Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 15th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Illegal file-sharing is becoming incredibly complex and it is becoming over-burdensome to try and police it." – Mark Mulligan


"If you go over 5GB...you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media." – Virgin Mobile


"When you go over the fair use amount…you won’t be able to download, stream and watch video clips." – T-Mobile



































January 15th, 2011





Piracy Websites Attract Billions of Visits
BBC

A study by anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor has offered a snapshot into the changing nature of online piracy.

It monitored illegal traffic levels on 43 file-sharing sites and found that they generated more than 53 billion visits per year.

The top three - RapidShare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com - generated more than 21 billion visits.

Such sites are becoming as popular as peer-to-peer methods of accessing illegal content.

The study only used a small sample of sites suggesting that the problem could be in fact much bigger.

"The numbers are staggering," said Charlie Abrahams, vice president of MarkMonitor.

The study was put together following requests from the US Chamber of Commerce to identify trends and rogue sites.

Very easy

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at research firm Forrester, points out that the numbers of visits does not necessarily equate to the number of downloads.

But it does show that commercial file-sharing sites, alongside other non-network based methods, are becoming as popular a way of sharing pirated music and films as peer-to-peer technologies.

"These upload sites index their files. It is very easy and convenient," he added.

"Upload sites, alongside instant messaging and blogs, are now on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy," he said.

What is more it is "proving difficult for content owners to do much about them", he said.

No filters

One of the sites highlighted by the study, RapidShare, has come under scrutiny from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) which blames the Swiss-based file-hosting firm for carrying huge amounts of pirated content.

It and other content owners want the firm to install filters to police the illegal content changing hands via its site.

In Germany this week, that aim was struck a blow when the Higher Regional Court of Dusseldorf ruled that Rapidshare does not have to install such filters.

It found that the firm was taking "reasonable measures" to fight piracy.

The attempts to block the content being transacted over such sites brings back memories of the early attempts to shut down Napster, said Mr Mulligan.

"It is complete deja vu and it took a very long time to close that down," he said.

With legislation on dealing with peer-to-peer illegal file-sharing already looking out of date, it could be time to find other ways to crack the nut, he thinks.

"Illegal file-sharing is becoming incredibly complex and it is becoming over-burdensome to try and police it," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12163161





Why Filesharing Companies Are Starting to Lobby Washington [INTERVIEW]
Maury Litwack

Rapidshare, the file-hosting giant, recently hired a Washington lobbying firm to combat legislative attempts to place penalties on companies that don’t adequately protect domestic copyright. This is its first attempt at adding U.S. legislative muscle to its ongoing copyright fights – which most recently included Atari’s failed bid to combat RapidShare in a German court.

I interviewed RapidShare spokesman Daniel Raimer about the decision of a foreign company to hire a Washington lobbyist, the company’s ongoing disputes with the movie, music and credit card industries, and what kind of voice he envisions RapidShare will have in Washington.

RapidShare recently hired a Washington lobbyist. That’s an unusual move for a company based in Switzerland. What’s the motivation and what do you expect to accomplish?

The decision to hire a U.S.-based lobbyist was a strategic decision. RapidShare has always been pioneering the file hosting business and it has been spearheading the file hosting industry’s efforts to fight copyright infringement on cloud computing services. There are probably only a few companies with as much knowledge about the file hosting industry [as] us. It just seems that there are too few people who know about this fact. Given the fact that the U.S. government is currently undertaking great efforts to fight copyright infringements on the InternetInternetInternet, our having a voice in Washington could be beneficial for us as well as for the U.S. government.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have both been cited as your key political opposition. Do you believe you can forge a compromise in Washington with their advocacy operations?

First, we don’t want to forge any compromises in Washington, because we believe that the vast majority of politicians in Washington [are] not against us. Some people seem to have a wrong understanding of what the nature of our business is, and it would surely be nice to correct that. But forging a compromise is not the main reason for our lobbying efforts.

Second, I believe that the gap between us and the content industry is not as deep as some people may think. There are plenty of reasonable people in the content industry. Those people know that a file hosting company that is truly dedicated to fight online infringement may be of high value to them. We therefore want to convince people in Washington and in the content industry that we are such a legitimate company. I would be surprised if anyone in Washington or anyone within the content industry is going to have an issue with that.

Recently it’s been reported that MasterCard is supportive of RIAA- and MPAA-supported anti-piracy legislation. What are your thoughts on that? It’s also been reported that financial providers have been pressured to cut down services; what do you think of the financial providers’ involvement in this ongoing fight?

With MasterCard’s significant market share comes responsibility toward merchants, contractual partners, and toward society in general. It is a positive sign that MasterCard and other financial providers do not want to provide services for criminals. We just hope that they know where to draw the line between websites that actively promote copyright infringement and legitimate ones.

Lobbying members of Congress often requires having a good issue that resonates with an elected official’s constituency. When faced with the movie, music and credit card industry vs. RapidShare, what argument do you have that you speak for the average constituent’s interest?

I believe that the average constituent is quite concerned about freedom of speech, and in particular about his freedom to store personal files on cloud computing services. The debate whether or not companies like us that operate cloud computing services should be forced to analyze, categorize and maybe even manually open users’ files, should therefore be of great importance to every citizen.
http://mashable.com/2011/01/10/rapid...ing-interview/





TalkTalk Told Govt Has No Plans To Scrap DEA

The coalition is not looking to repeal the controversial act.

The government has again said it has no plans to repeal the Digital Economy Act (DEA), despite complaints from BT and TalkTalk.

These two broadband providers have been granted the right to a judicial review of the piece of legislation, with each insisting it infringes the basic rights and freedoms of internet users in the way it seeks to clamp down on illegal filesharing.

But despite this, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is not looking to scrap the act, which was passed in the final few days of the Labour government, reports the Independent.

A spokesman from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "The government believes the DEA is consistent with EU legislation and contains sufficient safeguards to protect the rights of consumers and internet service providers."

TalkTalk's strategy and regulation chief Andrew Heaney has argued the act is "disproportionate", although he has insisted the company is not opposed to the battle against illegal filesharing.
http://www.cable.co.uk/news/talktalk...dea-800331350/





TalkTalk: BPI Fails to Co-Operate in File-Sharing Battle
Nicole Kobie

TalkTalk has claimed music lobby group, the BPI, has refused its offer to send warning letters to customers found to be file-sharing.

The ISP has been a noisy critic of the Digital Economy Act (DEA), saying the measures to shut down the connections of accused illegal file-sharers are disproportionate and expensive. TalkTalk and BT have filed for a judicial review of the Act.

However, Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk's executive director of strategy and regulation, said the ISP is willing to help rights owners by alerting customers that their illegal file-sharing activities have been detected.

At the moment, rights owners need court orders to gain access to the IP address data needed to identify users downloading illegal content.

TalkTalk says it has offered to help send educational letters, if lobby groups such as the BPI pay mailing costs and don’t demand payment from their subscribers.

“So far, they’ve been silent,” Heaney said at a meeting organised by the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) at the House of Commons.

Heaney said such letters would inform parents what their web-savvy kids were up to and remind people of copyright laws. “If a connection was being used for illegal file-sharing, we’re happy to send a letter to our customer and say: ‘Your connection is being used. If it was you, it’s illegal; if it wasn’t, you might consider taking some measures to stop it',” he explained.

However, he stressed the letters shouldn't threaten customers with "consequences" if they fail to stop. "We’re very happy with sending out those letters, with the proviso that they pay for it," he added. "We don’t see why we should pay to protect the rights of third parties.”

Heaney said TalkTalk feels the BPI would prefer to use legislative means – such as the controversial DEA – rather than co-operate with ISPs.

“They refused to respond to our suggestion, because – in our view – they were holding out for the big prize of legislation,” he said. “We felt they didn’t want to find a compromise."

A BPI spokesperson confirmed that TalkTalk did offer to send such letters. "Let’s be clear – we believe educational letters are important, and they are a key part of the Digital Economy Act," the spokesperson said. "But without any associated deterrent for repeated infringers, letters would not be likely to significantly reduce illegal file-sharing."

"Moreover, we believe that TalkTalk should take some financial responsibility for dealing with the illegal file-sharing that is happening on its network. For those reasons, the discussions with TalkTalk at that time did not progress."

Don't condone piracy

Heaney said TalkTalk wasn’t against shutting down illegal file-sharers, but thought the specific measures in the DEA were doomed to fail.

“Whatever is done to tackle online infringement, it must be fair and proportionate,” he added. “It must have a fair balance between the rights holders, and their rights to protect their property, and the rights of the consumers. That balance just hasn’t been struck [with the DEA].”

Heaney argued that the DEA will cost millions of pounds to implement, and have very little effect because it focuses on P2P sharing, which makes up only a third of piracy. Even if it does reduce P2P piracy, determined sharers will simply move to a different method, such as using cyber lockers, Heaney argued.

“Somebody described it as using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Well, no, it’s a sledgehammer that misses the nut,” he said. “It doesn’t crack the problem."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/364354/t...sharing-battle





China Vows Tougher Punishments for Copyright Piracy

China has arrested more than 4,000 people for violating intellectual property rights (IPR) since November and will enforce tougher punishments to combat the "rampant" problem, a senior government official said on Tuesday.

Gao Feng, deputy director of the Ministry of Public Security's Economic Crimes Investigation Bureau, told a news conference that his agency had uncovered more than 2,000 cases since China launched a six-month campaign to beef up enforcement of intellectual property rights last November.

The financial value of the cases totaled 2.3 billion yuan ($348 million), Gao said, adding that the number of arrests, cases and financial value represent a tripling from the same period a year ago.

"On one hand they demonstrate the achievements we've made in cracking down on the violation of IPR, on the other hand it also indicates that IPR violation is still quite rampant and frequent," Gao said. "So we want to introduce heavier punishments."

China's lax enforcement of intellectual property rights could feature in trade talks between President Barack Obama and his counterpart Hu Jintao, when the Chinese president visits the United States next week.

Under mounting pressure from the United States, China has vowed harsher punishment of copyright piracy, responding with a six-month campaign aimed at counterfeit books, music, DVDs and software, in an effort to show that the country is serious about tackling the problem.

China has promised "concrete results" from the latest crackdown, but U.S. groups say a sustained effort is necessary to achieve real results.

Despite China's campaign and repeated vows to get tough, pirated goods remain widely available on Chinese streets and in shops, sometimes sold within sight of large propaganda posters denouncing IPR violations.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which represents U.S. copyright industry groups, has estimated U.S. trade losses in China due to piracy at $3.5 billion in 2009.

U.S. customs officials say 80 percent of the fake tennis shoes, clothing, luxury bags and other goods they seize each year at the border come from China.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Alex Richardson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70A0WV20110111





Antipiracy Lawyers from Porn, Indie-Film Sectors Unite
Greg Sandoval

The two camps that have waged copyright war this year on accused movie pirates --adult and independent filmmakers--are teaming up to fight illegal file sharing.

Kenneth Ford, one of the attorneys that made news this year by filing copyright lawsuits against tens of thousands of people, told CNET on Monday that he is now working with Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver. DGW is the Washington, D.C., law firm that sometimes operates as U.S. Copyright Group and represents nearly a dozen indie film studios, including the makers of the Academy Award winning war film, "The Hurt Locker."

"[DGW] has initiated new lawsuits today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of our clients against nearly 15,000 Doe defendants," Ford wrote CNET in an e-mail.

Among the porn producers DGW and Ford represent are Axel Braun, the maker of "Batman XXX, A Porn Parody."

We now have a legal tag-team grudge match. In one corner is DGW and Ford and in the other are some of the lawyers representing the accused and attorneys from watchdog groups as well as Internet service providers. Among the groups that have opposed the indie and porn studios on their antipiracy campaign are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Time Warner Cable.

This was bound to happen. Both Ford and DGW in earlier cases ran up against federal courts that didn't appear friendly to the idea of naming thousands of defendants, who live all across the country, in a single district court far from their homes. Thomas Dunlap, co-founder of DGW, told CNET last week that the plan now is to band a group of attorneys who practice in various parts of the country to file complaints in numerous federal districts. This apparently designed to make the issue of jurisdiction moot.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20028080-261.html





Brussels Wants 7-Year Limit on Works Digitized by Google
James Kanter

Companies like Google that digitize artworks and books from public bodies should allow other companies and institutions to commercialize those materials after seven years, three experts advising the European Commission said Monday.

The experts, including Maurice C. Lévy, the chairman and chief executive of Publicis, a communications and advertising company based in Paris, also encouraged the emergence of additional innovative companies besides Google to help digitize Europe’s cultural heritage.

“We believe there is a lot of opportunity for new players to come and confront Google,” Mr. Lévy said. Google had been “essential in the process” of digitizing cultural materials like books, films, photographs and paintings, but it was not “very good for competition to have one player on the ground,” he said.

The amount of effort needed to digitize Europe’s heritage should generate work for a lot of entrepreneurs, he said.

Androulla Vassiliou, the European Union commissioner for education and culture, backed the experts’ suggestion for a system in which companies like Google could recoup the costs of digitization, but also ensure that a period of preferential use was limited to seven years.

During a period of preferential use, a public domain book, for instance, that was digitized by Google would be available only through a library’s Web site, through Google’s Web site, or through noncommercial Web sites for that seven-year period.

At a news conference with Mr. Lévy in Brussels on Monday, Ms. Vassiliou said Google was observing a 15-year limit, and added that that limit needed to be more than halved. Neelie Kroes, the E.U. commissioner for digital issues, said she also supported a seven-year limit.

Al Verney, a spokesman for Google, said the call to lower the limit “adds to the discussion on digitization and highlights its importance in preserving and increasing access to cultural heritage.”

But Mr. Verney declined to say whether Google would follow the suggestion.

The experts also included Elisabeth Niggemann, the director general of the German National Library, and Jacques De Decker, the permanent secretary of the Belgian Royal Academy for French Language and Literature. They said that Europeana, a nonprofit Web portal financed by the European Union, should become the central online reference point for European cultural heritage. Ms. Niggemann is chairman of the body that governs Europeana.

Europeana already contains more than 15 million digitized books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings and musical extracts. But that is only a fraction of works held by European cultural institutions. According to the commission, E.U. governments should direct more public funds to digitizing those works to increase educational resources and develop new businesses.

The commission also suggested that that would offer value for money, as the funds needed to build 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of roads would be enough to pay for the digitization of 16 percent of all available books in E.U. libraries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/bu.../11google.html





Swedish Memory Devices Face Possible Price Hike

Hard drives and USB sticks sold in Sweden may face a significant price hike later this year, but an industry organisation claims the fees are against the law.

Attempts by rights organisation Copyswede to negotiate an agreement on the charges with the digital storage device industry have been unsuccessful.

In the end, Copyswede unilaterally announced last month that the charges would apply starting on April 1st despite the industry's protests.

"We have been discussing these for about a year with the industry. They have been reluctant to negotiate with us. They are obliged to pay the fees. We claim remuneration from the companies directly on recordable CDs, DVDs and MP3 players," Copyswede CEO Mattias Åkerlind told The Local on Monday.

"We haven't had any counterpart to carry out negotiations with. This is our way of approaching the companies. Our hope is the companies will sit down and negotiate in the next couple of weeks," he added.

According to Åkerlind, consumers are moving away from copying material onto CDs and DVDs and now use digital storage devices such as hard drives and USB sticks. Copyswede collects all fees on behalf of the rights owners belonging to 14 organisations.

The new fees would make an external hard drive of 250 gigabytes of 160 kronor ($23) more expensive.

"Under Swedish law, the fee is only payable on products that are especially devoted to copying. In addition, the products cannot be widely used for anything else. We believe that it is illegal to impose such a fee," said Anders Appelqvist, CEO of Elektronikbranschen.

The organisation brings together retailers such as large electronics chains and manufacturers of electronic products.

Industry players will meet later this month to discuss Copyswede's demands.

However, Appelqvist believes that since external hard drives and USB sticks are largely used for private files such as personal photos, there are no grounds for the additional surcharges.

Åkerlind would not say whether the organization was prepared to take electronic companies that do not pay the fees to court, nor if the organisation is prepared to alter the fees or implementation date.

"Our tradition is to negotiate with the industry and copying on these products is covered by the law. However, the industry says they do not want to negotiate and it takes two to tango," said Åkerlind.

"If we end up in real negotiations, the conditions may be different from what we agree upon. We have indications that the industry is ready to negotiate," he added.

According to a statement last month, Copyswede is asking for 1 kronor per gigabyte for digital storage devices of less than 80 gigabytes, 120 kr for storage devices of 81 to 250 gigabytes.
http://www.thelocal.se/31348/20110110/





Record Labels To Pay $45 Million for Pirating Artists’ Music
Ernesto

The major record labels are known for their harsh stance on copyright infringements, which in an ironic turn of events is now costing them millions of dollars. Revealing a double standard when it comes to ‘piracy’, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music now have to pay Canadian artists $45 Million for the illegal use of thousands of tracks on compilation CDs.

It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t always cleared the rights. This happens worldwide and more frequently than one would think.

Over the years the labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000 in Canada alone.

This questionable practice has been the subject of an interesting Canadian class action lawsuit which was started in 2008. A group of artists and composers who grew tired of waiting endlessly for their money filed a lawsuit against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA.

Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for the illegal use of thousands of tracks and risked paying damages of up to $6 billion. Today the news broke that the two parties have agreed upon a settlement, where the record labels are required to pay $45 million to settle the copyright infringement claims.

During the case the labels were painfully confronted with their own double standard when it comes to copyright infringement. “The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” the artists argued in their initial claim for damages.

Of course, the labels are not so quick to admit their wrongdoing and in their press release the settlement is described as a compromise. “The settlement is a compromise of disputed claims and is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the record labels,” it reads.

David Basskin, President and CEO of one of the major Canadian licensing collectives, was nonetheless happy with the outcome. “This agreement with the four major labels resolves all outstanding pending list claims. EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner are ensuring that the net result is more money for songwriters and music publishers. It’s a win for everyone,” he said.

The major issues that led to this dispute are not resolved though. After paying off a small part of their debt the labels can continue to ‘pirate’ artists’ music as usual, using their work and placing the outstanding payments on a pending list for decades. A real solution would require the licensing system to change, and that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
http://torrentfreak.com/record-label...-music-110110/





Supreme Court Won't Take Music Antitrust Case
FMQB

The U.S. Supreme Court said today that it would not review an appeals ruling in the lawsuit against the major labels, accusing them of price fixing digital downloads. Reuters reports that the Supreme Court Justices rejected without comment an appeal by the four major labels.

Previously, a U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled that a federal judge's 2008 decision to dismiss the lawsuit against the major labels was in error. The plaintiffs' suit accuses the labels of setting a wholesale price floor of 70 cents per song for digital downloads, when other labels were offering a lower wholesale price. The suit also involves the the digital music retailers the labels started in 2001, MusicNet and pressplay. According to Bloomberg, the plaintiffs claim the services charged high subscription fees and imposed a number of restrictions on its users.

Following the appeals court decision, the major labels' attorneys appealed, saying the case raises important issues that should be heard before the Supreme Court. The plantiffs' attorneys opposed this appeal, saying the appeals court used Supreme Court precedent correctly in its decision.

Regardless, the case will not be heard before the Supreme Court, following this morning's decision. Instead the case will go forward and the appeals court ruling will remain.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2075011





Ubisoft: Sony Will Not be Able to Stop PS3 Pirates
Emil Protalinski

Ubisoft believes that Sony will not be able to combat piracy on the PlayStation 3, which was recently hacked. Martin Walfisz, former CEO of Ubisoft subsidiary Ubisoft Massive, was a key player in developing Ubisoft's new DRM technologies. Since playing pirated games doesn't require a modchip, his argument is that Sony won't be able to easily detect hacked consoles.

"If that hack works as reported, I don't believe that Sony can regain any control," Walfisz told GamesIndustry. "And given that it seems that users won't even need a hardware mod-chip to play pirated games, I don't believe that Sony can even detect which users to lock out from PSN. They could try to employ a similar system to Xbox Live, so that people running hacked systems won't have access to PSN. But Sony won't be able to stop people from running pirated game copies as long as the machines are not hooked up online. I would assume that pirated copies can be stored on the HDD as well, making it so easy to use that PS3 piracy, given time, might even surpass the handhelds."

Sony's only possible solution is to revise the PS3 hardware itself, which would be a very costly process. Changing the hardware could possibly work for new console sales, though there would be the problem of backwards compatibility with the already-released games. Furthermore, current users would still be able to run pirated copies on current hardware.

Last week, hackers publicly posted the PlayStation 3 root key, which is used for code signing games. The root key lets the PS3 know that a piece of software is legitimate, meaning other hackers can use it to make custom software or use pirated games. So far, Sony's only response has been to file a legal complaint against the hackers.
http://www.techspot.com/news/41966-u...3-pirates.html





Sony Files Lawsuit Against PS3 Hacker
Kayot

George Hotz, or, as he is known on the internet, GeoHot, has been served court papers. Shorty after Team fail0verflow discovered faults in the PS3's TPMs, Geohot and others figured out how to extract the long sought after holy grail encryption keys. Apparently Sony is not pleased and is very keen on defending their poorly defended system with the US legal system. The basis is that GeoHot released programs that allow the signing of homebrew which can be used to make PSN-like games out of normal PS3 games. However GeoHot has never supported any form of piracy and in fact has taken a constant stance against it.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/0...-Hacker-GeoHot





Accused PS3 Hacker Responds to Sony Suit, Vows to Fight Back
Dennis Fisher

George Hotz, one of the hackers sued this week by Sony in connection with the jailbreaking of the PlayStation 3, has hired a pair of attorneys who say they plan to "vigorously defend the baseless accusations asserted by Sony."

In a statement sent to reporters Friday, two attorneys hired by Hotz say that Sony has no grounds for its legal action and is asking for unreasonable relief in the case, including the seizure of Hotz's computers.

"While most companies issue firmware upgrades to increase a product's abilities over its life cycle, Sony has taken the unacceptable and draconian approach of decreasing the PS3's capabilities by actually destroying a core feature of the PS3. Imagine taking in your car for an oil change and having the manufacturer remove your car's air conditioner, radio, and half its horsepower because of fears that other hypothetical individuals might abuse their vehicles. It just doesn't make any sense, and it's a slap in the face to the consumers that put their support behind the product," Yasha Heidari, one of the attorneys, said in the statement.

Sony is accusing Hotz, as well as several members of a group known as Fail0verflow, of violating the terms of use for the PS3 and violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by bypassing the security mechanisms Sony installed to prevent users from running alternate operating systems or pirated games on the console. Member of Fail0verflow discussed their technique for extracting the encryption keys from the PS3 at the 27C3 conference last month. Hotz then built upon that work and posted a method for finding the root key and then loading a homebrew OS onto the PS3.

Part of the dispute centers on the decision by Sony last year to remove one of the PS3's features, OtherOS, which enabled users to run Linux on the console and use it as a PC, and quite a powerful one. In April, Sony released a firmware update that removed that functionality, angering a large portion of the PS3 user base. Hotz's method effectively re-enables that functionality.

