (Not all scientific publishers work under this kind of copyright scheme. “Open Access” scientific publications, like those of the Public Library of Science, are under Creative Commons attribution licenses, meaning that they can be copied freely from the day they are published.)

Most of these works are famous – that is why we included them here. And the authors of famous and commercially successful works would probably renew the copyright for a second term of 28 years. But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher – 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1982 would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2011.

That means that all these examples from 1954 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1982 enter the public domain on January 1, 2011. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Instead, these works will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century. And for most of them – orphan works – that means they will be both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits, without any benefit going to a copyright holder. Think of the cultural harm that does. How ironic that Samuel Beckett’s English-language version of Waiting for Godot, the existentialist play in which the characters Vladimir and Estragon wait interminably for a Godot who never appears, was published in 1954 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2011. As Vladimir says in the play: “But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—” 56 years later, we are still waiting.
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976





EFF Speaks Out Against $675K File-Sharing Damages
Wendy Davis

Boston grad student and file-sharing defendant Joel Tenenbaum has garnered support from the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is backing his argument that a six-figure damage award for sharing music is unconstitutional.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week with the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the EFF argues that "exemplary damage awards that are grossly excessive" are unconstitutional because they don't serve any legitimate purpose. What's more, the group argues, such awards potentially dissuade people from entirely legitimate forms of expression. "Without balance, and especially where there is no evidence of actual harm or reprehensibility, excessive statutory awards can stifle creativity and innovation that involves even a small risk of copyright liability," the EFF argues.

The organization is urging the appellate court to uphold U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner's ruling slashing the amount Tenenbaum must pay for sharing 30 tracks to $67,500. The jury had ordered Tenenbaum to fork over $675,000, or $22,500 for each of the 30 songs he shared.

Even though the copyright statute provides for damage ranging from $750 to $150,000 per work infringed, Gertner ruled that the jury's award violated his right to due process of law because it was "grossly excessive" considering that Tenenbaum hadn't attempted to make a profit by sharing the music.

The Recording Industry Association of America filed an appeal; the group says that Gertner's decision marked the "elevation of [her] own policy views over those of Congress" and that the jury's $675,000 award against Tenenbaum was justified. "By putting copyrighted works in the public domain for free, Tenenbaum contributed to the continuing decline in the value of copyrighted sound recordings," the RIAA argues. "Given that file-sharing has cost the industry billions of dollars, there is no basis to question the award here."

But the EFF points out that allowing juries to ding people $150,000 for copyright infringement also carries a cost. "Permitting excessive statutory damage awards without due process review chills speech, expression, creativity and innovation," the group argues.

The organization goes on to provide examples of instances where copyright holders threatened groups who arguably made fair use of material. For instance, in 2009 National Public Radio sent a cease-and-desist letter to the anti-gay marriage group Stand for Marriage Maine, which used 20 seconds of NPR material in an ad. And in 2008, major news organizations complained that the campaigns of both presidential candidates wrongly used short clips of news shows in ads. "In all of these cases, there was no evidence of actual harm to the media giants that owned the copyrights," the EFF argues. "Even so, the candidates each faced a potential judgment of up to $150,000 per video clip."
http://www.mediapost.com/publication...art_aid=142378





Record $250K Porn File-Sharing Settlement Reached
Rhett Pardon

In what apparently is the largest porn file-sharing settlement against a single defendant in the U.S., an East Coast man has consented to a $250,000 judgment against him for uploading six Corbin Fisher movies.

XBIZ has learned that a Boston-area resident known as T.S. signed settlement papers on Christmas Eve, just four days after the gay studio filed a complaint against the BitTorrent defendant who was identified through his IP address.

Marc Randazza, Corbin Fisher's general counsel, told XBIZ he knows of no other file-sharing settlement, porn or mainstream, that has reached this dollar high.

"This case was airtight," Randazza said. "Some people fight like cats and dogs; he didn't."

Randazza noted that the defendant, who is in his 20s, is "one of our Patient Zeroes" relative to his prolific distribution of Corbin Fisher content using torrents.

"[T.S.] is not merely one of many who steal the [Corbin Fisher's] copyrighted works online, Schwaller is one of the primary sources of the stolen Corbin Fisher works circulating on the Internet," Randazza wrote in the copyright infringement complaint.

"[T.S.] provided copies of [Corbin Fisher's] copyrighted works to various torrent sites, where they were recirculated and redistributed widely," the suit said.

Corbin Fisher movies allegedly uploaded through BitTorrent and named in the Schwaller suit include "Mason Fucks Trey," "Aiden," "Connor Fucks Ryan," "Jude Fucks Austin," "Carter Fucks Justin" and "Preston Fucks Trey."

Corbin Fisher, in the settlement, agreed to halve its actual damages in the suit to $250,000, with [T.S.] entitiled to "an opportunity to reduce the amount payable to if he ceases any further content theft (whether the plaintiff’s content or anyone elses), and if he makes regular payments toward the judgment on a schedule, which will be agreed upon between the parties in a separate settlement agreement."

Attorney Evan Stone, who represents a number of companies in porn BitTorrent litigation, called the file-sharing settlement "eye-popping" because of its high-dollar sum.

"I don't know of any settlement of its kind with anything close to that figure," Stone told XBIZ. "That's wild; very surprised."

A federal judge has yet to sign off on the consent judgment.
http://newswire.xbiz.com/view.php?id=128936





Atari Loses Copyright Suit Against RapidShare

Online copyright lawsuits aren’t all about music. Video game publisher Atari Europe recently became concerned that copies of its game Alone in the Dark were floating around one-click file-hosting service RapidShare, so it took the hosting company to court. The publisher wanted RapidShare to take responsibility for the files hosted and downloaded via their service – and to block any which compromise copyright or intellectual property agreements.

The first court to hear the case – in Düsseldorf, Germany – found in favour of Atari‘s arguments, but RapidShare didn’t like the decision, appealed, and finally won when the case was heard in the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf.

RapidShare have released a statement:

“The Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf acknowledged RapidShare’s efforts against the distribution of material that is protected by copyright and deemed the additional measures required by Atari to be unreasonable or pointless.”

This is not the first time that the file hosting company has come under the legal spotlight. Last year, the same German appeals court overturned a separate ruling against them, while a US court has also decided the company is not liable for its users behaviour.

Spokesman Daniel Raimer added:

“The ruling demonstrates once again that RapidShare is operating a fully legal range and has taken measures against the misuse of its service which go beyond the level that is legally required. We are confident that copyright holders will gradually come to accept this conclusion.”

Gradually is the key word there though, as Atari and other major copyright holders around the world still aren’t keen on the court’s decision. I doubt this will be the last time that RapidShare are in the legal spotlight, with worldwide music trade group IFPI also highlighting “Unlicensed download sites, news groups, specialised search engines, forums, blogs and cyberlockers” in their 2010 digital music report as significant channels for copyright infringements.
http://www.gamepron.com/news/2011/01...st-rapidshare/





Mac App Store Cracked Open for Piracy

Mac App Store Cracked Open for PiracyThe Mac App Store's security has been cracked. This means that, by installing a software called Kickback, you will be able to pirate any applications in the store. However, the crack will not be available until February 2011, according to Dissident:

We don't want to release kickback as soon as the [Mac App] Store gets released. I have a few reasons for that.

Most of the applications that go on the Mac App Store [in the first instance] will be decent, they'll be pretty good. Apple isn't going to put crap on the App Store as soon as it gets released. It'll probably take months for the App Store to actually have a bunch of crappy applications and when we feel that it has a lot of crap in it, we'll probably release Kickback.

So we're not going to release Kickback until well after the store's been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don't want to devalue applications and frustrate developers.

Dissident is a member of Hackulous, the community that cracked Apple's Digital Rights Management system for iOS.

While I don't support piracy, I understand the need to allow people to try apps for free, especially when there's so much crap out there. However, this opens the door to wide piracy, which is not good for anyone, developers and users alike in the long term.

That's why Apple should provide a test mode for all apps. Lite and trial versions don't cut it. It's cumbersome and not universal. Storewide 24-hour testing would be perfect, allowing users to quickly purchase or delete at any time during the trial period.

And they should do the same with iOS.
http://gizmodo.com/5727080/





5 Anti-Piracy Strategies Designed to Hurt Torrent Sites in 2011
enigmax

In 2011 the war against BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites will reach a new level. Since sites such as The Pirate Bay have proven that no amount of litigation or criminal sanctions against their operators can take them down, the focus will switch to undermining their infrastructure. Companies and organizations providing file-sharing sites with essential services are set to face the glare of the spotlight and attempts to hold them accountable for the actions of their customers’ users.

After nearly a half decade of criminal and civil action against The Pirate Bay and untold millions spent trying to take the site down, one might have just a little cold sympathy for the position of the international music and movie industries.

The combined might of the MPAA and IFPI, with almost limitless funding and the ears of politicians worldwide, has failed miserably to take The Pirate Bay offline. Their lawyers couldn’t do it and their friends in government assisted by their friends in the Swedish police department couldn’t do it either.

Nevertheless, the entertainment industries will have learned a lot on the way. In 2011 they will continue their pressure on BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites with a multi-pronged strategy that will see them pile pressure not just on the sites themselves, but on those providing them with critical services and infrastructure. Here are five predictions for 2011.

Domain Seizures

The next phase of these domain seizures will certainly come in 2011 and they are expected to be bolder than those in 2010. Whether or not they include any of The Pirate Bay’s domains remains to be seen (both TPB and MegaUpload escaped this fate in 2010) but it seems almost inevitable that more torrent sites will make an appearance.

Pressure on webhosts

Companies that provide hosting for BitTorrent and other file-sharing sites can expect to come into the spotlight in 2011. This pressure technique has been used by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN for several years already and has sealed the fate of hundreds of smaller BitTorrent sites. More recently, it also took down some bigger players.

Not only has The Pirate Bay suffered downtime and been forced to relocate several times in the last 12 months, but other prominent file-sharing sites such as Rlslog have too. The trend will continue during this year but while it has proven to be an annoying inconvenience, it will probably only be effective short term.

Forcing ISPs to block sites

As we have seen in a number of cases in the last few years, the IFPI and MPAA have attempted to have The Pirate Bay banned or blocked in a number of countries including Italy, Denmark, Ireland and The Netherlands, with varying success.

In the last few weeks the MPA have begun testing the strategy against Usenet indexer, Newzbin, another site which refuses to go offline. The movie industry group is trying to force UK ISP BT to block customer access to the site. If successful the pressure will shift to other ISPs in the country initially, then other sites will be suggested for blockade, probably starting with The Pirate Bay.

While ISP blocks can be circumvented with ease, they still have the potential to hinder the growth of sites as inexperienced users will quickly give up trying to access a non-responsive site.

Cutting off donations and payment processing

As demonstrated by the recent withdrawal of service from Wikileaks by Mastercard and PayPal, pressure applied in the right places by the right people can have powerful results. In 2010 significant numbers of private BitTorrent sites also reported problems with their donation accounts at PayPal. With little advertising to speak of, private sites are particularly vulnerable to this kind of setback.

Last month What.cd confirmed that due to music industry pressure their donations processing services have been withdrawn several times. Expect this approach to become more widespread.

Assaults on advertisers

Whenever the entertainment industries speak about The Pirate Bay, they are sure to assert that the site makes a fortune in advertising revenue. In their submission to the U.S. Government on “notorious pirate markets” the MPAA said that the site makes $60,000 per month in advertising, a clear attempt to give the impression that the running of the site is motivated by illegal commercial interests.

In a complaint dated 23rd August 2010 and filed in the U.S. District Court in California, Disney and Warner Bros revealed their intention to go after Triton Media, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company (not to be confused with Triton Media Group of Sherman Oaks, CA) they claim “owned, operated, provided advertising consulting and referrals for, and/or provided other material assistance” to nine movie-centric sites.

In October a judge signed a consent judgment barring Triton from working with several streaming sites including watch-movies-online.tv, watch-movies-links.net and thepiratecity.org or other similar operations. They were also ordered to pay $400,000 to Disney and Warner.

While Triton were an easier target than most, this success may well embolden the entertainment industries to take further legal action against advertisers. They may, however, simply have a quiet word in those at the top of the advertising chain and suggest that promoting goods on torrent sites can prove counter productive.

Still the big question remains – will these draconian measures prove effective? While they will certainly prove to be a hindrance, sites are already preparing to deal with the various threats listed above. Are torrent sites about to give up and go home? Absolutely not.
http://torrentfreak.com/5-anti-pirac...n-2011-110102/





Google Helps Seized BitTorrent Site to Regain Lost Traffic
enigmax

The domain seizures by the U.S. Government in November hit the sites affected badly, reducing their traffic to a trickle overnight. One of the sites, BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, is refusing to throw in the towel and shows how futile the seizure was. In addition to taking legal action to hopefully recover his .COM domain, the owner has been working hard using Google tools to regain lost traffic.

Back in November when the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized more than 80 domain names of sites they claim were infringing copyright, the effect on their traffic was instant and massive.

With their domain names no longer under their control rendering most existing search engine links unusable, most of the sites all but disappeared. Some, however, refused to give in and moved immediately to new domain names.

One of those is the BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, which relocated to a .info domain it already owned. Just after the seizures, TorrentFreak asked site owner Waleed Gadelkareem how the action had affected his traffic. The response was clear – the domain seizure had set the site’s traffic back massively.

Like many other torrent sites Google was the main traffic source of Torrent-Finder, so even with the .info domain ready traffic initially plunged up to 90%. Google was simply sending the traffic to the seized .com domain, not the new one.

But for this determined Egyptian, patience, hard work and a little help from Google was to set the site back on track to recovery. At the same time, Waleed shows how futile the U.S. seizures are for sites that are determined to continue their operations.

“Google webmaster tools are very important for any website’s SEO and I had already registered torrent-finder.com on my cpanel and confirmed ownership,” Waleed explained.

This registration meant that using the “Change of Address” option on the panel could be done immediately.

“Then I had to direct all linkbacks to the new .info domain by contacting webmasters or changing it by myself if I could. You can see the result on Google analytics of search engine traffic,” says Waleed.

“Slowly Torrent Finder is getting back most of the indexed pages that we used to have on Google, and of course the targeted keywords,” adds Waleed.

Despite the encouraging signs of recovery with the .info domain (thanks to Google), Waleed is also continuing with his legal action to reclaim his .com domain with the help of lawyer David Snead.

Waleed hopes that the mistakes that were made will serve him well in his case.
http://torrentfreak.com/google-helps...raffic-101231/





BitTorrent File-Sharing Apps Hit 100 Million Monthly Users
Mark Hefflinger

BitTorrent, the company created by the designers of the file-sharing software, announced on Monday that it now counts over 100 million worldwide monthly users of its applications.

San Francisco-based BitTorrent offers both the original BitTorrent Mainline application, and µTorrent.

The company said it is seeing over 400,000 daily downloads of the applications, and clients checking in from over 220 countries every day.

It also highlighted recent partnerships with content producers, to legitimately distribute a number of feature films.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/01...-monthly-users





BitTorrent to Put Its Stamp on Taiwanese Electronics
Ralph Jennings

BitTorrent will work with a Taiwanese research institute to develop a certification scheme for local consumer electronics makers who want to put its filesharing applications in their products, a world first for the popular high-speed file-sharing protocol, the research institute said on Friday.

BitTorrent will work with the government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan to develop a specification, said institute international collaboration manager Margaret Chen. Taiwanese makers of PCs, DVD players, television sets and Shadowbox media viewers will then be able to stick BitTorrent-certified labels on products that support or pre-load the applications.

The BitTorrent protocol, which makes downloading a file faster the more people share it, should easily win respect among Taiwanese electronics manufacturers, Chen said.

"BitTorrent certificates will let everyone know publicly that the product has quality and value," Chen said. "It will be like the Dolby label."

The file-sharing icon wants a piece of Taiwan due to the high volume of consumer electronics manufactured on the island for the world market, Chen said. The two parties agreed at CES in Las Vegas to work together. BitTorrent has expressed interest in issuing certificates in other regions later, she said.

Taiwan's institute has begun soliciting manufacturers to participate. It has not agreed yet with BitTorrent on how to pay for the standardization and certification project or how long the research will take.

Local electronics firms would also install DRM (digital rights management) tools to stop BitTorrent downloads from violating music, video or document copyrights, Chen said.

BitTorrent applications allow quick transfers of files, such as film clips, that are sought after by numerous users at once. The protocol lets early phases of a file transfer upload to someone else as later ones download. They have also eased cost burdens on file hosts.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/21602...ectronics.html





China Actually Brags About How Much It Censors Online
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Pretty striking. While it's not news that the Chinese government censors the internet, it shows how uncontroversial it is that officials would actually brag about how much content they're censoring. (Via the FT)

In China, most bureaucracies wrap up the year with long, numbers-heavy statements on how well they did the past year, and the propaganda department is no different.

Last year, “by November, […] 350m pieces of harmful information, including text, pictures and videos, had been deleted,” he said. “There was a notable improvement in the online cultural environment.” This doesn't include sites that are blocked like Facebook.

Efforts by Google and the US government and others to get the Chinese government to loosen its grip on the internet a little bit are pretty much doomed, at least in the short term.
http://www.businessinsider.com/china...-online-2011-1





New Edition Purges ‘N’-Word from ‘Huck Finn’
Mike Moffitt

Samuel Clemens would not approve

For years, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” – arguably Mark Twain’s greatest novel – has been disappearing from classrooms because many school districts consider it racist.

Why? Mainly because Twain uses the “n”-word 219 times.

Bans of the classic tale about a 13-year-old’s journey down the Mississippi with a runaway slave didn’t sit well with Twain scholar Alan Gribben. Rather than have it go unread, Gribben and NewSouth Books decided to sanitize it for 21-century tastes.

In their upcoming edition, the “n”-word vanishes from the book’s 1830s Missouri vernacular. Replacing it is the safe, non-controversial “slave.” (“Injun” also is expelled.)

Literary purists will be appalled, of course. But so may casual readers. There’s a strong argument to make that the elimination of the word neuters the novel.

“The word is terrible. But it’s a linchpin of this book … It lays bare the inhumanity of slavery through the power of satire.” says the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri. “… If we keep updating things to reflect our current sensitivities, where do we stop?”

On the other hand, a politically correct “Huckleberry” removes a hurdle for public school English departments.
http://blog.ctnews.com/hottopics/201...n%E2%80%99-10/





Kingdom Announces New Web Publishing Law
Fatima Sidiya

JEDDAH: Online newspapers, blogs and forums will now need to register with the Ministry of Information and Culture for licenses to operate, according to new regulations that the ministry announced Saturday it is to introduce.

The new system, which will be introduced in a month’s time, has been discussed by online newspapers and bloggers who say the attempt to regulate online media in the same way that the Kingdom’s print publications are regulated is not workable.

The regulations also specify punishments in case of violations. These include the obligatory publishing of corrections, fines and bans for various time periods, including total bans. Applicants for licenses need to be Saudi, no less than 20 years of age, have high school certificates in the least and documents testifying to their good behavior. Online newspapers also need to employ editors in chief who have been approved by the Ministry of Information and Culture.

Abdul Aziz Khoja, minister of information and culture, said that the system is “in line with the development moves that the media sector is witnessing.” He added that the rules do not include any clauses restricting freedom of speech and that the ministry is eager to ensure there is transparency. He also said that the rules will be made open to improvement in the future.

Turki Al-Rougi, editor in chief of Al-Wiaam Online newspaper, said that the rules are welcome as they specify a particular government department that will be in charge of online media. He, however, added that there is fear that the regulations might be misused to restrict freedom of speech.

Al-Rougi said the Ministry of Information and Culture wants to implement the rules governing the print media on Internet websites and that this is not workable. He added that the drawbacks of the system will be discussed with the ministry at a seminar that is to be held on Monday at the Riyadh Literary Club.

“The fines could be as high as SR100,000 and SR50,000. The owners of websites simply cannot afford them as they are individuals unlike the print publications which are owned by establishments and businessmen,” said Al-Rougi, adding that the new system neglects mentioning visitors to websites.

Trad Al-Asmari, who blogs about poverty, unemployment and social justice in the Kingdom at alasmari.wordpress.com, said the system will remain “ink on paper” because it is “not applicable.”

“There are already contradictions in the system. It says that the person needs to have a license for his website and at the same time the person is actually applying for a license,” said Al-Asmari who won an award — “Reporters Without Borders, freedom of expression” — for his blog.

He added that the system would work for online newspapers but not for blogs, forums or Twitter. He also wondered whether it would be a requirement to ask the Ministry of Information and Culture for permission to post on Twitter or Facebook.

“What we hoped for is a chance for the media to obtain a self-controlled system not that of a government one,” he said.
http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article228424.ece





Announcing ScienceLeaks

This venture was triggered by the many people complaining that they couldn't evaluate the 'arseniclife' paper because the journal Science only allowed access to its abstract, not to the full paper or its supplementary online materials. In response, Science temporarily opened access to people wiling to register at their site, but when the month ends the barrier will go right back up.

This access problem applies to the great majority of scientific papers. The public pays for the research, but the results are locked behind journal-subscription paywalls, accessible only to people with personal subscriptions or affiliated with major research libraries, or to those willing to pay $20-$40 for access to individual articles.

Most researchers agree that this legacy of the pre-internet days is morally wrong and unfair to everyone. Those of us who can afford it pay thousands of dollars to the journals to make our own articles open access. And many of us post PDFs of our own papers on our personal web sites. But these aren't easy to find, especially for people not working in the field.

So I've set up a web site called Science Leaks (actually a Blogger blog) to serve as a clearing house, providing links to the papers people want to read. Anyone who's looking for access to a paper can simply post the paper's information as a comment, and anyone who knows where a pdf is available can then post the link. (Once a link is posted I'll remove the request comment, to keep things tidy.)

This is just a stopgap solution. In the short term, if there's sufficient interest someone will (I hope) help me to set up a better site. But the real solution is to change from having subscribers pay publication costs to having granting agencies pay them, either directly or as a line item in grant budgets.
http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/...enceleaks.html





Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage
Benedict Carey

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

All four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though “there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”

But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account — as conventional social science analyses do — makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say.

“Several top journals publish results only when these appear to support a hypothesis that is counterintuitive or attention-grabbing,” Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, wrote by e-mail. “But such a hypothesis probably constitutes an extraordinary claim, and it should undergo more scrutiny before it is allowed to enter the field.”

Dr. Wagenmakers is co-author of a rebuttal to the ESP paper that is scheduled to appear in the same issue of the journal.

In an interview, Dr. Bem, the author of the original paper and one of the most prominent research psychologists of his generation, said he intended each experiment to mimic a well-known classic study, “only time-reversed.”

In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.

In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.

In another experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

In recent weeks science bloggers, researchers and assorted skeptics have challenged Dr. Bem’s methods and his statistics, with many critiques digging deep into the arcane but important fine points of crunching numbers. (Others question his intentions. “He’s got a great sense of humor,” said Dr. Hyman, of Oregon. “I wouldn’t rule out that this is an elaborate joke.”)

Dr. Bem has generally responded in kind, sometimes accusing critics of misunderstanding his paper, others times of building a strong bias into their own re-evaluations of his data.

In one sense, it is a historically familiar pattern. For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.”

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal.

Physics and biology, among other disciplines, overwhelmingly suggest that Dr. Bem’s experiments have not changed those odds, Dr. Rouder said.

So far, at least three efforts to replicate the experiments have failed. But more are in the works, Dr. Bem said, adding, “I have received hundreds of requests for the materials” to conduct studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html





Why Are Health Data Leaking Online? Bad Software, Study Says

Hard-to-use software is behind the leakage of sensitive health data online, according to a study by Dartmouth researchers published in December.
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Health documents with sensitive patient information can be found in “peer-to-peer” networks, which people typically use to share music files and the like. The programs used to navigate these networks often locate files on a user’s computer and share them — whether they’re music and videos or things like spreadsheets with health data. The issue can arise when health workers transfer data from firms’ proprietary software to their home computers. If they or someone in their family uses file-sharing software, files can be picked up.

Over a two-week period in 2009, the researchers were able to find more than 200 files that contained identifying information such as name, address, date of birth, social security numbers, insurance numbers and health-related information. It’s not much compared with the vast number of files in these networks, but it presents a big risk — for health companies as well as patients.

The researchers also tracked searches on the networks, conducted by people looking for files, and saw many that were clearly intended to find sensitive documents — like “public health passwords” and “Columbia Center for AIDS Research.” These aren’t the phrases the average user types in when searching for free music.

Some of the searches could be intended to find information for corporate espionage — like results in drug trials — but many are likely aimed at finding numbers that could be used to commit fraud, said M. Eric Johnson, the director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “With health numbers, it’s complex, but once you have them, the amounts of money you can scam out of organizations like Medicare, Medicaid, Blue Cross,” are sizable, he said in an interview with Digits.

Mr. Johnson has been studying the data leakage on these networks for several years now; in his most recent study, he attempted to find out why the leaks happen and what can be done about it.

The biggest culprit: software that is difficult to use. “So many of the systems, particularly in health care, are bad. They’re worse than many other industries,” Mr. Johnson said. So people find workarounds — using word-processing and spreadsheet tools that aren’t secure, and downloading the files onto their home computers, where they often are forgotten.

Another problem, he said, is that organizations like bill-collection agencies and laboratories are sharing “much more information about patients than they need to conduct business.”

Mr. Johnson argues that incentives beginning this year for doctors and hospitals to invest in technology might actually help stem the leaks. Ironically, “cloud computing” — the broad term that encompasses Internet services like Google Docs — could actually help solve the problem of inadvertent Internet leaks, by making it easier for smaller businesses to get good, easy-to-use software, he said.

“People say, ‘No, don’t do the cloud. It’s terrible,’ but it’s already a very leaky system,” he said, although he added that cloud computing offers new kinds of threats from large-scale hackers.

But it will still be difficult to get doctors to move away from programs they find comfortable, he said. “We’ll probably be fighting this for at least the next five to 10 years,” he said.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/...re-study-says/





The Ultimate Patent Troll Patent: Get Sued When You File A Patent
Wolfgang Gruener

It may be somewhat ironic that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published in the last week of 2010, a year with a boat load of questionable patent filings and approvals, a patent application from IBM, which automates the management of intellectual property and comes with a “defend” module to formulate a strategy in the case of patent infringement.

The right to protect inventions and intellectual property from being copied in a frivolous way is one of the foundations of a rewarding economy, but a loose control and oversight in fact can have the opposite effect and we are witnessing astonishing lawsuits based on IP infringement claims every day. A few days ago, Microsoft co-founder revised his rampage against Google, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo. There is an ongoing trial involving a key Wi-Fi patent. And we are lost in confusion who is suing whom over what in the smartphone arena. The latest entrants are Sony and LG: Sony claims that LG infringes on 7 Sony mobile phone patents.

Those with massive IP holdings, whether they are used for products or not, may now hope for an efficient software, or at least procedure, how to organize a patent mess from the beginning to end. The components are divided in a “direct” portion, which includes the overall strategy such as R&D, portfolio, filing, budgeting and forecasting. “Control” covers factors such as market alignment, invention evaluation, IP valuation, and inventor training. “Execute” includes trade secret protection, trademark creation, IP landscaping, technology monitoring, and competitive intelligence.

My personal favorites are the “defend”, “influence” and capitalize modules, which describe a method for

“defending against infringements and invalidations of said IP rights based on said business strategies and monitoring market and competitor actions to develop risk management plans; an influence computer module including a standards influencing unit, a legal and regulatory influencing unit, and a policy influencing unit; and capitalize computer module for identifying potential licensees and potential assignees of said IP rights, and managing licensing negotiations, cross-licensing negotiations, and assignment negotiations based on said business strategies.”

In case you could not follow the entire phrase, you may want to read the patent filing itself, since IBM found it necessary to repeat these words more than two dozen times.

This patent reads a lot like a late Christmas present for Paul Allen (or the entire smartphone industry for the purpose of general entertainment), but there seems to be a deeper meaning in this patent. Some genius at IBM simply collected all the experience IBM gained from filing more than 100 patents virtually every week throughout the year and assembled that into a chart, which was then turned into a patent filing. Essentially, IBM could claim to have patented the …. patent. It covers very broad strategies how to file and protect a patent. So, this particular patent is, in fact, approved by the USPTO, and you file for a patent in the future, you may want to contact IBM, because you may infringe on at least on ingenious idea IBM laid out in its filing.

What a way to end the year.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/4823/...file-a-patent/





Big Media Fails to Turn ISPs into Copyright Cops
Greg Sandoval

Last month marked the second anniversary since the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the four largest music labels, stopped filing copyright lawsuits against people suspected of illegal file sharing.

At the time, the RIAA said it would seek help in copyright enforcement efforts from Internet service providers, the Web's gatekeepers, which are uniquely positioned to act as copyright cops. Under a proposed RIAA plan, ISPs would first issue warning letters and gradually increase pressure on customers who illegally shared songs, and even suspend or permanently terminate service for repeat offenders. RIAA execs said then that some ISPs were weeks away from announcing the adoption of what they called a "graduated response" program.

Two years later, we're still waiting. Not only have the largest ISPs declined to cut off accused file-sharing customers but one ISP, Time Warner Cable, did more than anyone to derail a litigation effort launched this year against file sharers by independent and adult-film studios. An RIAA representative declined to comment for this story

Instead of befriending the entertainment industry on copyright issues, the major bandwidth providers appear to be a foe. The top ISPs have conspicuously failed to support an antipiracy bill introduced in the U.S. Senate--and backed by the major entertainment sectors--late last year. If passed, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act would authorize the government to shut down U.S. Web sites suspected of piracy as well as order ISPs to block access to similar sites overseas. Two ISP execs, who spoke to CNET on condition of anonymity, were dismissive of the legislation and are skeptical it will pass.

Comcast as content owner

Entertainment execs brush all the bad news aside. They say the same thing they've said for two years: Just wait. They say there's a big announcement from some of the major ISPs coming around the corner. This time, they might be right about at least one ISP.

A year ago, Comcast announced it would pay $30 billion to acquire NBC Universal, parent company of one of the six largest Hollywood film studios and major TV networks. The deal for NBC Universal, home of "The Bourne Identity," and TV show "30 Rock," was supposed to be completed by the end of 2010 but it continues to draw scrutiny from regulators.

Nonetheless, the acquisition is expected to go through this year and that means Comcast has bet big on content. Film industry insiders say Comcast, with nearly 17 million high-speed Internet customers, has indicated it plans to get tough on piracy, though nobody seems to know what that means. A Comcast representative wasn't immediately available for comment.

Beyond Comcast, however, there still appears to be little appetite for a get-tough-on-piracy attitude at competitors such as AT&T and Time Warner Cable. The reasons the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America, which has also pitched the ISPs on a graduated response, have failed to sell their program to the ISPs are varied: ISPs don't want to alienate customers, the costs of implementing the plan are potentially high. What it boils down to is there are very few benefits for ISPs if they fight piracy and few consequences if they don't, insiders say.

The bandwidth providers are bigger than their entertainment counterparts, wield more power in Washington, and much of the public supports them on this issue. The big ISPs are more than capable of pushing back on the entertainment companies.

Underestimating ISP power

Evan Stone, a Dallas-based lawyer who this year began filing suits against suspected film pirates on behalf of porn studios, learned this the hard way. After filing a lawsuit last year on behalf of Larry Flynt Publications, the adult-entertainment empire that includes Hustler magazine, Stone needed to obtain the names of the people he accused of pirating his client's films. First, he retrieved the Internet protocol addresses belonging to people he accused of illegal file sharing and then asked ISPs to identify the owners of the IP addresses.

Time Warner Cable informed him the company would hand over names of only 10 subscribers a month. Stone seethed. "If you're a pirate in these times," Stone told CNET, "TWC is the ISP to have."

But that was only the start of his troubles. When he pressed TWC to hand over more names, Larry Flynt Publications cut ties with him. While it's hard to connect the dots, there's no doubt TWC had leverage since some of Flynt's movies are distributed over TWC's channels.

Stone "wanted us to put pressure on the cable operators, but it's not our goal to go after them," Michael Klein, Larry Flynt Publications' president, told AVN, a publication that covers the adult-film sector.

In a similar case, TWC offered to provide a minimum of 28 names to Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, the law firm that represents a dozen independent film companies that filed copyright complaints against thousands of alleged film pirates this year. At the rate TWC proposed, it would take years for the filmmakers to obtain all the defendants' names. The courts overseeing the cases signaled they wouldn't hold up the legal process for this. As a result, Dunlap was forced to drop thousands of defendants from one of the complaints.

Meanwhile, Stone said other major ISPs have resisted helping him discover names. He said his other adult-film clients are prepared to take the ISPs to court and that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is on their side. The DMCA requires ISPs to take specific action with regard to repeat copyright infringement committed by their customers or else lose protection from liability under the law's safe harbor provision.

So, do ISPs need the big film studios and music labels or is it the other way around? Some regional ISPs have booted accused film and music pirates off their networks. One of the more aggressive appears to be Qwest. But similar to Comcast's situation, Qwest has a financial stake in the entertainment industry. The company, which operates in 14 western states, is owned by tycoon Philip Anschutz, an investor in the movie "The Chronicles of Narnia," and owner of the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the world.

Self-interest, it seems, is perhaps the only way to get an ISP to play cops and robbers with its own customers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20027202-261.html





So Long, Broadband Duopoly? Cable's High-Speed Triumph
Nate Anderson

Broadband users have long been skeptical of the duopoly situation in the US Internet market, which often feels like “pick your poison”: telephone company or cable company. "Where's the real competition?" they cry, pointing to other countries with healthy ISP markets thanks to regulated line-sharing or even direct government control of the underlying fiber infrastructure (Australia's new plan). But will they one day look back at the US duopoly situation with something like longing?

When the Federal Communications Commission rolled out its National Broadband Plan last year, it shied away from any bold calls to transform ISP competition. But it did note that the US is quickly moving to a situation where many markets have only a single truly high-speed Internet provider. To put it in the plainest possible terms, if your home isn't served by Verizon's fiber optic FiOS system, you could be looking at a local high-speed monopoly. And that monopoly will probably come courtesy of an industry routinely rated low for customer satisfaction: cable.

The good news is that cable operators are upgrading speeds at a rapid clip, thanks largely to the modest expense associated with doing so. But DSL, provided by telephone companies over aging copper wiring, has simply not kept pace. Here's how the National Broadband Plan frames the problem (see p. 42):

Analysts project that within a few years, approximately 90% of the population is likely to have access to broadband networks capable of peak download speeds in excess of 50 Mbps as cable systems upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0. About 15% of the population is likely to be able to choose between two robust high-speed service services [sic]—cable with DOCSIS 3.0 and upgraded services from telephone companies offering fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP)...

However, providers offering fiber-to-the-node and then DSL from the node to the premises (FTTN), while potentially much faster than traditional DSL, may not be able to match the peak speeds offered by FTTP and DOCSIS 3.0. Thus, in areas that include 75% of the population, consumers will likely have only one service provider (cable companies with DOCSIS 3.0-enabled infrastructure) that can offer very high peak download speeds.

Some evidence suggests that this market structure is beginning to emerge as cable's offers migrate to higher peak speeds.

In an article recently put online by the Yale Law & Policy Review, law professor Susan Crawford (and former Obama administration member) argues that the “looming cable monopoly" is not just one more problem, but rather “the central crisis of our communications era.”

“When there is only one provider in each locality making available the central communications infrastructure of our time, what should the role of government be with respect to that infrastructure?” she asks. “When broadcast, voice, cable, and even newspapers are just indistinguishable bits flowing over a single, monopoly-provided fat pipe to the home, how should public goals of affordability, ubiquity, access to emergency services, and nondiscrimination be served? And what happens to diversity, localism, and the civic function of journalism?”
The "open Internet" and the "broadband Internet"

Because of the tremendous bandwidth available to cable operators, most of which now use a hybrid fiber/coax network, cable can offer these tremendous speeds while still using up only a handful of its 6MHz "channels." (DOCSIS 3.0 supports faster speeds in large part by bonding more channels together, but most systems currently bond only a few.) That leaves most of the network's bandwidth available for other uses. For now, those other uses include television, video on demand, etc. But as cable companies free up space by dumping analog channels and moving to things like Switched Digital Video (where only the currently requested channels are sent down the wire), huge new swaths of bandwidth will be freed up. For what?

“The real growth area for cable is 'broadband,'" says Crawford, “but very little of ‘broadband’ will be recognizable as Internet access. The rest of the transmissions filling the pipe will use the Internet protocol but will be thoroughly managed, monetized, prioritized, filtered, packaged, and non-executable—much like traditional cable television today. When a monopoly cable provider can allocate just two or three of its hundreds of virtual ‘channels’ to Internet conductivity and when only that provider can sell you video-strength speeds, net neutrality becomes a subsidiary issue—a tiny white bird landing on the back of an enormous hippo. Net neutrality matters, but it is a sideshow. As one content executive told me, ‘Comcast owns the Internet.’”

Crawford is a long-time advocate of net neutrality and related tech policy issues, so this might sound more than a bit hyperbolic to some observers. But one has only to listen to the ISPs themselves to see just how much they would love such a future (and it's one of the reasons they fought so hard to limit FCC oversight of “specialized services” in the recent network neutrality rulemaking).

Verizon's top lobbyist Tom Tauke put it quite plainly last summer: "Certainly nobody believes that the promise of broadband is Internet access and video, which is what we have today."

Instead, the future belongs to “‘other services’ that should be available over the broadband pipe. They need unique creativity and partnerships to make them work. It's the communications company partnering with the power company to do the smart grid. It's the communications company partnering with the healthcare provider to do heart monitoring at home. That requires a different set of rules than the rules that govern the best-effort Internet."

Everyone backing such managed services talks in terms of tele-health and the smart grid, but there's little doubt that the big ISPs would like to stay in the content distribution business (AT&T now runs an IPTV system, Verizon has FiOS TV, and the cable companies have "cable TV"). Why not a "managed service" that provides rock-solid support for Netflix streaming—if you pay an extra monthly fee?

Netflix is terrified at the prospect, and has made its worries known to the FCC, since it doesn't relish the thought of ISPs having financial incentives to serve more as a gatekeeper than a provider of a fat, fully open broadband pipe. And if that fat pipe can only be provided by one company in each market, the situation looks even worse.

Competition could come from several directions: continued advances in vectoring, pair bonding, and FTTN deployments might just keep DSL speeds competitive. Wireless, though unlikely to ever match speeds with wireline networks, could bring enough competition at medium speeds to keep abuses in check. "White spaces" broadband remains untested in the market.

But when it comes to truly high-speed Internet access, the cable companies currently have the best seat in the house. And they know it.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ed-triumph.ars





BT Content Connect Service Faces 'Two-Tier Net' Claims

BT's new service is opposed by some campaigners
BBC

BT has introduced a controversial service that some say could allow broadband providers to create a "two-tier internet".

Content Connect, as it is known, allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that use BT's network to charge content firms for high-speed delivery of video.

It could spell the end of so-called "net neutrality", where all traffic on the net is treated equally.

Critics say it will also reduce competition for consumers.

"This is a sea change in the way that content is delivered by ISPs," Jim Killock of the net freedom campaign organisation, the Open Rights Group, told BBC News.

"It is essentially them saying: 'Rather than delivering whatever content is on the internet as best we can, here are our services that we will deliver through our own network.'"

He said the result could be a "fundamental shift" from consumers choosing what video and gaming services they buy on the internet to "buying services from the internet to bundled services from ISPs".

"This would reduce competition and take investment away from internet companies - that would be bad for everyone."

But a spokesperson for BT denied that the offering would create a "two-tier internet".

"BT supports the concept of net neutrality, but believes that service providers should also be free to strike commercial deals, should content owners want a higher quality or assured service delivery."

It said that its new service would speed up download speeds across its network - even for those not buying into Content Connect - by easing congestion.

Free experiments

Network neutrality is one of the founding principles of the internet and is meant to ensure that all ISPs treat all web traffic equally - serving merely as a conduit for whatever data is passing from content providers to end users.

But debates have been raging around the world as the explosive growth in internet traffic - and particularly video - has put a strain on the existing infrastructure.

In the US, regulators recently voted in favour of rules that are designed to uphold the principles of network neutrality.

The EU has openly backed network neutrality, but has introduced regulation that allows network providers to manage traffic on their networks, provided what they are doing is transparent.

The UK regulator Ofcom is expected to clarify its stance later this year.

In the meantime, the UK government has already said that it backs a two-speed internet.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey said in November that ISPs had to be free to experiment with new charges to help pay for the expansion in internet services and infrastructure.

"This could include the evolution of a two-sided market, where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service," he said.

The new offering from BT seems to be the first major step in that direction.

The service, offered by BT's wholesale division, is based on a new content distribution network built by BT that stores video content closer to the user, reducing congestion on the network and speeding up load times.

BT retail - a separate division of BT - will begin to use the service to deliver BBC iPlayer content on its BT Vision TV service within the next few months.

"It will cache iPlayer content closer to customers on the network, allowing for the content to be delivered to customers in a more efficient and cost-effective way, as well as improving the overall viewing experience," a BT spokesperson told BBC News.

"The Content Connect service will also be available to all UK ISPs within the same timescales."

The spokesperson said that BT would not throttle or discriminate against other video services on the network, but did not rule out that ISPs using the network could do so.

"The treatment of content on the network - such as prioritisation of content or bandwidth throttling - is strictly within the domain of the ISP and not the wholesale provider."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12112389





Liverpool To Trial 200 Mbps Powerline Broadband

More than 1,000 Liverpool homes will get broadband over power lines, thanks to smart meters
Matthew Broersma

More than 1,000 homes in Liverpool are participating in a trial using smart metering technology to deliver broadband Internet access, according to the Liverpool Daily Post.

The trial, being carried out by Scottish Power and Plus Dane Homes, began in the summer and will see the installation of smart meters in 1,200 homes in Toxteth in the spring, according to the paper.
Experimental technology

The companies will reportedly then use the technology to experiment with providing broadband at speeds of up to 200 Mbps.

Scottish Power began installing the smart metering equipment in July and needed to work in a low-key way due to the fear of cable thefts, said Mark Knowles, low carbon economy manager for The Mersey Partnership (TMP), the region’s inward investment agency, in the report.

Power line-based broadband, also known as Powerline Digital Scubscriber Line (PDSL) delivers data networking as a high frequency signal sent over the electric grid, instead of using telephone cables or fibre-optics.

This has the advantage of providing a connection to subscribers who are off the fibre network, and who don’t have good enough copper links for good broadband. has the potential benefit as one of its advantages the use of the existing power grid infrastructure.

The technology was proposed as an alternative medium in the early days of ADSL broadband, but was sidelined because copper-based broadband fell in price, and there were casese where powerline broadband systems interfered with radio communications.

Now, as broadband moves towards a faster generation of services, BT and Virgin Media are going all out to provide higher speed links using fibre optic cable. However, a new generation of poweline broadband has come back out of the woodwork, helped by the overlap with smart grid technology.

Smart grids are intended to provide more intelligent control over electricity use in homes and businesses. they require smart meters to be installed, and Liverpool is taking advantage of this to reduce the additional cost of installing powerline broadband.

As part of the trial electric vehicle charging points will also be established at an area supermarket, to be used mainly for the supermarket’s delivery vehicles. Merseytravel has applied for £4m to install 400 such charging points across the city, according to the report.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/li...roadband-17089





Calif. County Criminalizes Smart-Meter Installations
Debra Kahn

Citing alleged health effects from electromagnetic waves, a county in the North San Francisco Bay Area has criminalized the installation of "smart" electric meters.

The Marin County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed an ordinance yesterday that deems the installation of smart meters a public nuisance in some areas.

The law applies to unincorporated Marin, home to about 70,000 of the county's 260,000 residents. In addition to electromagnetic health risks, the board cited concerns about meters being used to collect information about residents' activities, impacts on aesthetics and potential damage to amateur radio networks.

The board has asked the California Public Utilities Commission before to declare a moratorium on the meters, following the lead of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

A spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which dismissed an executive last November after he admitted to monitoring smart-meter opponents online, said the company planed to continue smart-meter installation despite the ordinance (Greenwire, Nov. 11, 2010).