"This case rests on Sony's misguided belief that it has the unfettered ability to control how consumers use the products they legitimately purchase," Stewart Kellar, one of Hotz's lawyers said in the statement.

In their response to Sony's suit and motion for a temporary restraining order against Hotz, his attorneys say that the order would do no good at this point, as the code is already public.

"On the face of Sony’s Motion, a TRO serves no purpose in the present matter. The code necessary to 'jailbreak' the Sony Playstation computer is on the internet. That cat is not goingback in the bag. Indeed, Sony’s own pleadings admit that the code necessary to jailbreak the Sony Playstation computer is on the internet. Sony speaks of "closing the door", but the simplefact is that there is no door to close. The code sought to be restrained will always be a Google search away," the response says.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/a...ht-back-011411





Update: Sony Must Show It Can Sue PS3 Hacker
Jesse Emspak

A California court today asked that Sony show it has jurisdiction over the hacker who publicized a "jailbreak" for the Playstation 3 console.

On Tuesday, Sony Computer Entertainment America filed for a temporary restraining order against George Hotz, a hacker who posted a method of "jailbreaking" PS 3 consoles, allowing them to run other operating systems and software not authorized by Sony. The complaint says Hotz, Hector Martin Cantero, Sven Peter, and John Does one through 100 violated copyright, the computer fraud and abuse act, as well as violations of California law.

Hotz's lawyer, Stewart Kellar, filed an objection stating that Sony has no jurisdiction in the case, as Hotz lives in New Jersey and the complaint was filed in California. If the court decides there is no connection then Sony must refile the case in New Jersey.

Even if the court decides in Sony's favor, there are still other substantive issues that have to be decided. For example, Sony claims Hotz is bound by the terms of service for the Playstation Network, but Hotz, Kellar says in his brief, never used the PSN to distribute the jailbreaking software.

The objection also states that Hotz has no connection with the other two defendants in the suit, as they released their own methods of hacking PS3s to the public generally and that doesn't demonstrate that Hotz acted in concert with them.

Sony also claims irreparable and immediate harm, the test for whether a restraining order can be granted. Kellar says the harm Sony says it would suffer without a restraining order has already been done. "The code necessary to "jailbreak" the Sony Playstation computer is on the internet. That cat is not going back in the bag," he wrote in his filing.

A restraining order, the filing says, would also be too broad, as taking away Hotz's computers (as well as his PS3) would adversely affect his ability to make a living as well as compromise data that might be private.

A video of the jailbreak was released by Hotz, who goes by the user ID geohot, on YouTube. On his blog he has a link to the software, which can be loaded on to any PS3, though the front page mentions that he was served with a temporary restraining order on Tuesday evening.

Sony's complaint also says Hotz, Cantero and Peter acted to circumvent the copy protections built into the device and "trafficked in circumvention devices and components thereof that enable unauthorized access to and copying of one or more PS3 System and SCEA's other copyrighted works." The trafficking part of the complaint refers to Hotz publishing the code on his blog.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1013...-over-hotz.htm





Corona Game from 14-Year-Old Developer Reaches #1, Ousts Angry Birds
Evan

Like the headline says, a Corona-built game named Bubble Ball, which was our most recent App of the Week, just passed the most recent version of Angry Birds on the App Store’s free apps chart. According to the developer — who is just 14 years old — the physics puzzle has game has over a million downloads to date, and the download numbers haven’t even topped off yet.

We’ve been watching Bubble Ball climb the charts today. Heck, we were pretty excited when it reached #2, thinking it could never unseat the mighty Angry Birds. But then, just a few minutes ago, it hit position #1:

Congratulations to developer Robert Nay on this achievement — we’ll be following up on this story with more details about his project and his future plans for it!
http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/01/...s-angry-birds/





Scan to Notify Illegal Sharers

UNC’s method to start in dorms
Paula Seligson

Beginning Tuesday, computers accessing the Internet in residence halls will automatically be scanned for file-sharing programs.

The Network Access Control service will scan for file sharing programs such as BitTorrent and LimeWire. If the service detects a file-sharing program, a pop-up message will notify him of the dangers of illegal sharing and ways to securely use the program.
Network access will not be suspended and no legal action can be taken against the student, as the program cannot be used as criminal evidence.

“What we detect with this service in no way, shape or form results in a meeting with security,” Ryan Turner, senior network engineer for ITS, said. “If we detect peer-to-peer, there’s not going to be a violation created.”

The new function, which cannot search for specific files, will be used merely as a preventative measure, said Chris Williams, ResNET program director.

“It’s like there’s one of these flashing speed limit signs, and you’re going 40 miles per hour. You can go 35, or you can go 40. It’s up to you to decide what to do.

It just tells you,” he said. “If you want to ignore it, then go for it, it’s your personal computer. You have to take responsibility with what you want to do for it.

“We’re just trying to provide some information.”

In all residence halls, the program currently checks for anti-virus and firewall software to allow a computer onto the campus network.

Williams said the new measure will speed up Internet connections since illegal file-sharing impedes the UNC network by using bandwidth. The University, after testing the program at the School of Dentistry, extended it to Cobb.

“Last year, because we’ve implemented NAC, we were able to increase the speeds for all the students that connect to the network,” he said. “They went to about 25Mb connections from 10Mb. That’s a huge increase, and beyond what most students get at any other university.”

UNC is required by U.S. copyright law to hold users of the campus network accountable for copyright infringement. Those cases cannot be initiated through the notification program.

“We encounter weekly issues with students having copyright complaints filed against them from various media organizations, including the MPAA and the RIAA,” said Stan Waddell, executive director for information security at ITS, in reference to the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

If a student is found illegally sharing files, the first offense leads to a loss of network access until completion of a training course and a meeting with ITS security officials. A second offence leads to a longer loss of network access and a referral to Honor Court.

Processing copyright complaints had been costing UNC about $40,000 per year of late, but the use of Network Access Control in target areas has coincided with a decrease in complaints.

ITS officials said media targets universities for copyright infringement because campuses with a high-volume of Internet users often provide exceptionally large bandwidths.

The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a peer institution of UNC, implemented a similar program in 2007 called “Be Aware You’re Uploading,” which successfully cut down on outside complaints of illegal file sharing. The university reported that 72 percent of violations came from residence halls.

Jim Gogan, director of networking for ITS, said he is optimistic about the new service.

“In the past it’s been very reactive. We’d get the copyright violation notices. We’d have to track down students and say, ‘The recording industry or the motion picture folks saw that you were sharing this stuff illegally,’” he said.

“What we want to do now is be more proactive.”
http://www.dailytarheel.com/index.ph...llegal_sharers





Verizon Wireless Is Confident It's Got Muscle for iPhone
Spencer E. Ante and Yukari Iwatani Kane

Verizon Wireless has been beefing up its network and believes it will have no problem handling iPhone-type loads, a claim that could be put to the test this year if the carrier signs up millions of subscribers using the Apple Inc. device.

Verizon Wireless, the country's largest wireless carrier, is confident enough in its network that it will offer unlimited data-use plans when it starts selling the iPhone around the end of this month, a person familiar with the matter said. Such plans would provide a key means of distinguishing its service from rival AT&T Inc., which limits how much Internet data such as videos and photos its customers may use each month.

AT&T has struggled to overcome complaints about network quality ever since it started exclusively selling the iPhone in the U.S. in 2007. That contributed to a decision last summer to offer new iPhone and other smartphone customers only pricing plans that cap how much data they send and receive..

The move was aimed in part at gaining a measure of control over heavy iPhone users, who have overtaxed the carrier's network, leading to complaints about dropped calls and spotty service.

It wasn't clear how long Verizon would offer unlimited-data plans. Its executives have said repeatedly that the industry needs to move to some form of tiered pricing—charging different prices for different amounts of data use—as mobile Internet service use rises, but for the moment the carrier is sticking to its existing plans.

Verizon Wireless, majority-owned by Verizon Communications Inc., has a lot at stake as it starts to carry the iPhone, which it will announce Tuesday at an event in New York City, people familiar with the matter say. Verizon more than any other U.S. carrier has built its reputation on its network quality, and any stumble in handling iPhone traffic will call into question Verizon's major selling point. On the other hand, if it does handle the iPhone well, then AT&T will have a harder time arguing it didn't mismanage its own network.

Verizon executives point to their network's success handling already heavy laptop traffic and a growing number of data-guzzling Android-based smartphone users on its main, 3G network.

"Whether they are iPhones or Droids, they are smartphones," Verizon Chief Executive Ivan G. Seidenberg said in a mid-November interview. "Regardless of the mix, we are prepared to carry more data."

Anthony J. Melone, Verizon's chief technology officer, said Sunday the company invested heavily in its 3G network last year to handle surging smartphone traffic. At the end of September, the carrier had some nine million Android subscribers, up from none a year earlier, according to Majestic Research.

Verizon also has been building a new, faster 4G network that it launched in December. Mr. Melone said that network will help by handling a lot of new data traffic and offloading demand from its 3G network as existing customers upgrade to faster wireless service.

"We added enormous capacity to the network in one fell swoop," Mr. Melone said. "It is there waiting for us to grow into it. That will help me tremendously with my 3G network."

Mr. Melone wouldn't comment on how the network would handle the iPhone, but said, "All of this planning can support any successful device."

AT&T has acknowledged it underestimated the stress the iPhone would put on its network. The carrier boosted spending this year particularly in the key markets of New York City and San Francisco, but still struggles with the perception its network is weak.
In December, a survey by Consumer Reports put AT&T's network quality in last place. Verizon, meanwhile, was the top-ranked major carrier.

AT&T says its network is faster and has advantages like allowing users to browse the Web while talking on the phone.

The design of Verizon's network, which uses a different technology called CDMA, has to this point allowed only one or the other.

"We think customers will prefer AT&T's faster speeds and better functionality," said an AT&T spokesman said.

Brisk demand is expected. Analysts think Verizon, which has 93 million subscribers, could sell nine million to 12 million iPhones this year, a huge boost in the phone's key U.S. market.

To put that into perspective,AT&T sold 11.1 million iPhones in the first nine months of 2010. Piper Jaffray & Co. projects a full-year total of 14.5 million iPhones for AT&T, accounting for 12% of Apple's overall revenue and 30% of its iPhone sales. In its fiscal year ended in September, Apple reported revenue of $20.34 billion.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Wall Street is expecting sales of the Verizon iPhone to boost Apple's overall sales by 5%—or more if Verizon does a better job of luring new customers than it does turncoats from AT&T.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...862862244.html





Why I’m not Switching to the Verizon iPhone: Need for Speed
Zach Epstein

The image above says it all. It shows a screen capture of an actual speed test performed on an Apple iPhone 4 while connected to AT&T’s 3G network in northern New Jersey. It is not an anomaly. In fact it’s pretty standard in my home town and in the surrounding areas. Sometimes my download speed is faster and sometimes it’s slower, but it generally stays between 3.5 and 5Mbps¹. I can’t give that up.

Verizon Wireless has an incredibly strong network. It works everywhere, seemingly without fail, and hopefully the carrier can maintain its reputation as a rock solid network even after it is infested with data-gulping iPhones. What the Verizon Wireless network is not, however, is fast. In my town, which is roughly 15 minutes northwest of the George Washington Bridge, Verizon’s average download speed sits around 800Kbps¹. The fastest I’ve seen it in this area is just over 1Mbps. I use Verizon devices all the time as part of my job, and I often carry them with me outside my job. When I want to do something that involves downloading large files or streaming video content, I use an AT&T phone.

But what about reliability? AT&T is horrible! Wrong. AT&T might be horrible for you, but it works just fine for me. Not always, of course, but often enough that I have no interest in switching my main personal account to another provider and sacrificing data speed in the process. In late 2009 and early 2010, it was a very different story. I could rarely make phone calls in the area around my office in New York City and had Verizon scored the iPhone back then, I would have switched in a second. But beginning last summer, however, AT&T’s service in midtown Manhattan improved dramatically.

The other big part my decision comes down to the core reason any “my network is better than your network” argument is patently ridiculous. A network’s coverage, performance and reliability vary greatly depending on region — without exception. Notice the full five bars my iPhone 4 was reporting when the screen shot above was captured. Along with every other AT&T phone I have lying around, my iPhone just about always displays five bars of coverage near my home, office and nearly everywhere else I go in the area. Even when I give it the death grip.

In 2012 when AT&T and Verizon Wireless each have LTE networks that offer widespread coverage and speedy data connections, I’ll reassess the situation. I expect a 4G LTE iPhone to launch for both networks in 2012, so pricing and coverage will become the two main factors I consider. Today, however, switching from AT&T to Verizon would be like switching from broadband to dial-up — and I just can’t handle that.

¹Figures represent estimated average download speeds observed on AT&T and Verizon Wireless’ 3G data networks. The figures are based on independent speed tests performed using various devices with various speed test applications and are in no way scientific.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/01/10/why-im...erizon-iphone/





Verizon Deal May Expose iPhone Flaws
Joe Nocera

With this week’s announcement that Verizon Wireless is going to begin selling the iPhone — something its customers have been panting for ever since AT&T got that first, exclusive iPhone contract four years ago — it’s time for me to face the music. Nobody really cares that the iPhone is flawed. After this column, I’m going to stop caring too. I swear it.

Its design is undeniably elegant; both the iPhone and its sister device, the iPad, stand at the pinnacle of modern industrial design. The iPhone offers some 300,000 apps that delight its users. Photographs look gorgeous on an iPhone. “It is the first and best implementation of a highly mobile computer,” said Roger L. Kay, the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a market intelligence firm.

Yet for all that it offers, the iPhone has always been plagued by serious drawbacks. The “phone” part of the iPhone has never worked very well, dropping calls with annoying regularity. Even when the phone works, the sound quality is often substandard. You would think in an age when fewer people are using landlines this would matter. Apparently not.

Meanwhile, the iPhone’s lack of a raised keyboard makes it next to impossible to do serious e-mailing. And users have to worry constantly about battery life; if they’re not judicious, the iPhone’s battery can be drained by noon.

At the Verizon Wireless-iPhone extravaganza on Tuesday — in which the two companies announced that the iPhone 4 would run on Verizon Wireless’s 3G network — Apple’s chief operating officer, Timothy D. Cook, was asked why Apple wasn’t going with the carrier’s faster, newer 4G LTE network. Mr. Cook replied that doing so required “design compromises” that Apple was unwilling to make.

They never make design compromises at Apple. They make consumer compromises. Yet consumers have always been willing to overlook those compromises so they can claim they own some of the coolest products on the planet.

“People so love their devices from Apple that they are willing to put up with the stupidities,” said Larry Keeley, president of the innovation and design firm Doblin. “For many users,” he added, “especially the ones Apple loves the most, the fact that the battery gets balky is how you convince yourself to get a new one.”

My oldest son, Amato, who is on my Verizon Wireless plan, told me recently that even though he was perfectly happy with his Android phone, if given the chance to switch to an iPhone, he would probably do it. “I can’t even say why,” he said. “I don’t even know if there is any real rationale behind that desire.”

Is Steve Jobs a business genius or what?

•

On the other hand, the fact that my son owns an Android phone — and finds it to be a fine smartphone, thank you very much — suggests that the Apple chief executive’s fetish for form over function has its downside. Not everybody, it turns out, is indifferent to whether their smartphones can actually make phone calls. For proof, all you have to do is look at the recent performance of Verizon Wireless, which has been, by far, the country’s most profitable wireless carrier, despite not having the iPhone in its arsenal.

Verizon Wireless could have snagged the original iPhone contract four years ago, but it passed. It did so not because of the iPhone’s flaws, which were then unknown, but because Apple was insisting on terms that it could not accept. These included a guaranteed subsidy for the phone (cellphone carriers use subsidies as important marketing tools), no say in the software design and loss of control of the customer to Apple.

A Verizon Wireless spokesman told me back then that with the iPhone deal, AT&T had handed over “the ability to insure customer service” to Apple, which, he added, “is something we would never have agreed to.” AT&T, which was struggling, felt it had no choice but to agree to Apple’s onerous terms.

The Apple-AT&T marriage has been a public relations disaster — for AT&T. Its network was quickly overwhelmed, in part because it was subpar, and in part because iPhone owners — with a mobile computer at their fingertips — used astonishing amounts of data: 15 times more than the average smartphone user, and “50 percent more than AT&T itself had projected,” according to Fred Vogelstein, who wrote about the problems for Wired magazine.

Mr. Vogelstein went on to note in his article that the troubles that ensued — the dropped phone calls, the frequent network crashes and so on — were not entirely AT&T’s fault. His Apple sources, he wrote, confirmed to him that “the software running the iPhone’s main radio, known as baseband, was full of bugs and contributed to the much-decried dropped calls.” But since Apple walks on water, and AT&T doesn’t, it was easy for Apple to place all the blame on its wireless carrier. Which it gleefully did.

And what was Verizon Wireless doing? Taking full advantage of AT&T’s problems to trumpet the reliability of its own network. Network reliability, in fact, became its core selling point: it may not have had the world’s sexiest phone, but at least the phones it sold worked. As it turns out, there are millions of people who care about having phones that work — they’re just not the cool people. Like CBS, which gets ratings with programming for Middle America, Verizon Wireless kept adding subscribers by catering to the unhip.

What also helped Verizon Wireless, though, was the introduction of Android phones beginning in the fall of 2008. Android is not a single phone, but rather an operating system developed by Google that allowed cellphone manufacturers to approximate the look and feel of an iPhone. Cellphone makers like Samsung and Motorola flocked to it. And so did Verizon Wireless, which abandoned its marketing support for loser phones like the Palm Pre, and put all its muscle behind the Android phones.

“Verizon Wireless has done an incredibly good job with the Android phones,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But the best you can say is that they are almost iPhones.” True enough, but while they may not be as sleek as the iPhone, or have as many nifty apps, they make phone calls more reliably. Oh, and if you are having problems with the battery, you can take it out and replace it. Imagine!

Here’s the shocker, though. According to Gartner, in the second quarter of 2009, Android sales constituted 1.8 percent of all smartphones sold, compared with Apple’s 13 percent. By the second quarter of 2010 — just a year later — Android was actually outselling Apple, 17.2 percent to 14.2 percent. This must have been a shock to the system at Apple — it was being outdone by an uncool competitor.

As much as anything, the success of Android is what finally pushed Apple into the arms of Verizon Wireless, which got much better terms than AT&T. When I asked a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless who was going to control the customer, she told me that iPhone users who were having problems would take their phone to the nearest Verizon Wireless store, not the Apple genius bar. Verizon Wireless does not appear to have promised the guaranteed subsidy, the way AT&T did. In truth, Apple needed Verizon Wireless more than Verizon Wireless needed Apple. The deal the two companies cut reflects that fact.

The deal is being described as the long-awaited marriage of coolness and reliability. And maybe it will work out that way. At the press conference on Tuesday, Mr. Cook called it a “tremendous opportunity” — as it surely is given Verizon Wireless’s 93 million subscribers. Charles Wolf, who follows Apple for Needham & Company, estimates that Apple could sell as many as 32 million iPhones in the next two years through the Verizon Wireless channel.

But there are also plenty of potential pitfalls. Verizon Wireless insists that its network is up to the task of handling all that data its iPhone customers will be clamoring for. But clever developers keep coming up with new ways to use even more data than anyone ever dreamed of.

Mr. Moffett described to me, for instance, an app he saw at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which allowed parents to turn their iPhone into a baby monitor at night. That might not sound like much, but it would require the iPhone to stream video while the baby was sleeping. It would be a huge data hog. “Eventually, that kind of thing clogs up the network and starts to compromise the user experience,” he said.

Another possibility is that the Verizon Wireless network will hold up fine but that the iPhone will keep dropping calls because of its own inherent compromises. This time, though, it will be much harder to blame all the problems on its wireless carrier, the way it could with the hapless AT&T. At the very least, the iPhone will have to compete with all the Android phones, which offer a sturdier, if less dazzling, experience. And Verizon Wireless is unlikely to abandon its marketing support for Android the way it did with Palm. Those phones have become too important to its bottom line.

Mainly, though, the Verizon Wireless subscriber is simply used to a different kind of experience. If they all migrate immediately to the iPhone, then truly I will raise the white flag. If they hang back, then it will signal that there are still some people who prefer something that works over something that dazzles.

As for the AT&T subscribers, I hear that many of them are planning to stay where they are, hoping that enough other subscribers move to Verizon Wireless to relieve some of the pressure on the network and reduce their own misery.

A person can always dream.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/bu.../15nocera.html





Virgin Mobile To Start Throttling Broadband2Go
Daevad

Virgin Mobile sent an e-mail today informing me of their plans to start throttling the Broadband2Go Plan. The web site doesn't seem to reflect the change yet, but here is the message they sent to me:

"Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of customers. To make sure we can keep offering our $40 Unlimited Broadband2Go Plan at such a great price, we're putting a speed limit in place for anyone on that plan who uses over 5GB in a month. How will it work? Starting February 15, 2011, if you go over 5GB in a month on the $40 Unlimited Plan: Your data speeds will be limited for the remainder of the monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media. Your data speeds will return to normal as soon as you buy a new Broadband2Go Plan. This change will only affect plans bought on or after 2/15/2011. How will it affect me? Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc."

Just when I was getting comfortable recommending it to people, too. I do prefer a slowdown to an absolute cap, but this sours me a bit on the (locked-to-Sprint) MiFi I bought to use the Virgin service.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/...g-Broadband2Go





T-Mobile Says "Download at Home" After Slashing Data Cap
Nicole Kobie

Mobile operator T-Mobile has unveiled a new fair use policy, raising a few eyebrows by telling customers to leave high-bandwidth downloads for home.

From the beginning of next month, the policy will limit customers to 500MB a month, down from 1GB or 3GB, depending on the contract. "If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband," a document on the T-Mobile site said.

A T-Mobile spokesperson has said the new policy will apply to all customers, including those who have already signed contracts with a higher cap. A message on the company's official Twitter account said: "We have to give you reasonable notice that our fair use policy is changing."

T-Mobile is touting the change as a benefit for customers, saying they won't be charged for going over that 500MB limit. Instead, they'll simply be banned for the rest of the month from downloading large files or viewing video via their handsets.

"Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games," the company claimed. "We’ve got a fair use policy, but ours means that you'll always be able to browse the internet, it’s only when you go over the fair use amount that you won’t be able to download, stream and watch video clips."

The move takes T-Mobile in the opposite direction to rival 3, which has removed any limit on mobile data, keeping with the trend of more and more people accessing services such as video, the web and app stores over their handsets.

T-Mobile's new fair use policy, on the other hand, encourages users to save heavy-bandwidth services for when they get home.

"So remember our Mobile Broadband and internet on your phone service is best used for browsing which means looking at your favorite websites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, BBC News and more, checking your email and looking for information, but not watching videos or downloading files," it said.

Update: A T-Mobile spokesperson has since sent over a statement, saying the new fair usage policy was "in line with the industry".

“These restrictions will affect both new and existing customers, and will ensure an improved quality of service for all of our mobile internet users," the spokesperson said. "As the average mobile internet customer uses only 200MB of data each month, this will only affect a small minority of users, whom we have begun notifying."