PG&E's meter installation is being done by a contractor, Wellington Energy, and is supposed to be finished by the end of next year to comply with a state mandate. The towns of Fairfax and Watsonville, as well as Santa Cruz County, have also passed laws against the meters.

"We continue to be committed to engaging fully with our customers as well as in communities where smart meters are being installed or are about to be installed," utility spokesman Jeff Smith said. "Ultimately, continuing the program will allow all our customers to enjoy the benefits of them."

Among the benefits, Smith said, are faster power-outage detection, daily and hourly summaries of energy use for residents and alerts when a home is about to use enough energy to enter into a higher pricing tier.

Katharina Sandizell, a mother of two who was arrested last week for blocking Wellington trucks on a public road in Inverness Park, noted that San Francisco passed a law last year requiring cell phone retailers to post information on the radiation produced by each type of phone. Smart meters emit more radiation than phones, she said.

"With cell phones, you can choose not to have them, or to turn it off when you're not using it or you can use a headset," she said. "With the smart meter, it's just constantly on and you can't turn it off."
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2011/01/05/2/





The Next Net
Douglas Rushkoff

The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network - its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation - is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them - that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.

Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no threat."

I'm not trying to be a downer here, or knock the possibilities for networking. I just want to smash the fiction that the Internet is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get on with the business of creating something else that is.

That's right. I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.

Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a shopping mall. It already *is* a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that's the price of "free" when you're operating on someone else's network.

But unlike our medieval forebears, we don't have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.

It is not rocket science. And I know there's more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it happen.

Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a network - albeit an asynchronous one.

One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but I'm sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a "server." This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.

Now FidoNet employed a genuinely distributed architecture. (And if you smart hackers can say why that's wrong, and how FidoNet could have been more distributed, please continue that line of thought! You are already on your way to developing the next network.) 25 years of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how much better we could do?

So let's get on it. Shall we use telephony, ham radio, or some other part of the spectrum? Do we organize overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur Foundation? Do we even need or want them or money at all? How might the funding of our network by a central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a public university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if anyone? Should there be ways for us to transact?

To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live - as well as how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin to forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority's ability to grant them protection.
http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net





Net Neutrality? The FCC Hopes You’ll Make an App For That
Ryan Singel

When the FCC re-established (just before Christmas) rules requiring cable and DSL providers not to block websites and services consumers want to use, the agency declined to also force wireless carriers to follow the same rules. It agreed with AT&T, Sprint and Verizon that it was too early to tell if such rules were necessary for smartphone users.

But that doesn’t mean the FCC isn’t curious to see what the wireless telecoms are up to — the FCC’s new rules do require wireless telecoms to be transparent about what blocking or “traffic management” they engage in.

So it’s little surprise that the FCC announced Wednesday a competition for apps that will check if mobile carriers are blocking online video sites, slowing down VOIP services that compete with them or are monkeying around with the sites a user is trying to visit.

It was exactly this kind of citizen-sleuthing that heated up the net neutrality debate, when, in 2007, barbershop quartet enthusiast and tech geek Rob Topolsky found that Comcast was blocking peer-to-peer file sharing using the same techniques the Chinese government uses to filter the internet.

The FCC says its so-called Open Internet Challenge is intended to spur developers to make “innovative and functional applications that provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with the open Internet.”

Researchers can also get in on the glory by writing “academic papers that analyze relevant internet openness measurements, techniques and data.”

Hackers and thinkers have until June 1 to submit their work. Both a jury of experts and the public will get to decide the winners, who, as a prize, get to visit D.C. on the FCC’s dime and eat at a banquet with FCC head Julius Genachowski — if he’s not been eaten alive by then by the ascendant Republican congress for imposing rules on the nation’s powerful telecom companies.

Those interested can check out more details on the FCC app competition at Challenge.gov.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/...eutrality-app/





AT&T Added 50 Percent More China Clients in 2010

AT&T (T.N) has increased the number of clients it has in the Greater China region by about 50 percent in the past year, a senior executive said on Thursday, and is now looking to target privately run Chinese companies.

AT&T now counts over 600 companies as its clients in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, including companies such as flag carrier Air China (601111.SS) and up from about 400 in 2009, said Johnny Ng, AT&T's general manager for the Greater China region.

"Some companies in China are looking to expand through acquisitions, and this will help them become large multi-nationals, and that's our focus," Ng said in an interview.

Revenue from the region in the first nine months of 2010 rose about 21 percent, faster than the 13 percent recorded in the full year of 2009, Ng said.

While China is the world's mobile market, it is largely off-limits to foreign operators such as AT&T and Vodafone (VOD.L), which have over the years resorted to setting up joint ventures or buying minority stakes instead.

AT&T has a 25 percent stake in a joint venture with China Telecom (0728.HK), the country's largest fixed line operator, where it hires about 70 people.

Its 740 million strong subscriber base is shared between China Mobile (0941.HK), China Unicom (0762.HK) and China Telecom, and the government has not shown any intention of issuing licenses to foreign operators the way India has.

"There are some restrictions when you work in China, and we just have to work within those restrictions," Ng said.

(Reporting by Huang Yuntao and Kelvin Soh; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7051Z420110106





Google Digital Newsstand Aims to Muscle In on Apple
Russell Adams and Jessica E. Vascellaro

Google Inc. and Apple Inc. have stepped up their battle to win over publishers, as the two companies vie to become the dominant distributor of newspapers and magazines for tablet computers and other mobile devices.

Google is trying to drum up publishers' support for a new Google-operated digital newsstand for users of devices that run its Android software. With the effort, it is chasing Apple, which already sells digital versions of many major magazines and newspapers through its iTunes store.

The e-newsstand would include apps from media companies offering versions of their publications for smartphones or tablets running Android, say people familiar with the matter. Google hopes to launch it in part to provide a more consistent experience for consumers who want to read periodicals on Android devices, and to help publishers collect payment for their apps, these people say.

Media executives who have talked to Google say details of the newsstand venture and its timing remain vague. They add that it's possible the venture won't materialize.

Google has discussed its intentions with a range of publishers, including Time Warner Inc.'s Time Inc. unit, Condé Nast and Hearst Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. The three publishers declined to comment on any talks.

In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.

Inside Google, the e-newsstand initiative is being spearheaded by Stephanie Tilenius, its vice president of e-commerce, according to two people familiar with the matter.

"We've consistently said we're talking with publishers about ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology for subscription services. We have nothing specific to announce at this time," Google said in a statement.

Apple, meanwhile, is readying several changes in iTunes to address publishers' frustrations with the online store, according to people familiar with the matter. Among the changes, Apple would make it easier for publishers to sell subscriptions on iTunes, in addition to single issues, with Apple keeping 30% of the tab.

That would allow publishers to offer discounts for longer-term commitments, as they do in print. And, because each new issue would automatically be sent to a subscriber's iPad or other device, the publisher wouldn't have to rely so much on buyers making frequent visits to iTunes.

Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.

Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.

Apple has been discussing the changes with publishers for several months, and some publications are expected to implement them early this year, the people say.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Apple declined to comment, except to say its app store is "growing rapidly with great publications."

Google and Apple aren't the only ones searching for new ways to attract publishers to tablets and e-readers. Amazon.com Inc. recently began allowing customers to read editions of periodicals available for its Kindle e-readers on Kindle apps for Android devices, allowing publications to make those titles available in color. Barnes & Noble Inc. has started selling digital magazine and newspaper subscriptions for its recently released Nook Color e-reader. Hearst, publisher of Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, offers subscriptions to all 14 of its titles on the device.

News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, had been trying to sign up publishers for an online newsstand where consumers could pay to access digital publications from a variety of media companies, but it shelved that project this past fall.

The remaining rivalries could speed up the migration of periodicals to tablets, providing publishers with more ways to sell their titles and more control over the sales.

A similar battle between Google, Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble has already begun to reshape the burgeoning market for digital books, helping publishers win more flexibility in pricing their titles.

While many media companies have rushed to build apps for iPads and Android tablets, they say their current inability to sell standard subscriptions through iTunes, a shortage of data about app buyers and tough business terms are keeping them from investing more in the effort.

Some publishers say customer data is essential because it allows them to identify app buyers as either existing or new customers and give or sell them access to the same titles in print, online or on other devices.

"We know consumers want an ongoing relationship with our print and digital products, and we are working with all partners to achieve that," says Monica Ray, executive vice president of consumer marketing at Condé Nast, which has developed iPad editions of magazines including GQ and the New Yorker. "We also need commercial terms that we're comfortable with."

"In a subscription environment, we must maintain a direct relationship with the consumer," says Jack Griffin, chief executive of Time Inc. which sells single issues of Time magazine for the iPad at $4.99 each.

Some companies already offer subscriptions through iTunes, but they have largely cobbled them together. The Economist, for example, sells bundled access to its website and iPad and iPhone apps for $110 a year. Newsweek sells 12- and 24-week subscriptions to the iPad edition, though Apple handles the transaction and Newsweek doesn't know who the subscribers are.

The Wall Street Journal sells iPad subscriptions for $3.99 a week; existing subscribers to the newspaper get full access to the iPad edition at no extra charge.

As publishers push for Apple to help them sell subscriptions, many are still leery of doing so on the tech company's terms. Apple has told publishers that it will continue to insist that iPad-only subscriptions be sold through iTunes, according to people familiar with the matter. As a result, some publications say they may choose not to offer an iPad-only subscription, but to bundle access to an iPad app with their own products, so they can use their own billing systems instead.

Others say they are worried that Apple will make it harder to find apps that don't use its billing system, according to these people.

Apple declined to comment.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...714082180.html





Who Owns Your Digital Downloads? (Hint: it's Not You)
Ed Bott

Steve Jobs once said, “People want to own their music.”

Someone better tell the folks who run the iTunes Store and its competitors. If you buy a digital music track or album from the iTunes store or one of its competitors, you don’t own it. Instead, you’re buying a license to play that track or album, and that license comes with an extremely limited set of rights.

Why does it matter? If you buy a CD in the United States, Section 109 of the Copyright Act gives you very specific rights under the first-sale doctrine. Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains those rights:

[O]nce you’ve acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. In simpler terms, “you bought it, you own it” (and because first sale also applies to gifts, “they gave it to you, you own it” is also true).

But the first-sale doctrine only applies to tangible goods, such as CDs. Digital music comes with a completely different, much more limited set of rights. If you buy a digital album from an online service such as the iTunes store, Amazon MP3, or eMusic, you have no legal right to lend that album to a friend, as you could if you had purchased a CD. If you decide after a few listens that you hate the album, well, tough. You can’t resell it. You can’t even legally give it away.

Don’t believe me? Read the license agreement that you agree to every time you purchase digital music. If you’re like 99.9% of the world, you’ve clicked right past those agreements to get to the download. Here’s what you missed. I’ve used boldface type to highlight the most interesting parts.

The Terms and Conditions for the iTunes Store contains more than 14,000 words of dense legalese, including these bits:

Apple is the provider of the Service, which permits you to purchase or rent digital content (”Products”) for end user use only under the terms and conditions set forth in this Agreement.

[…]

You agree that the Service and certain Products include security technology that limits your use of Products and that, whether or not Products are limited by security technology, you shall use Products in compliance with the applicable usage rules established by Apple and its licensors (“Usage Rules”), and that any other use of the Products may constitute a copyright infringement. Any security technology is an inseparable part of the Products. Apple reserves the right to modify the Usage Rules at any time. You agree not to violate, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security technology related to such Usage Rules for any reason—or to attempt or assist another person to do so. Usage Rules may be controlled and monitored by Apple for compliance purposes, and Apple reserves the right to enforce the Usage Rules without notice to you. You agree not to access the Service by any means other than through software that is provided by Apple for accessing the Service.

The “Usage Rules” heading contains six rules. Four of those rules apply to products protected by digital rights management technology, including music sold through the iTunes store before early 2009 and movies and TV shows sold at any time. Music tracks sold after March 2009 do not include Apple’s FairPlay DRM technology and are referred to as iTunes Plus Products. Rules (i) and (vi) apply to all digital music sold today in the iTunes Store:

(i) You shall be authorized to use Products only for personal, noncommercial use.

[…]

(vi) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such Products, and Usage Rules (ii) – (v) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.

What about the competition? The Amazon MP3 store Terms of Use contain a mere 1330 words. The license terms make it abundantly clear who owns the product you’re purchasing:

2.1 Rights Granted. Upon your payment of our fees for Digital Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Digital Content for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to and in accordance with the Terms of Use. You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to and in accordance with the Terms of Use.

[…]

5. Reservation of Rights

Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content.

And finally, there’s the eMusic Subscription Agreement, which contains more than 8800 words, including this blunt statement:

5.2 By enrolling in the Service, you acknowledge and agree that you have no right to provide any files obtained through the Service to any other party or through any other means. You may only make copies of any file obtained through the Service for your own personal use.

[…]

5.6 eMusic derives its rights to use the media offered on the Service from artists, record labels, publishers and other third parties for fixed periods of time and, sometimes, for limited territories. As well, eMusic is sometimes required to pull certain media off the Service (or otherwise restrict access to such media) for legal or commercial reasons.

[…]

8.1 Only you may access the Service using your IDs, unless otherwise agreed to in writing by eMusic. The content available through the Service is the property of eMusic or its licensors and is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. Content received through the Service may be viewed, used and played for your personal, non-commercial use only. You agree not to reproduce, retransmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, broadcast, perform, make available to third parties or circulate the content received through the Service to anyone or to exploit any such content for commercial or noncommercial purposes without the express prior written consent of eMusic. You further agree not to make use of the Content in a manner that would infringe the copyright therein.

The moral of the story? If you really want to own your music, forget about downloading and buy a CD. You might even save some money compared to a digital download.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/who-o...s-not-you/2831





EFF Wins Landmark Ruling Freeing Promo CDs for Resale

Big Victory for Consumers' First Sale Rights

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller's right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores and rejecting UMG's attempt to claim that a sticker on a CD created a license agreement forbidding resale.

Troy Augusto, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm Durie Tangri LLP, was sued by UMG for offering promo CDs for auction on eBay. At issue was whether the labels on the CDs, some of which stated that they were "promotional use only, not for sale," trumped Augusto's right to resell the CDs that he bought. Copyright's "first sale" doctrine prevents a copyright owner from restricting further sales or uses of a work once title has passed.

In an opinion issued today, the appeals court held: "UMG transferred title to the particular copies of its promotional CDs and cannot maintain an infringement action against Augusto for his subsequent sale of those copies." The court noted that UMG did not maintain control of the CDs once it mailed them out, did not require the recipients to agree to the "conditions" it sought to impose with the not-for-sale label, and did not require return of the CDs if the recipient did not consent.

"This ruling frees promotional CDs from the shadow of copyright infringement claims, which is good news for music lovers," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "But it also has broader ramifications. The court flatly rejected the argument that merely slapping a notice on a copyrighted work prevents the work from ever being sold. It eliminates the risk of copyright infringement claims against later recipients -- regardless of whether they paid for the work."

"The Ninth Circuit recognized an important principle: that you can't eliminate consumers' rights just by claiming there's a 'license agreement,'" said Joe Gratz of Durie Tangri, lead counsel for Mr. Augusto. "Once a copyrighted work is freely given, the copyright holder isn't in charge anymore. The copyright owner can't stop you from selling it or lending it to a friend."

For the full opinion in UMG v. Augusto:
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/u...to9thCircuitOp...

Contact:

Corynne McSherry
Intellectual Property Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
corynne@eff.org

https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/04-0





Pink Floyd Give in to Digital Downloads

Tripped out old rockers Pink Floyd have inked a deal with EMI to allow single tracks by the band to be peddled as downloads.

The band which has sold over 200 million proper albums gave in to the march of time after having fought the beast - or the man - for, oooh, almost a year now. Because it was only 10 months ago that its three remaining members - or perhaps the remains of its three members - were in court fighting to preserve the "artistic integrity" of the the likes of Animals and Wish You Were Here by only flogging them as complete works rather than individual tracks.

The terms of the five-year deal haven't been made public but we assume Money has something to do with it. Nick Mason has probably run out of Ferraris or something.

In a statement, EMI Group CEO, Roger Faxon said, "Pink Floyd are one of the most important and influential bands of all time."

He suggested the pay per track deal would "help the band reach new and existing fans through their incredible body of work."

Those fans will also be able to skip some of the dodgier tracks without paying for them. In the old days we had to lift the needle.

No doubt the band's oeuvre will now appear at 99p per track on iTunes, even though most of the tracks run into one another (which made lifting the needle an art form).

In the words of Freddie Mercury, a one-time EMI stablemate of the band, 'Another one bites the dust'.

Or in their own: 'Did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it Riding the Gravy Train'.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/4/pink...tal-downloads/





Beatles Being Paid Directly by iTunes in Deal
Ed Christman

It seems that the EMI/Beatles deal that finally brought the Fab Four's catalog to iTunes may be more groundbreaking than originally thought.

According to industry sources, iTunes is paying the Beatles' royalties from digital download sales in the United States directly to the band's company, Apple Corps, and is paying the songwriting mechanical royalties directly to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls most of the Beatles' song catalog.

That suggests the royalty split could be more lucrative for the Beatles than it would be under the typical provisions of a standard artist contract, which treat digital downloads as a retail sale.

Under a standard contract, a label issues an album, licenses the songs from music publishers, collects all wholesale revenue from the retailers and then distributes royalties to the artist and the publisher.

For superstar artists, the royalty typically equals about 20%-25% of retail revenue. So in the case of iTunes' Beatles sales, where tracks are sold to the merchant for about 90 cents and are retailed for $1.29, a standard contract with a typical superstar royalty rate of 20%-25% would pay the Beatles about 18 cents to 22.5 cents per track sale.

But because iTunes is making royalty payments to the Beatles and Sony/ATV, EMI may be treating its deal with the digital retailer as a licensing pact.

Under such deals, the licensee pays mechanical royalties directly to a publisher and revenue from use of a master recording is split evenly between an artist and a label, making it far more lucrative for the artist than a standard artist contract.

An EMI spokesman declined to comment, as did Sony/ATV and representatives at Apple Corps and iTunes. And a high-placed source familiar with the deal insists that it's "absolutely incorrect" that the agreement between EMI and Apple Corps is a licensing deal.

However one describes the EMI-iTunes deal for the Beatles' catalog, its similarities to a licensing pact put it at the center of a heated debate over the nature of download sales.

Since the dawn of the digital age, artists, managers and labels have wrangled over whether a digital download purchase should be considered a licensed use of a master recording or a retail sale, much like the sale of a CD. Labels, of course, insist the latter designation is correct and have paid artist royalties accordingly.

But some recording acts, like Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers, have taken their labels to court claiming that sales of their downloads should be treated as licensing deals. While Cheap Trick ultimately settled with Sony, the Allman Brothers case is still ongoing.

In another closely watched case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in September voided a jury's decision on the royalty split issue that was favorable to Universal Music Group and against F.B.T., the music company that Eminem was originally signed to before Universal picked up his contract.

F.B.T. maintains that a digital download represents a licensing deal, which requires the higher royalty split. With the case sent back to the original court, UMG has filed a petition for the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court's decision.

In addition to a potentially much more lucrative royalty rate, iTunes' direct payment of U.S. royalties to the Beatles and Sony/ATV would give the band greater accounting transparency over their iTunes sales than they would if EMI distributed the royalties.

Other label/superstar contract negotiations have resulted in far costlier give-backs -- for example, acts like AC/DC and Garth Brooks negotiated the return of their master rights.

Still, whether the agreement that put the Beatles on iTunes is a licensing deal or not, it's still significant that the Fab Four and their publisher are being paid directly by iTunes.

U.S. music publishers lament that labels treat an iTunes download as a retail sale, because they want to be paid directly by any U.S. digital retailer selling downloads, rather than by a label.

Likewise, it would be a singular deal, label and publishing sources say, for an artist on a label to be paid directly by the retailer for the sale of the artist's music.

In practically every other known instance, the retailer pays the label, which in turn pays the artist royalty.

(Editing by Zorianna Kit)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7050IC20110106





New iTunes Features Aim To Outdo DVD

Some of the coolest so-called “extras” embedded only on the iTunes’ version of several recent film releases from Sony (NYSE: SNE) Pictures aren’t even mentioned in their promotional materials. That’s because Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is quietly testing new features with an eye on a future in which digital distribution offers a more compelling product than physical discs.

Buy the Will Ferrell comedy The Other Guys and you’ll notice three extras that can’t be found on DVD or any other digital platform. A search button allows you to input a word, and any mention of it in the script will be retrieved along with a link to the exact moment in the movie in which the line was uttered. A “clip & share” function lets the viewer take select scenes and post them to social networks. There’s also a playlist with songs from the film, which are linked to to places on iTunes where those songs can be purchased. The same features are also found on Sony’s Salt and Resident Evil: Afterlife.

Mind-blowing add-ons? No, but they do represent the intent of studios like Sony, which declined comment, to offer differentiating value on digital platforms from that on DVD, where extras are often nothing more than a collection of additional short videos. When Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) launched iTunes Extras in September 2009, all it was really doing was matching the ability of DVDs to embed companion video. The goal now is to exceed what DVD can offer with a true interactivity discs can’t offer (though Blu-Ray can already do more than DVD via Internet-connected players).

That these features are available only to those who buy Guys, not rent, should come as no surprise. Studios like Sony want to make the case that ownership of digital copies of movies and TV programming is worth consumers’ dollars. They’ve found more success to date on the rental front, where services like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) have shone. But the electronic sell-through market is a tougher nut to crack, as a recent http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/2...ness-by-2015/” title=“Gleacher & Co. estimate”>Gleacher & Co. estimate noted. Analyst Brian Marshall projected that rentals accounted for three-quarters of the $71 million in movie transactions iTunes may have generated in 4Q 2010. He indicated an even greater disparity on the TV side, where he projected one purchase for every nine rentals made.

It’s not difficult to see why that is. Besides the fact that rental prices are dramatically lower than that of purchases, there seems little current incentive to own something that isn’t like the tangible DVD a consumer can store proudly on a shelf. In the absence of the kind of viable digital-locker technology like the Ultraviolet initiative still in development, consumers have to contend with conserving hard-drive space and little compatibility across devices.

(Speaking of devices, iTunes Extras aren’t available yet on Apple TV or iPad. That said, it’s only a matter of time before this new breed of extras pop up on other digital storefronts, with Sony Playstation Network a likely destination given the studio involved in this foray.)

Studios are going to do their damndest to revitalize the EST market. Besides the fact that the physical-disc market is clearly in decline, there are healthy high profit margins to be had. A 2009 study by Morgan Stanley pegged the revenue that goes back to the studio from an average online purchase of a new-release movie at $13—about six times what what they get from a rental.

Of course, consumers don’t care about any of that; they will only make those margins happen if they are given products worth spending on. Unfortunately, in recent years the studios have done less to spur EST and more to discourage rental of physical discs by blocking access to the extra content with messages encouraging consumers to buy the discs to get the full run of the DVD. That’s probably done little more than kick up complaints online, especially because the discs’ packaging don’t make clear that the extras are no longer available.

Getting digital lockers like Ultraviolet up and running is all well and good for creating the infrastructure necessary for consumers to bypass DVD. But what also needs to be addressed is incentivizing the consumer to make that bypass. Sony has taken a small step forward here, but one down a very uphill path.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-n...-to-outdo-dvd/





Netflix Streaming Is The Gateway Drug To Internet TV
Erick Schonfeld

Nobody likes cable TV, although we all pay exorbitant sums for it to be piped into our homes. That is why the idea of being able to cut that cord (and related bill) and replace it with a variety of streaming video services from the Internet is so appealing. So far, however, you can’t quite yet replace what you watch on cable with Internet TV. But that day will one day come, and the gateway drug to cord cutting and embracing Internet TV is Netflix streaming.

In a presentation put together by J.P. Morgan’s Internet analyst Imran Khan (which also goes into ecommerce and ebook trends) is the slide above, which shows the results of a consumer survey titled “Netflix Watch Instantly subscribers are more likely to consider dropping their cabe packages.” Of those surveyed who stream one to two movies and TV shows a month from Netflix, 47 percent would “consider dropping pay TV,” compared to only 33 percent of non-Netflix subscribers. By the way, the fact that a third of people who don’t even have access to Netflix streaming are ready to ditch cable should worry the industry even more. But once they get into the habit of streaming video from the Internet, the number of potential cord cutters goes up by 14 percentage points.

Netflix may not have the most recent Hollywood films available because of the deals it is striking with the studios which add a 28-day lag to the movies that Netflix gets, but streaming is taking off. Already Netflix streaming accounts for 37 percent of peak Internet traffic during primetime, and you can sign up for a streaming-only subscription.

I have a review-unit Boxee Box, which I only pull out occasionally because most Internet video simply can’t compete with the gazillion channels I get from Verizon FIOS TV. But Netflix is supposed to come to the Boxee Box by the end of the month, and once that happens I can guarantee the amount of Internet TV I am going to watch will go up at least five or ten times. Yes, I can hook up my laptop to my TV in the living room today and stream from Netflix to the big screen, but it is kind of a hassle and I’m too lazy, especially when I am feeling lazy. And being lazy what watching TV is all about. Once I get Netflix to a box always connected to the TV that I can control with a remote . . . oh boy, bring out the popcorn.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/net...g-internet-tv/





Turner Chief Explains How TV Industry Will Neutralize Netflix
Andrew Wallenstein

If there was ever any doubt that the animus towards Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) runs deeper throughout Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) than chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes, get a load of what one of his top lieutenants had to say at the Citigroup Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference on Wednesday in Phoenix. Turner Broadcasting chairman and CEO Phil Kent talked in depth about how the TV business is circling the wagons to marginalize the upstart streaming service.

Addressing what he called “the elephant in the room,” Kent singled out Netflix as the fly in the ointment when it came to the syndicated acquisitions two of his biggest cable properties, TBS and TNT, count on as key to their businesses. He spoke of a dawning awareness throughout the TV industry “to the long-term effect to having top-tiered programming on SVOD services,” he said, referring specifically to Netlix. “We tell our suppliers, the studios we buy from: This is going to have a significant impact on what we’ll be willing to pay for programming or even bid at all.”

But if you thought Kent was being hard on the studios—Warner Bros. is actually a corporate sibling of Turner’s—that’s nothing compared to what he says the industry is doing to Netflix to effectively block Reed Hastings from getting his hands on premium TV series. The new and old broadcast sitcoms and dramas Turner pays billions for may never even get an opportunity to be on Netflix because Kent implied SVOD rights are being “frozen” in the latest rounds of dealmaking.

“I think there’s a heightened sense across the industry of the importance of freezing those rights, and that’s what you see us from us in the future,” said Kent. “We’re going back to other series on renewals and attempting successfully to retroactively freeze the SVOD rights.”

Kent also talked up what he positioned as “a fantastic consumer alternative to SVOD”: TV Everywhere. He spoke of the progress the cable operators’ authentication strategy was making, including an upcoming deal with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) that he indicated would set the standard for programming deals in that nascent area.

But Kent is not without some measure of mercy. He did say that Netflix still has a seat at the table, but for the scraps. He talked about a deal between Netflix and Warner Bros. TV Distribution for the FX series “Nip/Tuck,” a program that drew little interest from the TNTs of the world.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-t...alize-netflix/





Netflix "Button" to Appear on Video Device Remote Controls
Mark Hefflinger

Netflix (NASD: NFLX) announced on Tuesday that it has partnered with a number of consumer electronics firms to place a Netflix button on remote controls, to provide subscribers with one-click access to Netflix streaming on supported devices.

The Netflix button, featuring the company's red logo, will start appearing on remote controls this spring on products from Boxee, Iomega, Roku, Dynex, Haier, Memorex, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.

Devices that will feature the remote button will include Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray disc players and set-top boxes.

"No more turning on the TV, going to a home screen and searching for the Netflix icon," said Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt.

"With the Netflix one-click remote, it's simply a matter of pushing the Netflix button to instantly watch any of the vast selection of TV shows and movies available to stream from Netflix."
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/01...emote-controls





Microsoft Ready to Take on Apple, Google with TV Set Top Box
Ed Oswald

Reports indicate that Microsoft is prepared to show off a connected television solution of its own, and will demo a TV set top box this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The device will be similar to those already offered by competitors Apple and Google.

The Seattle Times reports that the device will come in at a price point below $200, and is expected to go on sale later in the year. In the simplest terms, it is an effort by Microsoft to bring its Windows Media Center concept to the masses.

It could be argued that the Redmond company was one of the first major companies to invest in the idea of a "connected TV" when it launched the Media Center platform back in 2002. However at the time, digital content had only begun to catch on, and the platform did not have broad-based appeal.

These days, it's certainly a different story. According to research firm DisplaySearch, the market for connected televisions is expected to triple to more than 124 million units by 2014.

Microsoft's entrant into the space will be built on Windows Embedded, with a UI similar to its Media Center platform. The company's plans are nothing new -- the devices made an appearance when Microsoft announced its plans for embedded software last year, and during an Intel conference last September.

The fact that the devices appeared at the chipmaker's gathering may give a strong indication that the devices themselves may use Intel chips.

If the Times reporting is true, it would mean a quicker timetable for Microsoft's connected TV plans than had earlier been reported. Reuters said in November that the company had been in talks to turn the Xbox 360 into a cable TV set top box for a monthly fee, although it was said at the time any service was a year away from becoming a reality.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Micr...box/1294166253





Graphics Ability Is the New Goal For Chip Makers
Ashlee Vance

In the good old days, it was all about speed.

Computer chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices tried to outdo each other by putting out ever faster chips, and then by improving battery life and making smaller, cheaper laptops.

These days, though, it’s all about graphics and how well computers can process and display photos, videos and other types of media. And the competition is putting marketing departments to the test.

Gone are the crisp pitches about faster, thinner and longer-lasting products, which allowed consumers who wanted the latest and greatest computer to look for simple metrics like more gigahertz, more hours of battery life or lighter weight. Instead, now there is baffling talk about things that improve visual performance like breathtaking tessellation, zippy transcoding speeds and DirectX 11 support — all of which will be highlighted by the chip makers at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, opening in Las Vegas on Thursday.

“It is certainly a challenge,” conceded Deborah S. Conrad, the chief marketing officer at Intel. “When we talk about graphics, we see people scrunch up their noses. It is just not language people outside of our industry use.”

The focus on graphics and the visual skills of computers reflects a pair of trends taking place in the computing market.

For one, the chips in the computers to be displayed at the electronics show, and which will soon hit retail shelves, have more graphics oomph. They represent the first wave of mainstream chips that combine top-of-the-line computation and graphics functions on the same piece of silicon. The result is that even low-cost laptops will have visual performance on par with some of yesteryear’s costliest, most powerful computers equipped with specialized graphics cards aimed at video gamers.

Second, consumers have driven an explosion in high-definition Web video and digital photo sharing. By some forecasts, video will account for about 90 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2013. Facebook says that people upload more than 100 million photos a day to its site alone.

And so, the chip makers are scrambling to meet consumers’ needs and do away with the hiccups people sometimes see when watching a video stream or the long wait to shift a home video from a camera or phone onto their PC.

“We think the new norm is this constant visual experience,” Ms. Conrad said. “You are not waiting for things to happen and getting that pinwheel on a Mac or hourglass on the PC.”

Intel, for example, is using this week’s electronics show as a platform to talk about its latest generation of chips, which include features like “Quick Think Video.” That’s the humanized name for a new transcoding engine, which is something that alters the size or makeup of a file.

In this particular case, Intel brags that its new engine can take a five-minute video from a phone and, in 18 seconds, turn it into something a computer can use. By another measure, the new Intel chips can rework an hourlong home video in about four minutes.

Other features in the new Intel chips are aimed at helping movie studios deliver high-definition versions of their films and to move video streams between computers and TV screens.

Advanced Micro Devices, meanwhile, makes some of the fastest stand-alone graphics products in the industry and has included much of that technology in its latest batch of laptop chips.

Rick Bergman, a senior vice president at A.M.D., has tried to emphasize the performance of the new products by saying they offer consumers the equivalent of a hotel room with an ocean view.

“Some people are usually willing to pay a premium for that ocean view,” Mr. Bergman said, during a recent meeting with Wall Street analysts. “Well, all of us deserve the ocean view.”

A.M.D. has been working with software makers to help them rework their applications to take advantage of the new chips that include graphics engines. The company claims a lead over Intel with this type of technology, and says common programs from Microsoft, game developers and Web browser makers will display visuals better on computers based on A.M.D. chips.

For instance, technology in A.M.D.’s chips can automatically remove some of the hand-holding jiggle from movies on Web sites like YouTube. The revamped videos come out smoother and more vibrant.

To emphasize such features with consumers, A.M.D. has also spent the better part of a year trying to train retail sales representatives in the art of marketing visual performance. According to the company’s own data, about half have mastered A.M.D.’s graphics-heavy pitch.

Intel has developed what it bills as more nuanced marketing programs that target 18- to 24-year-olds with the message that top-of-the-line computers let people “write better songs, design better clothes and design better buildings,” Ms. Conrad said. The company has set up a Web site called the Creators Project where young people can promote their creations at Intel’s expense.

Ms. Conrad said all of the attention on the visual performance of chips and investment in the accompanying technology meant that amazing graphics would be commonplace in a couple of years.

“That’s the good news,” Ms. Conrad said, before lamenting that the chip makers will then need to find the next big thing to promote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/te...gy/04chip.html





Intel's Sandy Bridge Chip to Offer Built-In DRM

Built-in anti piracy measures for HD movies
Kate Solomon

The soon-to-be-revealed Sandy Bridge chip from Intel will offer customers a little something extra: new-release movies that will be streamed to computers using the super-chip.

Warner Bros is among the Hollywood studios planning to offer high-definition films via Sandy Bridge, with Intel working to strike deals with other content distributors.

Films will be available at the same time as they are released on DVD and the chip comes with built-in DRM to prevent pirating of the streamed content.

Jack of all trades?

By wooing Hollywood with its protected premium content option, Intel hopes to differentiate itself further from competitors and make chip choice more important to the PC consumer and movie studios alike.

Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU promises improved multimedia processing and, because the central processing and graphics processing are done on the same piece of silicon, it is said to be faster and more efficient than previous iterations.

The long-rumoured CPU was recently shipped to manufacturers and is set to be officially revealed at CES this week.
http://www.techradar.com/news/comput...-in-drm-919047





Show's Over: How Hollywood Strong-ARMed Intel and the CE Biz
Jon Stokes

Intel's new movie service, Intel Insider, is a lot more interesting for what it signifies than for what it actually is. The service, which takes advantage of a new hardware module inside Sandy Bridge's GPU to enable the secure delivery of downloadable HD content to PCs, has been blasted as "DRM." But of course it's only a DRM-enabler—a hardware block that can store predistributed keys that the Sandy Bridge GPU uses to decrypt movies a frame at a time before they go out over the HDMI port.

This hardware-based encryption scheme is also just the latest chapter in a long, sorry story of electronics industry capitulation to the much smaller, but incredibly powerful Hollywood studios. There was a time when Intel and the rest of the consumer electronics industry could have chosen to stand up and fight, but that window has now closed. The fix is in, and Hollywood is likely to get everything it wants from here on out.

Time for your own set of keys, son

Despite the fact that everything at Intel's press conference yesterday had already been announced, the event was nonetheless revealing. One moment in particular stood out as emblematic of the new state of play in the consumer electronics market: when the president of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group, Kevin Tsujihara, took the stage with Intel's Mooley Eden, every aspect of their interaction made it clear that Tsujihara was holding all the cards, and that Eden and Co. were just aiming to please their cool new friends from Hollywood.

Eden made several explicit references to the fact that Intel had built the HDCP-enabling part of Sandy Bridge solely to please the studios, and Tsujihara followed up by explaining that, before Intel Insider, the PC could only be "trusted" with lower-value, non-1080p content. "Your platform is going to enable us to release our highest value content on the PC," Tsujihara told Eden.

In other words, "you done good, son... your little platform is all grown up now, and it's time for you to have your own set of keys to the family station wagon"—I half expected Tsujihara to fondly pat Eden on the head.

Hollywood to devicemakers: cripple your product, or else

The moment that played out at Intel's press conference was a long time coming. Intel's own prior history of failed attempts at pleasing the studios aside, the consumer electronics industry once actively resisted the advent of DRM, and it's not hard to see why. The burden of supporting Hollywood's parade of failed DRM schemes has fallen exclusively on the technology makers, who must add costly hardware and software to their products to restrict their functionality in ways that consumers detest. Think about that: Hollywood demands that the CE industry pay to develop and support a set of features that actively degrades the user experience and decreases the attractiveness of its products.

It didn't necessarily have to be this way. Back in 2006, we half-jokingly suggested that for the price of a single 65nm fab, Intel could buy "25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 $5 million episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos." Maybe it was folly to suggest that Intel buy a few studios and give away content as a loss leader to sell hardware, but the point still stands: Intel's market cap is over three times that of Tsujihara's parent company, Time Warner. But Intel and the rest of the CE giants have been jumping through hoops to please these relatively tiny companies since day one, when their marketing budgets (Intel's alone is typically over $1 billion) could have easily paid for enough premium content to sell hardware.

While it may be a mystery as to why Intel and the rest of the CE industry have let things get to this point, it's perfectly clear why Intel is in the position it's in at this week's CES: ARM.

Strong ARMed

When Tsujihara was shaking Eden's hand on stage, he was probably thinking about the upcoming spate of ARM processor announcements that would happen that day, and about the fact that it probably wouldn't make much difference to him in the long run if Intel had refused to play ball. In everything from smartphones to Internet-connected TVs to Windows workstations, the CE industry will soon have a viable alternative processor architecture in ARM.

The many makers of ARM chips can easily add any kind of module that Hollywood likes into their SoCs, consumers will buy them, and nobody will editorialize about how this or that chipmaker sold out to The Man. Hollywood can play the individual ARM chipmakers against each other, and it can play the whole ARM ecosystem against Intel in order to get what it wants. The studios now have all the leverage they need at every level of the stack, from chips to software to devices to service providers. An Intel with a monopoly on CE might have been able to keep Hollywood in check, but no one has a monopoly in the CE space. And that works to Big Content's advantage.

Hope springs eternal

Despite all of the developments described above, the way the music DRM struggle turned out gives some hope that sanity may yet prevail with movies. Eden may have kowtowed to Tsujihara publicly, but the Kangol-wearing geek may have the last laugh. In the end, Sandy Bridge's DRM-enabling features (which could also be used for more constructive purposes, like preventing game piracy) won't do a single thing to combat the movie piracy phenomenon, and Eden certainly knows that.

The nature of digital files is that once there's a single unencrypted HD copy available in the wild, there's an infinite number. Hollywood would have to secure every last digital copy with hardware encryption comparable to Sandy Bridge's, and that won't happen. Blu-ray has proven all too crackable, so every Blu-ray release is quickly available on file-sharing networks. Indeed, while Intel and Warner Brothers may speak of closing the gap between a Blu-ray release and a 1080p digital download, for many tech-savvy PC users that gap is already just a few hours.

Here's hoping that Hollywood will spare consumers and the CE industry the pain of developing, implementing, and maintaining the kind of cross-device DRM interoperability that Verizon and Time Warner execs fantasized about at the CES kickoff keynote, and just start selling unprotected downloads.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news...rmed-intel.ars





Intel Insider - What Is It? (No, It's Not DRM, and Yes it Delivers Top Quality Movies to Your PC)
Nick Knupffer

There has been some confusion online about Intel Insider. So here are the facts:

What it isn’t:

There have been stories describing Intel Insider as a ‘DRM’ technology. DRM means ‘Digital Rights Management’ and is used to control the use of digital media by controlling access, and preventing the ability to copy media such as movies. This means that if you pay only a rental fee, your service provider decides when and for how long you will be able to view your movie. Or if you buy a film it will let you keep and view it forever, but not copy it and share it with your friends, or burn it onto a DVD, mass produce it and sell it on the streets. DRM is a piece of software, not hardware.

Now there are opponents and proponents of DRM, and I am not going to get into a discussion about the pros and cons of DRM in this blog; but I will say that Intel

Insider is NOT a DRM technology.

What it is:

Intel Insider is a service that enables consumers to enjoy premium Hollywood feature films streamed to their PC in high quality 1080P high definition. Currently this service does not exist because the movie studios are concerned about protecting their content, and making sure that it cannot be stolen or used illegally. So Intel created Intel insider, an extra layer of content protection. Think of it as an armoured truck carrying the movie from the Internet to your display, it keeps the data safe from pirates, but still lets you enjoy your legally acquired movie in the best possible quality. This technology is built into the new Intel chips and will become even more important once wireless display technology like Intel’s WiDi become more popular, as it would prevent pirates from stealing movies remotely just by snooping the airwaves. WiDi enables you to wirelessly beam video to your big screen TV easily and in HD.

Intel has a lot of these kinds of technologies that keep data safe. For example our chips include AES-NI, a technology that speeds up encryption and decryption of data and improves performance when you access secure websites like your online banking system. This keeps your credit card numbers safe.

Modern PC’s with components from chip makers such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia already support another feature called ‘HDCP’ or High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection - a system that keeps the contents of media such as Blu-Ray movies secure between the Blu-Ray player or PC and your big screen TV.

This New York Times story discusses what Intel Insider and similar technologies can bring to the sofa dweller.

But why stop at just movies, could this technology bring a myriad of services to the PC?
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/20...t_is_it_no.php





Microsoft Alliance With Intel Shows Age
Nick Wingfield and Don Clark

The technology industry's most lucrative partnership—the long-running alliance between Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp.—is coming to a day of reckoning.

Nick Wingfield is live at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to preview Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote speech later today and tell us what we might expect from him and Microsoft as the software giant tries to play catch-up in mobile.

Sales of tablets, smartphones and televisions using rival technologies are taking off, pushing the two technology giants to go their separate ways.

The clearest sign that their interests are diverging: Microsoft on Wednesday is expected to unveil a future version of the company's flagship Windows operating system that runs on microprocessors designed by Intel rival ARM Holdings PLC, according to people familiar with its plans.

Microsoft still plans to make versions of Windows that also run on Intel chips, but the company's ARM plans amount to a huge bet on a chip technology that has become the de facto standard for smartphones, tablets and other mobile products.

The marriage of Intel chip designs and Windows—what became known as the "Wintel" alliance—has shaped the PC business since the early 1980s, defining the standard for which software developers created applications. But both companies have struggled to capitalize on newer growth markets.

While Windows still powers more than 90% of global personal computers, research firm Gartner says Microsoft software ran less than 3% of smartphones in the third quarter. Despite pushing tablets for the past decade, no Wintel tablet has caught on with consumers.

The success of Apple Inc.'s iPad has driven a deeper wedge between Microsoft and Intel. The two companies, in collaboration with hardware makers, haven't been able to come up with any tablet products that match the performance, power efficiency and ease-of-use of the iPad, a worrying trend as the Apple device has come to nibble into mobile PC sales.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer will kick off the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday. The new version of Windows Microsoft is expected to show off there will be better suited to touch-screen interfaces and the power limitations of tablets, people familiar with the matter said.

Technology industry veterans say the move by Microsoft is a milestone in the slow decay of the Wintel alliance. "I think it's a deep fracture," says Jean-Louis Gassee, a venture capitalist and Silicon Valley executive.

A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment. Bill Kircos, an Intel spokesman, said the relationship between the two companies is "deep and strong."

"While we can't comment specifically on any future Windows plans, there is a tremendous business opportunity for both of us in the projected billions of devices, gadgets and machines going online in the next five years, above and beyond the more near-term tablet area," Mr. Kircos said.

Microsoft and Intel have been collaborating since before International Business Machines Corp. introduced its first PC in 1981, a machine that used Microsoft's DOS operating system and the Intel chip design known by the designation x86. The relationship became particularly lucrative after Microsoft's easier-to-use Windows software helped make PCs a mainstay in homes and companies. The vast majority of the more than 350 million PCs sold last year ran some form of Windows on x86 chips sold by Intel or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

The rise of smartphones—and more recently, tablets—has strained the relationship. A key reason people have long preferred Wintel-based PCs —compatibility with application programs for Windows—has so far not been an important selling point in the new mobile categories. Indeed, Apple and Google Inc. have had success in creating large markets for lightweight apps on smartphones and tablets—to the point that users don't seem to care much about Windows compatibility.