“Customers who have a need for higher volumes of data will be encouraged to take up a separate mobile broadband plan," the spokesperson added. "We are confident that these changes will result in a better experience for all of our customers who use internet on their phone.”
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadban...shing-data-cap





Microsoft Investigates 'Phantom' Windows Phone 7 Data
BBC

Microsoft has told BBC News that it is investigating why some handsets running its Windows Phone 7 software are sending and receiving "phantom data".

Several net forums detail complaints from people that say their phones are automatically eating into their monthly data plans without their knowledge.

Some have complained that their phone sends "between 30 and 50MB of data" every day; an amount that would eat into a 1GB allowance in 20 days.

Most complainants are based in the US.

"I received an e-mail from AT&T saying that I was close to my 2GB data limit which truly shocked me as I feel I do not use data that much," a phone owner called Julie told Paul Thurrott's supersite for Windows.

"I went and looked at my AT&T account online and noticed that my phone was sending huge chunks of data seemingly in patterns."

Another said that they had noticed that the phone's "idle data usage is around 2-5MB per hour".

"This seems quite excessive to me - what exactly is being transferred? This even happens at night when I'm not getting any e-mails at all," they wrote on Howard Forums.

Some have speculated the problem may be related to the phones sending "feedback" to Microsoft about the software's performance or that the phones are using a 3G connection even when wi-fi is available.

"We are investigating this issue to determine the root cause and will update with information and guidance as it becomes available," said a Microsoft spokesperson.

Windows Phone 7 was launched in October 2010 to acclaim by manufacturers and users.

It is considered the company's first credible challenge to rival operating systems from Apple, Google, Research in Motion and Nokia.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said that the firm would soon release "a series of platform improvements" in response to users' feedback.

These will include copy and paste capabilities and performance improvements when loading or switching between applications.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12152517





Internet Usage Costs to Rise
CBC

Surfing and downloading from the internet is about to get more expensive for many Canadians as internet companies Shaw and Primus have announced plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage.

Over the past year, the CRTC, Canada's communication regulator, let Bell and Rogers start charging extra for customers who download a lot of data. The growing demand for live-streaming and online movies gobbles up huge chunks of bandwidth on the World Wide Web.

Primus and Shaw have said they will begin passing on higher fees to their customers beginning Feb. 1. Primus, for example, rents bandwidth on Bell's networks and said Bell is inflating the costs for everyone, including them.
The growing demand for live-streaming and online movies has prompted internet companies to announce plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage.The growing demand for live-streaming and online movies has prompted internet companies to announce plans to impose new fees and caps on internet usage. (iStock)

"It's an economic disincentive for internet use," said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus. "It's not meant to recover costs. In fact these charges that Bell has levied are many, many, many times what it costs to actually deliver it."

Hugh Thompson, who runs the website Digital Home, said he's been hearing growing consumer complaints.

He said more people say they are receiving bills of $5 to $10 a month in penalties — with some complaining their penalties are running as high as $100 — all for their use of iTunes, YouTube and Netflix.

"Their bandwidth has skyrocketed from maybe a gigabyte or two a month to some cases of 200 to 300 gigabytes per month," said Thompson.

"So now that people are using so much bandwidth, the companies are crying foul. They're saying: 'We can't make money off this. We need to charge more.'"

Currently, only a small percentage of users download enough data to hit these new caps. But many fear these fees will soon apply to everyone as the internet becomes more video based.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2011/...canadians.html





Android Manufacturers Withholding Updates and Worsening Platform Fragmentation?

A T-Mobile insider claims manufacturers are deliberately withholding updates to boost new phone sales.
Ryan Faas

I've talked about Android fragmentation here before, particularly about how various people view it as a major concern (IT professionals mostly along with some developers) while others (including most Android users) see it as a non-issue. Everyone, however, can agree that most Android updates bring new features, bug fixes, and security patches with them – all good reasons to look forward to updates arriving for your Android device over the air from your carrier.

A new wrinkle in the update and fragmentation story emerged today. AndroidSpin is quoting an unnamed T-Mobile employee as saying that the carrier is being told not to release the Android 2.2 update (Froyo) to customers that own the Samsung Vibrant. The reason: to increase sales of the new Vibrant 4G.

The kicker is that the Vibrant 4G's specs are largely identical to the existing Vibrant devices. The only major difference (aside from name and branding) is that the Vibrant 4G sports a forward-facing camera and some additional multimedia features. It also is able to take full advantage of T-Mobile's HSPA+ network (which the carrier is branding as 4G). That HSPA+ advantage, however, has nothing to do with the hardware. The reason the Vibrant 4G can take full advantage of those speeds is because it ships with Froyo pre-installed.

T-Mobile allegedly has an update for Vibrant users ready to be pushed out, but is being asked not to push it out because doing so would remove a major advantage that the newer phone offers (increased data performance).

Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely Samsung strong-arming T-Mobile. After all, selling newer phones also ties customers into a new contract (and, depending on the age of their existing contract, may allow T-Mobile to sell the devices at a higher cost to users). Regardless of which company is behind the move, it represents another factor in the fragmentation debate (presuming the report is accurate).

If true, this means that manufacturers (potentially including others beyond Samsung) are deliberately preventing users from getting updates that could be critical to preserving privacy and security in addition to keeping features from them for the sake of more sales. This should be a concern for all Android users, regardless of your position on whether fragmentation as a whole is an issue.

It certainly should be alarming to IT managers because it means that there may be no way to ensure complete security of devices over the long term. Having been an IT manager, this would certainly be a reason to avoid Android as a platform to invest in. It would also make me question how much access I'd grant Android users who want to use their own devices on my network.

Considering Froyo offers enterprise features not available in previous Android release, this is a one-two punch for Android in the workplace. It makes the entire platform less desirable and it prevents Samsung Vibrant users (and potentially users of other phones) from gaining as much workplace access and support as they might otherwise enjoy. Not good news.

Of course, the ability for manufactures and/or carriers to behave this way does underscore one of the arguments that fragmentation is a problem. Other common smartphone platforms like the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7 offer a much more streamline and controlled update release schedule. In the case of iPhone and BlackBerry, there's only manufacturer in charge of which devices get which updates and when. Windows Phone 7 features a greater range of manufacturers, but Microsoft has said it will follow Apple's update model and make updates directly available to consumers on its own timetable (Microsoft is also keeping manufacturers on a much tighter leash than Google).

On a final note, there are many Android devices on the market that have yet to receive an update to Froyo. To find out the status and expected release schedule for your device, check out Computerworld's guide to Android upgrades.
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...m-fragmentatio





Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: App Stores a Clear and Present Danger
John Lister

The app store model is a more immediate threat to internet freedom than breaches of net neutrality. That’s the opinion of Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales.

According to Wales — who was quick to stress he was speaking in a purely personal capacity — set-ups such as the iTunes App Store can act as a “chokepoint that is very dangerous.” He said such it was time to ask if the model was “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem” and made the argument that “we own [a] device, and we should control it.”

Speaking at an event in Bristol, England in the week of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, Wales argued that many of the concerns over net neutrality were hypothetical and didn’t pose an immediate danger. While he noted the entire issue was complicated, and that his own views would be “policy wonky” (apparently meaning they wouldn’t necessarily blindly follow a strict principle regardless of the specific issue), he said elements of the campaign for net neutrality were “highly overblown” and centered on fears about what might happen rather than what is happening.

Wales answered questions on the topics after giving a presentation on Wikipedia’s past, present and future. He cited a tweet from a teacher who noted “Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said ‘Is it something like Wikipedia?’”

According to Wales, examples such as this mean that “the quality of Wikipedia is an important cultural issue.” But he stressed that university students should not be citing Wikipedia in essays and dissertations — or for that matter, any encyclopedia.

Noting that 87% of Wikipedia contributors are male, with an average age of 26 and double the rate of PhD holders of the general population, Wales said one of the major issues for the site going forward was to extend the diversity of people taking part. He said one way of achieving that would be to make the editing system easier to use, getting away from the current tendency for contributors to be confronted with mark-up coding: in particular, he conceded Wikipedia’s syntax for table layout was “a nightmare.”

But Wales also stressed Wikipedia will stick to its core purpose. He noted that adding features such as e-mail or chat functions might increase the number of visitors to the site, but while that is the goal of commercial services, it wouldn’t necessarily improve the quality of Wikipedia’s content, which he believes should be “[Encyclopedia]Britannica or better.”
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...resent-danger/





Twileshare Makes File-Sharing on Twitter Super Easy
Mike Butcher

We’ve become used to the idea of sharing photos on Twitter (from Twitpic to Instagr.am), video (YouTube to Qik) and audio (Cinch to Soundcloud). But have we done much file-sharing via Twitter? Not to date.

There’s Tweetshare, Filesocial and Tweetcube but they are not something you will see in the average user’s stream – or at least not mine, and I follow nearly 4,000 accounts.

Twileshare is still in beta and launched just before Christmas but already it’s seen a lot of viral traffic from what I can see. There are now 24,000 mentions of it on Google.

After logging in via Twitter you upload and share images, PDFs, Word and Excel files up to 20MB in size. Almost any kind of file can be shared and PDFs and Word documents are also placed in the page via Scribe’s API so that you can simply view the document on a page rather than downloading it to that pile of other PDFs on your desktop you meant to read but still haven’t. You can also see how many times your file has been viewed and tweeted, comment on uploaded files.

Although they are running Google ads on it, Twileshare’s founders Danny Bull and Ryan Foster are hesistant about charging for a premium service – the jury is out on that. What is more likely is branded channels for organisations.

You can’t yet DM a file link but it is potentially in the plan – which would make this even more interesting, shall we say.

We have an invite link that will give the first 200 people to comment on this post access, so let us know what you think.
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/01/07/...er-super-easy/





DoJ Subpoena Proves Twitter’s Value — and Its Weakness
Mathew Ingram

Not that long ago, there was much debate about whether Twitter was just a plaything for nerds or a powerful, real-time information network. Now the US Department of Justice has answered the question for us by serving the company with a court order related to WikiLeaks, and the case the government is trying to make against founder Julian Assange for releasing secret diplomatic cables. But the subpoena also points out how easy it is for the DoJ to get the information it seeks, because Twitter acts as a central gatekeeper. To its credit, the company has effectively made this process public, unlike some others that have reportedly received similar orders.

The subpoena first came to light on Friday, when Birgitta Jónsdóttir — a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks — said on Twitter that she had been informed by the company of a DoJ order. As Glenn Greenwald has reported, the order (a copy of which is embedded below) compels Twitter to turn over not just tweets, but also IP addresses, payment information from user accounts and various other personal information the government claims is related to its case (Jónsdóttir has said she is going to fight the order). The U.S. government is said to be pursuing a case against Assange under the Espionage Act by proving that he conspired with the leaker of the diplomatic cables.

In addition to Manning and Jónsdóttir, letters about the court order have been sent to Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, also an early supporter of WikiLeaks. According to the official WikiLeaks account on Twitter, similar orders have been sent to Google and Facebook, although neither of these companies has made the federal requests public, if they have received them (a spokesman for Facebook said the company “has no comment to make at this time,” and Google has not responded to an emailed request for comment).

According to Greenwald and a report in the New York Times, the court order sent to Twitter would not have become public at all if the company had not initially refused to comply with the DoJ request and effectively forced it out into the open. Twitter should be congratulated for this (and has been by many users on Twitter since the news broke Friday night). The company didn’t have to fight for this court order to be made public; it could easily have complied with the DoJ subpoena in private.

However, the fact that Twitter is being targeted by the government is another sign of how important the network has become as a real-time publishing platform, and also of how centralized the service is — something that could spark interest in distributed and open-source alternatives such as Status.net, just as the downtime suffered by the network early last year did. It is another sign of how much we rely on networks that are controlled by a single corporate entity, as Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman pointed out when WikiLeaks was ejected from Amazon’s servers and had its DNS service shut down.

All of this makes it even more important that Twitter has forced the government’s attempts out into the light. One would hope that Facebook and Google — the latter of whom has talked a lot in the past about its commitment to freedom of speech, and has also taken action in China to protest that government’s digital surveillance of its citizens — would also come clean about any court orders they have received, especially when the DoJ appears determined to make a case that could easily entrap virtually anyone, up to and including reporters for the New York Times.

The US government’s move to “tap” Twitter as a way of engaging in digital surveillance confirms the network’s status as a real-time information network, but also makes it obvious how much we have come to rely on it, and the implications of that dependence. As founder Evan Williams has noted, Twitter effectively makes everyone a publisher — and that means we are all potentially targets for similar court orders.
http://gigaom.com/2011/01/08/twitter-doj-wikileaks/





Twitter Fights US Court Demands For WikiLeaks Details
Peter Judge

Twitter is fighting a US court’s demand, made in December, for details of WikiLeaks supporters

Micro-blogging site Twitter is opposing an order from a US court, to reveal the account details of supporters of WikiLeaks. Twitter has called on Facebook and Google to reveal whether they also received similar court orders.

As part of the US government’s investigation into WikiLeaks, a court ordered Twitter, in mid-December, to give details of accounts owned by supporters of the whistle-blower site. Twitter has protested against the subpoena and informed the individuals whose account information has been requested, while raising the possibility that other social networking players have received similar orders.
Records required for criminal investigation

The US Department of Justice obtained a subpoena for the micro-blogging site on 14 December, requesting records going back to 1 November 2009, that are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Among those targeted are WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp (whose name is misspelled in the subpoena) and Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking documents to WikiLeaks.

Also named in the subpoena are computer programmer Jacob Appelbaum (identified by his Twitter username, ioerror) and former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jónsdóttir (left), who wrote the following in a tweet: “just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks).”

Jónsdóttir also tweeted that she plans to oppose the subpoena.

According to a copy of the court order published by Salon.com, the government is looking for a variety of information, including session times and mailing addresses.

“WikiLeaks strongly condemns this harassment of individuals by the US government,” WikiLeaks said in a statement relayed to Reuters by WikiLeaks attorney Mark Stephens.

The recent WikiLeaks controversy began when the site started publishing a trove of US diplomatic cables in late November. The release of the documents has touched off months of debate and prompted WikiLeaks supporters and opponents alike to air their differences with denial-of-service attacks while businesses such as PayPal cut ties with the whistle-blower site.

In December, Assange was arrested in the UK on charges of sexual assault originating in Sweden. He is currently out on bail.

In its statement, WikiLeaks reportedly said that some of the people named in the subpoena were key figures in helping WikiLeaks make public US military video of a 2007 airstrike that killed Iraqi civilians. WikiLeaks is instructing its lawyers to oppose the subpoena, and is calling on Facebook and Google to disclose whether they received similar subpoenas as well.

A federal judge unsealed the court order on 5 January after Twitter requested the right to inform the people being targeted.

In addition to obtaining the subpoena, it was also revealed that the US government has taken steps to protect people judged by officials to be in danger because of the document leak. On 7 January, US State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley told the media the department has helped relocate “a handful of people” identified in the diplomatic documents out of concern for their safety. The CIA set up a WikiLeaks Task Force (WTF) in response to the leak.

WikiLeaks has denied putting any lives at risk, and the UN has supported its right to publish the leaked material on human rights grounds.

WikiLeaks publication of the US cables resulted ina war of denial of service (DoS) attacks, hitting both WikiLeaks itself , and the sites of financial institutions such as Mastercard, which withdrew facilities for WikiLeaks supporters to donate money to the whistleblower.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/tw...-details-17602





Swiss Banker Who Helped WikiLeaks Faces Trial
AP

A Swiss banker whose actions caused a U.S. judge to briefly shut down WikiLeaks three years ago goes on trial next week for distributing confidential documents.

Rudolf Elmer has been ordered to appear before a Zurich regional court on Jan. 19 to answer charges of coercion and violating Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and fined.

Elmer's release of files from the Swiss-based bank Julius Baer's offshore operations in the Cayman Islands prompted a U.S. judge to temporarily shut down WikiLeaks in 2008. The order was lifted following complaints from free speech groups and media organizations.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011...WikiLeaks.html





Wikileaks Calls for Sarah Palin's Arrest
Marshall Kirkpatrick

The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes.

Assange is attributed the following quote in the release: "No organisation anywhere in the world is a more devoted advocate of free speech than Wikileaks but when senior politicians and attention seeking media commentators call for specific individuals or groups of people to be killed they should be charged with incitement -- to murder. Those who call for an act of murder deserve as significant share of the guilt as those raising a gun to pull the trigger." The release pointed to specific high-profile calls for Assange's assasination by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and others and concluded with a link to the website PeopleOKwithMurderingAssange.com.

The release references multiple public statements that to many just seemed like obnoxious bluster when they were made, but admittedly look a little different when examined in light of the Palin gun sights visual calling for the unseating of Democratic congresspeople, including Giffords.

Palin has responded to criticism of the graphic after the assassination attempt and concurrent murders primarily through statements of sympathy for the victims on her Facebook page, though she doesn't discuss the image itself. Comments that criticize Palin appear to be subject to deletion from the page. A Palin aid said yesterday that the map was never intended to represent gun sights, rather that they were "surveyors marks." Palin has referred to them as "bullseyes" on Twitter.

From the release:

"WikiLeaks staff and contributors have also been the target of unprecedented violent rhetoric by US prominent media personalities, including Sarah Palin, who urged the US administration to 'Hunt down the WikiLeaks chief like the Taliban'. Prominent US politician Mike Huckabee called for the execution of WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on his Fox News program last November, and Fox News commentator Bob Beckel, referring to Assange, publicly called for people to 'illegally shoot the son of a bitch.' US radio personality Rush Limbaugh has called for pressure to 'Give [Fox News President Roger] Ailes the order and [then] there is no Assange, I'll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.', while the Washington Times columnist Jeffery T. Kuhner titled his column 'Assassinate Assange' captioned with a picture Julian Assange overlayed with a gun site, blood spatters, and 'WANTED DEAD or ALIVE' with the alive crossed out."

There certainly seems to be some logic to the argument Wikileaks is making. Meaningful prohibition of public figures advocating extra-judicial killings of their political opponents might represent an even bigger disruption of the realpolitik status quo than the dissolution of diplomatic secrecy, however. Thanks to the ease of rapid publishing online, it's now easy for anyone to call for anyone else's assassination or arrest and find a global audience, but that new capability for any kind of messages, good or bad, to fly far and free, clearly requires a discussion of how to relate to it responsibly.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ins_arrest.php





Inexplicable Edits on Sarah Palin's Facebook Page

Sarah Palin has a reputation for being an agressive editor of comments on her Facebook page - a reputation that has always seemed likely accurate to me, given the tedious consistency with which all comments on the page are along the lines of "I love you SARAH!"

But in the wake of the terrible events in Arizona, with many commentators pointing out the obvious fact that Gabrielle Giffords had been targetted by Palin in the November election on a map that used a chilling gun site graphic, I thought it would be worth watching her page for a little while to see if her team were indeed deleting negative comments routinely. But I had no idea how incredibly, almost comically, efficient her people would turn out to be in deleting comments that were even slightly critical of the former Governor. And then I came across... well, what I guess you'd have to politely call an appalling example of editorial misjudgement at best.

Here's what I found, from a brief sample achieved by the simple expedient of hitting the refresh button repeatedly over a short period of time:

A negative comment saying, "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, YOU EVIL WITCH" - at 17:19PM. (I'm in London, so that's British Standard Time.)

Removed by 17:21.

Two negative comments, one suggesting that her publicity team must be working overtime to make her not look guilty and one from a British poster saying "Guns and nutters don't mix..."

Removed by 17:26.

Comment saying, "I can't believe you don't have the leadership of intelligence to tell your people that putting crosshairs on people incites violence." 17:27

Was removed by 17:28 (although I failed to capture a screen grab - oops).

A comment that simple says, "hypocrite" - presumably in reference to Palin at 17:28

Gone by 17:29.

Comment alleging "THEIR BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS" at 17:29.

Gone by 17:31.

Comment saying the commenter is glad her show was cancelled and saying, "I'm not blaming her but is it really a smart thing posting a map with gun sights of politicians with opposing views?" At 17:38.

Gone by 17:39.

Comment that refers to the text of Palin's post by saying, "Peace and Justice? That's a new concept for you isn't it?" at 17:48.

Gone by 17:50.

OK. At this point, I am finding this all kind of... well, funny I suppose. I mean, the ruthless efficiency of the deleting and the desperation with which people would try to get their negative comments up there combined with the efficiency of their removal. There were actually a lot more examples than what I've been able to show here.

And in fairness to Sarah Palin, I should say that there were a couple of comments that were removed that weren't directly critical of the Governor but clearly offensive. Most notably, a commenter who repeatedly posted, "To bad it wasn't Pelosi." Yikes.

But then things got a little... well, upsetting.

A commenter posted the following at 18:12:

"It's ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as 'they' say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly."

I think I literally gasped when I read that. Remember, Christina Taylor Green was the 9 year old girl killed by the shooter. Apparently she had been brought there by her mom, who thought she might get a kick out of meeting Rep. Giffords, having recently been elected to her student council.

I assumed, as a matter of course, that this particular comment would be deleted with greatest possible speed.

So I kept hitting refresh, hoping to use this as an example to say, "You see, Palin's Facebook editing at least has the good judgement to remove clearly offensive content such as this." But it didn't come down.

By this point I thought it was likely that the staff person monitoring the page was simply no longer working - I mean, fair enough it's a Sunday, right? So I thought I would just satisfy myself that the page was no longer being edited by continuing to look for negative comments, assuming that either they would all remain live for the time being, or if the editor came back to work, that they would be removed simultaneously with the Christina post.

So here's a comment posted at 18:16 saying, "I hope you're happy now. It's because of the influence that you do wield, that you should think about things you say and do."

Deleted by 18:18.

But the Christina post was still live.

Huh.

So then I thought, well maybe the page editors just haven't seen it. We all make mistakes, perhaps it just slipped by them.

Then I spotted another commenter, rightly expressing her disgust at the post. "You are so out of touch... Show a little consideration and leave innocent out of your twisted diatribe."

Having been alerted to the post, does the editor NOW remove it? Nope, it's still there.

And I spot several other posts being removed. For instance, here's a post from 18:28 saying, "Your type of sorrow doesn't make up for the blood on your hands."

Gone by 18:29.

I found a few more instances, but I won't belabour the point. The Christina post was still live at 16:39 when I started writing this post.

I don't really know what to make of this. Sarah Palin has the right to edit her Facebook profile - it's not technically a public platform, it's a privately owned space. But the fact someone has a right to do something doesn't mean it is always a good idea, and I think that someone who aspires to public office has an especially strong responsibility to try and engage with the public at large - not just those who agree with them. But still... she's not currently in any form of elected office and she can do what she likes.

But I find her team's editorial judgement to say the least... odd.
http://obamalondon.blogspot.com/2011...ah-palins.html





Facebook 'Attack a Teacher Day' Invite Gets Girls Arrested
Chris Matyszczyk

With CES winding down, I'm still in Nevada--and I'm suddenly worried about the state's education system. Specifically, a school a few hours up the road in Carson City.