At the same time, Intel's chips haven't been able to match the low-power consumption of chips based on designs licensed from ARM Holdings, which supply the processing power to the majority of mobile gadgets. Apple's iPad, for instance, has a 10-hour battery life and requires relatively little memory, attributes that are tough to match with Intel-powered designs, said Rick Whittington, an analyst at the research firm TechIndicators.

Microsoft has long made a version of Windows for mobile phones that run on ARM chips because of the power constraints of those devices, but not the flagship version that runs on PCs.

Steve Perlman, chief executive of online game start-up OnLive Inc. and veteran of Microsoft and Apple, said Wintel technologies are "so deeply embedded in the information-era economy" that they will exist for a long time, but that the existing products from the companies are missing out on big growth opportunities in the mobile business. "The Wintel system is too heavyweight to move into these new markets," Mr. Perlman said.

Intel has been trying to lower the power consumption of its chips, and has made progress in the area. Paul Otellini, Intel's chief executive, said at a conference in December the company's chips are being designed into more than 35 tablet PCs.

Intel's effort to build up the software side of its business has also vexed Microsoft. In June 2009 Intel made a surprise $900 million bid to buy Microsoft rival Wind River Systems Inc., a company with an operating system for a range of non-computer applications.

More recently, Intel struck a deal to buy McAfee Inc., a maker of security software, for nearly $7.7 billion. Intel is jointly developing with Nokia Corp. an operating system for mobile devices based on Linux called Meego.

After the McAfee deal closes, Intel will employ approximately 12,000 software developers at the company, out of a total workforce of roughly 90,000.

Intel has also thumbed its nose at Microsoft by collaborating with Microsoft archrival Google on Google TV, a technology for running televisions and other living room devices that connect to the Internet. Intel also contributed software technologies to Chrome OS, a new operating system from Google that will compete with Windows in the netbook computer market. Mr. Otellini has long been on Google's board of directors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...117494078.html





Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices to One-Year Low

Tuesday's average DRAMeXchange price dipped to US$0.84 per chip.
Ralph Jennings

DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said.

Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of US$0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys.

DRAM began losing value most recently in December as the Western holiday shopping season wound down, Lin said. But major manufacturers such as Elpida Memory, Powerchip Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics kept pumping out chips to stay competitive, he said.

DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said.

Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of US$0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys.

DRAM began losing value most recently in December as the Western holiday shopping season wound down, Lin said. But major manufacturers such as Elpida Memory, Powerchip Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics kept pumping out chips to stay competitive, he said.

Increased factory capacity has also held prices in check despite warnings of a DRAM shortage due to problems obtaining equipment and phasing in new technology.

PC makers typically spend about 10 percent, or $20 to $36, of a PC's total manufacturing cost on DRAM, Lin said. Lower DRAM prices allow PC manufacturers to cut prices or to offer improved performance for the same price by adding more memory.

From December, PC makers chose to discount some of their stock, said Helen Chiang, research manager with IDC in Taipei. "They had some space to do promotions," she said.

That trend stands to hold through the first quarter of this year as memory prices should remain low through March, Lin said. Prices would then climb again in the second quarter as demand picks up.

"It's seasonal," said Eric Tang, Vice President of Taiwan-based Powerchip. The island's largest memory manufacturer with an annual capacity of 130,000 wafers has adjusted production based on the price drops. "We usually don't see much sales in the first quarter, but in the second they should increase."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...prices-to.html





45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Hold True?
Jeremy A. Kaplan

Intel has packed just shy of a billion transistors into the 216 square millimeters of silicon that compose its latest chip, each one far, far thinner than a sliver of human hair.

But this mind-blowing feat of engineering doesn't really surprise us, right? After all, that's just Moore's Law in action … isn't it?

In 1965, an article in "Electronics" magazine by Gordon Moore, the future founder of chip juggernaut Intel, predicted that computer processing power would double roughly every 18 months. Or maybe he said 12 months. Or was it 24 months? Actually, nowhere in the article did Moore actually spell out that famous declaration, nor does the word "law" even appear in the article at all.

Yet the idea has proved remarkably resilient over time, entering the public zeitgeist and lodging hold like a tick on dog -- or maybe a stubborn computer virus you just can't eradicate. But does it hold true? Strangely, that seems to depend more than anything on who you ask.

"Yes, it still matters, and yes we're still tracking it," said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration. The company is certainly one reason Moore's Law has remained in the public's mind: A section on Intel's website details the law, explaining that "his prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. Intel has kept that pace for over 40 years, providing more functions on a chip at significantly lower cost per function."

Bohr told FoxNews.com that doubling the number of chips is far less important these days than making them smaller, which has other tangible benefits for consumers.

"The true benefit is to reduce the transistor size, because when they're smaller, you improve performance, reduce the power use, and you reduce the cost," he explained.

While no one questions the innovations Intel, AMD and other companies have brought to computers through their infinitesimally small transistors -- a human red blood cell is about 4,000 nanometers in diameter, 125 times larger than the smallest parts in Intel's new chips -- many industry experts are less certain that Moore's so-called law is really an accurate representation of the industry.

"Moore’s law isn’t tracking exactly, but the spirit of the law is still alive in that the dies are still shrinking, and CPUs become more and more capable every 12-18 months or so," said Joel Santo Domingo, lead analyst, desktops at PCMag.com. His former boss agrees.

"I did the math, and while it’s not exactly doubling every two years, it’s pretty close," agreed Michael Miller, the award-winning math geek and former editor in chief of PCMag.com.

Maybe, as Johnny Depp said in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it's really more of guideline?

"Semiconductor chips haven't actually tracked the progress predicted by Moore's law for many years," said Tom Halfhill, the well respected chip analyst with industry bible the Microprocessor Report.

Halfhill is quick to note that Moore's law isn't truly a scientific law, merely "an astute observation." In fact, since Gordon Moore made his observation in '65, the law has been modified and manipulated to fit the actual progress of semiconductors to such an extent that it can arguably be said to have predicted nothing.

It's also been so frequently misused that Halfhill was forced to define Moron's Law, which states that "the number of ignorant references to Moore's Law doubles every 12 months."

Halfhill wrote a paper for "The Microprocessor Report," published in December of 2004, which debunked the connection between Moore's Law and reality. In it, he noted that Moore's Law was more like Bode's law, an observation by early astronomers that each planet in our solar system is roughly twice as far from the sun as the planet in the next inner orbit.

"Modern astronomers don't expect the distances between planets to add up exactly, and they don’t expect other solar systems to conform to the same rules," Halfhill explained. Likewise, engineers don't really require the latest generation of computer chips to exactly meet Moore's Law either.

In fact, to make it track more closely to actual transistor counts, he proposed Epstein's amendment, named after a fellow editor at "The Microprocessor Report," which adds a leveling factor that accounts for the law of diminishing returns.

Halfhill is quick to point out that the Law is meaningless -- but the idea that computing keeps relentlessly advancing, that's what's really important. "Whether it's exactly as fast as Moore predicted isn't really relevant. No one's holding him to the numbers," Halfhill told FoxNews.com. What's more important is that innovation continues. And at the end of the day, if the law drives innovation, and we end up with faster PCs, who cares whether Gordon Moore was right 45 years ago?

"Moore law is almost whatever you want to make it mean. And as long as chips keep getting faster, that's good enough for most people. "
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...law-hold-true/





The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU

Android has two major technical UX problems: animation performance and touch responsiveness.
Charles Ying

Android’s UX architecture needs work. UI compositing and the view system are both primarily done in software. Garbage collection and async operations frequently block UI rendering.

Android team members are still in denial on the importance of GPU acceleration. They recommend eliminating garbage collection to improve animation performance. They say drawing isn’t the bottleneck and GPU accelerated 2D drawing won’t yield good results:

“It is very naive to think that using the GPU to render text and bitmaps is suddenly going to fix every issue you may see. There are many things that can be done to improve performance of the UI without using the GPU. Notably improving touch events dispatching, reducing garbage collection pauses, asynchronous operations to avoid blocking the UI thread, etc. A one year old NexusOne (and other devices before) is perfectly capable of scrolling a list at close to 60fps (limited by the display’s refresh rate.) Using GPUs to do 2D rendering can introduce other types of inefficiencies (fillrate can be an issue, some primitives like arbitrary shapes are complicated to render with antialiasing, textures need to be uploaded, shaders compiled, etc.) I am not saying we won’t do GPU rendering for the UI (I have worked on it myself a couple of times to test it) but please stop assuming that this is what has to be done right now.”

— Romain Guy, Android software engineer


No one is saying that Android’s “2D primitive drawing” needs GPU acceleration. It’s Android’s view system and animation compositor that needs GPU acceleration. To compare, Core Graphics is still mostly software based while Core Animation is entirely GPU accelerated.

Look at Samsung’s Galaxy S browser. GPU accelerated and tile-based. I’m told it’s a result of Samsung’s PowerVR GPU optimizations. Smooth as butter, runs circles around the Nexus S Gingerbread browser on the same hardware!

Stop executing Dalvik Java VM code on every animation frame. Use the programmable GPU graphics pipeline. Add a scene graph if it makes sense. Run it on a separate thread. You might even get 32-bit graphics along the way.

Android engineers say that better hardware will eventually solve the problem — an insane rationale for the problem. On mobile, power efficiency is king. Throwing dual cores or more GHz at the problem is just going to get you more average performance with zero battery life, and even then, as long as your screen doesn’t get too big.

Wake up, Android team. Windows Phone 7 just lapped you.
http://www.satine.org/archives/2011/...e-android-gpu/





Motorola Gadget to Make Smartphones like Computers
Sinead Carew

It's dumb and it's called a lapdoc but Motorola Mobility bets consumers will want to use this gadget to make their smartphones work more like real computers and help Motorola stand out from the crowd.

The company that invented the cellphone unveiled the Atrix 4G phone, which will attach to a new type of accessory called a lapdoc -- a "dumb" device that looks like a laptop computer but does not work without the phone attached. It has a laptop size screen and a keyboard aimed at better Web browsing, video viewing and typing than on a phone.

Chief Executive Sanjay Jha told Reuters in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show that he aims to develop slimmer lapdocs onto which consumers could attach multiple phones.

While consumers can use smartphones for a lot of computing activities such as web browsing, Jha said they need more than this for long emails or watching a movie on a plane.

"I like it a lot because all we've done is added accessories to our devices and added applications that change the way you can use them," Jha said. "I think we've a chance of differentiating ourselves."

After the product unveiling in a big packed room where attendees cheered and clapped after seeing the demonstration Jha said he already has plans in place to expand the line up.

"If you wait you miss the slot, so you have to commit," he said.

The No. 2 U.S. mobile provider AT&T Inc highlighted Atrix at its product showcase earlier in the day and said it would sell it at a "competitive price" starting this quarter.

Marketing Hike

Motorola will also try to boost sales in the new product category with a marketing splash on the Atrix and lapdoc, which are so unusual, they need to be explained more carefully to consumers than typical phones, Jha said.

But Chief Marketing Officer Bill Ogle told Reuters that while Motorola will spend "dramatically more" on marketing this year it will still be a relatively small amount versus spending on devices like Razr, its flagship phone from 2004 to 2006.

Jha said Motorola Mobility, which was newly created a day before January 4 as a spin off from Motorola Inc, would be cautious not to over-extend itself this year. The executive has revamped the company in the last two years by focusing solely on smartphones based on Google Inc's Android software.

With this in mind Jha said Motorola would not branch into new operating systems such as Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft Corp and will instead continue to focus on building Android phones for the foreseeable future.

Motorola will also keep its device lineup the same size or smaller than its 2010 range of 23 phone models, Jha said.

"We think more and more than doing fewer devices better is more important that doing lots of devices," Jha said noting that some mid-range devices made less of a financial contribution than Motorola had expected last year. He did not give details about these phones.

Jha said the company would launch a range of tablet computers this year. The top two U.S. mobile operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc both said they would sell Motorola tablets, which compete with the Apple Inc iPad.

Jha had a positive outlook for the industry in 2011.

"It looks like 2011, at a macro economic level, will be good. And as I look at the quality of developments, the competition between carriers and between handset makers, it kind of feels like 2011 should be a exciting year," Jha said.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7050WV20110106





Why Digital Newsstands Stink

Who is to blame for declining sales of iPad magazines? Can Google do better?
Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Much has changed in the eight months since Le Monde Magazine put Steve Jobs on the cover and asked whether he might be the new Gutenberg -- the man whose iPad would save the publishing industry from the menace of le tout-gratuit (the all-free).

For one thing we know that Apple (AAPL) has sold a lot of iPads -- somewhere in the order of 13 or 14 million in nine months.

We also know -- thanks to last week's Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers -- that iPad magazine sales have gone in the opposite direction. Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.

Now comes the news -- via a page B1 story in Monday's Wall Street Journal -- that Google (GOOG) is talking to publishers about building a competing digital newsstand for Android devices that might offer them what Apple has thus far refused to share: The names and addresses of their online subscribers.

TechCrunch's MG Siegler sums up the situation with this headline: "The 'Digital Newsstand' Race Becomes: Who Is More Willing To Trick Users, Apple Or Google?"

The issue is whether the subscriber data that publishers want so desperately -- and which Steve Jobs has so far resisted giving them -- is "opt out" or "opt in." According to the Journal, Apple is ready to soften its stance in the iTunes newsstand it is rumored to be building. The key passage:

"Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.

"Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people."

According to the Journal, Google has been telling publishers that it would be willing to give them "certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services." Whether that would be opt-in or opt-out is unclear -- thus Siegler's question about tricking users.

If Google builds its Android newsstand -- and the Journal makes it clear that that's still a big if -- it might give publishers a little more leverage and break open the logjam in their hard bargaining with Apple.

Meanwhile, it's hard to know who is more to blame for the iPad's failure to deliver a Gutenberg-like publishing revolution -- the publishers who are charging $4.99 for iPad versions of magazines they give to subscribers for pennies or Le Monde's new Gutenberg, who guards the names (and credit card numbers) Apple has collected through iTunes like the Queen guards her crown jewels.

No one likes to see newspapers and magazines go under -- least of all the writers who depend on them to pay the rent. On the other hand, these same publishers for years hawked subscriptions through "sweepstakes" so misleading that 25 state attorneys general felt obliged to step in. (See Publishers Clearing House).

Who wants to get spammed by those guys?
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/...sstands-stink/





Warners Bros. Leads Studio Market Share for Third Year
Pamela McClintock

Warner Bros. was the top Hollywood studio by market share for a third year in 2010, despite suffering a drop in ticket sales even as overall industry revenues were flat.

The studio led the pack in North America with a $1.89 billion gross, giving it 18.3 percent of the total revenue pie. Its top-grossing films were "Inception" ($292.5 million), and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" ($283 million). In 2009, the studio claimed a 19.8 percent share and a total take of $2.1 billion.

Overall domestic revenue for 2010 came in just below $10.57 billion, down less than 1 percent from the record $10.6 billion earned in 2009.

It was only the second time in history that domestic revenue has jumped $10 billion. However, attendance dropped more than 5.2 percent in 2010 from the previous year, the second biggest dip in a decade.

The discrepancy was attributed to a stiff 3D-fueled increase in the average ticket price, from $7.46 in 2009 to $7.85 in 2010 (midyear, the average price jumped to $7.95, then went back down in the fall to $7.85).

Paramount held at No. 2 in 2010 with roughly 16.1 percent, as its films collected more than $1.67 billion. Its top performers were a pair it distributed for other studios, Marvel's "Iron Man 2" ($312 million) and DreamWorks Animation's "Shrek Forever After" ($238 million). In 2009, the studio's market share was 13.9 percent on $1.48 billion in sales.

Thanks largely to the 2009 release "Avatar," 20th Century Fox jumped one place to No. 3 with roughly $1.45 billion and a 14 percent share. Otherwise, Fox had a lackluster year domestically. In 2009, it earned $1.39 billion,. good enough for a 13.1 percent share.

Disney rose one place to No. 4, with $1.4 billion and a 13.6 percent share, up from $1.2 billion and 11.6% in 2009.

Sony fell two places to No. 5 with $1.26 billion and a 12.3 percent marketshare, down from $1.46 billion and a 13.7 percent share in 2009.

Universal had enough tough year, holding at No. 6 with 8.2 percent and a $842.2 million haul. In 2009, it pulled in $890 million, which was good enough for an 8.4 percent share.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7030IX20110104





‘Skins’ Will Arrive Soon on MTV, Baring All That It Can
Dave Itzkoff

In a downstairs recording studio in the West Village, Bryan Elsley, a co-creator of the British teenage comedy-drama “Skins,” was guiding James Newman, a star of the MTV remake of the show, through a typical line of dialogue.

Conjuring up his confidence, Mr. Newman, a handsome, baby-faced 18-year-old who plays Tony, the cocky ringleader of a high school clique, said to an unseen co-star, “Normal girls like it.”

Mr. Elsley offered his thoughts on the line reading: “If you could be slightly scandalized,” he said, “but also amused.”

In an interview afterward, a more demure Mr. Newman declined to specify what indiscreet act he was trying to talk another (undoubtedly female) character into during that scene. “You’ll see,” he said with a grin.

MTV and its viewers will also soon see what an Americanized version of “Skins” looks like when the series has its premiere on Jan. 17. Famous in its original incarnation for frank depictions of sex, substance abuse and other authentic teenage pursuits, “Skins” is a show that MTV sought specifically for its boundary-pushing content while knowing that it could not break as many rules on American television.

As the United States debut approaches, the network and the “Skins” creative team realize that whether this version is too risqué or too tame, or even if it gets its balance just right, there will be consequences to pay.

“When you do things the fans don’t like, they really turn on you,” Mr. Elsley said. “When characters die in the show, there’s trouble. When people have the wrong sexuality or sexual behavior, there’s trouble. And when you bring the show to America, there’s trouble.”

Mr. Elsley, 49, a Scottish-born television producer with a gentle voice and sleepy eyes, recalled in an interview how he and his son Jamie Brittain created “Skins” about five years ago out of “a slightly irritable conversation across the dinner table.”

“He was acquainting me with my age,” Mr. Elsley said of Mr. Brittain (he uses his mother’s last name), then 19, “and my boringness and the mundaneness of what I did.”

Drawing from Mr. Brittain’s pop cultural interests (and his desire to make a teenage drama that would “be actually good and not rubbish”), the father and son created a group of characters based on Mr. Brittain and his friends: the well-liked, devious Tony; the hard-partying Chris; the fumbling, virginal Sid.

“Jamie wouldn’t mind you knowing that he is, in fact, Sid,” Mr. Elsley said, “and he would take great pleasure in telling you that his ridiculous, shout-y Scottish dad is in fact me.”

The only limitation placed on the original “Skins,” broadcast in Britain and Ireland on the E4 channel, was the prohibition of two particular swear words. The series took full advantage of this freedom, depicting its characters in various sexual couplings and triplings, struggling with unrequited crushes, eating disorders and unwanted pregnancies, and even dying.

Now on the verge of its fifth season (produced by a 24-year-old Mr. Brittain), “Skins” caught the eye of MTV executives as it started appearing on Netflix and BBC America.

“It was letting go of its assumptions about what young people do and how they talk, and letting them do it for themselves,” said Stephen Friedman, the general manager of MTV.

“Skins” also appealed to MTV as a signature series that could help the network reinvent itself as it pursued a millennial-age, 18-to-24-year-old audience and added more scripted series to its portfolio. Though documentary-style shows like “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom” are still far and away MTV’s most popular programs, the proliferation of the reality format across television has made it “hard to feel pioneering in reality,” Mr. Friedman said.

Scripted shows, he added, “became another opportunity to represent the life and the rhythm of our audience, in the way great fiction can be disconnected to your life but still speak central truths to you.”

But striking the deal that brought “Skins” to MTV took more than a year. Mr. Elsley said he spoke to several “amazing, legendary” show runners in the United States, only to conclude that he would have to produce the series himself.

“We would have been their second or third show they were doing at once,” Mr. Elsley said of the American candidates, whom he declined to name, “and ‘Skins’ can’t happen that way.”

MTV, meanwhile, was committed to broadcasting “Skins” with a TV-MA rating, meaning that it was intended for viewers 18 and over and could not be shown before 10 p.m.

This necessarily involved some compromises. The MTV version will still show its characters having sex and using drugs and alcohol, and it won’t always punish them immediately for these behaviors.

David Janollari, who runs MTV’s programming division, said that in several conversations with the network’s standards and practices department, executives had to explain, “When you see someone doing drugs, you want to see the consequences in that episode — well, now, the consequences may not happen till three episodes later.”

At the same time, Mr. Janollari said: “Obviously, we cannot go as far as the U.K. version. I don’t think anyone in basic cable can.”

The crucial difference for the United States “Skins,” Mr. Elsley said, has been letting go of some explicit words that were central to the show’s British lexicon.

“Language is a trigger in America,” Mr. Elsley said with some resignation. “I’ve learned this. What seemed to me like innocuous words have enormous power on television.”

He added: “It seems a bit silly. But there’s plenty of words in the language and plenty of ways of describing the inner lives of teenagers.”

Ultimately, Mr. Elsley said that MTV was letting him pursue his vision for “Skins” and that “they’re not snobs and they’re not scum.” He added: “They’re a television channel, which always occupies the space in between. Some channels are scum. And some channels are horrible, ridiculous snobs who think spending $40 million to bore you to death is a great idea.”

If the unabashed newcomers who star in MTV’s “Skins” are at all representative of its goal audience, the network should have no fear of offending young sensibilities with its provocative content.

Sofia Black-D’Elia, 19, who plays a lesbian cheerleader named Tea, said she and her cast mates quickly bonded while filming the series in Toronto last year.

“Everyone going out for the show had the same personality qualities,” she said, adding that they were “not necessarily outcasts but definitely more neurotic than most teenagers.” (She also said the most efficient way to organize the “Skins” characters was not to separate “females from males” but to distinguish “pill-poppers from the nymphomaniacs.”)

Daniel Flaherty, the 17-year-old actor who plays a character named Stanley (the United States equivalent of the British character Sid) and who attended his recording session with his mother, Cathy, said he was not embarrassed to shoot scenes in which he was undressed or otherwise presented in compromising situations.

“Coming down to it, it’s your job, right?” Mr. Flaherty said in an interview. “I was definitely just super-stoked. My mom’s the one who was nervous.”

Ms. Flaherty, who was seated next to her son, readily agreed. Recalling her reaction to a “Skins” script she had read, she said: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, Dan, you’ve got to be naked in this one. You’ve got to kiss this one and this one and this one.’ ”

Repeating a mantra she had told herself many times during the making of the show, Ms. Flaherty added, “You just have to keep remembering, it’s acting.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/ar...n/04skins.html





A L♥ng-Distance Affair
Abigail Sullivan Moore

CHANTELLE WELP and Colin Sorensen grew up together in Greeley, Colo. They despised each other in middle school, became friends junior year of high school and, in a twist of romantic irony, turned into a couple over Christmas vacation of their senior year — just weeks before they learned of their very different college destinies.

Ms. Welp was accepted into her dream college, Suffolk University in Boston; Mr. Sorensen, the University of Colorado, Boulder. Initially, they fretted over their divergent paths. “I really wanted to try to make it work,” says Ms. Welp. Ditto, Mr. Sorensen says.

So far, it has. Two years later, they are still seriously dating, cross-country. “In love, most definitely,” Mr. Sorensen says.

Generations of high school sweethearts have stayed together into college, but the connection tends to unravel amid the charms of a new campus, often during the rite known as the Thanksgiving Break-up, or Turkey Drop.

That tradition — and college dating over all — is being tweaked, thanks to today’s ability to communicate easily and variously across the miles. Relationships begun in high school and over summer vacations are continuing. Studying abroad isn’t a deal-breaker. As long as they can Skype, text, send a BlackBerry message, post on Facebook and call at will, distance is no obstacle to love, or to long-distance sexual play.

“I used to hear a lot more that ‘I don’t want to deal with a long-distance relationship,’ ” says Mike Malmon, a psychologist and counselor at the College of Wooster in Ohio. “But there’s been a transformation.”

Take Ms. Welp and Mr. Sorensen. Last year, they Skyped for an hour or longer nearly every night. They texted constantly, talked on the phone and wrote letters (yes, snail-mail letters). Now, more confident in their relationship and squeezed by busy schedules, they Skype twice weekly and call a bit more than that. They send a stream of daily texts and see each other at home on break. For the past two Thanksgivings, Mr. Sorensen has flown to Boston, and later this year they plan to study abroad together in New Zealand. “I’m so reliant on being able to just check in with him and do video Skype conversations,” Ms. Welp says.

Skype and similar technology figure large in this trend. “I don’t know if we would be together without Skype,” says Lisa Hoeynck, a University of Notre Dame junior, committed for the past three-plus years to Dusty Weber, a senior at St. Louis University. “Seeing his face makes our relationship even stronger,” she says.

Ms. Hoeynck recently acquired an iPhone. “It’s like Skype for your phone. When I’m walking to class I can talk and look at him.”

But what students say they find most romantic is a handwritten letter. “There is nothing really romantic about getting an e-mail or a text,” says Alia Roth, a Connecticut College freshman who has been dating Jake Blum, a University of Pennsylvania junior, since the end of her junior year in high school. “But there is something romantic about going to my mailbox and seeing a letter from my boyfriend and reading alone words from wherever he is,” she says. “It was the action of thinking of me, wherever he was, removed from technology.”

In return, Ms. Roth pens her own letters, sealing them with a lipsticked kiss.

Skype and Facebook also let students make contact with the other’s roommates and friends. This virtual intimacy, say students, increases understanding of each other’s lives. From Boston, Ms. Welp used Facebook to enlist four friends in her boyfriend’s dorm to run a scavenger hunt for his 20th birthday. Each clue focused on a moment in their relationship: the dorm piano for a song Mr. Sorensen taught her there during a visit, for example; the prize, a special T-shirt. Mr. Sorensen feared his friends might laugh, but “they went along with it and enjoyed it just as much as she and I did.”

IN the adjustment to college, first-year students often cling to high school sweethearts for security and for the history shared. For many, it’s their first big relationship, making it harder to move on even as they grow apart.

Introverts tend to be clingier, says Suki Montgomery Hall, assistant director and psychologist in the Counseling and Wellness Center at Ithaca College. “Because,” she says, “it’s difficult for them to make new friends.”

Though technology binds campus-to-campus relationships, text messages, calls and virtual images still provide just a momentary — and sometimes puzzling — window into a partner’s life.

Stories abound of jealousy over comments posted on a boyfriend’s Facebook wall or photos showing him dancing with someone else. A late response or poor word choice in a text can leave girlfriends stewing for hours about the state of their romance and asking friends and therapists to decipher a message’s meaning.

“Most people aren’t great at giving feedback through words, especially 19-year-old college boys,” says Ms. Montgomery Hall. “All that data is creating some very anxious college students and a lot of fighting between partners.”

And there’s reason for worry. This is college, after all, and there’s a cute guy in the next room. Sexting and Skype go only so far. When revealed, infidelities can be devastating.

“Freshmen can be more vulnerable to some of these things because they don’t know where to get support or who their friend circle is,” says Dawn LaFrance, associate director of counseling and psychological services at Colgate. Some students, she says, “haven’t developed other friendships because they have devoted so much of themselves to the relationship.”

Long-distance involvement keeps many from fully embracing their own campus. “Sometimes they don’t feel that they are fully present at school because they are getting pulled back into the connections with the other person,” says Jefferson Singer, a clinical psychologist and Connecticut College professor.

College administrators pride themselves on a vibrant, engaging campus life, and prefer students to start fresh, open to new experiences. “By nature we are that kind of school that precludes you from clinging onto the past,” says Amy Uecke, associate dean of students for campus life at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. “A wise college president said: If you come to campus and you do four or five years here and find yourself leaving with only the same friends that you had in high school, we as an institution have failed you.”

Some students skip parties or road trips with buddies. “I lost some friendships because of the constant struggle about where I spend my time and who I spend my time with,” says Mr. Weber, who tries to weekend once a month with Ms. Hoeynck. Partly for that reason, Mr. Weber stopped managing the university’s basketball team and began coaching an inner-city school basketball team that didn’t travel for games. “It’s not as glamorous,” he says. “But it is fulfilling. You have to choose wisely.”

Students, of course, are contrarian: they say that their long-distance relationships help them become more involved on campus. “We both wanted each other to have our own college experiences,” says Liza Carens, a Connecticut College junior with a high school boyfriend now at Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania. She has a calendar of classes, theater rehearsals, gym visits, community service projects and a job.

“I don’t think I would have the time for a relationship at my school,” she says. Besides, she adds, “Having a long-distance relationship allows me to compartmentalize everything that I do.”

Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor of communication and culture at Indiana University Bloomington, interviewed students for her recent book “The Breakup 2.0.” She found that many were worried that a relationship on campus would deprive them of hours to study, work and make friends, whereas a faraway boyfriend or girlfriend wouldn’t.

As for Ms. Welp and Mr. Sorensen, they are deeply engaged in their schools — a bittersweet pleasure for Ms. Welp, who attributes her jam-packed schedule partly to her boyfriend. “Otherwise, you would drive yourself crazy thinking about how much you missed them and how much you want to be with them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/ed.../09date-t.html





Many Using Technology to Control Impulses, Enforce Good Behavior
AP

Dan Nainan can’t trust himself to work at his computer without clicking on distractions, so he uses an Internet-blocking program to shut down his Web access twice a day.

“I’m sorry, but try as I might, I could never, ever do this on my own,” said the New York City comedian who’s struggling to finish a book. “I wish I could, but I just don’t have the discipline.”

Nainan’s system of two, two-hour blocks is one example of how Americans are trying to control their impulses using technology that steps in to enforce good behavior.

With the new year days away, many tools are now available to help people stay in line, including a GPS-enabled app that locks down texting once a car gets rolling and a program that cuts off credit-card spending. Another device monitors your workout and offers real-time voice feedback.

Have we entered an era in which electronics serve as mother, cop and coach because we can’t manage our own desires?

Yep, said Ann Mack, a trend-watcher for JWT Intelligence, an arm of the marketing giant. She named “outsourcing self-control” and “de-teching” as two top trends for the new year.

“The thing is we’re becoming more aware of these behaviors, and as a result, we’re trying to seek help to circumvent some of our more base impulses,” Mack said. “We’re bombarded more and more with temptations on a regular basis, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to deal with that.”

Tools to cope with temptation are everywhere.

Some car owners are voluntarily using a technology developed for convicted drunk drivers — ignition locks attached to in-car breathalyzers.

Shelley Snyder, marketing coordinator for Intoxalock, said about 1.5 percent of the company’s clients are voluntary, which includes parents imposing the setup on their young drivers.

“I know that isn’t a lot, but it is growing at a slow, steady pace,” she said.

One of Intoxalock’s competitors, Guardian Interlock Systems, said its figures are slightly higher: 5 to 7 percent of clients are drivers voluntarily installing the equipment, with about 2 percent intended for use by teens.

Also gaining ground are clients using the system permanently after they’ve completed court-ordered monitoring — about 1 percent of Guardian’s clients in 2010, compared with none the year before.

“We hope not to see these people again,” said David Contreras, Guardian’s vice president of operations. “It’s the one product I’ve been associated with where I don’t want to sell it to you twice.”

If your drunken behavior tends to cause more remorse off the road than on, there’s an app for that as well.

A handful — including “Don’t Dial!” and “The Bad Decision Blocker” — will cut off your access to phone numbers for up to 24 hours, the former allowing you to name a friend as gatekeeper. Another app requires the answers to math questions before allowing you to send an e-mail, the presumption being it’s really hard to do math while somehow impaired.

George Distler in Orlando, Fla., developed the BlackBerry app NOTXT n’ Drive after a teacher at his daughter’s high school was killed when a texting motorist — an older one — crossed a median and struck her car.

“I didn’t even realize texting and driving was such a tremendous issue until I got into investigating it,” he said. “I was challenged by my teenage daughters.”

Distler, who had previously developed games for the iPhone, based the app on the notion that the safest way to deal with your phone while driving is to remove temptation altogether. His NOTXT runs in the background and, using GPS, automatically restricts texting via a phone’s airplane mode when a car reaches 10 mph. It deactivates when it detects the car has stopped.

The app, sold in several other counties as well, hit the BlackBerry market Sept. 3 and has been downloaded about 2,000 times.

Among those downloading the app were three companies with a combined fleet of more than 1,200 trucks. Distler estimates about 48 percent of his sales are parents hoping to curtail the texting habits of young drivers.

“Nobody’s really going to just put the phone down and not use it,” he said. “The issue is we don’t police ourselves.”

Another app, Slow Down, alters the tempo of your music, depending on your driving speed, on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Using GPS, the music slows if a preset speed limit is exceeded and stops completely if you’re over the limit by more than 10 mph. You can have your tunes back when you slow down.

What about other areas, like overspending?

Enter MasterCard’s inControl program, which has one company partner in the United States, Citigroup. You can set a general cap and the bank cuts you off when you’ve reached your spending limit, or you can preset a monthly amount for specific purchases such as restaurant meals. Like other bank cards, you can also order up spending alerts.

Overthinking, overdrinking, overspending. What’s left?

Are you lonely on your runs? Adidas has extended monitoring and data collection technology for its miCoach brand to include a “coaching mode.” You can choose from a variety of voices to feed information about form and speed.

Mack thinks a greater awareness of how we consume has produced a growing awareness of the limits of self-control.

“The spotlight has definitely been put on that,” she said. “We’re increasingly living in this era of mindfulness. Expect more technology coming out that saves us from ourselves.”
http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/3...l-percent.html





Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You
Steve Lohr

Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises.

Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout — body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year’s drill, computers that could see the action.

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert — a text message — to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants.

The enthusiasm for such systems extends well beyond the nation’s prisons. High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smartphones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly.

A computer-vision system can watch a hospital room and remind doctors and nurses to wash their hands, or warn of restless patients who are in danger of falling out of bed. It can, through a computer-equipped mirror, read a man’s face to detect his heart rate and other vital signs. It can analyze a woman’s expressions as she watches a movie trailer or shops online, and help marketers tailor their offerings accordingly. Computer vision can also be used at shopping malls, schoolyards, subway platforms, office complexes and stadiums.

All of which could be helpful — or alarming.

“Machines will definitely be able to observe us and understand us better,” said Hartmut Neven, a computer scientist and vision expert at Google. “Where that leads is uncertain.”

Google has been both at the forefront of the technology’s development and a source of the anxiety surrounding it. Its Street View service, which lets Internet users zoom in from above on a particular location, faced privacy complaints. Google will blur out people’s homes at their request.

Google has also introduced an application called Goggles, which allows people to take a picture with a smartphone and search the Internet for matching images. The company’s executives decided to exclude a facial-recognition feature, which they feared might be used to find personal information on people who did not know that they were being photographed.

Despite such qualms, computer vision is moving into the mainstream. With this technological evolution, scientists predict, people will increasingly be surrounded by machines that can not only see but also reason about what they are seeing, in their own limited way.

The uses, noted Frances Scott, an expert in surveillance technologies at the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s research agency, could allow the authorities to spot a terrorist, identify a lost child or locate an Alzheimer’s patient who has wandered off.

The future of law enforcement, national security and military operations will most likely rely on observant machines. A few months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm, awarded the first round of grants in a five-year research program called the Mind’s Eye. Its goal is to develop machines that can recognize, analyze and communicate what they see. Mounted on small robots or drones, these smart machines could replace human scouts. “These things, in a sense, could be team members,” said James Donlon, the program’s manager.

Millions of people now use products that show the progress that has been made in computer vision. In the last two years, the major online photo-sharing services — Picasa by Google, Windows Live Photo Gallery by Microsoft, Flickr by Yahoo and iPhoto by Apple — have all started using face recognition. A user puts a name to a face, and the service finds matches in other photographs. It is a popular tool for finding and organizing pictures.

Kinect, an add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console, is a striking advance for computer vision in the marketplace. It uses a digital camera and sensors to recognize people and gestures; it also understands voice commands. Players control the computer with waves of the hand, and then move to make their on-screen animated stand-ins — known as avatars — run, jump, swing and dance. Since Kinect was introduced in November, game reviewers have applauded, and sales are surging.

To Microsoft, Kinect is not just a game, but a step toward the future of computing. “It’s a world where technology more fundamentally understands you, so you don’t have to understand it,” said Alex Kipman, an engineer on the team that designed Kinect.

‘Please Wash Your Hands’

A nurse walks into a hospital room while scanning a clipboard. She greets the patient and washes her hands. She checks and records his heart rate and blood pressure, adjusts the intravenous drip, turns him over to look for bed sores, then heads for the door but does not wash her hands again, as protocol requires. “Pardon the interruption,” declares a recorded women’s voice, with a slight British accent. “Please wash your hands.”

Three months ago, Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., began an experiment with computer vision in a single hospital room. Three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling, monitor movements in Room 542, in a special care unit (a notch below intensive care) where patients are treated for conditions like severe pneumonia, heart attacks and strokes. The cameras track people going in and out of the room as well as the patient’s movements in bed.

The first applications of the system, designed by scientists at General Electric, are immediate reminders and alerts. Doctors and nurses are supposed to wash their hands before and after touching a patient; lapses contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections, research shows.

The camera over the bed delivers images to software that is programmed to recognize movements that indicate when a patient is in danger of falling out of bed. The system would send an alert to a nearby nurse.

If the results at Bassett prove to be encouraging, more features can be added, like software that analyzes facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress, said Kunter Akbay, a G.E. scientist.

Hospitals have an incentive to adopt tools that improve patient safety. Medicare and Medicaid are adjusting reimbursement rates to penalize hospitals that do not work to prevent falls and pressure ulcers, and whose doctors and nurses do not wash their hands enough. But it is too early to say whether computer vision, like the system being tried out at Bassett, will prove to be cost-effective.

Mirror, Mirror

Daniel J. McDuff, a graduate student, stood in front of a mirror at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. After 20 seconds or so, a figure — 65, the number of times his heart was beating per minute — appeared at the mirror’s bottom. Behind the two-way mirror was a Web camera, which fed images of Mr. McDuff to a computer whose software could track the blood flow in his face.

The software separates the video images into three channels — for the basic colors red, green and blue. Changes to the colors and to movements made by tiny contractions and expansions in blood vessels in the face are, of course, not apparent to the human eye, but the computer can see them.

“Your heart-rate signal is in your face,” said Ming-zher Poh, an M.I.T. graduate student. Other vital signs, including breathing rate, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure, should leave similar color and movement clues.

The pulse-measuring project, described in research published in May by Mr. Poh, Mr. McDuff and Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the lab, is just the beginning, Mr. Poh said. Computer vision and clever software, he said, make it possible to monitor humans’ vital signs at a digital glance. Daily measurements can be analyzed to reveal that, for example, a person’s risk of heart trouble is rising. “This can happen, and in the future it will be in mirrors,” he said.

Faces can yield all sorts of information to watchful computers, and the M.I.T. students’ adviser, Dr. Picard, is a pioneer in the field, especially in the use of computing to measure and communicate emotions. For years, she and a research scientist at the university, Rana el-Kaliouby, have applied facial-expression analysis software to help young people with autism better recognize the emotional signals from others that they have such a hard time understanding.

The two women are the co-founders of Affectiva, a company in Waltham, Mass., that is beginning to market its facial-expression analysis software to manufacturers of consumer products, retailers, marketers and movie studios. Its mission is to mine consumers’ emotional responses to improve the designs and marketing campaigns of products.

John Ross, chief executive of Shopper Sciences, a marketing research company that is part of the Interpublic Group, said Affectiva’s technology promises to give marketers an impartial reading of the sequence of emotions that leads to a purchase, in a way that focus groups and customer surveys cannot. “You can see and analyze how people are reacting in real time, not what they are saying later, when they are often trying to be polite,” he said. The technology, he added, is more scientific and less costly than having humans look at store surveillance videos, which some retailers do.

The facial-analysis software, Mr. Ross said, could be used in store kiosks or with Webcams. Shopper Sciences, he said, is testing Affectiva’s software with a major retailer and an online dating service, neither of which he would name. The dating service, he said, was analyzing users’ expressions in search of “trigger words” in personal profiles that people found appealing or off-putting.

Watching the Watchers

Maria Sonin, 33, an office worker in Waltham, Mass., sat in front of a notebook computer looking at a movie trailer while Affectiva’s software, through the PC’s Webcam, calibrated her reaction. The trailer was for “Little Fockers,” starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, which opened just before Christmas. The software measured her reactions by tracking movements on a couple of dozen points on her face — mostly along the eyes, eyebrows, nose and the perimeter of her lips.

To the human eye, Ms. Sonin appeared to be amused. The software agreed, said Dr. Kaliouby, though it used a finer-grained analysis, like recording that her smiles were symmetrical (signaling amusement, not embarrassment) and not smirks. The software, Ms. Kaliouby said, allows for continuous, objective measurement of viewers’ response to media, and in the future will do so in large numbers on the Web.

Ms. Sonin, an unpaid volunteer, said later that she did not think about being recorded by the Webcam. “It wasn’t as if it was a big camera in front of you,” she said.

Christopher Hamilton, a technical director of visual effects, has used specialized software to analyze facial expressions and recreate them on the screen. The films he has worked on include “King Kong,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Matrix Revolutions.” Using facial-expression analysis technology to gauge the reaction of viewers, who agree to be watched, may well become a valuable tool for movie makers, said Mr. Hamilton, who is not involved with Affectiva.

Today, sampling audience reaction before a movie is released typically means gathering a couple of hundred people at a preview screening. The audience members then answer questions and fill out surveys. Yet viewers, marketing experts say, are often inarticulate and imprecise about their emotional reactions.

The software “makes it possible to measure audience response with a scene-by-scene granularity that the current survey-and-questionnaire approach cannot,” Mr. Hamilton said. A director, he added, could find out, for example, that although audience members liked a movie over all, they did not like two or three scenes. Or he could learn that a particular character did not inspire the intended emotional response.

Emotion-sensing software, Mr. Hamilton said, might become part of the entertainment experience — especially as more people watch movies and programs on Internet-connected televisions, computers and portable devices. Viewers could share their emotional responses with friends using recommendation systems based on what scene — say, the protagonists’ dancing or a car chase — delivered the biggest emotional jolt.

Affectiva, Dr. Picard said, intends to offer its technology as “opt-in only,” meaning consumers have to be notified and have to agree to be watched online or in stores. Affectiva, she added, has turned down companies, which she declined to name, that wanted to use its software without notifying customers.

Darker Possibilities

Dr. Picard enunciates a principled stance, but one that could become problematic in other hands.

The challenge arises from the prospect of the rapid spread of less-expensive yet powerful computer-vision technologies.

At work or school, the technology opens the door to a computerized supervisor that is always watching. Are you paying attention, goofing off or daydreaming? In stores and shopping malls, smart surveillance could bring behavioral tracking into the physical world.

More subtle could be the effect of a person knowing that he is being watched — and how that awareness changes his thinking and actions. It could be beneficial: a person thinks twice and a crime goes uncommitted. But might it also lead to a society that is less spontaneous, less creative, less innovative?

“With every technology, there is a dark side,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “Sometimes you can predict it, but often you can’t.”

A decade ago, he noted, no one predicted that cellphones and text messaging would lead to traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers. And, he said, it was difficult to foresee that the rise of Facebook and Twitter and personal blogs would become troves of data to be collected and exploited in tracking people’s online behavior.

Often, a technology that is benign in one setting can cause harm in a different context. Google confronted that problem this year with its face-recognition software. In its Picasa photo-storing and sharing service, face recognition helps people find and organize pictures of family and friends.

But the company took a different approach with Goggles, which lets a person snap a photograph with a smartphone, setting off an Internet search. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and links to Web pages with background information and articles about it appear on the phone’s screen. Take a picture of a wine bottle and up come links to reviews of that vintage.

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smartphones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information — name, occupation, address, workplace.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html





Court OKs Searches of Cell Phones Without Warrant
Bob Egelko

The California Supreme Court allowed police Monday to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody.

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents, "this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body ... but also to open and examine what they find," the state court said in a 5-2 ruling.

The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the nation's high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge.