The Associated Press solemnly informs me that six teenage girls at Carson Middle School have been arrested after one of them allegedly sent a Facebook invite to about 100 of her closest schoolmates.

The event to which they were invited--scheduled for yesterday and that 18 students cheerily agreed to attend--was called "Attack A Teacher Day."

Carson Middle School Principal Dan Sadler told the AP that the girl who allegedly sent the invite was arrested along with five others who allegedly participated in the party mood by posting Facebook threats against specific teachers.

He explained to the AP the school's (and the police's) stern response: "School shootings really happen. That's why we took it seriously. It's not OK, and it's not funny in this day and age if you're going to make a threat against a teacher."

The girls were 12- and 13-year-olds and the school says these were not known troublemakers.

And though the girls reportedly claimed it was all a joke, some might wonder whether they had paid sufficient attention in the Thinking Things Through class.

You will be saddened into mowing your lawn when I tell you that it was the inviter's parents who reportedly discovered the plan for "Attack a Teacher Day" on Facebook and finally removed the invite.

Didn't she and all the other potential croupiers, convention center security staff, and--who knows?--governors of the state, imagine that perhaps some strange adult might raise an eyebrow, or even an objection?

Perhaps one is asking too much of kids in an era in which whatever happens on Facebook is believed (by the naive) to stay on Facebook.

This is surely a fine advertisement for secret notes scribbled on little pieces of paper. They're far more secure than Facebook, with all its pesky security settings, even if their private nature makes them not so bracing for the ego.

All six of the girls have reportedly been charged at juvenile hall with communicating threats.

I have a feeling their parents will be communicating a couple of threats of their own. They won't, perhaps, choose Facebook as the medium in which to convey their thoughts.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20027896-71.html





Shooting Suspect Left Unsettling Artifacts Online
Edward Moyer

The suspected gunman in the shooting today of a U.S. Congresswoman posted disturbing artifacts on YouTube and MySpace, according to various reports, including a photo of a gun on top of a U.S. history book, and videos featuring strange, sometimes political ramblings.

Police arrested 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner in connection with the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that took place this morning during an appearance by Giffords at a supermarket in Tucson.

Giffords was shot once through the head and is in critical condition; 18 others were shot as well, with 6 dying, including a 9-year-old girl and John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona, The New York Times reported.

Loughner's odd behavior at Pima Community College in Tucson, along with a disturbing Internet video, had caused officials at the school to suspend him in September, pending a mental health clearance, The Times said in another report.

"The rambling, disconnected writings and videos he has left on the Web are consistent with the delusions produced by a psychotic illness like schizophrenia, which develops most often in the teens or 20s," The Times reported.

Videos ostensibly posted by Loughner on YouTube contain bizarre screeds about the government.

"Reading the second United States Constitution, I can't trust the current government because of the ratifications," runs one remark. "The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."

Another says:

You're a treasurer for a new currency, listener?

You create and distribute your new currency, listener?

You don't allow the government to control your grammar structure, listener?

And another says:

The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America's Constitution.

You don't have to accept the federalist laws.

Nonetheless, read the United States of America's Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.

You're literate, listener?

All those remarks appear in a video titled "Introduction: Jared Loughner," which opens with the words, "My Final Thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner!" The YouTube page says the video was posted three weeks ago.

MySpace pages reportedly posted by Loughner featured a photo of a pistol on top of what looks like a book bearing the title "United States History." Web site Good reported that the pages had been taken down as of this afternoon, but Good showed a screen shot of a "My Photos" page with the described image.

A former classmate of Loughner's, Catie Parker, posted a series of statements to Twitter today, the Times reported, in which she said Loughner was "oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy" and had "met Giffords once before in '07, asked her a question & he told me she was 'stupid & unintelligent.'"

Loughner had tried to get into the Army but was rejected for reasons the Army said it could not disclose for privacy reasons, the Times reported, adding that police officials said the suspect had a criminal record of some sort, though they would not provide further information.

Police are reportedly searching for a second man in connection with the shooting.

Both Good and the Times said Loughner had posted a farewell message on MySpace this morning. It read, said Good, "Goodbye friends...Please don't be mad at me."

The Times reported that Loughner is refusing to cooperate with authorities and has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20027930-93.html





A Walled Wide Web for Nervous Autocrats

Beijing and Moscow see American information technology as a threat. They want systems of their own
Evgeny Morozov

At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015.

The move will save billions of dollars in licensing fees, but Mr. Putin's motives are not strictly economic. In all likelihood, his real fear is that Russia's growing dependence on proprietary software, especially programs sold by foreign vendors, has immense implications for the country's national security. Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

Nor is Russia alone in its distrust of commercial software from abroad. Just two weeks after Mr. Putin's executive order, Iran's minister of information technology, citing security concerns, announced plans for a national open-source operating system. China has also expressed a growing interest. When state-owned China Mobile recently joined the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit entity behind the most famous open-source project, one of the company's executives announced—ominously to the ears of some—that the company was "looking forward to contributing to Linux on a global scale."

Information technology has been rightly celebrated for flattening traditional boundaries and borders, but there can be no doubt that its future will be shaped decisively by geopolitics. Over the past few years, policymakers around the world have had constant reminders of their growing dependence on—and vulnerability to—the new technology: the uncovering of the mysterious China-based GhostNet network, which spied on diplomatic missions around the globe; the purported crippling of Iran's nuclear capability by the Stuxnet virus; and, of course, the whole WikiLeaks affair. Governments are taking a closer look at who is providing their hardware, software and services—and they are increasingly deciding that it is dangerous not to develop independent national capabilities of their own.

Open-source software can allay some of these security concerns. Though such systems are more democratic than closed ones, they are also easier to manipulate, especially for governments with vast resources at their command. But open-source solutions can't deal with every perceived threat. As Google learned, the Chinese government continues to see Western search engines as a challenge to its carefully managed presentation of controversial subjects. Similarly, email can be read by the host government of the company offering the service, and the transmission of sensitive data can be intercepted via secret back doors and sent to WikiLeaks or its numerous local equivalents.

For these reasons, more governments are likely to start designating Internet services as a strategic industry, with foreign firms precluded from competing in politically sensitive niches. The Turkish government has emerged as the leading proponent of such "information independence," floating the idea of both a national search engine and a national email system. Authorities in Russia, China and Iran have debated similar proposals.

Judging by last year's standoff between the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and the governments of India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, questions of access also will play a growing role in shaping technology. If a government suspects that the U.S. National Security Agency has arranged to be able to retrieve private emails sent with BlackBerry's secure encryption technology, it starts to wonder why it doesn't have similar streams of intelligence data, from BlackBerry as well as from services like Gmail and Skype. At a minimum, more governments will demand that data servers base their operations in their own jurisdictions, inconveniencing global Internet companies that have based their business plans on the assumption that they could run their Indian operations from Iowa.

The real Internet trade wars will begin once Russian and Chinese technology giants, with their poorly veiled government connections and piles of cash, come looking for American and European acquisitions. How will officials in Washington or Brussels react when China's Tencent (with a market capitalization of $42 billion, almost twice that of Yahoo) or Russia's Yandex makes a bid for AOL or Skype?

Painful decisions will need to be made soon. The Russian company Digital Sky Technologies, owned by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch, has a nearly 10% stake in Facebook and a 5% stakes in such hot Web properties as Zynga and Groupon. What will happen once Russian or Chinese firms seek to purchase a stake in companies like Google (a contractor to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) or Amazon (which caters to nearly 20 U.S. government agencies through its Web hosting services)?

The unpleasant effects of this rising nationalism are already evident in the case of hardware exports. When Sprint Nextel began considering bids from China's Huawei and ZTE Technologies in 2010 for a projected $5 billion upgrade of its network, a group of American senators wrote to the company's chief executive, expressing their concern that Huawei might be subject to "significant influence by the Chinese military" and that communications in the U.S. could be "disrupted, intercepted, tampered with, or purposely misrouted." Sprint Nextel turned down the bids. The European Union recently announced plans to create an authority similar to the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment to specifically vet approaches from China's technology giants.

Even if they are spurned by the U.S. and Europe, China's tech giants are likely to resurface elsewhere. For several years China has been using its huge cash reserves to hand out loans—mostly to governments in Africa, but also to neighbors like Cambodia—with the condition that those governments only do business with China's telecom companies. With or without secret access to that data, the fact that China controls so much of the communications infrastructure in the developing world gives it political leverage.

At the same time, Yota, a partly state-owned Russian telecom provider, has been trying to build a base in Latin America, launching its 4G service in Nicaragua and, soon, in Peru. Other Russian companies are busy building (or buying up) the telecom infrastructure in the former Soviet republics, perhaps in a bid to do for the Internet what Russia's gas giant Gazprom has done for energy: build up physical infrastructure and then use it as a tool of political leverage.

What does all of this mean for the future of America's technology industry? If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington. In the past, foreign governments have rushed to install the latest version of Microsoft Office or Google's Chrome browser because it was hard to imagine that Washington would tinker with technology to advance its strategic interests.

But just a few weeks before Mr. Putin publicly endorsed open-source software, FBI Director Robert Mueller toured Silicon Valley's leading companies to ask their CEOs to build back doors into their software, making it easier for American law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies to eavesdrop on online conversations. The very possibility of such talks is likely to force foreign governments to reconsider their dependence on American technology. Whatever the outcome of Washington's engagement with the Internet, Silicon Valley will be the one to bear the costs.

For ordinary Internet users, there is one silver lining: The embrace of open-source technology by governments may result in more intuitive software applications, written by a more diverse set of developers. The possible downside is that the era of globally oriented services like Skype may soon come to an end, as they are replaced by almost certainly less user-friendly domestic alternatives that would provide secret back-door access. As governments seek to assert control, companies will be providing fewer and fewer guarantees about both data security and access by third parties—such as governments.

The irony in these developments is hard to miss. Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...376054226.html





Leaked: US Government Strategy to Prevent Leaks
Emil Protalinski

The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked to MSNBC. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. Here's the crux of the memo, which was sent this week to senior officials at all agencies that use classified material:

"Each initial assessment should be completed by January 28, 2011, and should include the following with respect to the attached list of self-assessment questions:"

1. Assess what your agency has done or plans to do to address any perceived vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or gaps on automated systems in the post-WikiLeaks environment.
2. Assess weakness or gaps with respect to the attached list of questions, and formulate plans to resolve the issues or to shift or acquire resources to address those weaknesses or gaps.
3. Assess your agency's plans for changes and upgrades to current classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites, and online collaboration environments # as well as for all new classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites or online collaboration environments that are in the planning, implementation, or testing phases - in terms of the completeness and projected effectiveness of all types of security controls called for by applicable law and guidance (including but limited to those issued by the National Security Staff, the Committee on National Security Systems, the National Institute for Standards and Technology).
4. Assess all security, counterintelligence, and information assurance policy and regulatory documents that have been established by and for your department or agency.

It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have.
http://www.techspot.com/news/41889-l...ent-leaks.html





Tunisia Invades, Censors Facebook, Other Accounts
Danny O'Brien

The Tunisian government has been a notorious censor for many years, for journalists online and off. In the wake of widespread domestic protests in December, however, the authorities appear to have turned to even more repressive tactics to silence reporting. In the case of Internet bloggers, this includes what seems a remarkably invasive and technically sophisticated plan to steal passwords from the country's own citizens, in order to spy on private communications and squelch online speech.

Based on reports of users in the country, Tunisian authorities appear to be modifying web pages on the fly to steal usernames and passwords for sites such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Unknown parties have subsequently logged onto these sites using these stolen credentials, and used them to delete Facebook groups, pages, and accounts, including Facebook pages administrated by Sofiene Chourabi, a reporter with Al-Tariq al-Jadid, and the account of local online video journalist Haythem El Mekki. Local bloggers have told CPJ that their accounts and pictures of recent protests have been deleted or otherwise compromised.

Usually in such hacking attacks, it's hard to pin responsibility, except circumstantially, on local governments. Those conducting this particular attack, however, needed an extraordinary amount of privileged access to Tunisia's network infrastructure. Looking at the clues left by the attack, I'm among those who think all the evidence points to a state- controlled operation.

Here's how it worked, as uncovered by the online news site The Tech Herald: When Tunisians visit, say, Facebook, the page they receive has 10 extra lines of code, as compared to the normal login page originally sent by Facebook itself.

When Tunisians hit the Facebook "login" button, this extra code takes their user names and passwords, scrambles them, and then calls for another Web page, with the scrambled data included in the new Web address it requests. Tunisians don't see this new page, but their browser still attempts to load it, sending their private credentials across the Net.

How did these extra 10 lines get there? It's possible that they could be inserted by local viruses or malware, but widespread accounts from Tunisians strongly suggest these lines are being dropped into the Facebook page by the state-run Internet service provider, the Tunisia Internet Agency.

Where is the private username and password being secretly sent? The extra code within the Facebook page doesn't send the password data to another rogue Internet server, as you'd expect if this code was inserted by criminal hackers. Instead, the user's browser attempts to load a non-existent page on Facebook's own site, called "http://www.facebook.com/wo0dh3ad".

A page access like that would normally only reveal your user name and password to Facebook itself. Unless that is, the Tunisian Internet Agency is logging all web addresses visited by its customers, and keeping a record of visits to this particular address. Such logs are not difficult for an ISP to create or maintain. Indeed, if you were building a local censorship system, you could easily generate such a log as a side effect of your filtering systems.

From every piece of evidence CPJ has seen, this looks nothing like a criminal hacking attack, and everything like a state-run attempt to gain access to private online accounts. Certainly, it explains the rash of hacking attacks on activists and reporters in the region.

What can be done? Fortunately, because the fake "wo0dh3ad" page accessed was on their site, Facebook may well have a log of everyone whose account was compromised and can take steps to warn and protect their Tunisian users. As we have previously advised, Internet companies should deploy encrypted "https" versions of their sites, which prevent intermediaries from meddling with their data in transit. And Internet infrastructure providers and foreign governments should publicly demand an explanation from the Tunisian Internet Agency for their violation of every principle of Internet management, as well as their own citizen's right to privacy and a free, uncensored online press.
http://cpj.org/internet/2011/01/tuni...r-accounts.php





Hot Social Networking Site Cools as Facebook Grows
Tim Arango

As Facebook was negotiating a half-billion-dollar investment from Goldman Sachs recently, MySpace, once the dominant Web site for social networking, was preparing to fire nearly half its staff.

The layoffs, which cut nearly 500 employees from a payroll of close to 1,100, were announced Tuesday. The downsizing is the most draconian yet for the beleaguered company, and could be a precursor to a sale of the site by the News Corporation, which bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million after a bidding war with Viacom.

On one level, the decline of MySpace again shows the fragility of social media where fickle consumers and changing tastes can make sensations out of services like Tribe and Friendster that quickly fade from public imagination. According to comScore, MySpace reported 54.4 million users at the end of November, a loss of more than nine million from the previous year.

“MySpace was like a big party, and then the party moved on,” said Michael J. Wolf, the former president of Viacom’s MTV Networks and managing partner at media consulting firm Activate. “Facebook has become much more of a utility and communications vehicle.”

More broadly, the decline of MySpace is a tale with echoes of the ill-fated pact AOL made with Time Warner: a highflying Internet venture caught in a culture clash precipitated by joining a big media conglomerate. Then a competitor arrives on the scene with better technology.

Now the News Corporation is considering selling the site entirely, putting the capstone on the legacy of a deal that never quite worked out.

Even Tila Tequila, the model and rapper who achieved fame by building an audience on MySpace, has switched allegiances. In 2006, Time magazine called her the queen of MySpace, but these days she prefers Facebook.

“I just lost my passion for MySpace,” she said in an interview, adding that she does not even remember her MySpace password, even though her page still lists 3.7 million fans. “I haven’t logged on because it’s not simple anymore.”

MySpace began life as part of the News Corporation with the same sort of hoopla that now surrounds Facebook. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation’s chairman, was immediately hailed as an Internet visionary. When Sumner M. Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Viacom, lost out to Mr. Murdoch, he called it a “humiliating experience” in an interview with Charlie Rose, and fired Tom Freston, the chief executive of Viacom, for failing to acquire the site.

Mr. Murdoch was an early champion of the site and its founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. He would have them to his ranch in Carmel, Calif., for long chats about the future of media, and often intervened personally to help them navigate the News Corporation’s hierarchy so decisions could be made quicker, according to a former executive who demanded anonymity so he could maintain his business relationships.

In 2007, when Mr. Murdoch set his sights on Dow Jones and its prize, The Wall Street Journal, his attention was diverted from what had been his obsession, nurturing MySpace.

The calls to Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson for impromptu beers at a bar near the News Corporation’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters became less frequent, as did Mr. Murdoch’s help in cutting through the bureaucracy.

Another early sign of the culture clash was the News Corporation’s decision — which executives publicly complained about at the time — to move MySpace’s offices from Santa Monica, where employees worked in a loft space and had access to countless restaurants and coffee shops, to a building in Beverly Hills that was originally intended to be a medical facility. There were many fewer restaurants nearby, and employees began leaving work early to eat, and not returning until the next day.

Users, meanwhile, have been fleeing by the millions. MySpace’s aesthetic came to be seen as cluttered and unwieldy, like a locker door, while Facebook came along with a simple, Google-like interface.

Like many Americans, Erin Polley, a 29-year-old who works for a nonprofit organization in Indianapolis, received her social networking baptism years ago on MySpace.

And like many Americans, she has moved on.

“To me, it was kind of a precursor to how Facebook is now, where everyone is on it, and it’s almost a necessity,” said Ms. Polley, who added that she had not logged on to MySpace in years because it became “amateurish” and “boorish” and too focused on celebrities and music.

“Every time I logged on it was just messages from bands I barely heard of,” she said. “Facebook allows you to actually connect with real people, rather than bands or celebrities.”

The imperatives of making money, rather than focusing on technology and expanding new users, is what perhaps sealed MySpace’s fate.

“The paradox in business, especially at a public company, is, ‘When do you focus on growth, and when do you focus on money?’ ” said Mr. DeWolfe. “We focused on money and Facebook focused on growing the user base and user experience.”

Early on, the News Corporation announced an ambitious goal of generating $1 billion in revenue, which it failed to meet. A $900 million advertising deal with Google ensured that the News Corporation made its money back from the acquisition, but more recently MySpace’s performance has been a drag on the earnings of the News Corporation.

In the most recent quarter, the division that houses MySpace reported a $156 million operating loss.

“The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable,” said Chase Carey, the News Corporation’s president, in a conference call with investors in November.

Facebook also attracted more affluent users who are more sought by advertisers. The only demographic group that showed gains in MySpace use last year were Americans who earned less than $25,000 a year, according to comScore.

“MySpace was clearly the dominant player, but unfortunately never innovated and got complacent,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a technology blogger and analyst at Altimeter Group in San Mateo, Calif.

The urgency to make money and meet ambitious revenue goals set by the News Corporation meant the company was forced to accept an ever-increasing number of advertisements of dubious quality — like pop-up weight-loss ads — that turned off consumers.

Facebook and its co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, have taken the opposite tack. By refusing billions to sell out to a larger company, Mr. Zuckerberg has focused on expanding the user base and improving the site, as well as attracting capital — like the infusion from Goldman Sachs — while maintaining near total control and independence.

“Could MySpace have become what Facebook is, a utility used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide?” said David Kirkpatrick, a technology writer and author of “The Facebook Effect.” “It could not have, had it not overcome its heritage of Times Square tawdriness.”

While MySpace and its joint venture with the major music companies, MySpace Music, remains a showcase for bands and musicians, even that niche is under attack.

Andy Suzuki, of the acoustic singer-songwriter act Andy Suzuki and the Method, founded his band in 2006 while a student at Brown, and quickly set up a MySpace page.

“It never really did much for us,” said Mr. Suzuki, 24, who said he was about to delete his MySpace page and has moved the band to the start-up music site Bandcamp. “It was a place where people could go and listen to our music for free. But as we got more legit, how cumbersome MySpace is became evident.”

After several tries to revitalize MySpace — rounds of management changes, layoffs, a shift in direction from social networking to entertainment and a redesign last fall — the company is no longer considered a competitor to Facebook. Still, MySpace’s trajectory could prove instructive for Facebook as it negotiates its rapid growth.

“These Internet businesses tend to have a cycle,” said Mr. Wolf, the former MTV president who once sought to buy Facebook for Viacom. “There’s a lot of people who wonder if the same thing will happen to Facebook.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/te...12myspace.html





Study: Love Music? Thank a Substance in Your Brain
AP

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.

The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.

Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.

While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It's active in particular circuits of the brain.

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases happened.

Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived.

Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain's limbic system, which is involved in emotion.

The study volunteers chose a wide range of music — from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber's Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Debussy's Claire de Lune.

Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn't possible to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under study, too.

Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical School, called the study "remarkable" for the combination of techniques it used.

While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work "really nails it."

Music isn't the only cultural experience that affects the brain's reward circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied artwork.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011...the-Brain.html





Overall Music Sales Declined 2.4% In 2010
FMQB

Nielsen SoundScan has released its annual report on the previous year in the music industry, finding that overall music sales declined 2.4 percent in 2010. The report covers the time period from January 4, 2010 to January 2, 2011. Overall units of albums, singles, videos and digital tracks combined for 1.507 billion in 2010, a decrease from 1.545 billion in 2009. Overall album sales, which includes "track equivalent albums," were down 9.5 percent to 443.4 million from 489.8 million.

Digital sales were up in 2010, with individual tracks growing just one percent, to 1.172 billion. Digital album sales grew 13 percent, from 76.4 million to 86.3 million. Vinyl sales jumped in 2010 by 14 percent, from 2.5 million copies sold in 2009 to 2.8 million in 2010.

Universal Music Group once again holds the largest share of the industry, with 30.84 percent of total album sales in 2010, a slight increase from '09. Sony Music was down by roughly half a percentage, to 27.95 percent. Warner Music Group also lost roughly half a percent, with 20.01 percent of album sales in 2010. EMI increased its share of album sales to 10.18 percent of the market.

Unfortunately, every genre of music (with the exception of Rap) saw sales declines in 2010. Rap sales were up three percent, to over 27.3 million units sold. New Age albums saw the biggest drop off, with sales down 29 percent last year. Classical music was down 26 percent, followed by Jazz and Latin music off by 25 percent from 2009 sales. Alternative sales were off 21 percent, while Rock was down 16 percent.

Comparing current releases to catalog albums, the catalog records actually saw a greater decline. Current album sales fell 11 percent in 2010, but catalog album sales were off by 15 percent.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2072175





Sign of the Digital Times: Sony Shutting Plant that Used to Make 18M CDs a Month

Sony shuttering 50 year-old media plant in Pitman, NJ
Michael Cooney

Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants - citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues.

The plant, which is in Pitman, NJ and has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website.

The closure is a reflection of the seismic shift that has been going on in the music industry for years. In the first half of 2009, CD album sales were down about 18% to 110.3 million units from 134.6 million units during that same time last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Vinyl record sales actually have been doing quite well, over the past four years. In 2009, 2.5 million albums were sold in the US, up from 1.88 million in 2008, according to Nielsen Entertainment.