The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data.

Monday's decision allows police "to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person," said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno.

They argued that police should obtain a warrant - by convincing a judge that they will probably find incriminating evidence - before searching a cell phone.

The issue has divided other courts. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco ruled in May 2007 that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in a December 2009 ruling in which the state unsuccessfully sought U.S. Supreme Court review.

The Ohio-California split could prompt the nation's high court to take up the issue, said Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in Monday's case.

"This has an impact on the day-to-day jobs of police officers, what kind of searches they can conduct without a warrant when they arrest someone," she said. "It takes it into the realm of new technology."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that a police department did not violate an officer's privacy when it read text messages he had sent on a department-owned pager.

Although the court has never ruled on police searches of cell phones, Wilson argued that it has signaled approval by allowing officers to examine the contents of arrestees' wallets without a warrant.

The defense lawyer in Monday's case was unavailable for comment.

Monday's ruling upheld the drug conviction of Gregory Diaz, arrested in April 2007 by Ventura County sheriff's deputies who said they had seen him taking part in a drug deal.

An officer took a cell phone from Diaz's pocket, looked at the text message folder 90 minutes later, and found a message that linked Diaz to the sale, the court said. Diaz pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and appealed the search.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...3G12.DTL&tsp=1





A Clear Danger to Free Speech
Geoffrey R. Stone

THE so-called Shield bill, which was recently introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.”

Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very least, the act must be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation.

The clear and present danger standard has been a central element of our First Amendment jurisprudence ever since Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1919 opinion in Schenk v. United States. In the 90 years since, the precise meaning of “clear and present danger” has evolved, but the animating principle was stated brilliantly by Justice Louis D. Brandeis in his 1927 concurring opinion in Whitney v. California. The founders “did not exalt order at the cost of liberty,” wrote Brandeis; on the contrary, they understood that “only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such ... is the command of the Constitution. It is, therefore, always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.”

On the other hand, the First Amendment does not compel government transparency. It leaves the government extraordinary autonomy to protect its own secrets. It does not accord anyone the right to have the government disclose information about its actions or policies, and it cedes to the government considerable authority to restrict the speech of its own employees. What it does not do, however, is allow the government to suppress the free speech of others when it has failed to keep its own secrets.

We might think of this like the attorney-client privilege. If a lawyer reveals his client’s confidences to a reporter, he can be punished for violating that privilege — but the newspaper cannot constitutionally be punished for publishing the information.

There are very good reasons why it makes sense to give the government so little authority to punish the circulation of unlawfully leaked information.

First, the mere fact that such information might “prejudice the interests of the United States” does not mean that that harm outweighs the benefit of publication; in many circumstances, it may be extremely valuable to public understanding. Consider, for example, classified information about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Second, the reasons that government officials want secrecy are many and varied. They range from the truly compelling to the patently illegitimate. As we have learned from our own history, it is often very tempting for government officials to overstate their need for secrecy, especially in times of national anxiety. A strict clear and present danger standard — rather than an unwieldy and unpredictable case-by-case balancing of harm against benefit — establishes a high bar to protect us against this danger.

And finally, a central principle of the First Amendment is that the suppression of free speech must be the government’s last rather than its first resort in addressing a problem. The most obvious way for the government to prevent the danger posed by the circulation of classified material is by ensuring that information that must be kept secret is not leaked in the first place.

Indeed, the Supreme Court made this point quite clearly in its 2001 decision in Bartnicki v. Vopper, which held that when an individual receives information “from a source who obtained it unlawfully,” that individual may not be punished for publicly disseminating the information “absent a need ... of the highest order.”

The court explained that if the sanctions now attached to the underlying criminal act “do not provide sufficient deterrence,” then perhaps they should be “made more severe” — but “it would be quite remarkable to hold” that an individual can constitutionally be punished merely for publishing information because the government failed to “deter conduct by a non-law-abiding third party.” This is a sound solution.

If we grant the government too much power to punish those who disseminate information, then we risk too great a sacrifice of public deliberation; if we grant the government too little power to control confidentiality at the source, then we risk too great a sacrifice of secrecy. The answer is thus to reconcile the irreconcilable values of secrecy and accountability by guaranteeing both a strong authority of the government to prohibit leaks and an expansive right of others to disseminate information to the public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/opinion/04stone.html





French Minister Uses Non-Existent Benefits to Sell LOPPSI 2 Legislation
Drew Wilson

LOPPSI 2, the surveillance legislation in France, has been making headlines recently given that the legislation has re-entered political debate in recent weeks. The Interior Minister reportedly was out in the media telling everyone that one of the benefits of LOPPSI 2 is that it would stop cell phone theft in its tracks. Critics point to one tiny little problem with that sales-pitch – it doesn’t exist in the legislation in its current form and blocking stolen phones is already possible.

LOPPSI 2 is a piece of French legislation that would make it legal for police to upload malware to suspected criminals and file-sharers alike without a court order without the users knowledge. When the story broke in 2009, it, at minimum, raised a few eyebrows. Many were quick to blast the legislation, saying that the legislation goes way too far.

More recently, the legislation was back in the public spotlight in France and the Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux recently went in to the media to sell the benefits of LOPPSI 2 (Google Translation):

“Given that, I decided to take several measures,” he announced. Among them, a measure “very important is that in the context of Loppsi 2, to be finally adopted at the end of the year, we change the system phones. Until now, when there had a phone stolen, they could block the SIM card. Now we can lock the phone. ”

“That means it will be much less attractive, naturally, to steal a phone. That’s what happened 20 years ago with the radios. There were thefts of car radios, and we found ways techniques to discourage. ”

In short, if LOPPSI 2 is passed, it would make stealing cell-phones/smart phones/iPhones less attractive because companies can then block the SIM cards and lock down the phone.

Numerama, a French news site covering the story, points out that there is one problem with this comment, LOPPSI 2, in its current form, doesn’t even discuss the theft of portable phones. Instead, there would have to be an amendment put in to make this purported benefit true.

Another critic of the legislation pointed out (Google translation) that the blocking of SIM cards on stolen phones is already possible in the first place.

So even if an amendment was introduced in to LOPPSI 2, there wouldn’t be any added benefit on this front in the first place.

Whether or not you are a fan of such intrusive surveillance laws, it’s very hard to defend such a style of selling a law to the public. Trying to tell people of non-existent benefits of a proposed law is, at best, showing a sense of general ignorance to laws you helped to create in the first place and, at worse, is pushing a direct lie out in to the public. If you’re going to sell the law to the public based on benefits, you’d think it is best to sell it on benefits that are actually in the legislation.

We know all about what happens when lawmakers try and sell legislation they appear to know little about. Jim Prentice, when he was trying to sell Bill C-61, Canada’s copyright legislation that ultimately died on the order-paper, kept telling Search Engine that a lot of what was being asked was “very technical” and wound up hanging up in the middle of the interview. Experts suggested that this was the result of the then minister not understanding the very bill he was in charge of. One thing is for sure, it didn’t help him ease tensions amongst Canadians over the contentious “digital locks” or anti-circumvention law controversy. While the countries and political situations are more than likely different between Canada’s Bill C-61 and France’s current LOPPSI 2, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the benefits of not knowing what is in the very legislation you are selling to local voters are similarly absent in both cases.

Given that the French government has already forced the issue on the passage of the three strikes law (AKA HADOPI), I would say that the situation in France with regards to LOPPSI 2 is more distressing given that Canada is currently in a minority government situation – meaning that if the opposition isn’t happy with what is being tabled, it can be voted down because there are more representatives in opposition than in the governing party.

It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the overall privacy and surveillance debate in France though. It’s unlikely that this revelation will quiet criticism towards the government though.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91857/f...2-legislation/





US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project

DARPA wants smart system that can learn to jam new wireless threats automatically
Layer 8

The US military is beginning to develop algorithms and other technology that can automatically learn to jam certain new wireless transmissions that may threaten personnel.

BAE Systems recently got about $8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) system.

The weirdest, wackiest and stupidest sci/tech stories of 2010

According to DARPA: As wireless communication devices become more adaptive and responsive to their environment by using technology such as Dynamic Spectrum Allocation, the effectiveness of fixed countermeasures may become severely degraded. The BLADE program will develop algorithms and techniques that will let our electronic warfare systems to automatically learn to jam new RF threats in the field.

DARPA added that it expects new software algorithms will be integrated into existing electronic warfare gear and not require new hardware.

BLADE development includes three central components. From DARPA:

* Detection and Characterization - this includes the development of algorithms and techniques for detecting the presence of a new threat and learning its characteristics. Proposals should address methods for detecting new communication threats operating over very wide frequency ranges and in highly cluttered tactical RF environments. Of particular interest are algorithms capable of deriving Physical (PHY), Media Access Control (MAC), and Network (NET) layer features of communication threats from over-the-air observables.
* Jam Waveform Optimization - this includes the development of methods and techniques for automatically synthesizing countermeasures that effectively and efficiently deny detected communication threat(s). Of special interest are machine learning algorithms that use information derived through passive signal characterization as well as from active probing and learning, to automatically synthesize surgical 'jamming techniques.
* Battle Damage Assessment - this includes the development of algorithms and techniques for accurately assessing jam effectiveness in the field. Proposals should address methods for evaluating jam effectiveness over-the-air, i.e., without physical access to the threat radio. Of particular interest are techniques that exploit the over-the-air observable changes in the threat radio caused by our jamming to enable the BLADE system to assess its impact and infer the integrity of the threat communication link.

BLADE is just one of many of DARPA's wireless efforts. In September the agency said it was looking for technology that would let wireless communications work even through the most extreme and nasty interference. DARPA's Communications Under Extreme RF Spectrum Conditions (CommEx) program wants to develop wireless communication networks that can operate under severe and complex interference, anticipating traditional interference and communications threats, high power threats, as well as novel interference resulting from new adaptive threats, DARPA stated.

The CommEx program will assess next generation and beyond jamming threats and then develop advanced interference suppression and avoidance technologies to successfully communicate in the presence of severe, traditional, and novel types of interference that are orders-of-magnitude more severe than what are currently addressed by the most advanced systems, DARPA stated.
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...s-jamming-proj





Mobile Users More Vulnerable to Phishing Attacks

Trusteer recently gained access to the log files of several web servers that were hosting phishing websites. Analyzing these log files provided visibility into how many users accessed the websites, when they visited them, whether they submitted their login information, and what devices they used to access the website.

Below are a few interesting findings from these logs.

Mobile users are the first to arrive

As soon as a phishing website is broadcast through fraudulent email messages the first systems to visit it are typically mobile devices.

This makes sense since mobile users are "always on" and are most likely to read email messages as soon as they arrive. Meanwhile, desktop users only read messages when they have access to their computer.

Also most fraudulent emails call for immediate action. For example, they usually claim that suspicious activity has been detected in the user’s account and that immediate action is required. Most victims who fall for this ploy will visit the phishing site quickly.

The first couple of hours in a phishing attack are critical. After that many attacks are blocked by phishing filters or taken down. Hence Mobile users are more likely to be hit by Phishing just because they're "always on".

Mobile users accessing phishing websites are three times more likely to submit their login info than desktop users

Most users who access phishing websites do not submit their personal information. Some submit fake information. However, compared with desktop users, mobile users are three times more likely to submit private information once they access a phishing website. Why do mobile users trust phishing websites more?

One explanation could be that it's harder to spot a phishing website on a mobile device than on a computer. As a research experiment, Trusteer compared the user experience of accessing a phishing website on a Blackberry and an iPhone.

BlackBerry: It's very difficult to tell whether an email is fraudulent since the “From” field doesn't include the sender's address but rather the name of the sender (such as ACME Bank). Some users could interpret that the device "trusts" the sender more because it is just shows the name and not the full address. Although email addresses can be spoofed, if the entire address is visible and appears “phishy”, certain users will not click through the link in the message.

In HTML mail (the most common format for fraudulent messages) when a link is embedded, hovering over the link will not reveal the actual address. When the user clicks on the link the BlackBerry device presents the following message: "Continue to" with the real address appended. Due to the limited screen size, if the URL is long enough and well crafted it is hard to detect that the URL is not legitimate.

Once the BlackBerry switches to the browser and starts loading the phishing website the top bar shows the website name created by the fraudster (e.g. Welcome to ACME Bank) and the real address is not presented. If the phishing website is a good clone of the authentic bank’s website (and most are) there is no easy way of determining that the website is fraudulent.

iPhone: The experience on this device is similar to the BlackBerry until the user clicks on a link. iPhone devices don't ask the user if they want to open the URL. They automatically load the page. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone does have an address bar. However, due to size limitations only the beginning of the URL is shown. Here again, if the URL is well crafted it's hard to detect that the URL is not legitimate.

According to Trusteer, it's equally difficult to spot phishing websites on BlackBerry and iPhone devices.

Eight times more iPhone users accessed these phishing websites than Blackberry users.

According to Comscore's October 2010 U.S Mobile Subscriber Market Share report, BlackBerry devices are still the market share leader in the US with almost 36% compared to iPhones with 26%.

Then why are more iPhone users accessing phishing websites? One explanation could be that Blackberry users, many of which are issued their device by a business, are more educated about Phishing threats and thus less likely to click these links, and have better protection on their mail servers. Although we don’t have any data to validate this theory, if in fact the iPhone is more commonly used in the private sector then this is a very plausible reason for these findings.

Also, the message that Blackberry devices present when a user clicks on the link in a Phishing email may discourage a certain percentage of victims from proceeding to the phishing website. Another possibility is that the Comscore market share numbers are inaccurate, and the iPhone has a greater market share than currently documented.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10386





Amazon Cloud Can Help Hack WiFi Networks: Expert
Jim Finkle

A security researcher says he has figured out a quick and inexpensive way to break a commonly used form of password protection for wireless networks using powerful computers that anybody can lease from Amazon.com Inc over the Web.

Thomas Roth, a computer security consultant based in Cologne, Germany, says he can hack into protected networks using specialized software that he has written that runs on Amazon's cloud-based computers. It tests 400,000 potential passwords per second using Amazon's high-speed computers.

That leaves businesses as well as home networks prone to attack if they use relatively simple passwords to secure their networks.

Amazon leases time on computers to developers and companies that don't have the money to buy their own equipment, or don't use it frequently enough to justify doing so. Customers include individual programmers and corporate users.

A spokesman for Amazon said that Roth's research would only violate his company's policies if he were to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing service to break into a network without permission of its owner.

"Nothing in this researcher's work is predicated on the use of Amazon EC2. As researchers often do, he used EC2 as a tool to show how the security of some network configurations can be improved," said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener.

"Testing is an excellent use of AWS, however, it is a violation of our acceptable use policy to use our services to compromise the security of a network without authorization."

Roth will distribute his software to the public and teach people how to use it later this month at the Black Hat hacking conference in Washington, D.C.

He said he is publicizing his research in a bid to convince skeptical network administrators that a commonly used method for scrambling data that travels across WiFi network passwords is not strong enough to keep crafty intruders from breaking in to networks.

That encryption method, dubbed WPA-PSK, scrambles data using a single password. If a potential intruder is able to figure out the password, he or she can gain access to computers and other devices on the network.

Roth said that the networks can be broken into if hackers use enough computer power to "brute force" their way into figuring out the passwords that protect networks.

Those passwords were difficult for the average hacker to break until Amazon.com recently started leasing time on powerful computers at relatively inexpensive rates: It takes the processing capability of multiple computers to perform mathematical calculations needed to break the passwords.

The online retailer charges users 28 cents a minute to use machines that Roth used in his attack. It would cost at least tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and maintain that equipment.

Roth said that he used his software and Amazon's cloud-based computers to break into a WPA-PSK protected network in his neighborhood. It took about 20 minutes of processing time. He has since updated his software to speed its performance and believes he could hack into the same network in about 6 minutes.

"Once you are in, you can do everything you can do if you are connected to the network," he said.

Roth said he was not publicizing his discovery to encourage crime, but to change a misconception among network administrators:

"People tell me there is no possible way to break WPA, or, if it were possible, it would cost you a ton of money to do so," he said. "But it is easy to brute force them."

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70641M20110107





Microsoft Confirms New Windows Zero-Day Bug

Hackers can use malformed images to hijack XP, Vista, Server 2003 and 2008
Gregg Keizer

Computerworld - Microsoft today confirmed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows just hours after a hacking toolkit published an exploit for the bug.

A patch is under construction, but Microsoft does not plan to issue an emergency, or "out-of-band," update to fix the flaw.

The bug was first discussed Dec. 15 at a South Korean security conference, but got more attention Tuesday when the open-source Metasploit penetration tool posted an exploit module crafted by researcher Joshua Drake.

According to Metasploit, successful attacks are capable of compromising victimized PCs, then introducing malware to the machines to pillage them for information or enlist them in a criminal botnet.

The vulnerability exists in Windows' graphics rendering engine, which improperly handles thumbnail images, and can be triggered when a user views a folder containing a specially crafted thumbnail with Windows' file manager, or opens or views some Office documents.

Microsoft acknowledged the bug in a security advisory, and said Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 were vulnerable. The newest operating systems, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, were not.

Attackers could feed users malicious PowerPoint or Word documents containing a malformed thumbnail, then exploit their PCs if the document was opened or even previewed, said Microsoft. Alternately, hackers could hijack machines by convincing users to view a rigged thumbnail on a network shared folder or drive, or in an online WebDAV file-sharing folder.

"This is a remote code execution vulnerability. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system," Microsoft's advisory stated.

"The vulnerability is exploited by setting the number of color indexes in the color table [of the image file] to a negative number," added Johannes Ullrich, the chief research officer at the SANS Institute.

Microsoft recommended a temporary workaround that protects PCs against attack until a patch is released. The workaround, which adds more restrictions on the "shimgvw.dll" file -- the component that previews images within Windows -- requires users to type a string of characters at a command prompt. Doing so, however, means that "media files typically handled by the Graphics Rendering Engine will not be displayed properly," said Microsoft.

While Microsoft said it didn't know of any active attacks, the new bug is another to add to a growing list of unpatched vulnerabilities, said Andrew Storms, director of security at nCircle Security.

"The pressure is on Microsoft," said Storms in an instant message interview. "They already have an outstanding zero-day in [Internet Explorer] plus a WMI Active X bug that Secunia issued a warning about [on Dec. 22]. Combine those concerns with a much bigger side story regarding cross_fuzz and now [an] image handling bug all make it a happy new year for Microsoft."

Microsoft confirmed a critical bug in IE two weeks ago; on Sunday, Google security engineer Michal Zalewski said he had evidence that Chinese hackers were probing a different flaw in Microsoft's browser.

"With Microsoft just closing the door on its largest patch year yet, 2011 is not starting out in a positive direction," Storms said.

Last year, Microsoft issued a record 106 security bulletins to patch a record 266 vulnerabilities.

The next regularly-scheduled Microsoft Patch Tuesday is Jan. 11. If the company maintains its normal development and testing pace, a fix is very unlikely next week.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...s_zero_day_bug





Researchers Hack Internet Enabled TVs, Discover Multiple Security Vulnerabilities
Mike Lennon

Was your home lucky enough to get a new Internet enabled TV over the holidays? If so, you’re probably quite excited and enjoying the features of your new digital media hub while you sit back and sip on some eggnog or hot chocolate from your couch – which you should. But you may also want to be careful, as Internet TVs could be the newest avenue for cybercriminals to infiltrate your home or business. (I know, more FUD from a security vendor, but this is actually interesting stuff and they were able to show us how it was done)

Security researchers have discovered several security flaws in one of the best-selling brands of Internet-connected HDTVs, and believe it’s likely that similar security flaws exist in other Internet TVs.

During the course of its research, Mocana, the security firm that discovered the flaws, demonstrated that the TV’s Internet interface failed to confirm script integrity before scripts were run. As a result, an attacker could intercept transmissions from the television to the network using common “rogue DNS”, “rogue DHCP server”, or TCP session hijacking techniques. Mocana was able to demonstrate that JavaScript could then be injected into the normal datastream, allowing attackers to obtain total control over the device's Internet functionality. This attack could render the product unusable at important times and extend or limit its functionality without the manufacturer’s permission. More importantly, however, this same mechanism could be used to extract sensitive credentials from the TV’s memory, or prompt the user to fill out fake online forms to capture credit card information. (Mocana did issue a technical report on the details of the security vulnerabilities which is available here - short registration required)

Additionally, researchers were able to recover the manufacturer’s private “third-party developer keys” from the television, because in many cases, these keys were transmitted unencrypted and “in the clear.” Many third-party search, music, video and photo-sharing services delivered over the Internet require such keys, and a big TV manufacturer often purchases high-volume “special” access privileges to these service provider’s networks. A hacker could potentially employ these keys, for example, to access these high-volume services at no charge (or at least, on the TV manufacturer’s bill).

The developer keys identified during their review, with the run- time ability to obtain other authenticators as described elsewhere in their report include:

Pandora Request - Key: dc7fb2c483dabd96d641e50676e49ec09d20fd3913543b088684ff488ec4 e82a

Pandora Sync Time - Key: e387bc2b437de156b999878a28be18389d20fd3913543b088684ff488ec 4e82a

Google YouTube - Key: AI39si7jB9CE4nuJ3u1PT0-XJwSjZJ3WwJWV2YVHwZxmKvI-2U7gMDc0cQCw0Nc7GOx CLObL3NSnY9AkJ5wKU_0KUmo_7BFMKA

The Weather Channel - Key: e88d2de8-a740-102c-bafd-001321203584

What can happen as a result of these vulnerabilities? Researchers from Mocana were able to show that attackers may be able to leverage the Internet-connected TVs to hack into a consumer’s home network and potentially:

• Present fake credit card forms to fool consumers into giving up their private information.

• Intercept and redirect Internet traffic to and from the HDTV, which could be used fool consumers into thinking that “imposter” banking and commerce websites were legitimate.

• Steal and co-op the TV manufacturer’s digital “corporate credentials” to gain special VIP access to backend services from third-party organizations including popular search engine, video streaming and photo sharing sites.

• Monitor and report on consumers’ private Internet usage habits without their knowledge.

Mocana said its researchers have met with the manufacturer to help them correct the security flaws and agreed not to disclose the manufacturer’s name until a fix is issued and have thus blocked out the manufacturer name from the vulnerability assessment details.