According to a recent Computerworld article: Record company revenues fell by 7.2% to $17 billion in 2009. At the same time, sales of digital music formats -- such as MP3s -- rose by 9.2% to $4.3 billion, which is 10 times what they were in 2004, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Physical album sales -- made up of CDs, tapes and vinyl albums -- fell by 12.7% globally. Digital music sales now account for 25.3% of all trade revenues to record companies. In the U.S., digital sales account for nearly half -- 43% -- of the recorded music market, according to the IFPI.

This isn't the first media producing plant Sony has eliminated. In 2010, it shut down its data storage magnetic tapes facility in Alabama that had operated for more than 30 years.

According to a Philadelphia Inquirer report, Sony is consolidating the production of music CDs and video DVDs in a plant in Terre Haute, Ind.
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...g-plant-used-m





Marshall McLuhan: Media Savant
David Carr

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

You Know Nothing of My Work!

By Douglas Coupland

216 pp. Atlas & Company. $24

Oh boy, yet another book about yet another modern thinker who suggests that “electronic inter#dependence” is the defining aspect of our time. All very ho-hum, except Marshall McLuhan, the subject of this book, figured it out 50 years before anybody ever updated his Facebook page or posted his whereabouts on Twitter.

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book. Not weird bad, just weird in a way that makes you stop and think about what precisely the author, Douglas Coupland, is up to. Like the man it chronicles, Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances. Rather than offering a #doorstop-size addition to the Great Man canon, it comes in at just over 200 pages that nonetheless sprawl and unfold to their own idiosyncratic rhythm.

This is the kind of book that will deliver major annoyance to academics who have made a career out of deconstructing McLuhan’s effort to define the modern media ecosystem. But to a reader interested in a little serious fun, a dip into someone we pretend to understand but don’t really know, “You Know Nothing of My Work!” is a welcome taunt. The book rewards by refusing to slip into the numbing vortex of academic discourse, taking a fizzy, pop-culture approach to explaining a deep thinker, one who ended up popularized almost in spite of himself.

The book will come in handy for those of us who parrot the phrase “The medium is the message” — the line that bore Mc#Luhan into public consciousness — without really understanding that the man who said it found the triumph of context over content to be profoundly depressing. Yes, we all know that McLuhan was a rock star, standing alongside Warhol and Leary in the ’60s pantheon (Time magazine ran a cover of him with the tag line “Canada’s Intellectual Comet”), but what in blazes was he talking about?

Coupland explains that it was Mc#Luhan’s ability to anticipate the homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media when the phenomenon was in its infancy that made him remarkable. Both a prisoner and a product of academic life, McLuhan broke out because he recognized the toxic effects of media long before media became the air we all breathe. And he did it before there was any genuine understanding of how human beings process mediated information. As Coupland writes: “One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

Put less charitably, McLuhan was the clock that was spectacularly right once a century. What made him singular was not his precision — anybody who takes “Finnegans Wake” as an ur-text will probably have a low signal-to-noise ratio. In between the puns, the aphorisms, the digressive language that seemed to chase itself and riddle the reader, McLuhan came up with a theory of media generation and consumption so plastic and fungible that it describes the current age without breaking a sweat.

Coupland, who has written at length on and for the Internet, does not belabor just how McLuhan predicted a world that he did not live to see — he died in 1980 — but simply frames the language and lets the reader marvel retrospectively. After doing relatively straightforward content analysis of advertising in “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man” in 1951, McLuhan began thinking about the systems that produced all that commercial rhetoric. And then beginning with “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man” in 1962 and following up with “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” in 1964, McLuhan saw the dimensions of an emerging global village in which the means of communication began to define and overwhelm the conversation. When he wrote, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” he was describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed. In the lexicon of McLuhan, the Web would be the ultimate “cool” medium defined by participation and a multiplicity of inputs. And he was far from romantic, even back then, about what that might mean for civil, thoughtful #discourse.

“When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other,” McLuhan said. “The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.” Placing that in a more contemporary milieu, what happens now that everyone is a broadcaster? Ubiquitous, cheap technology (digital cameras) and a friction-free route to an audience (YouTube) means that people might broadcast images of their closeted gay roommate having sex, and that the unwitting star of their little network might subsequently, tragically, jump off a bridge.

In Coupland’s hands, McLuhan’s upbringing is a chatty, gossipy exercise, in which his encounters as a young academic with the thinking and writing of G. K. Chesterton, the English writer and so-called prince of paradox, are no more or less important than the fact that he spent endless hours arguing with (and trying to impress) a perpetually unsatisfied mother who taught elocution in the provinces of Canada. Born Herbert Marshall McLuhan in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911, he attended the University of Manitoba, receiving a bachelor’s degree before heading off to Cambridge, where he studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and fell under the sway of the New Criticism. He then taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before beginning a long series of teaching assignments at various Catholic universities, including St. Louis University and Assumption College, and ending up at St. Michael’s, a Catholic college of the University of Toronto. His growing renown eventually led to the establishment of the Center for Culture and Technology there, which would serve as his intellectual base camp.

Coupland argues persuasively that McLuhan thought differently because he was wired differently, with two arteries pumping blood to his brain. (A stroke that left him unable to speak is attributed in some aspects to this biological anomaly.) In what seems to be a bit of a trend, almost a narrative infection in biographies of high-impact eccentrics, McLuhan is also placed on the spectrum of autism, although given his sensitivity to loud noises, love of ritual, distaste for physical contact and general obliviousness, it is not much of a stretch.

McLuhan was a mash-up of remarkable incongruities: He loathed television, yet stared at it long enough to discern its ability to generate mass culture. He was more interested in Dagwood Bumstead and his deleterious effects on the modern American male than he was in the Second World War, even though he moved to England to study at Cambridge the day war was declared. He loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis. He was a paranoid scold who not only believed in hell with the fervor of a Catholic convert, but felt the world was quickly headed toward that fiery portal.

Coupland has no pretension to having written the definitive biography of Mc#Luhan. “You Know Nothing of My Work!” is a sketch of someone who coined a meme — “the global village” — rendered by another who did some coining of his own: Coupland wrote “Generation X.” The biography’s subtitle is a nod to just how misunderstood McLuhan was (he was frequently dismissed as an evangelist for rather than a chronicler of modern media) and a signal that the book is not about to take itself too seriously; it derives from a snatch of dialogue from a McLuhan cameo in “Annie Hall.”

Coupland, a Canadian who has his own struggles with noise and is something of a polymath (an accomplished designer and artist who is also a novelist, journalist and documentarian), sees himself as a kindred spirit and shares his subject’s taste for finding meaning in marginalia. The main text of the book is interrupted with found scraps from the Web, a test for autism and lists that may or may not illuminate the adjacent pages. I found some of this puzzling, but began to think that puzzling out what was in front of me was part of the conversation Coupland was trying to have with the reader, all through the prism of a biography of a man who loved puns and riddles.

In addition to his role as seer, Mc#Luhan was an undisputed crank, and as both fame and infirmity began to overtake him, he lapsed into parody that suggested he had grown intoxicated with his self-referential prose. For someone thought of as the first modern media savant, he was capable of incredibly archaic, hermetic thinking. In Coupland’s rendering, it was clear that McLuhan thought of women as accessories to men. He never took a side during World War II, and in his later years failed to understand there were revolutions taking place beyond media. In 1967, something of a golden age for black literature and a time of rising black consciousness, he wrote as if he were describing an alien life form: “The Negro is turned on by electricity. The old literacy never turned him on because it rejected and degraded the Negro, but electricity turns him on and accepts him totally as an integral human being.” Where to begin with that one?

Like many of McLuhan’s fanboys, Coupland acknowledges, but then looks past the quirks and wrinkles on the way to placing him in the pantheon, writing: “Had Marshall not been born, there would have been a hole in the world. There would have been a hole in the sky; a hole in heaven.”

Much of what McLuhan wrote and some of what Coupland relates are beyond my ken, but I don’t know about that “hole in heaven” stuff. It’s hyperbole, a passage written in purple, but there is something so good-natured in the telling, so unpretentious in its unalloyed admiration for an incredibly complicated thinker, that the reader will be inclined to let Coupland get away with it. McLuhan may not have approved — his taste in literature tended toward far more punishing tutorials — but no doubt he would have understood. “Art is anything you can get away with,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/bo...ew/Carr-t.html





Larsson Partner: 'I Can Finish Millennium Series'

Eva Gabrielsson, the longtime partner of Swedish author Stieg Larsson, as said she could complete the unfinished fourth volume of the wildly-successful Millennium crime trilogy if she could secure the rights.

The longtime partner of Stieg Larsson says she could finish a fourth volume in the phenomenal Millennium series left incomplete by the Swedish novelist's sudden death, if she secures the rights.

In a 160-page memoir to be published in France, Sweden and Norway next Wednesday, Eva Gabrielsson casts new light on the creation of the crime series that has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.

Larsson, 50, died of a heart attack in November 2004, before the publication of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest".

Gabrielsson, his partner for 32 years, has been locked in a dispute with Larsson's family over his inheritance. The journalist-turned-novelist died without a will, and the couple never had children.

"She is not fighting to recover money, but to obtain moral rights on Millennium and all the political writings of her companion," said a spokesman for her French publisher, Actes Sud.

Not unlike the trilogy's main characters -- crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander -- Larsson campaigned throughout his journalistic career against extremism and racism with Gabrielsson, an architect, at his side.

On the much-talked-about fourth volume, Gabrielsson confirmed that Larsson, typing on a computer, had gotten just over 200 pages into the story before his untimely death.

"I am able to finish it ... Steig and I often wrote together," she said, adding that she would only do so once she gets undisputed rights to his work from the Larsson family.

"It is not my intention to recount here the plot of the fourth volume," she said. "On the other hand, I want to say that Lisbeth little by little frees herself from her ghosts and her enemies."

Confronted with death threats, the couple never married in order not to make it easier for neo-Nazis to track them, she explains in the book, which is to be published in other markets including the United States later this year.

Under Swedish law, the author's assets -- including copyrights -- thereby automatically went to his father and brother.

In June last year, soon after a Swedish film adaptation of "Tattoo" was released in the United States, Gabrielsson turned down the family's offer of €2.1 millions ($2.75 million) plus a seat on the board of directors of the company that manages the rights to Larsson's work.

In her book, she condemns what she calls "the Stieg Larsson industry and brand... I don't want to see coffee mugs and other 'Millennium' merchandise; I want to see the 'real' Stieg respected".

Written in collaboration with French journalist Marie-Francoise Colombani, Gabrielsson's memoirs recount her childhood, how she met Larsson, their lives together and the struggles they confronted together, notably through Expo, the periodical he founded in 1995 as the far-right was gaining traction in Sweden.

Both Larsson and his editorial staff "moved around constantly to escape the Nazis who were harassing them," she recalled.

Millennium fans will find two chapters particularly gripping, as they flesh out the characters whose fictional lives echoed the real experiences of Larsson and Gabrielsson.
http://www.thelocal.se/31412/20110113/





Apple, News Corp. Push Back Launch Date
Peter Kafka

Turns out you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s long-awaited iPad news service.

Apple and News Corp. have made a joint decision to push back next week’s planned launch, according to sources familiar with the companies’ plans. The delay is supposed to give Apple time to tweak its new subscription service for publications sold through its iTunes platform.

Plans to debut the iPad newspaper at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next Wednesday have been tabled “for weeks, not months,” I’m told.

The issue isn’t with the app itself, which News Corp. executives and their proxies have been showing off over the last few weeks, but a new subscription feature that Apple is building into iTunes.

As I noted last month, the Daily was supposed “to use a new “push” subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers’ iPads every morning.”

A PR rep from News Corp., which also owns this Web site, confirmed the delay, but wouldn’t comment further. Apple declined to comment.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2011...k-launch-date/





Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data

Brian O'Leary on why publishers should tackle book piracy with open minds and lots of data.
Jenn Webb

As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy?

In the following interview, Magellan Media founder and TOC 2011 speaker Brian O'Leary (@brianoleary) discusses the current state of book piracy, how measurement data isn't sufficient to determine its impact, and why DRM is a poor anti-piracy tool.

What's the current impact of piracy on the book publishing industry?

Brian O'LearyBrian O'Leary: We don't know. Some people will tell you that it's the biggest problem facing publishing or that ebook piracy will kill publishing. None of those perspectives are informed by solid data.

We undertook research two-and-a-half-years ago with O'Reilly, and we've been studying Thomas Nelson as well, to measure the impact of piracy on paid content sales. We approached it as if it were cooperative marketing. We would look at the impact of what sales looked like before there was piracy, say for four to eight weeks, and then we'd look at the impact of piracy afterward. Essentially, if the net impact of piracy is negative, then you would see sales fall off more quickly after piracy; if it were positive, the opposite.

Data that we collected for the titles O'Reilly put out showed a net lift in sales for books that had been pirated. So, it actually spurred, not hurt, sales. But we were only looking at O'Reilly and Thomas Nelson. The results are not emblematic of publishing overall. It could be more conservative, it could be less conservative. We just don't have enough data. I've tried to get other publishers to join in, but it really hasn't been a successful mission. Even at a low- or no-cost offer, publishers seem reluctant to collect the data required to reveal the true impact of book piracy.

Can content tracking tools, such as those from Attributor, curb piracy?

BO: Companies like Attributor gather data that specifies how many files were uploaded or downloaded from pirate sites. Their methodology, to me, is a little problematic, but that's not really the big problem. The most significant challenge is we don't know what the impact is on paid sales. Common methodologies count the number of times that something appears on a site and assumes every one of those is a lost sale.

I would offer two counter points: First, the method for counting downloads of pirated books is clunky at best. Second, you can't say that every download is equivalent to a lost sale. Some are, but there's at least some likelihood that the pirated titles either spurred sales or represented a download that never would have resulted in a sale anyway.

The other thing, too, is you've got to look at where the downloads occur. If it's a North American title and the downloads occurred in Romania, I'm not that worried about it if I'm a publisher. It actually, if anything, says to me I should be moving my English language rights and my translation rights faster.

It's not that piracy is not a problem, it's just that it's not demonstratively a problem until you know what's actually happening.

I think content-tracking tools are good if you're using them as a starting point for a conversation. No one can sample all of the torrent sites and know exactly what's going on. The sampling is limited in how broadly you can draw conclusions, particularly about things like trade publishing versus academic publishing. Companies like Attributor tell you when piracy is occurring. What they can't do, and what publishers need to generate the data to do, is understand the impact of piracy.

What tactics are publishers using to thwart piracy?

BO: Most publishers focus on variations of enforcement. They find out that piracy occurs, they issue a takedown order, and they escalate it if they so choose. The jury's out on whether that actually works. I think in general for offshore torrent sites, it's probably not that effective. All you need to do is look at WikiLeaks and you'll see a whole host of examples of how hard it is in a global Internet environment to get something truly taken down.

Some companies are focused on applying fairly strict DRM software to their digital books. I'm pretty adamant on DRM: It has no impact whatsoever on piracy. Any good pirate can strip DRM in a matter of seconds to minutes. A pirate can scan a print copy easily as well. DRM is really only useful for keeping people who otherwise might have shared a copy of a book from doing so.

Is piracy really a threat to the book industry?

BO: I don't have enough data to say unequivocally "yes" or "no" to the extent of the piracy threat. I think what leads to rampant piracy is not meeting emergent demands. The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn't put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers.

As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there's a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market.

I think piracy has become more acute with ebooks, not because ebooks are easily pirated but because ebooks are easily visible. So, for example, if I'm living in South Africa and I speak English, but I want to read Nora Roberts, and Nora Roberts is only published in North America, I might have to wait through a four-year cycle to get her latest book. That lead time made sense when it was about ink on paper. But if it's an ebook, as a reader, I want to read it today — I love Nora Roberts, and I'd pay for her latest book, but I can't get it here because there's no service that will sell me an ebook in South Africa. That's when piracy starts to occur. Readers say: "I would have paid for it, but they wouldn't give it to me. They frustrated my demand."

Will publishers — and content producers in general — get past the "lost revenue" mindset attached to digital piracy?

BO: I think they already are. Not globally and not entirely, but I think that people are beginning to say, "Maybe this isn't as big a deal as we thought it was." When you see companies like O'Reilly moving a lot of their sales from print to digital, you'd think they would be more prone to piracy. And yet, we didn't see that in our research. Publishers have seen other things occur that suggest that being widely available in digital formats that are not DRM restricted has helped with predictable sales. Baen Books, again, is a good example.

I think there are plenty of people paying Attributor and other companies to monitor and issue takedown notices. I'm just not sure that it makes a difference. The really interesting things are happening around innovation in how we deliver content to people. That's what's fun, and those innovators will find ways to make money. I just hope the folks who find interesting ways to make money are not all technology providers and platform companies, but publishers as well.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/boo...-drm-data.html





Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?
Nick Bilton

MY wife and I sat cross-legged on the floor of a local Barnes & Noble store recently, surrounded by several large piles of books. We were searching for interior design ideas for a new home that we are planning to buy.

As we lobbed the books back and forth, sharing kitchen layouts and hardwood floor textures, we snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones. We wanted to share them later with our contractor.

After a couple of hours of this, we placed the books back on the shelf and went home, without buying a thing. But the digital images came home with us in our smartphones.

Later that evening, I felt a few pangs of guilt. I asked my wife: Did we do anything wrong? And, I wondered, had we broken any laws by photographing those pages?

It’s not as if we had destroyed anything: We didn’t rip out any pages. But if we had wheeled a copier machine into the store, you can be sure the management would have soon wheeled us and the machine out of there.

But our smartphones really functioned as hand-held copiers. Did we indeed go too far?

I asked Julie A. Ahrens, associate director of the Fair Use Project at the Stanford Law School. “The core issue here is that you are creating a copy of something rather than buying it,” she said. “Is it morally incorrect? Maybe. But it entirely depends how much of the book you copy, and what you do with that copy, that would determine if it was illegal.”

These kinds of questions aren’t entirely new, of course. Consider the heyday of the photocopier, in the 1960s and early ’70s. After the Xerox copying machine was introduced into offices in 1959, it quickly found its way into libraries. The price of copies dropped, and people began to photocopy books and journals in large numbers. Many students discovered that it was cheaper to photocopy a friend’s textbook — or a copy of his copy — than to buy the book.

By the 1970s, the publishing industry saw the copier as the enemy, and publishers began to file lawsuits — prefiguring, by several decades, the music industry’s suits against those who would download free music over the Internet.

Time magazine covered this earlier era of copyright confusion. The photocopier’s opponents said the technology enabled theft and “stifled creativity and punched holes in the copyright laws,” according to one article.

After endless legal battles, the publishing industry succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Copyright Act of 1976, which defined “fair use” of copyrighted material and sought to establish a set of rules for ownership of content. It allowed limited replication of snippets of music, video and text, and it gave teachers the right to photocopy certain materials without having to pay hefty fees to publishers.

That worked well enough — for a while. But it didn’t take long before new technologies came along. The Internet and other digital tools like file sharing enabled new forms of duplication and set off new copyright disputes.

Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and the director of its Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation, spent years investigating the economic impact of the Xerox machine on the publishing industry.
He said my cellphone copying bore some resemblance to that earlier behavior, but because it depended on the portability and ubiquity of the phone’s camera, he said it was closer to music piracy. “When you’re talking about people making copies of things with their cellphones, it’s much closer to people making MP3s than people using Xerox copies of books,” Mr. Liebowitz said. “In the 1970s, everyone didn’t have a photocopier sitting in their home. Now everyone has a cellphone in their pocket that can easily copy anything.”

Music file sharing didn’t become a mass activity until a simple digital compression technology, MP3, was invented. That made it simple to copy (in the industry’s view, steal) the music.

As the technology in cellphones advances, higher-resolution cameras, image-enhancing software and high-clarity screens make it delightfully easy to capture a photograph and view it later. There may not be Web sites devoted to purloined pictures — there are such sites for music or videos — but many people have a cavalier attitude toward using cameras to obtain copyrighted material.

Charles Nesson, the Weld professor of law at Harvard Law School and founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society there, also said that the act of “documenting” a book, as he called it, bears many similarities to pirating music. It could lead to a new wave of legal cases brought by bookstores or publishers, he said, much like the litigation brought by music companies against sites like Napster and LimeWire and their users.

“If people are taking a picture of a picture to take with them, then is it is exactly like the MP3 issue,” Mr. Nesson said.

Need I worry yet that a phalanx of lawyers will soon grab me between the Home Décor and New Age aisles at Barnes & Noble?

Mr. Nesson says the question is unanswerable for now. The music industry, he says, has a strategy of going after individuals while not addressing changing technologies as they apply to copyright law. The publishing industry could well do the same, he adds. “I think the law and the draconian action of copyright holders will stay the way it is for a long time,” said Mr. Nesson “There’s change in the air, but it’s not a change that’s going to come very quickly.”

Indeed, it could be years before the publishing industry feels real economic pressure caused by people who take pictures of books or magazines with their mobile phones. In fact, it’s quite possible that digital technology will make this particular problem moot.

As Ms. Ahrens says, “By the time this becomes an issue, we might not even have bookstores anymore.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/business/16ping.html





How to Remove DRM from Your Kindle Ebooks

Amazon's Kindle jumpstarted the ebook revolution, but that doesn't make it the eReader of choice for everyone. If you've got some Kindle books you'd like to use with a different device, here's how to remove the DRM so you can.

Too Smart Guys created the video (the tutorial portion starting at 2:05), demonstrating how to remove DRM from Kindle ebooks that you legally purchased. To get started, you need the following:

* Kindle for PC (Yes, this means you need Windows but it Kindle for PC reportedly works with Wine.)
* Python (Anything 2.x should work fine, but if you want to follow instructions exactly ou can download 2.6.4.)
* The Unswindle Python script
* The supporting mobidedrm.py script

Note: the Python scripts are currently down but Too Smart Guys have been kind enough to provide a torrent you can use to download the files instead.

Once you've got all of that installed and ready, open up the unswindle.py script. You may be required to browse to python.exe in order to run it, but either way the goal is to run it with Python. After an extended moment, the Kindle for PC application will launch. You'll find your Kindle books in Archived Items. Open one up and then quit the Kindle for PC app. At this point you should be prompted to save the DRM-free ebook. Pick a location, and you're all set.
http://lifehacker.com/5733075/how-to...-kindle-ebooks





I Write Free Books and People Buy Them. It Works Out Surprisingly Well.
Mark Pilgrim

My big accomplishment of 2010 was finishing the first edition of Dive Into HTML5 and working with O’Reilly to publish it on paper as HTML5: Up & Running (as well as several downloadable DRM-free formats). I also accomplished a few minor personal things, but in this post I’m going to focus on the book.

The book went on sale in mid-August and earned out almost immediately. “Earning out” is a publishing term which means that the book has sold enough copies that my cut of the profits has paid back the advance payments that O’Reilly gave me during the writing process. Which means that I’m already receiving royalty checks for real money. Of the four books I’ve published through traditional publishers, this is only the second book to earn out. (The original Dive Into Python was the first, and it was on sale for over two years before it earned out.)