“Internet connected HDTVs are huge sellers this holiday season. But a lot of manufacturers are rushing Internet-connected consumer electronics to market without bothering to secure them. I think this study demonstrates how risky it is to ‘connect first, worry later’, and suggests that consumer electronics companies that might lack internal security expertise should seek it out, before connecting their portfolio of consumer devices to the Internet,” said Adrian Turner, Mocana’s CEO.

The flaws Mocana uncovered should raise questions about the security of consumer electronics in general—which manufacturers are scrambling to connect to the Internet, often with little or no security technology on board. Mocana’s researchers felt that while vulnerabilities may vary from brand to brand, it is reasonable to assume that many other IPTVs from many other manufacturers share similar problems.

“While much public discussion is currently focused on the recent explosion of smartphones, what’s not being talked about is that fact that the vast majority of new devices coming onto the Internet aren’t phones at all: they are devices like television sets, industrial machines, medical devices and automobiles – devices representing every conceivable industry. And the one thing that all these manufacturers have in common is that, unlike the computing industry, they don’t have deep experience in security technology,” added Turner.

Market research firm DisplaySearch, predicted that over 40 million Internet-accessible TVs were shipped worldwide in 2010 and that this number will grow to 118 million global shipments by 2014. Mocana recommends that consumers be careful, until such devices are tested and certified safe in a systematic way.
http://www.securityweek.com/research...erabilities?fb





Facing a New Type of Threat From WikiLeaks, a Bank Plays Defense
Nelson D. Schwartz

By the time the conference call ended, it was nearly midnight at Bank of America’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., but the bank’s counterespionage work was only just beginning.

A day earlier, on Nov. 29, the director of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said in an interview that he intended to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. With Bank of America’s share price falling on the widely held suspicion that the hard drive was theirs, the executives on the call concluded it was time to take action.

Since then, a team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation — scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised.

In addition to the internal team drawn from departments like finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, to help manage the review. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.

The company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, receives regular updates on the team’s progress, according to one Bank of America executive familiar with the team’s work, who, like other bank officials, was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential inquiry.

Whether Mr. Assange is bluffing, or indeed has Bank of America in its sights at all, the bank’s defense strategy represents the latest twist in the controversy over WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.

The United States government has been examining whether Mr. Assange, an Australian, could be charged criminally for the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department diplomatic cables that became the subject of articles in The New York Times and other publications last month.

The Swedish government is also seeking to question Mr. Assange about rape accusations against him. As he fights extradition from Britain in that case, he remains under house arrest in an English mansion. Mr. Assange has said the timing of the rape accusations was not coincidental, and that he was the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States government.

Despite his legal troubles, Mr. Assange’s threats have grown more credible with every release of secret documents, including those concerning the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, the treatment of prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most recently, the trove of diplomatic cables.

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.

“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”

Last month, the bank bought up Web addresses that could prove embarrassing to the company or its top executives in the event of a large-scale public assault, but a spokesman for the bank said the move was unrelated to any possible leak.

Then, on Dec. 18, Bank of America may have antagonized Mr. Assange further when it said it would join other companies like MasterCard and PayPal in halting the processing of payments intended for WikiLeaks, citing the possibility the organization’s activities might be illegal.

Mr. Assange has never said explicitly that the data he possesses comes from Bank of America, which is the nation’s largest bank, though he did say that the disclosure would take place sometime early this year.

The bank has emerged as the most likely target because a year before the latest threat, Mr. Assange said in an interview that his group had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive containing five gigabytes of data — enough to hold more than 200,000 pages of text — and was evaluating how to present it. It was this connection that set the wheels in motion on Nov. 30.

The financial markets took the threat seriously. Bank of America shares fell 3 percent in trading the day after Mr. Assange made his threat against a nameless bank, and while the stock has since recovered, the prospect of a Bank of America data dump from WikiLeaks remains a concern, said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst with Credit Suisse.

“The fears have calmed down somewhat, but if there is something out there that is revealed, the market reaction will be negative,” he said.

Bank of America’s internal review has turned up no evidence that would substantiate Mr. Assange’s claim that he has a hard drive, according to interviews with executives there. The company declined to otherwise comment on the case. A WikiLeaks representative also declined to comment.

With the data trail cold, one working theory both inside and outside the bank is that internal documents in Mr. Assange’s possession, if any, probably came from the mountains of material turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congressional investigators and the New York attorney general’s office during separate investigations in 2009 and 2010 into the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

As it happens, Mr. Assange’s first mention of the Bank of America hard drive, in October 2009, coincided with hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the Merrill merger, and with wide-ranging requests for information by the committee.

The bank’s investigative team is trying to reconstruct the handover of materials to public agencies for a variety of inquiries, in pursuit of previously undisclosed documents that could embarrass the company, bank officials said.

In addition to the Merrill documents, the team is reviewing material on Bank of America’s disastrous acquisition in 2008 of Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage specialist, the officials said. The criticism of Bank of America’s foreclosure procedures centers mostly on loans it acquired in the Countrywide deal, and one possibility is that the documents could show unscrupulous or fraudulent lending practices by Countrywide.

If that is the case, it would not only reignite political pressure on Bank of America and other top mortgage servicers, but it could also strengthen the case of investors pressuring the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgages.

“If something happens, we want to be ready,” one bank official said. “You want to know what your options are before it comes out, rather than have to decide on the spot.” Bank of America’s efforts are complicated by the fact that it has made several huge acquisitions in recent years, and those once-independent companies had different computer systems and security procedures.

WikiLeaks has taken on private companies in the past, including leaking documents from Barclays of Britain and Bank Julius Baer of Switzerland, but neither disclosure drew nearly as much attention.

Officials at the S.E.C., the House oversight committee and the New York attorney general’s office insist the information they received had been turned over in the form of papers and discs, never a hard drive, and deny they are the source of the WikiLeaks cache.

At the same time, Mr. Assange’s own statements would seem to undermine the government-as-source theory, hinting instead that resignations might follow as evidence emerges of corruption among top executives, something the public investigations never found.
“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said in the November 2010 interview with Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”

Eric Dash and Louise Story contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/bu...eaks-bank.html





U.S. Subpoenas Twitter, WikiLeaks Says
AP

U.S. officials have issued a subpoena (pdf) to demand details about WikiLeaks' Twitter account, the group announced Saturday, adding that it suspected other American Internet companies were also being ordered to hand over information about its activities.

In a statement, WikiLeaks said U.S. investigators had gone to the San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. to demand the private messages, contact information and other personal details of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and other supporters, including the U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of handing classified information to the site and a high-profile Icelandic parliamentarian.

WikiLeaks blasted the court order, saying it amounted to harassment.

"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in the statement.

A copy of the court order, dated Dec. 14 and posted to Salon.com, said the information sought was "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" and ordered Twitter not to disclose its existence to Assange or any of the others targeted.

The order was unsealed "thanks to legal action by Twitter," WikiLeaks said.

Twitter has declined comment on the claim, saying only that its policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.

Others named in the order include Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private suspected of being the source of some of WikiLeaks' material, as well as Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic lawmaker and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator known for her role in pioneering Iceland's media initiative — which aims to make the North Atlantic island nation a haven for free speech.

The U.S. is also seeking details about Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum, both of whom have previously worked with WikiLeaks.

Assange has promised to fight the order, as has Jonsdottir, who said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly." Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was traveling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the U.S.

"Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.

Gonggrijp expressed annoyance that court officials had misspelled his last name — and praised Twitter for notifying him and others that the U.S. had subpoenaed his details.

"It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

WikiLeaks also voiced its suspicion that other organizations, such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., had also been served with court orders, and urged them to "unseal any subpoenas they have received."

Google and Facebook's London offices did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

U.S. officials have been deeply angry with WikiLeaks for months, for first releasing tens of thousands of U.S. classified military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then more recently posting thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. U.S. officials say posting the military documents put informers' lives at risk, and posting diplomatic cables made other countries reluctant to deal with American officials.

Although its relations with the U.S. government have been ugly, WikiLeaks and its tech-savvy staff rely have relied heavily on American Internet and finance companies to raise funds, disseminate material and get their message out.

WikiLeaks' Facebook page, for example, counts 1.5 million fans and its Twitter following is upward of 600,000 followers. Until recently, the group raised donations via PayPal Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc., and hosted material on Amazon.com's servers.

But the group's use of American companies has come under increasing pressure as it continues to reveal U.S. secrets.

U.S. officials have been examining possible charges against WikiLeaks and its staff following the series of spectacular leaks, which have embarrassed officials and tarnished Washington's image.

WikiLeaks denies U.S. charges that its postings could put lives at risk, saying that Washington merely is acting out of embarrassment over the revelations contained in the cables.

___

Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011...WikiLeaks.html





Claim: ISP Identified Non-Subscriber In Troubled File-Sharing Case
enigmax

Last year when thousands of Internet users had their privacy breached due to the actions of ACS:Law, watchdog Privacy International said it would pursue the anti-piracy law firm for breaching the Data Protection Act. Now, in PI’s 2010 report, there is a suggestion that BSkyB “contaminated” subscriber information it sent to ACS:Law, which led to someone being accused of piracy who had no broadband account with BSkyB.

In September last year, the email archives of ACS:Law, the UK law firm which pursued thousands of Internet users for alleged breaches of copyright on file-sharing networks, were spilled onto the Internet. In addition to the inner workings of ACS:Law being laid bare, many thousands of Internet subscribers accused by the company had their names, addresses and accusations of sharing pornography revealed too.

Surveillance and privacy watchdog Privacy International (PI) immediately notified the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of this event in the belief that ACS:Law had breached the Data Protection Act with its mishandling of data handed to it by Internet service providers including BSkyB and BT.

In late December 2010, PI released their annual activity report and tucked away on page 23 is the following text which confirms their earlier announcement that they would pursue ACS:Law.

Commenced exploratory proceedings for legal action against law firms involved in file sharing prosecutions. Filed official complaint with ICO regarding the ACS:Law data breach and receiving complaints from individuals who were victims of the breach.

However, it is followed by another interesting statement, this time involving BSkyB.

Wrote statement of claim for an injunction against NPO [Norwich Pharamacal (disclosure) Orders] data after discovering BSkyB had contaminated data they sent to ACS:Law, currently working with barristers to file for injunction in the high court.

For legal reasons Privacy International declined to comment further, but information obtained by TorrentFreak outlines the basis for PI’s concerns surrounding the data supplied to ACS:Law by BSkyB.

The claim is that following the ACS:Law leak, an individual contacted PI explaining that their details had been leaked onto the Internet as part of the breach. Furthermore, ACS:Law had sent a letter with allegations of infringement of copyright on a pornographic movie with the usual offer to settle for cash. This letter was followed by a second, both of which asked for £495 to make the matter go away.

But there seems to have been a problem. Although its alleged that the person being accused had previously been a broadband subscriber with BSkyB, its claimed that the individual’s Internet subscription was terminated in 2007, some two years before the date of the alleged infringement.

The individual being accused by ACS:Law had, however, remained a customer of BSkyB but not for broadband Internet services. At the time of the alleged infringement the individual was a satellite TV subscriber with BSkyB, but a broadband customer of another supplier, BT.

This week TorrentFreak pointed out the Privacy International report to BSkyB along with an outline of the allegations and gave the company the opportunity to respond.

“Neither the customer nor Privacy International have formally contacted Sky to provide evidence of this alleged incident or to complain about our handling of their data. However, we have contacted PI to request more information. In the meantime, and in light of no substantive information or evidence, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further on this allegation,” a Sky spokesperson told us.

Quite how far direct discussions between Privacy International and BSkyB can go on this matter remains to be seen. The Sky subscriber at the center of the claims has asked PI not to disclose their details to a 3rd party and PI are still investigating legal action through the High Court against BSkyB.

PI have, however, been in touch with Sky to say that the customer did indeed lodge a complaint via the company’s customer support center.

“I will say that if you check your support logs you should be able to find more information as the victim contacted your support team directly to explain that you had passed on their details to ACS:Law despite them not being a Sky Broadband subscriber – however, your support team refused to discuss the matter with the victim,” Privacy International’s Alexander Hanff wrote to the company today.

For their part, Sky feel that all necessary precautions have been taken.

“Sky makes every effort to ensure it provides accurate information when complying with Court Orders. It does this by carrying out a number of checks against the IP session reported within the Order. If there’s any degree of uncertainty, the details are not supplied.”

For the countless individuals who believe that they have been wrongly accused by ACS:Law, this case will certainly be one to watch.
http://torrentfreak.com/claim-isp-id...g-case-110107/





ISPs to Challenge New Digital Law
John Aston

BT and TalkTalk go to the High Court in March to challenge legislation aimed at tackling illegal filesharing and protecting intellectual property rights online.

The companies, two of the UK's largest broadband providers, argue the Digital Economy Act is seriously flawed and conflicts with European law.

They warn it could infringe internet users' "basic rights and freedoms" and was given "insufficient scrutiny" in Parliament when it was rushed through in the dying days of the last Labour government.

The Coalition says it has no plans to repeal the Act.

A spokesman at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said today: "The Government believes the Digital Economy Act is consistent with EU legislation and contains sufficient safeguards to protect the rights of consumers and Internet Service Providers."

The Act "sets out to protect our creative economy from the threat of online copyright infringement, which industry estimates costs them £400m a year".

BT and TalkTalk's application for judicial review is listed to be heard at a three-day hearing at the High Court in London beginning on March 22.

They argue the way the new law was introduced was procedurally flawed and could potentially lead to millions of innocent customers having their privacy invaded.

A number of MPs and pressure groups voiced concern following the controversial Digital Economy Bill being given royal assent after just two hours of debate in the Commons.

The parliamentary inquiry into the protection of intellectual property (IP) rights online was recently suspended pending the High Court challenge.

The IP framework brought in by the new Act was set to be assessed by the culture, media and sports committee.

The submission deadline for written evidence has been extended, and no public evidence sessions will be held until the BT/TalkTalk judicial review has concluded.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...w-2178810.html





Could This be the Beginning of the End of Illegal File Sharing?
Carley Ens

On October 26, Limewire users were stunned to come across an important little message on their computer screens: “THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE. DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL.”

Founded in 2000 by former Wall Street trader Mark Gorton, LimeWire permitted the illegal downloading of thousands of copyrighted works for over ten years. The file sharing empire managed to gain 50 million monthly users, which, according to a survey by New Product Development Group, was approximately 58% of all people who have taken part in unlawful music downloads in the past year.

In May 2010, federal Judge Kimba Wood found LimeWire liable for copyright infringement, with Gordon himself personally liable. The Recording Industry Association of America then made two separate motions: one for permanent shut down of the company, and the other for freezing of the company’s assets. The final court ruling will be held in January, but as of now, the Lime will stay behind bars for what the judge stated as “intentionally encouraging direct infringement.”

The music service may have managed to avoid the limelight for years, but this is not the first time legal action has been taken. In fact, the RIAA targeted Limewire over four years ago, and has been fighting to shut it down ever since. Peer-to-peer sites, especially Limewire, have cost the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. According to RIAA figures, US recorded music sales fell from $14.5 billion in 2009 to $7.7 billion in 1999. This means that in those ten years, the industry’s revenue was practically cut in half. This is coincidentally the same time frame of Limewire’s success.

It may be bad for the artists, but free music is a dream-come-true for those who cannot or do not want to pay for their music downloads. For this reason, it is not surprising that there are such loopholes. Monmouth Regional senior Stephanie Alina said, “I think music should be free because everyone in the world shares a passion for it, but not everyone can afford all of their favorite songs.”

“Shutting down peer-to-peer networks is like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months,” said Tom McInerney, co-founder of Guba.com, in a Seattle Times article. “It just leads to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down.”

But how can artists make a profit if their copyrighted work is stolen and given away for free? Mrs. Mindas, musician and Monmouth Regional music teacher said, “As a music writer myself, I feel that artists should get credit for their music and get paid for it. I never download music illegally.” Famous pop singer Lily Allen said in an interview, “For new talent, file sharing is a disaster as it’s making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge.” Nuclear Blast label manager Gerardo Martinez said in a public statement, “You stop supporting your [favorite] bands the moment you illegally obtain their new album. You don’t just go to a dealer and steal a car and expect to get away with it.”

Limewire CEO George Searle said in a blog post that the company is “naturally disappointed with this turn of events,” but is “deeply committed to working with the music industry and making the act of loving music more fulfilling for everyone.” It seems pretty clear, however, that the music artists and the music stealers will never coexist in perfect harmony. Unless file sharing websites respect copyrights, they will be brought down.
http://falconaire.monmouthregional.n...-file-sharing/





Stopping Illegal File Sharing a Low Priority for DOJ?
Greg Sandoval

For nearly a decade, major music and film companies have lamented the loss of revenue and jobs that they blame on illegal file sharing. During that time they have lobbied lawmakers and enforcement agencies for antipiracy help.

But after reading reports from the FBI and Department of Justice about efforts to protect the nation's intellectual property, I was stunned to find so few cases involving online file sharing. Among the "significant" prosecutions the DOJ listed in 2010, only one involved the illegal distribution of digital media over the Web. In April, the DOJ won a conviction against the operator of USAwarez.com, a site that the feds claim used the Web to distribute pirated movies, games, and software. The man was sentenced to more than two years in jail.

Contrast this one conviction with the scores of sites that stream pirated movies and the millions of people around the world who use peer-to-peer networks to access unauthorized copies of films, TV shows, e-books, and games. Media companies say piracy costs the U.S. economy billions and kills jobs, harming actors and musicians as well as caterers and truck drivers. Entertainment companies spend millions on lobbying efforts and all the government can muster is one "significant' digital-media prosecution. A DOJ representative did not respond to an interview request.

The DOJ's 28-page report raises all kinds of questions for me.

Is the commercial pirating of films and music online harder to prosecute? Are media companies hurt by this as much as they say? (The credibility of the studies that film and music sectors have cited on the impacts of piracy were called into question by the U.S. Government Accountability Office last year.) How much support in Washington do entertainment companies possess?

Smash and grab

The reports from the DOJ and FBI are part of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (PRO IP), signed into law by former President George Bush. As part of the act, civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement were increased and a new office within the government's executive branch was established. The act also requires the DOJ to submit a report on its PRO IP investigative and prosecution efforts.

President Barack Obama has promised to step up efforts into protecting intellectual property. Last June, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told reporters that file sharing wasn't any different than stealing physical goods. "Piracy is theft," Biden said. "Clean and simple, it's smash and grab. It ain't no different than smashing a window at Tiffany's and grabbing [merchandise]."

That's tough talk. Pinpointing government action on this issue is more difficult.

A bill introduced in the Senate last year called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act would have given the government sweeping power to shut down U.S.-based pirate sites as well as the authority to order Internet service providers to cut off access to similar sites overseas. Opponents called the legislation censorship. The bill never got out of the Senate and its future is unclear.

DOJ priorities

As for the DOJ, it appears the FBI and other agencies under its umbrella are making plenty of arrests for counterfeiting and copyright infringement. But the kind of cases the department pursues speaks volumes.

In its report, the DOJ provides a list of its priorities. No. 1 is protecting the health and safety of U.S. citizens. The DOJ reported that it successfully prosecuted people involved in the sale of fake cancer drugs, phony airplane parts, and dubious pharmaceuticals. Who can argue with that? Next on the DOJ's list was taking down organized criminal networks, followed by the prosecution of large scale commercial counterfeiting. Last was protecting the country's trade secrets and battling economic espionage.
Under a heading titled "Large-scale counterfeiting and online piracy" the DOJ had little to say about digital music or movies.

A man was busted for selling counterfeit slot machines, another for dealing in bogus Microsoft software. One was sentenced to jail for selling "popular business, engineering and graphic design software." There were people arrested for selling counterfeit sports jerseys and women's handbags. There was even a prosecution of a woman and man from Turlock, Calif., for selling pirated film discs via the Web. The only other action involving digital media in the DOJ's report besides the USAwarez prosecution was a seizure last June of nine alleged pirate site domain names as part of a joint operation by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

It should be noted that ICE is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and not the DOJ. In November, ICE oversaw a seizure of an additional 82 site domains, some of which were distributing digital music and films online. There's no mention of arrests in either ICE operation. It appears pirated movies, music, and games don't rate as high as the fake Gucci bags.

Because many of the people allegedly pirating U.S. intellectual property operate overseas, the DOJ's task isn't simple. But in the report, the DOJ says it has a team consisting of 40 attorneys specializing in computer crime and Internet protocal law that "places a high priority on fostering international cooperation and coordination in its IP enforcement efforts." The group participated in an international investigation that brought down a Chinese seller of counterfeit Cisco networking hardware. So, the DOJ's long arm extends into other countries, but apparently not to protect media.

The music and film industries can point to some successes in their antipiracy efforts over the past year. But for all the talk about the political might of big entertainment companies, when it comes to protecting copyright, it appears more and more that they're on their own.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20027788-261.html





How to Steal Any Movie You Want on the Web: Wall Street Gets a How-To Guide
Peter Kafka

It’s easier than ever to download any movie or TV show you want on the Web, for free. Just ask Rich Greenfield. Or better yet, let the Wall Street analyst show you, via a helpful four-minute video embedded at the bottom of this post.

And if you don’t want to invest that much time, here’s the super-short version: Head to a pirate review site like Scenesource, look for any movie you want and then look in the comments for links to cloud-based storage lockers where you can grab a copy of the movie, for free.

You may have to try a couple of links, because they eventually get shut down, but it should still be very easy–and more comfortable for mainstream users than dealing with BitTorrent software, which has been the preferred piracy method for some time.

Greenfield’s larger point is that the rise of Internet-connected TVs–look around this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and you’ll realize that the next set you buy will almost certainly have a Web connection, whether you want it or not–and cheap bandwidth is going to create a giant headache for big media.

Big media and technology companies can try to fight it with legal and mechanical tactics, or half-steps like UltraViolet, the “everybody but Apple” coalition. But the best long-term answer is to make media consumption incredibly cheap, and incredibly easy, so that it’s more convenient for mainstream users to get it legally than to go through the pirate sites.

That’s an incredibly hard thing to do, because it involves trading big, existing revenue streams for smaller ones down the line. But not doing it can be even more costly: Ask the music labels.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2011...-how-to-guide/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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