“HTML5: Up & Running” sold over 14,000 copies in the first six weeks, of which about 25% were digital downloads and 75% were books on paper. Folks sure do love them some paper. The book continues to be available online for free, as it was during the entire writing process, under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. This open publishing model generated buzz well in advance of the print publication, and it resulted in over 1,500 pre-orders which shipped the day the book went on sale. Res ipsa loquitur.

The online edition at diveintohtml5.org includes Google Analytics so I can evilly track your every movement find out what the hell is going on. The analytics tell me many things. Some highlights:

* Throughout 2010, the site served 2 million visitors and 3.9 million pageviews. Each chapter is on its own page because that’s how I wrote the book (in HTML5). I don’t need to inflate pageviews for non-existent advertisers (I work for Google so I’m not allowed to put ads on it anyway), and I never got around to writing a split-chapter-into-multiple-pages script.
* 40% of the site’s traffic came from search engines. 30% came from direct traffic or non-web applications like Twitter or email clients. 30% came from one of over 8,900 referring sites.
* 98.7% of the search engine traffic came from Google. Less than 1% came from Bing. The rest came from search engines that I didn’t know still existed.
* John Gruber sent me three times as much traffic as Bing.
* The most popular chapters tracked closely with the most popular incoming search keywords. HTML5 video was the most popular topic, logging almost half a million pageviews alone. #2 was web forms, followed closely by canvas, semantics, and Geolocation. Microdata was in dead last. Seriously, the shit that nobody gives about my beloved Peeks, Pokes & Pointers chart is rivaled only by the shit that nobody gives about microdata.
* My little history of HTML logged almost a quarter million pageviews, and the average visitor spent almost four minutes reading it. (Only the video chapter was higher, at 4:45.) Folks love them some Internet folklore.
* 6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. That is not a typo. The site works fine in Internet Explorer — the site practices what it preaches, and the live examples use a variety of fallbacks for legacy browsers — so this is entirely due to the subject matter. Microsoft has completely lost the web development community.
* 4% of visitors read the site on a mobile device. Of those people, 85% used an iOS device (iPhone + iPad + iPod Touch). 14% used Android, and the rest used mobile devices that I didn’t know had browsers.
* The site itself, its typography, and the book’s live examples have led to bug fixes in at least four browsers and one font. Hooray for living on the bleeding edge.

Although it makes little sense to talk about “editions” of a web site (you can see a changelog if you like), O’Reilly and I have already discussed the possibility of doing a new edition of the printed book. Besides rolling up all the updates since August, we’ve discussed one chapter on Web Workers and another on web sockets. Since all the world’s browsers have recently disabled their web sockets implementations due to a subtle (but fatal) protocol-level security vulnerability, the Web Workers chapter will probably come first. No promises, you understand. No promises at all.

If there are new chapters someday, I will urge O’Reilly to provide them for free to everyone who has already bought a digital copy. But understand that the final decision is not mine to make. Not mine at all. In any event, it will be available online at diveintohtml5.org for free, like the rest of the book.

I’m not big on predictions, but I do have one for 2011: HTML5 will continue to be popular, because anything popular will get labeled “HTML5.”
http://diveintomark.org/archives/201...dive-into-2010





The Library: The Original Book Pirate
Candace Adams

In a recent article on AOL about E-piracy: The High Cost of Stolen Books, the author talks about file sharing and bit torrent sites and the legal lengths that publishers and authors are going to get these sites to “cease and desist” sharing their work. While the article cites best-selling author Michael Crichton as losing 15,174 potential buyers of his book due to illegal downloads, the question becomes: If readers are only willing to read your book if they can steal it for free, would they actually have bought the book if these sites didn’t exist?

For the longest time, there has been a government sponsored, file sharing community accessible to everyone—including children! It’s called the public library. Authors sell a handful of copies to the public library with the understanding that the book will be shared hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times at no additional cost. Are people who patron libraries stealing money from the author by being potential buyers of a book who read the book without paying for it?

Perhaps authors see file sharing sites as different from libraries because there is a finite number of print books in library circulation, but in a file sharing community, every leecher of an ebook (one who downloads content) potentially becomes a seeder of the same content (one who uploads). This exponential growth of the number of copies available could definitely make authors and publishers uneasy.

But is the legal system really the best way to police this when thousands of everyday individuals are the culprits? As the AOL article mentioned, copies are taken down only to be replaced by some other user. The different proprietary formats for different e-readers is probably the best solution to curbing piracy currently in place. However, as ebooks are moving to make ePub the de facto “standard” format, it will only make it easier for users of different devices to share among themselves. Rather than paying high-priced lawyers to keep ebooks off the street, they might do better to spend that money on R&D for better encryption software.
http://www.examiner.com/publishing-i...al-book-pirate





Library of Congress Gets a Mile of Music
Larry Rohter

The Library of Congress has begun taking possession of a huge donation of recordings, some 200,000 metal, glass and lacquer master discs from the period 1926 to 1948 that have been languishing in the subterranean vaults of Universal Music Group, the largest music conglomerate in the United States.

The bequest, which is to be formally announced on Monday, contains music representing every major genre of American popular song of that era — jazz, blues, country and the smooth pop of the pre-rock-’n’-roll period — as well as some light classical and spoken-word selections. One historic highlight is the master recording of Bing Crosby’s 1947 version of “White Christmas,” which according to Guinness World Records is the best-selling single of all time.

“This is a treasure trove, a mile-plus of material on the shelves, much of it music that has been out of circulation for many years,” said Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded sound section of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. “You can’t get any better copies than these, so this represents a major upgrade.”

Under the agreement negotiated during discussions that began two years ago the Library of Congress has been granted ownership of the physical discs and plans to preserve and digitize them. But Universal, a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Vivendi that was formerly known as the Music Corporation of America, or MCA, retains both the copyright to the music recorded on the discs and the right to commercialize that music after it has been digitized.

“The thinking behind this is that we have a very complementary relationship,” said Vinnie Freda, executive vice president for digital logistics and business services at Universal Music Logistics. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to economically preserve these masters in a digital format, and the library is interested in making historically important material available. So they will preserve the physical masters for us and make them available to academics and anyone who goes to the library, and Universal retains the right to commercially exploit the masters.”

The agreement will also permit the Web site of the Library of Congress to stream some of the recordings for listeners around the world once they are cataloged and digitized, a process that Mr. DeAnna said could take five years or more, depending on government appropriations. But both sides said it had not yet been determined which songs would be made available, a process that could be complicated by Universal’s plans to sell some of the digitized material through iTunes.

Universal’s bequest is the second time in recent months that a historic archive of popular music has been handed over to a nonprofit institution dedicated to preserving America’s recorded musical heritage. Last spring the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired nearly 1,000 discs, transcribed from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the recording engineer William Savory, featuring some of the biggest names in jazz.

Michael Cuscuna, the jazz record producer and historian who runs Mosaic Records, a label specializing in jazz reissues, said of the Universal donation, “This is very crucial material for us, and we’ve been assured it will be an active archive that is not going to be tied up in bureaucracy, and that we and others will have access to it.”

“Having lived in the vaults for many years,” he added, he is aware that “there has been a lot of attrition” to the archives of major labels because of “stupid decisions, acts of nature, and material that has been lost, stolen, or never saved,” so a transfer to the Library of Congress is theoretically welcome.

Much of the material has been stored at Iron Mountain, the former limestone mine near Boyers, Pa., that also holds numerous government and corporate records. Universal began delivering the material to a Library of Congress site in Culpepper, Va., just before Christmas, so it is still too early for archivists to know what historic recordings, rarities and curiosities may be lurking in the collection. But a quick look at the lacquer recordings, which are being examined first because they are the most vulnerable, has already given hints of the riches that might be there.

Many of the lacquer discs appear to be backup recordings of studio sessions, including the chatter of performers and producers between takes. “Certainly there are many, many takes, 8 to 10, of some songs,” Mr. DeAnna said, “so that you can track the decisions made in the studio and get some sense of what they were deciding, the criteria they were using” to determine how a song should sound.

One such sequence of studio recordings has Bing Crosby instructing backing musicians and singers how he wants to shape a song. Other discs feature Crosby and the guitarist Les Paul. Mr. DeAnna said there was even one session, which would have to be from the 1950s, of Crosby’s encounter with the New York City doo-wop group the Jesters.

The Universal Music Group, today the largest group of labels in the beleaguered recording industry, began its life in 1934 as Decca Records, the American affiliate of the British recording company of the same name. Over the years as it was melded first into MCA and then Universal, it acquired or established subsidiary labels like Brunswick, Coral, Vocalion and Mercury, whose recordings from the era of 78 r.p.m. discs are also part of the archive.

The collection bequeathed to the Library of Congress does not, however, include recordings from the vaults of some of the important blues and soul labels that MCA acquired on its way to becoming the largest of the “big four” record companies. For example master recordings of both Chess Records (and its subsidiary Checker, Cadet and Aristocrat labels) and Motown Records (and its Tamla and Gordy subsidiaries) are excluded from the agreement, at least initially.

“We’re hoping this is a long-term relationship that could span decades,” Mr. Freda said. “If all goes well, our hope is to eventually deliver another tranche, maybe the 1950s and into the early 1960s, and cherry pick from that.”

The exact monetary value of the collection is not known, and a formal assessment has not yet been made. But in addition to the savings that will be gained from no longer having to store the discs, Universal could be in line for a substantial tax write-off as a result of the donation.

“That’s a complicated question for a lot of reasons,” Mr. Freda said. “It’s not a yes or no answer. Universal is a subsidiary of a much larger company, so it’s got a lot of complications. But I can absolutely tell you that without a doubt that was not a consideration of why we did this. To the extent that we get a tax benefit, that will only be an extra plus.”

Besides music by towering figures like Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland, the collection includes songs by stars like the Mills Brothers, Fred Waring, Guy Lombardo and the Andrews Sisters. For connoisseurs of American roots music, there is also country music from Ernest Tubb, bluegrass from Bill Monroe and a wide variety of guitar and piano blues, gospel and jug-band music.

“This is going to be the gift that keeps giving, that keeps our engineers and staff here busy for years,” Mr. DeAnna said. “Our challenge right now is to decide where to start, because the sheer numbers are just staggering.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/ar...10masters.html





EU Report Warns of "Digital Dark Age" if Digitization of Cultural Heritage Left to Private Sector
Audrey Watters

The European Union says its member states must do more to digitize Europe's cultural heritage and not simply leave that work to the private sector. To do otherwise, suggests a recently commissioned report, could steer Europe away from a digital Renaissance and "into a digital dark age."

The report by the "Comité des Sages" was delivered to the European Commission earlier this week and calls for continued development of Europeana, the portal to Europe's digital libraries, as well as for efforts to expand access to public domain material. EU member states must ensure that all material that's digitized with public funding is available online and that all public domain masterpieces are available via Europeana by 2016. Works that are still covered by copyright but are no longer distributed commercially need to be brought online as well, and if the rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have the opportunity to digitize the material and make it available to the public.

"We are of the opinion that the public sector has the primary responsibility for making our cultural heritage accessible and preserving it for future generations," the report argues. "This responsibility for and control over Europe's heritage cannot be left to one or a few market players, although we strongly encourage the idea of bringing more private investments and companies into the digitisation arena through a fair and balanced partnership."

That's an oblique reference to Google, whose efforts to digitize the world's books have caused some concerns in Europe over copyright issues and licensing agreements. The report notes that Google has digitized about 15 million of the world's 130 million unique books and has entered into exclusivity agreements with some institutions. The report urges agreements of this sort between the private sector and public cultural institutions to be made public, with the preferential use for the digitized material to be kept to a maximum of seven years.

The report does recognize the importance of these private efforts and says that EU member states need to find a way to match private investment and build partnerships with private companies. But as the report notes, "Can Europe afford to be inactive and wait, or leave it to one or more private players to digitise our common cultural heritage? Our answer is a resounding 'no'."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...igitizatio.php





Kantar Media: Radio Saw 6.2% Growth In First 3 Quarters Of '10
FMQB

Kantar Media has released its report on U.S. ad revenue in the first three quarters of 2010, finding that radio saw growth in all categories last year. According to Kantar's data, comparing the first nine months of '10 to '09, radio's overall ad dollars grew by 6.2 percent. Local radio was up 3.8 percent, national spot radio grew by an impressive 15.9 percent and network radio increased by 1.7 percent.

Total ad spending in the first nine months of 2010 was up 6.4 percent overall, to $94.06 billion. Ad spending in Q3 was up 8.7 percent compared to the third quarter of 2009, the largest quarterly gain since 2004.

"The advertising recovery expanded during the third quarter to include stronger participation by the long-tail of marketers beyond the Top 1000," said Jon Swallen, SVP of Research at Kantar Media. "Having fewer resources, this segment was previously cautious about raising budgets and it lagged behind the early year rebound in ad spending. Smaller advertisers are now as fully vested as their large counterparts and in that sense, the advertising recovery has reached a significant milestone."

Looking outside of radio, TV ad revenue was up 10.5 percent in the first three quarters of 2010, with Internet display ad revenue up 7.7 percent. Outdoor revenue grew 7.3 percent and magazine revenue was up 2.6 percent. Newspapers were the only category to continue a decline, with ad dollars down 2.9 percent from a year earlier.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2071058





Redbox Quarterly Performance Disappoints
Don Reisinger

Redbox owner Coinstar had a worse-than-expected fourth quarter as it severely underestimated the impact 28-day delays on movie availability, among other factors, would have on its operation.

The company said yesterday that it expects to make between $78 million and $82 million when it announces fourth-quarter earnings next month. Coinstar initially estimated that it would generate a profit of $84 million to $90 million. Moreover, it has revised its 2011 revenue outlook down from $1.85 billion to $1.70 billion.

"Overall, the performance of the Redbox business during the fourth quarter was not in line with our forecast," Coinstar CEO Paul Davis said in a statement. "This was Redbox's first holiday season with 28-day delayed titles, and we underestimated the impact that the delay would have on demand during the fourth quarter."

Davis also said that his company "expected much better performance from Blu-ray and had purchased to a higher level of demand." The company first started offering Blu-ray rentals in July.

Even though it didn't live up to expectations, Redbox still performed quite well in the fourth quarter, Coinstar said. The company said its rental business was up 38 percent year-over-year with 144 million movies rented during the quarter.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter was quick to point out that Redbox's lower-than-expected performance in the fourth quarter does not indicate trouble at Coinstar. He said in a note to investors today that the rental company's fourth quarter "was a hiccup attributable to overly aggressive guidance." And he specifically blamed Coinstar management for the mistake.

"We believe today's preannouncement is more a reflection of management's inability to accurately forecast than of a serious deterioration in the Redbox business," he said.

Pachter was especially critical of Coinstar management's underestimation of the impact 28-day delays have on the rental company's operation.

Last year, Redbox inked deals with Warner Bros., Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and Twentieth Century Fox to offer the studios' titles 28 days after they were made available at retail. He said that the studios "took full advantage of their head-start," and helped contribute to his estimate that Redbox had 14 million fewer rentals during the quarter than it expected.

"Prior to yesterday's preannouncement, we believed that the typical Redbox and Netflix customer is unaware of, or doesn't mind, the 28-day window for the majority of the year," Pachter wrote. "It is now clear that the 28-day window can make a difference in spending patterns at the holidays."

Redbox's other issue on the quarter, according to Pachter, was its inability to manage its "rent and return anywhere" offering. The program lets users rent a movie from a Redbox kiosk in one location and return it to another when they're done. He said that the program "caused over-supply of key titles in some kiosks and under-supply in others." The impact of that shift could have turned some customers away.

On Redbox's Blu-ray woes on the quarter, Pachter offered up a solution: "Those selecting Blu-ray should be shown only Blu-ray titles, and those selecting standard definition should be shown only standard definition." Currently, Redbox lets users browse Blu-ray and DVD titles at the same time.

Going forward, Pachter sees strong performance from Redbox. He told investors that Coinstar should "deliver sequential earnings growth throughout the year," and perhaps most importantly, he believes that "management has learned its lesson."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20028545-17.html





The TV-Internet Nuptials
Brian Stelter

The blending of television and the Internet is inevitable. But will it happen in concert with the major cable and satellite distributors, or in spite of them?

That question loomed large at the Consumer Electronics Show last week as manufacturers promoted Internet-connected television sets and companies like Cisco and Sony talked about “redefining television.” All involved know that connecting the Internet to television and vice versa could solidify the distributors’ place in the food chain — or greatly erode it.

“We want to use all this technology to make a better consumer experience,” Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said in an interview after speaking on stage here. A better experience, it stands to reason, will help Time Warner Cable and other cable companies retain customers, protecting the lucrative subscription TV business from the prospect of cord-cutting. It will also help manufacturers sell more hardware for the living room.

During the trade show, however, there was a point in every demonstration where fantasy collided with reality — and it was usually when the cable and satellite distributors came up.

“The idea here is to work with cable,” said Google’s Rishi Chandra as he showed off Google TV to Julius Genachowski, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, on Friday afternoon. When working together, Google TV can seamlessly find live television channels, recorded shows, on-demand options and Web streams. So far, though, it works that way only with Dish Network.

“Right now,” Mr. Chandra said, “we’re limited.”

After seeing television setups at the show, Mr. Genachowski said, “They’re incentivizing the cable companies to innovate.”

At the show, media and technology executives largely agreed with that sentiment. And signs of innovation were evident: Time Warner Cable, one of the biggest cable operators, announced that it would start delivering programming via its network straight into some Sony and Samsung television sets, removing the need for a set-top cable television box.

The so-called smart TVs receive video via the Internet, protect the video as directed by the content owners, and display it all with a program guide that is much slicker than the ones that most people are saddled with now. Time Warner Cable customers who buy the television sets will have a cable television app on the program guide next to a YouTube app and a Facebook app, all tied together by a search bar.

Many distributors “will have an app for us” over time, predicted Stuart Silloway, a training manager for Samsung Electronics America.

Also last week, Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced that they would replicate their live channel lineups on tablet computers. Other distributors like Verizon and Cablevision are working on similar features. (Of course, the channels themselves are also scurrying to reach consumers on tablets, too.)

The move onto tablets is part of a recognition by the Comcasts and Verizons of the world that they have to keep up with changing consumer habits.

“If you buy a video subscription from us in your home, our goal is to make the video available on all your devices,” Mr. Britt of Time Warner said, echoing the goal of the “TV Everywhere” concept espoused by his and other companies. He added, “People don’t see PCs and phones and tablets and TVs as different things. They are all just video display devices.”

Making a television subscription available on all those devices is wrenchingly difficult, because of a maze of copyrights and sometimes contradictory content strategies. At first, the live streams to tablets will be available only in customers’ homes, the distributors indicated last week. But that is still progress.

Stand-alone boxes that bring the Internet to big-screen TVs have not caught on with the public, but including that functionality in televisions may make it more popular.

It was learned last week that the remote controls for some Blu-ray players and connected televisions will come with red Netflix buttons this year, which is sure to “cause some consternation among those concerned about cable service cord-cutting,” wrote David Joyce of Miller Tabak and Company in an analyst’s note. But Mr. Joyce is optimistic that cable and satellite companies will adapt.

Sensing a big business opportunity, companies are lining up to bolster “TV Everywhere” and, thus, the cable companies. John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco, proclaimed at a news conference Wednesday that “video is the next voice.” He said that Cisco had a software and hardware architecture package called Videoscape to blend television and Internet video sources.

In demonstrations, Cisco imagined an on-screen guide with three columns — the largest column being the television channels provided by the distributor, the second column being Web content, and the third being videos and photos from friends and family members. That guide was replicated on laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Cisco and Motorola, with a prototype of something it called “MediOS,” want customers to be able to quickly shift a television show or a Web video from one screen to another, and to be able to see what friends are watching at the same time. But that will take deals with distributors — and big investments.

As an example, the Google TV setup works well when it is fully tied into a distributors’ system, as it is with Dish Network. “But because there’s no integrated ability to control tuners — to stream content — it’s not standard,” Mr. Chandra told Mr. Genachowski on Friday during a tour of the trade show floor. “It’s going to take years and years and years to negotiate the integrations,” Mr. Chandra added.

For content owners, it is a confusing time. At the trade show, companies like News Corporation and the CBS Corporation held court with all manner of manufacturers and in a couple of cases announced new pacts. CBS will soon start allowing users of Boxee, an Internet television software package, to buy episodes of shows like “CSI.”

One senior media executive deemed the Internet TV marketplace a “jump ball,” with television makers, distributors and content owners all participating. “That’s why we have to talk to everybody,” said the executive, who insisted on anonymity because those talks are private.

What is still lacking, in large part, is consumer education about Internet-connected TVs — but that will change. The Sony chief executive, Howard Stringer, announced Wednesday that Sony would start a worldwide advertising campaign called “Television Redefined” this year.

“The next evolution is upon us: the marriage of the television and the Internet,” he said that day, without specifying who would officiate at the wedding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/bu...edia/10tv.html





Disney and Yahoo in Internet TV Content Talks: Report

Walt Disney Co is in discussions on allowing content from some of its television networks to be available on sets embedded with Yahoo Inc's Internet-TV software, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Disney is looking to create widgets for its ESPN, ABC, and Disney networks that would pipe content to Yahoo-connected TV sets and these widgets would be free to consumers, the paper added.

Rival News Corp is also in talks with companies including Samsung Electronics Co about licensing TV shows and movies from 20th Century Fox's library for use on tablets and internet-connected TVs, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Disney, Yahoo and News Corp were not immediately available for comment outside of regular U.S. business hours.

(Reporting by Jennifer Robin Raj in Bangalore; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7091H520110110





Analysis: TV Makers Fumble Towards the Future: Smarter TVs
Isabel Reynolds

Electronics makers are covering all bases as they rush headlong into a "smart" TV market deemed the next stage of evolution, trying to figure out just what will catch on with consumers using increasingly sophisticated displays in living rooms.

From the industry's giants -- Samsung, Sony Corp, LG, Panasonic -- to upstarts like Vizio, tech manufacturers fell over themselves to tout the latest versions of their connected televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

Parks Associates expects connectable models to make up 76 percent of global TV sales by 2015, although some analysts express concern about whether the broadband infrastructure can cope with such a massive increase in actual usage.

The most apparent end-use may be as a simpler way to access sports, movie and standard television content, without the need for cable, satellite, or the game consoles that many households now resort to for streaming video.

"We have been doing net TV for more than two years, especially in the American market," said Masaaki Osumi, head of Toshiba's TV division.

"It's replacing the kind of things people used to rent on video, not so much looking up stock prices or searching for things. It's the way people have always used televisions."

That's why Sony and Samsung announced content deals with Time Warner Cable at CES last week and Samsung with the largest U.S. cable company, Comcast Corp.

These tie-ups are being spurred on by the cable companies' need to protect their customer base against growing threats from the Web, where viewers watch many programs for free.

Beyond conventional TV content, the future is less certain. Games, music, shopping, social networking, photo galleries and health and fitness applications were just a few of the plethora of uses proffered by TV makers at CES.

"What makers are realizing is that there's no way to predict what the next phenomenon will be, so it's best to open it up to third parties," said Kurt Scherf, principal analyst at Parks Associates.

Long Road Ahead

High-definition had a long road to fruition, coming into its own only after content that took advantage of crisper resolutions reached critical mass.

Samsung, LG and Panasonic are all set to offer third-party applications on their televisions, similar to those consumers use on phones and tablets.

With so many electronics makers vying to differentiate themselves, none has yet come out as a clear leader, and several are in any case hard-pressed to make profits off televisions.

But many say ease of use will be key to promoting take-up. Sony offers a keyboard interface for its Google TV, but smartphones and tablets are hot contenders to become the new, and hopefully more intuitive, TV remote.

"People are overwhelmed by technology," said Joe Taylor, CEO of Panasonic's North America unit, which showed a tablet-style remote for its Viera Connect smart TVs at CES.

"Essentially, we want to make an intuitive device. A 70-year-old could figure out how to use it without looking at an operating guide," he said.

Microsoft showed how TVs could be controlled with an LG Windows smartphone, by swiping and tilting the device to control what is shown on the big screen.

Other, even more futuristic technologies are being put forward as ways for people to control their TVs, with Microsoft and Toshiba showing off hand-signal and voice-command systems.

For those who are not looking to replace their televisions, Blu-ray players from some makers are also beginning to add "smart" features, or there are separate accessories from Apple and Logitech.

Another less expensive option could be a new phone from Sony Ericsson, the Experia Arc, which can be simply plugged into the TV's HDMI port, using a cellular or Wi-Fi connection to deliver content such as YouTube videos to the TV.

"Its not a full blown Google TV but it does give you access to your email and content like YouTube," said Peter Farmer, head of marketing for North America.

(Additional Reporting by Edwin Chan, Miyoung Kim, Bill Rigby, Sinead Carew, Gabriel Madway, Paul Tomasch and Kenneth Li, Editing by Edwin Chan and Diane Craft)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7082PR20110109





1986 Privacy Law Is Outrun by the Web
Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller

Concerned by the wave of requests for customer data from law enforcement agencies, Google last year set up an online tool showing the frequency of these requests in various countries. In the first half of 2010, it counted more than 4,200 in the United States.

Google is not alone among Internet and telecommunications companies in feeling inundated with requests for information. Verizon told Congress in 2007 that it received some 90,000 such requests each year. And Facebook told Newsweek in 2009 that subpoenas and other orders were arriving at the company at a rate of 10 to 20 a day.

As Internet services — allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents — have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement. That phenomenon became apparent over the weekend when it surfaced that the Justice Department had sought the Twitter account activity of several people linked to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group.

Many Internet companies and consumer advocates say the main law governing communication privacy — enacted in 1986, before cellphone and e-mail use was widespread, and before social networking was even conceived — is outdated, affording more protection to letters in a file cabinet than e-mail on a server.

They acknowledge that access to information is important for fighting crime and terrorism, but say they are dealing with a patchwork of confusing standards that have been interpreted inconsistently by the courts, creating uncertainty.

“Some people think Congress did a pretty good job in 1986 seeing the future, but that was before the World Wide Web,” said Susan Freiwald, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and an expert in electronic surveillance law. “The law can’t be expected to keep up without amendments.”

Law enforcement agencies have reacted in the aftermath of 9/11 and argue the opposite side of the coin, fearing that changing communications technology will impede their access to crucial information.

Last year, for example, the Justice Department argued in court that cellphone users had given up the expectation of privacy about their location by voluntarily giving that information to carriers. In April, it argued in a federal court in Colorado that it ought to have access to some e-mails without a search warrant. And federal law enforcement officials, citing technology advances, plan to ask for new regulations that would smooth their ability to perform legal wiretaps of various Internet communications.
“When your job is to protect us by fighting and prosecuting crime, you want every tool available,” said Ryan Calo, director of the consumer privacy project at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School. “No one thinks D.O.J. and other investigative agencies are sitting there twisting their mustache trying to violate civil liberties. They’re trying to do their job.”

Even Google, when it posted its online tool, acknowledged that the majority of requests it received “are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations.”

Still, Internet companies chafe at what they say is the weaker protection under the law afforded online data. They contend that an e-mail should have the same protection from law enforcement as the information stored in a home. They want law enforcement agencies to use a search warrant approved by a judge or a magistrate rather than rely on a simple subpoena from a prosecutor to obtain a person’s online data.

While requests for information have become routine, the way Internet companies respond is not. In the WikiLeaks case, Twitter took the unusual step of seeking to unseal the court order so it could follow its own internal policies and notify its customers, the WikiLeaks members, that the government wanted information about them. Privacy experts praised Twitter for this.

Most of the time, companies do no such thing; they are not required to do so under the patchwork of rules that govern law enforcement access to customer data.

But as the data requests mount, companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook find themselves on the front lines of the tug of war between security concerns and the need to protect privacy.

The rules established by the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act depend on what type of information is sought and how old it is. And courts in different jurisdictions have interpreted the rules differently.

But in many cases, the government does not notify people that they are searching their online information or prove probable cause, and if the government violates the law in obtaining information, defendants are generally unable to exclude that evidence from a trial, Ms. Freiwald said.

Generally law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to read e-mail messages that are more than 180 days old. This makes online surveillance different from surveillance of postal mail or phone calls. For example, when wiretapping phones, law enforcement must get a court order and when searching homes, they must obtain a warrant.

At the same time, since the attacks of 9/11, it has become increasingly common for law enforcement to demand that its requests for information be sealed from the people who are the target of the investigation, as the Justice Department initially did in the WikiLeaks case.

Facebook declined to comment on whether it had received requests for customer data linked to the WikiLeaks investigation. A company spokesman said Facebook had resisted “overly broad requests for user data.” Its privacy policy does not say whether the company will notify customers who are target of those requests.

Google did not respond to requests for comment. Google’s privacy policy, like Facebook’s, alerts customers that it will comply “with valid legal processes seeking account information” but is silent on whether it will try to notify targets of an investigation.

In contrast, Twitter’s policy “is to notify users of requests for their information prior to disclosure unless we are prohibited from doing so by statute or court order.”

In the WikiLeaks case, Twitter has told the targets of the government investigation that it would turn over the information after 10 days unless they went to court to seek to block the release of the data, according to online postings by Birgitta Jonsdottir and Robbert Gonggrijp, two of the people who said they had received notices from Twitter.

Electronic privacy and civil rights advocates say they worry that because the WikiLeaks court order gained such widespread attention, it could have a chilling effect on people’s speech on the Internet. But it could also teach unknowing Web users about the limits of the law, they said.

In the absence of updated regulations, meanwhile, the tension between Internet companies and law enforcement is causing diplomatic strain as well. The Iceland government, of which Ms. Jonsdottir is a member, has said it will ask the American ambassador to explain the request for information about her. And in a recent post to Twitter, Ms. Jonsdottir said she was talking with American lawyers about her legal options.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/te...10privacy.html





WikiLeaks Twitter Spying May Break EU Privacy Law

European MPs want answers
James Nixon

A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users' account details.

ALDE members want to know why US investigators demanded the information when they hadn't yet provided evidence that any crime has been committed.

"The lack of an identified illegal act and of a judicial enquiry in the US casts a shadow on the whole process of lifting the protection of citizens' privacy for the sake of national security through such subpoena orders," Romanian MEP and ALDE member, Renate Weber, said in a statement.

"The EU should raise with the US authorities the fundamental issue of putting into question those persons who have not committed any crime," she added.

Twitter informed a number of users last Friday that the US Department of Justice had obtained the subpoena, known as a 2703(d) order, on 14th December. The request is part of its ongoing investigating into WikiLeaks' outing of more than 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables.

US-based Twitter informed users of the demand after a court last week threw out Judge Theresa Buchanan's original gagging order, which prevented the site from notifying them of the request for access to their personal information.

The order covers a number of accounts linked to the WikiLeaks organisation, and includes those of a number of Europeans. Among the individuals affected are Dutch hacker and co-founder of Internet service provider XS4ALL, Rop Gonggrijp, and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

"It sort of feels to me as if [the Department of Justice has] become quite desperate," Jónsdóttir told a press conference in Canada yesterday. "None of us would ever use Twitter messaging to say anything sensitive."

The Twitter account of Bradley Manning, the US Army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, was also among those facing the attentions of DoJ investigators.

ALDE, the group demanding the EU probe, is the third largest in the European Parliament, consisting of 85 MEPs, and claims to hold the balance of power between left and right in the legislature.

In addition to its request for legal clarification, the group wants a debate on the matter in the European Parliament.

ALDE's call for action comes as UK lawyers for Julian Assange warned that, if he is extradited to Sweden, the WikiLeaks founder could face illegal rendition to the United States - and, once there, execution or detention at the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

A judge at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court yesterday set the date for a two-day extradition hearing, to begin on 7th February.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/12/wik...u-privacy-law/





Why Obama's National Internet ID Solution is a Really, REALLY Bad Idea
JD Rucker

When it comes to the Internet, the US government usually doesn’t have a clue. That seems to be the case with the recent announcement of the Obama Administration’s plans to develop an internet identity system that officials claim will reduce fraud and identity theft while streamlining online transactions.

Cut to the chase: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is a bad idea. On the surface having something that will increase online transactions and reduce identity theft makes (some) sense. Security is the #1 reason that people avoid online transactions and in an age that is continuously going more and more digital, it would appear prudent to take steps towards improving security.

This step is not a prudent one. It will lead us down the wrong path for several reasons.

How Do You Spell Disaster? S-I-N-G-L-E-P-O-I-N-T

A skeleton key is “a key or similar object capable of opening any lock regardless of make or type.” In its most basic form, this is what the Obama Administration is proposing. Rather than have different passwords and email validations to access the various places we surf, NSTIC will be a single point of entry for online interactions and transactions that consumers and businesses can use to engage.

This should terrify the tech-savvy crowd.

Having a single-point of entry into many websites is already available in several forms, most prominently through Facebook. Many have accepted it because there is only privacy at stake – we aren’t making purchases or attaching financial information to Facebook (even though there is a looming Facebook eCommerce potential, but that’s a different story).

Allowing access to our financial credentials and buying power through a single interface is ludicrous. eCommerce fraud is bad as it is and this solution is only an opportunity to empower the nefarious types to have more access in one tightly-wrapped package called NSTIC.

Stay Out of My Interwebbing Activities

“This is going to cause a huge shift in consumer use of the Internet,” said John Clippinger, co-director of the Law Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “There’s going to be a huge bump and a huge increase in the amount and kind of data retailers are going to have.”

Exactly.

There’s a reason that companies such as Google and Paypal support this. It’s an opportunity to centralize and collect the most important asset on the Internet: data. There will be assurances that this piece of data or that piece of data will not be shared, but “sharing” is an ambiguous term. Necessity will kick in.

By necessity, I mean that there will be increasing “needs” by businesses and government agencies to peek in on what we are doing. If you think that this is a false statement, you are naive. It will happen. It will start under the guise of necessary adjustments to the law in the name of “consumer protection” or “homeland security” and will expand from there. I could write an entire piece about why this is the general trend on anything that pertains to our online privacy rights, but suffice to say that when you have a data-collection venue that data will be used by multiple entities regardless of the safeguards put in place up front.

A False Sense of Security

Diligence is often fueled by paranoia. A healthy dose of paranoia goes a long way towards maintaining proper personal online security. NSTIC will erase the paranoia for many and, as intended, bring more people into the online-transaction fold.

When it comes to financial security, anything that makes people trust a service is potentially a bad thing. It is in most people’s nature to relax about a particular subject when we feel secure that we are protected. By stamping it with the US Commerce Department’s seal of approval, many will trust it.

They will trust it too much.

Constant diligence protects millions of Americans from falling victim to online scams and financial security breaches. Anything that puts people too much at ease will be exploited, as is the case with a National Internet ID.

Who Are Smarter? Hackers or The US Government?

The most intelligent aspect of this solution is that they do not plan on having a centralized database. The government will rely on several service providers to house the data in the most secure fashion imaginable.

And yet, I’m still terrified.

The only reason that financial institutions have not been widely hacked for their data in the past is because it is generally worthless. The “buying power” is not there and money transfers are specifically geared to require multiple-points of approval. It would require a very organized and large-scale operation to form a true financial institution hack that could produce results, and those results would likely be short-lived.

This is different.

By its very nature, this is a streamlining initiative. Anything that is made to simplify our actions is open to manipulation. Hackers today who examine the way transactions happen online naturally go towards the easiest point of access which is currently directly through consumers. NSTIC may change that. By “may” I mean there is a chance the government will understand this before launch and add the appropriate safeguards. If they do, they would limit the effectiveness of the product by making it challenging for businesses and consumers to interact.

They “may” do it the secure way, which would make hacking into the service providers worthless. Chances are slim, however, as the goal here is to make things easier for online transactions to take place.

The Big Brother Factor

“We are not talking about a national ID card. We are not talking about a government-controlled system,” United State Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said on Jan. 7.

The first thing that comes to mind (and should come to your mind) when hearing these words is, “Yet.”

This is a very dangerous step towards increasing the power and reach of the government into our pocketbooks. Until the details of the plan are released this is just a conspiracy-theory-laden section of paranoia without substance, but any time the government gets involved with anything pertaining to the Internet, the alarm bells ring in the back of my CPU.
http://www.techi.com/2011/01/obamas-...l-internet-id/





The Fed Goes Hunting for Malcontents

In wake of WikiLeaks, Office of Management and Budget asks government agencies about practices for identifying potential insider threats
Robert Lemos

Last week, the Office of Management and Budget asked government agencies to spell out their strategies for minimizing insider risk. The memo, published by MSNBC, asked agencies to assess their security efforts and compliance to federal standards following the release of a trove of government documents, including classified State Department memos, by Wikileaks.

It's likely that federal contractors and government suppliers will also find themselves responding to this list of questions [PDF] and the central issue of preventing the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified materials. In a key section of the memo, the OMB requests information on whether organizations are measuring the "trustworthiness" of their employees and whether they use a psychiatrist or sociologist to measure the unhappiness of an employee as a measure of trustworthiness.

In an effort to prevent the leak of the crown jewels, government agencies and companies with significant intellectual property may be moving to stricter management of employees, says Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer for network access control firm Xceedium.

"Historically, policy and training have been the way (organizations) have handled insiders," Ammon says. "But if you talk with the DOD (Department of Defense), their most significant threat is an intelligent and motivated insider system administrator."

Privileged insiders are not responsible for the loss of great quantities of data, but they steal the more valuable data, according to Verizon Business's Data Breach Investigations Report, which it released last year.

"In general, we find that employees are granted more privileges than they need to perform their job duties and the activities of those that do require higher privileges are usually not monitored in any real way," the report states.

Xceedium focuses its efforts on monitoring and auditing the access of such privileged insiders, blocking any attempts to access data and resources outside of explicit policy.

With privileged insiders, "you have to go with the zero-trust model," says Ammon.

The Department of Defense is doing just that. Last year, the research arm of the Pentagon, known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), tasked researchers with finding better methods of detecting government employees and soldiers who may be planning to go rogue. The program, dubbed ADAMS (Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales), aims to detect changes in behavior that could suggest a decision to attack. In another proposal, issued in August, DARPA asked for technological solutions to better detect enemies already present in networks.

The WikiLeaks memo and the ADAMS project seem to indicate that the government will be looking more closely at the people with access to critical assets and data. With the government focusing on increasing the security of government contractors, it's likely that corporate America will take a greater interest in the happiness and trustworthiness of its IT staff as well.

It's time to grit your teeth and be happy, folks.
http://infoworld.com/t/insider-threa...alcontents-411





Torrentsecurity.com Internet Proxy Service to provide IP Privacy and Security for Anonymous Web Surfing and Bittorrent Downloading
Press release

TORRENTSECURITY.COM offers its' Internet Proxy Service to hide IP addresses and provide true anonymous web surfing. The use of bittorrent technology for file sharing is at an all-time high and users must hide IP addresses to maintain download speed and prevent bandwidth throttling by ISP's.

Dunedin, FL (PRWEB) January 10, 2011

TORRENTSECURITY.COM offers its' Internet Proxy Service to hide IP addresses and provide true anonymous web surfing. The use of bittorrent technology for file sharing is at an all-time high and users must hide IP addresses to maintain download speed and prevent bandwidth throttling by ISP's.

ISP's are becoming rapidly aware of the upsurge in the use of bittorrent technology by their clients and are responding by limiting the bandwidth available to their individual customers by “packet or bandwidth shaping” and throttling.

Ryan P. Ford, CEO of TORRENTSECURITY.COM (http://www.torrentsecurity.com) says: “Considering the virtual explosion of bittorrent technology, the need of an Internet proxy service is fast becoming mandatory. ISP's are rapidly controlling, limiting and throttling bandwidth, often without their customers' knowledge, simply for using any peer-to-peer or bittorrent service or client. If I simply choose to download anything utilizing bittorrent technology, I must hide my IP via an Internet proxy service such as Torrent Security or risk significant loss of the whole Internet experience by my ISP's throttling or limiting of my bandwidth. Internet privacy is also a huge concern: My IP address indicates who I am, where I am and what I am doing and security is paramount for anonymous web surfing. I must hide my IP from everyone, including my own ISP. Torrent Security offers just that: Hide your IP, maintain download speed and surf anonymously – all in one easy package.”

The use of bittorrent technology is under dramatically increased scrutiny globally due to copyright infringement issues, and although TORRENTSECURITY.COM in no way advocates or endorses the downloading and/or dissemination of copyrighted materials, TORRENTSECURITY.COM believes that privacy and security in the Internet realm are of the utmost priority.

TORRENT SECURITY is poised to offer a dedicated solution providing a safe, secure experience for both downloading and web surfing in a comprehensive, cost-conscious, user-friendly package.

Digital Garden, LLC is a technology-marketing firm based out of Columbia, SC.
http://www.benzinga.com/press-releas...privacy-and-se





For the Downtrodden Have No Names to Tyrants

Since its inception, the internet has provided new ways for people all over the world to exercise the rights of free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. These rights are not simply the benefits of a free society--they are the very means of preserving that society's freedom. The recent increase in government interference with these freedoms coincides with the failure of the corporate media to fulfill their vital role in checking the abuse of authority. Censorship and journalistic abdication have left citizens unaware and unable to hold their governments accountable.

WikiLeaks has moved to fill the void left by traditional news media, providing the necessary information for citizens to hold their governments to account. Yet it has not been granted the legal protections generally afforded to journalists. Instead, the organization has been vilified and monetary support has been blocked by governments and private corporations. The vitriol aimed at WikiLeaks demonstrates an unsettling disregard for the fundamental freedom to exchange information and express ideas. Members of a free society must not allow information to be suppressed simply because it inconveniences those in power. We share the responsibility to defend vital liberties. The time to act is now.

We are Anonymous, a leaderless movement that has worked tirelessly to oppose all forms of Internet censorship worldwide, from DMCA abuses to government mandated content filters. Our initiatives include supporting dissenting groups in Iran, Zimbabwe and Tunisia, as well as waging the highly visible information battle against the Church of Scientology. We are now prepared to take the fight to the world stage. Join us on January 15th for the first in a series of global protests in defense of WikiLeaks and freedom of expression. Stand with us to defend your freedoms.

We Are Anonymous And So Are You

http://www.whyweprotest.net/en/





The Best of Cablegate: Instances Where Public Discourse Benefited from the Leaks
Rainey Reitman

Since late November, the whistleblower website Wikileaks has been in the process of releasing in waves over 250,000 leaked United States diplomatic cables. Known as "Cablegate," this is the largest publication of confidential documents by any organization. (Catch up on Wikileaks developments by reviewing EFF’s page on this issue).

Wikileaks’ disclosures have caused tremendous controversy, with critics of Wikileaks claiming the leaks of classified information could endanger lives and harm international diplomacy. Others have commended Wikileaks, pointing to a long history of over-classification and a lack of transparency by the United States government.

Regardless of the heated debate over the propriety of Wikileaks’ actions, some of the cables have contributed significantly to public and political conversations all around the world. In this article, we highlight a small selection of cables that been critical to understanding and evaluating controversial events.

1. “Dancing Boy” Scandal Alleges Child Prostitution, Possible Drug Use among U.S. Private Contractors
The Guardian reported on a cable describing an incident in which employees of DynCorp, a U.S. military contractor, hired a “dancing boy” for a party. The term “dancing boy,” also known as bacha bazi, is a euphemism for a custom in Afghanistan in which underaged boys are dressed as women, dance for gatherings of men and are then prostituted. Read more. The incident allegedly involved soliciting local Afghan police for a bacha bazi as well as usage of illegal drugs. The cable detailed that Hanif Armar, minister of the Interior of Afghanistan, urged the United States to help contain the scandal by warning journalists that reporting on the incident would endanger lives.

The incident contributed important information to the debate over the use of private military contractors in Afghanistan. The articles published in the wake of Wikileaks’ publication of the cable are far more critical than the original reporting on the issue. For example, back in July of 2009, the Washington Post described the incident as “questionable management oversight,” in which “DynCorp employees in Afghanistan hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance.” This cable helped the Post and the public understand there was more to this story than a tribal dance.

2. Pfizer Allegedly Sought to Blackmail Nigerian Regulator to Stop Lawsuit Against Drug Trials on Children
A cable released by Wikileaks says that Pfizer “had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to [Nigerian] Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases.” The Guardian reported that the drug giant was trying to convince the Nigerian attorney general to settle lawsuits arising from medical testing of the oral antibiotic Trovan that it administered to children living in Kano during a meningitis epidemic in 1996. The cable also noted that Pfizer Nigeria Country Director Enrico Liggeri felt the lawsuits “has had a ‘chilling effect’ on international pharmaceutical companies because companies are no longer willing to conduct clinical testing in Nigeria.” This episode helped the public understand more about the controversies surrounding drug testing in underdeveloped countries, as well as the politics behind Nigeria's settlement of the multi-billion dollar lawsuit for $75 million.

3. U.S. Failed to Bully Spain Into Adopting Untested Anti-P2P bill
A diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks to the Spanish paper El Pais shows that the United States used bullying tactics to attempt to push Spain into adopting copyright laws even more stringent than those in the U.S. As EFF reported, a U.S. official apparently pressured the government of Spain to adopt novel and untested legislative measures that have never been proposed in the United States. The Wikileaks revelations came just in time, providing critical information in a December legislative session, and saving Spain from the kind of misguided copyright laws that could cripple innovation and facilitate online censorship.

4. U.S. to Uganda: Let Us Know If You Want to Use Our Intelligence for War Crimes
The United States has long supported the efforts of the Ugandan government to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army, as part of a conflict known for its brutality and the use of child solders. One cable released by Wikileaks indicated the United States was considering selling arms to Uganda. The Guardian reported that the U.S. ambassador accepted verbal promises from the Ugandan defense minister that they would “consult with the US in advance if the [Ugandan army] intends to use US-supplied intelligence to engage in operations not government [sic] by the law of armed conflict.” That same article noted that the United States has been concerned that the Ugandan government is engaged in actions which might violate the laws of war.

Learning that U.S. intelligence might be used outside the laws of law, and that the U.S. government merely wanted a consultation, helped the public understand more about the American-Ugandan cooperation against the LRA, and informed the debate over the methods used to combat rebellions in Africa. This is not an idle concern- the very next day a cable detailed the use of extrajudicial execution of a Ugandan prisoner.

5. U.S. Haggling over Guantánamo Detainees
President Obama promised to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp since his campaign for the office, and reiterated the promise once he took office. Yet the controversial detention facility remains open. An article by the New York Times analyzed cables released by Wikileaks which indicated the United States is having difficulties in fulfilling this promise and is now considering some unique solutions. The cables show that U.S. diplomats have been searching for countries that would take detainees, often bargaining with foreign countries over the placement of prisoners. In return for accepting detainees, the receiving country might get a one-on-one meeting with Obama, assistance obtaining International Monetary Fund assistance, or some other helping hand from the United States. In one cable, Saudi Arabian King Abdullah recommended that the U.S. implant an electronic chip in each detainee for location tracking, using technology developed for livestock.

The debate over Wikileaks will continue for some time. But these examples make clear that Wikileaks has brought much-needed light to government operations and private actions which, while veiled in secrecy, profoundly affect the lives of people around the world and can play an important role in a democracy that chooses its leaders. As founding father James Madison explained, "a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy or perhaps both." Regardless of whether you agree with WikiLeaks, Cablegate has served an important role in bettering public understanding on matters of public concern.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...-investigative





RIM Says Gives India Solution for Messenger Access

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion said on Thursday it had given a solution to India ahead of a January 31 target date for access to consumer services including BlackBerry Messenger, but reiterated that no changes can be made to the security system for corporate emails.

India had last year threatened to shut off corporate email and instant messenger services on BlackBerry unless it gains access to them, in a campaign driven by fears that unmonitored communication puts the country's security at risk.

RIM averted a potential ban and the Indian government said last October that RIM had set up an interim arrangement for lawful interception of BlackBerry Messenger services and assured a final solution by end-January.

RIM said in a customer update the solution it had given would enable Indian wireless carriers to address lawful access requirements for consumer messaging services including BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry Internet Service and that the solution meets the standard required by the Indian government.

The firm reiterated that it did not have capabilities to provide access to its highly secure corporate emails.

RIM uses powerful codes to scramble, or encrypt, email messages as they travel between a BlackBerry device and a computer known as a BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The company has said it does not have a master key to decode these emails and only the sponsoring business or organization has the technical capability to grant access to encrypted enterprise email.

"...no changes can be made to the security architecture for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers since, contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers' encryption keys," the company said in a customer update.

RIM, which had earlier offered to lead an industry forum to look at India's need to have access to BlackBerry services, said on Thursday the government was seeking to address access issues for BlackBerry corporate emails at an "industry level" as similar strong encryption was being widely used by others.

This week, RIM said it would filter pornographic Internet content for its BlackBerry smartphone users in Indonesia, following government pressure to restrict access to porn sites or face its browsing service being shut down.

Last year, the company narrowly escaped a ban in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Neither side disclosed what RIM did to get itself onside with UAE telecom regulations.

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Ranjit Gangadharan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70C1G920110113





Blackberry Maker Says Will Filter Porn to Meet Indonesia Rules

Research In Motion said on Monday it will filter pornographic internet content for its Blackberry smartphone users in Indonesia, following government pressure to stop access to porn sites or face its browsing service being shut down.

Indonesia, home to about 2 million Blackberry users, has also asked RIM to open a local server, part of demands by a number of countries to gain access to its encrypted data.

Indonesian Communications and Information Minister Tiffatul Sembiring has called for tighter internet controls and wants RIM to block access to porn sites to comply with an anti-pornography law in the world's most populous Muslim nation.

"Research In Motion confirms that it shares Minister Tifatul Sembirings sense of urgency on this matter and it is fully committed to working with Indonesias carriers to put in place a prompt, compliant filtering solution for Blackberry subscribers in Indonesia as soon as possible," RIM said in a statement.

Indonesia in July said it would ask internet service providers to restrict access to porn sites, and Sembiring said others had already complied. When asked for a response on RIM's statement of intent, Sembiring told Reuters: "So, do it".

Indonesia is one of RIM's faster-growing markets, with gross domestic product growth of about 6 percent and booming consumer demand in Southeast Asia's biggest economy.

BlackBerry's reputation is built on its system security and a compromise under pressure from governments could damage the device's popularity with business professionals and politicians.

The anti-porn law, passed in 2008, was seen by many as a sign of the growing influence of conservative Islam in policy-making in traditionally moderate Indonesia, and Sembiring's calls for more internet censorship have sparked a public outcry.

(Reporting by Janeman Latul and Telly Nathalia; Editing by Neil Chatterjee)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7092DK20110110





Hugh Hefner Takes Playboy Enterprises Private (At $6.15 Per Share)
Robin Wauters

Playboy Enterprises, the world-famous adult entertainment and media company, is to “go private” again.

The media company, which of course publishes the Playboy magazine but also runs an Internet business segment called Playboy Online, alongside TV and radio networks, will be taken private for $6.15 per share by Icon Acquisition Holdings.

The latter is a limited partnership controlled by iconic Playboy Enterprises founder Hugh Hefner (who also just got engaged, hurray!). Playboy originally went public in 1971.

The $6.15 price represents a 18.3% premium over the closing price Friday, January 7, and a 56.1% premium over the $5.50 a share closing price on July 9, 2010, the last trading day before the proposal was first announced.

Icon Acquisition Holdings has obtained equity commitments for the transaction from an affiliate of Rizvi Traverse Management and a debt commitment for the transaction from affiliates of Jefferies & Company.

Playboy CEO Scott Flanders will remain with the company in his current position and maintain a significant equity investment in Playboy. He says the strategy is to transform the struggling Playboy into a full-fledged brand management company:

“This transaction will advance our efforts by strengthening our balance sheet and streamlining our operations, while creating opportunities to participate in new ventures. I am excited about the future, and I look forward to working with our new partners as we guide Playboy into the next era.”

More details on the transaction are available in the press release.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/hug...-15-per-share/





What if Flickr Fails?
Doc Searle

As of last October, Flickr hosted 5,000,000,000 images. I’m approaching 50,000 images on Flickr right now. Sooo… if I lop off a bunch of zeros that comes to… .001% of the total. Not much, but maybe enough to show on their radar.

Here is what I hope they see: some heavy Flickr users are getting worried. Those with the most cause for worry are at the ‘pro’ level, meaning we pay for the service. (In my case, I pay for three of the four at links above). One cause for worry is reports of sudden and unexplained account deletions. The other is the possibility that Flickr might fail for the same reason that, say, MySpace is now failing. That is, by declining use, disinterest or mismanagement by the parent corporation, or a decline in advertising revenues.

Of particular interest right now is a report by Thomas Hawk of Deepa Praveen’s Flickr Pro account deletion. She claims she lost 600 photos, 6,000 emails, 600 contacts, 20,000 favorites, 35,000 comments, 250,000 views and more. “Don’t I deserve a reason before they pressed the DEL key?” she writes.

Of course we only have her side on this thing, so far, so bear that in mind.

Meanwhile the closest thing I can find to an explanation in Flickr’s Help Forum is this thread, which leads me to think the most likely reason for the deletion is that Deepa voilated some term of service. But, I dunno. Maybe somebody from Flickr can explain in the comments below.

Still, even if blame for the deletion ends up falling at least partly on Deepa (which I hope it does not, and have no reason yet to think it should), one’s exposure on Flickr goes up with the sum of photos one puts there. And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world.

Right now that world looks to advertising for paying many big Web companies’ bills, and for driving those companies’ valuations on Wall Street and in pre-IPO private markets. Some numbers… The online advertising business right now totals about $63 billion, close to half of which goes to Google. In fact the whole advertising business, worldwide, only comes to $463 billiion. (Sources: Zenith Optimedia and Google Investor Relations.) That’s a lot of scratch, but does that alone justify the kinds of valuations that Facebook and Google are getting these days? A case can be made, but that case is a lot weaker if Facebook and Google remain mostly in the advertising business. Which, so far, it looks like they will.

Wall Street is less enthusiastic about Yahoo, but still a little upbeat, perhaps because advertising is still hot, and Yahoo still makes most of its money from “marketing services.” Flickr is part of Yahoo. I can’t find out how much Flickr brings in, but I’m curious to know what percentage comes from Pro account subscriptions, versus advertising placed on non-pro account pages.

There are cracks in the edifice of the online advertising. This comScore report, for example, and an earlier one, both show that ‘natural born clickers’ (that is, people who like to click on ads, versus the rest of us) account for a huge percentage of all the clicks on advertising, which pays based on “click-throughs”. Chas Edwards says, “these ‘natural born clickers’ are not the most desirable demographic for most advertisers: They skew toward Internet users with household incomes below $40,000 who spend more time than average at gambling sites and career advice sites.”

Among all the revenue diets a company might have, advertising equates best with candy. Its nutritive value is easily-burned carbohydrates. A nice energy boost, but not the protien-rich stuff comprised of products and services that provide direct benefits or persistent assets. (I can hear ad folk’s blood begin to boil here. “Advertising is nutritive! It delivers lots of positive public and private good!” Please, bear in mind that I made my bones for many years in the advertising business. I co-founded and served as creative director for one of Silicon Valley’s top agencies for many years. My name was on a building in Palo Alto when I did that. I know what the candy is, how it’s made, how easily most companies who use it can get along without it, and how it differs from stuff they can’t get along without.*)

Regardless of whether or not you think the online advertising business is a bubble (which I do right now, but I’m a voice in the wilderness), we should face the fact that we are seriously exposed when we place our businesses and online lives in the hands of companies that make most of their money from advertising, and that aren’t diversifying into other businesses that aren’t based on guesswork.

I just got off the phone (actually Skype) with folks working on a project that examines Facebook. Many questions were asked. Rather than repeat what you’ll hear me say when that show is produced, I’d rather point to one example that should prove at least some of my points: MySpace.

What’s to stop another company from doing to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace? More to my point, what’s to stop some new owned-by-nobody technology or collection of protocols and free code from doing to Facebook what SMTP, POP3 and IMAP (the protocols of free and open email) did to MCI Mail, Compuserve mail, AOL mail, and the rest of the closed mail systems that competed with each other as commercial offerings? Not much, frankly.

So I think we need to do two things here.

First is to pay more for what’s now free stuff. This is the public radio model, but with much less friction (and therefore higher contribution percentages) on the customers’ side. In ProjectVRM (at the Berkman Center) we’re working on that with EmanciPay. Here’s a way EmanciPay will help newspapers. And here’s our Knight News Challenge application for doing the same with all media sources. You can help by voting for it.

Second is to develop self-hosted versions of Flickr, or the equivalent. Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to support in the first place, and the architecture is still there. We’ll have our own Flickrs and Zoomrs and Picassas, either on servers at home (ISP restrictions permitting) or in a server rack at the likes of RackSpace. But somebody needs to develop the software. Dave Winer has been working in this direction for years. Flickr Fan being one example. The end point of his work’s vector is Silo-free everything on the open web. We are going to get there.

Fortunately Flickr has a generous API Garden that does allow the copying off of most (or all) data that goes with your photographs. I’m interested in being able to copy all my photos and metadata off into my own self-hosted system. How much they would welcome that, I don’t know. But their API is certainly encouraging. And I do want them to stay in business. They’ve been a terrific help for me, and many other photographers, and we do appreciate what they’ve done and still do. And I think they can succeed. In fact, I’d be glad to help with that.

But mainly I want them, and every other silo out there, to realize that the pendulum has now swung full distance in the silo’d direction — and that it’s going to swing back in the direction of open and distributed everything. And there’s plenty of money to be made there too.

I think they might also consider going all-pro or mostly-pro. I say that because I’m willing to pay more than I do now, for a serious pro account — meaning one in which I have more of a relationship with the company. When the average price of first-rate cameras and lenses each run well into four figures, paying, say, $100+ per year for hosting of photos and other value-adds isn’t a bad deal. Hell, I used to pay that much, easy, per month, for film processing, back in the last millennium. And I did most of that at Costco.

So here’s hoping we can talk, that Deepa can recover what she’s lost (or at least see a path toward something better than the relationship she had with Flickr), and that the entrepreneurs and VCs out there will start seeing value in new open-Web start-ups, rather than the ad-funded and silo’d ones that are still fashionable today.

*I actually have hopes for advertising — not as the super-targeted, quant-driven, “personalized” stuff that’s all the rage these days; but as a new communications mechanism on the corporate side of real conversational marketing, in which the customer has full status as a sovereign individual, and takes initiative, expresses intentions, and engages through mechanisms he or she controls (and preferably also owns).
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/201...-flickr-fails/





GE’s $520M Acquisition Into Data Center Power
Jeff St. John

General Electric is grabbing a piece of the booming business of providing power for the ever-expanding data center industry. On Thursday, GE announced a $520 million offer for Lineage Power Holdings, a provider of gear for data center and telecom power conversion, which is a $20 billion-per-year industry.

By buying the Plano, Texas-based Lineage from its current owner, the private equity firm The Gores Group, GE will get a hold of data center power equipment customers including Verizon and HP, as well as a revenue stream that stood at $450 million in fiscal year 2010. It will also gain an in-house provider of inside-the-building gear for its growing data center business and related power grid businesses, which stretch from power generation to energy distribution grids.

GE has been making investments lately in data center-focused technologies; power conversion devices being just one area. GE has invested multiple rounds into wireless energy sensor startup SynapSense, and has been offering engineering and management services for more energy-efficient data center construction and retrofit projects for years now.

Lineage’s roots in AC-to-DC power conversion could give it a boost in a growing trend amongst data center designers: going to all-DC power systems. JPMorgan, Sprint, Boeing, Bank of America and SAP have built all-DC data centers, and GE has partnered with DC data center equipment maker Validus DC Systems.

In the meantime, rivals in the power grid space such as Schneider Electric and ABB have been making their own moves into the data center realm. Data centers used about 1.5 percent of the power generated in the U.S. in 2006, but that share was expected to double by 2012 to add up to $7.4 billion in annual power bills, according to a 2007 EPA report.

That could drive a fourfold increase in the green data center market to some $41.4 billion by 2015, Pike Research estimates. Growth has been driven both by telecom-focused growth in smartphones and other mobile devices, as well as through innovations in the traditional IT sector such as cloud computing.

Gores Group bought Lineage from conglomerate Tyco for $100 million three years ago, and Tyco acquired it from Lucent as part of a $2.5 billion deal in 2000. GE’s acqusition should close in the first quarter of 2011, GE told Bloomberg.
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/ge%E2%80...-center-power/





A Light in India
David Bornstein

When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve argued in Fixes, some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are underserved.

One area where this is desperately needed is access to electricity. In the age of the iPad, it’s easy to forget that roughly a quarter of the world’s population — about a billion and a half people — still lack electricity. This isn’t just an inconvenience; it takes a severe toll on economic life, education and health. It’s estimated that two million people die prematurely each year as a result of pulmonary diseases caused by the indoor burning of fuels for cooking and light. Close to half are children who die of pneumonia.

In vast stretches of the developing world, after the sun sets, everything goes dark. In sub-Saharan Africa, about 70 percent of the population lack electricity. However, no country has more citizens living without power than India, where more than 400 million people, the vast majority of them villagers, have no electricity. The place that remains most in darkness is Bihar, India’s poorest state, which has more than 80 million people, 85 percent of whom live in households with no grid connection. Because Bihar has nowhere near the capacity to meet its current power demands, even those few with connections receive electricity sporadically and often at odd hours, like between 3:00 a.m and 6:00 a.m., when it is of little use.

This is why I’m writing today about a small but fast-growing off-grid electricity company based in Bihar called Husk Power Systems. It has created a system to turn rice husks into electricity that is reliable, eco-friendly and affordable for families that can spend only $2 a month for power. The company has 65 power units that serve a total of 30,000 households and is currently installing new systems at the rate of two to three per week.

What’s most interesting about Husk Power is how it has combined many incremental improvements that add up to something qualitatively new — with the potential for dramatic scale. The company expects to have 200 systems by the end of 2011, each serving a village or a small village cluster. Its plan is to ramp that up significantly, with the goal of having 2,014 units serving millions of clients by the end of 2014.

Husk Power was founded by four friends: Gyanesh Pandey, Manoj Sinha, Ratnesh Yadav and Charles W. Ransler, who met attending different schools in India and the United States. Pandey, the company’s chief executive, grew up in a village in Bihar without electricity. “I felt low because of that,” he told me when we met recently in New Delhi. He decided to study electrical engineering. At college in India, he experienced the Indian prejudice against Biharis — some students refused to sit at the same table with him — which contributed to his desire to emigrate to the U.S.. He found his way to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y., where he completed a master’s degree before landing a position with the semiconductor manufacturer International Rectifier in Los Angeles. His job was to figure out how to get the best performance from integrated circuits at the lowest possible cost. This helped him develop a problem-solving aptitude that would prove useful for Husk Power.

He was soon earning a six-figure income. He bought his family a diesel-powered electric generator. As a single man living in Los Angeles, he enjoyed traveling, dining out and going to clubs. “I was basically cruising through life,” he recalled. “But along with that pleasure and smoothness was a dark zone in my head.” He began meditating — and he realized that he felt compelled to return home and use his knowledge to bring light to Bihar.

Back in India, he and his friend Yadav, an entrepreneur, spent the next few years experimenting. They explored the possibility of producing organic solar cells. They tried growing a plant called jatropha, whose seeds can be used for biodiesel. Both proved impractical as businesses. They tested out solar lamps, but found their application limited. “In the back of my mind, I always thought there would be some high tech solution that would solve the problem,” said Pandey.

One day he ran into a salesman who sold gasifiers — machines that burn organic materials in an oxygen restricted environment to produce biogas which can be used to power an engine. There was nothing new about gasifiers; they had been around for decades. People sometimes burned rice husks in them to supplement diesel fuel, which was expensive. “But nobody had thought to use rice husks to run a whole power system,” explained Pandey.

In Bihar, poverty is extreme. Pretty much everything that can be used will be used — recycled or burned or fed to animals. Rice husks are the big exception. When rice is milled, the outside kernel, or husk, is discarded. Because the husk contains a lot of silica, it doesn’t burn well for cooking. A recent Greenpeace study reports that Bihar alone produces 1.8 billion kilograms of rice husk per year. Most of it ends up rotting in landfills and emitting methane, a greenhouse gas.
The mini-power plant during the day.Courtesy of Husk Power SystemsThe mini-power plant during the day.

Pandey and Yadav began bringing pieces together for an electric distribution system powered by the husks. They got a gasifier, a generator set, filtering, cleaning and cooling systems, piping and insulated wiring. They went through countless iterations to get the system working: adjusting valves and pressures, the gas-to-air ratios, the combustion temperature, the starting mechanism. In they end, they came up with a system that could burn 50 kilograms of rice husk per hour and produce 32 kilowatts of power, sufficient for about 500 village households.

They reached out to people in a village called Tamkuha, in Bihar, offering them a deal: for 80 rupees a month — roughly $1.75 — a household could get daily power for one 30-watt or two 15-watt compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs and unlimited cell phone charging between 5:00 p.m and 11:00 p.m. For many families, the price was less than half their monthly kerosene costs, and the light would be much brighter. It would also be less smoky, less of a fire hazard, and better for the environment. Customers could pay for more power if they needed it — for radios, TVs, ceiling fans or water pumps. But many had no appliances and lived in huts so small, one bulb was enough. The system went live on August 15, 2007, the anniversary of India’s independence.

It worked. Back in the United States, their colleagues Sinha and Ransler, who were pursuing M.B.A.s at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, put together a business plan and set out to raise money. They came first in two student competitions, garnering prizes of $10,000 and $50,000. The company received a grant from the Shell Foundation and set up three more systems in 2008. It has since raised $1.75 million in investment financing. In 2009, they had 19 systems in operation; in 2010, they more than tripled that number.

Technically, most of the problems were solved by 2008. But to make the business viable has required an ongoing process of what has been called “frugal innovation” — radically simplifying things to serve the needs of poor customers who would otherwise be excluded from basic market services due to their limited ability to pay.

In order to bring down costs, for example, the company stripped down the gasifiers and engines, removing everything non-essential that added to manufacturing or maintenance expenses, like turbocharging. They replaced an automated water-aided process for the removal of rice husk char (burned husks) from gasifiers with one that uses 80 percent less water and can be operated with a hand crank. They kept labor costs down by recruiting locals, often from very poor families with modest education levels (who would be considered unemployable by many companies) and training them to operate and load machines, and work as fee collectors and auditors, going door-to-door ensuring that villagers aren’t using more electricity than they pay for. (Electricity theft is a national problem in India, resulting in losses to power companies estimated at 30 percent. Husk Power says it has managed to keep such losses down to five percent.)

When the company noticed that customers were purchasing poor-quality CFL bulbs, which waste energy, they partnered with Havells India, a large manufacturer, to purchase thousands of high quality bulbs at discount rates, which their collectors now sell to clients. They also saw that collectors could become discount suppliers of other products — like soap, biscuits and oil — so they added a product fulfillment business into the mix.

And they found ways to extract value from the rice husk char — the waste product of a waste product — by setting up another side business turning the char into incense sticks. This business now operates in five locations and provides supplemental income to 500 women. The company also receives government subsidies for renewable energy and is seeking Clean Development Mechanism benefits.

With growth, human audits have proven inadequate to control electricity theft or inadvertent overuse. So the company developed a stripped-down pre-payment smart-card reader for home installation. The going rate for smart-card readers is between $50 and $90. Husk Power is near completion of one that Pandey says will cost under $7.

Alone, none of these steps would have been significant. Taken together, however, they make it possible for power units to deliver tiny volumes of electricity while enjoying a 30 percent profit margin. The side businesses add another 20 percent to the bottom line. Pandey says new power units become profitable within 2 to 3 months of installation. He expects the company to be financially self-sustaining by June 2011.

From a social standpoint, there are many benefits to this business model. In addition to the fact that electricity allows shop keepers to stay open later and farmers to irrigate more land, and lighting increases children’s studying time and reduces burglaries and snakebites, the company also channels most of its wages and payments for services directly back into the villages it serves.

For decades, countries have operated on the assumption that power from large electricity plants will eventually trickle down to villagers. In many parts of the world, this has proven to be elusive. Husk Power has identified at least 25,000 villages across Bihar and neighboring states in India’s rice belt as appropriate for its model. Ramapati Kumar, an advisor on Climate and Energy for Greenpeace India, who has studied Husk Power, explained that the company’s model could “go a long way in bringing light to 125,000 unelectrified villages in India,” while reducing “the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.”

It’s too soon to say whether Husk Power will prove to be successful in the long run. As with any young company, there are many unknowns. To achieve its goals, it will need to recruit and train thousands of employees over the next four years, raise additional financing, and institute sound management practices. Many companies destroy themselves in the process of trying to expand aggressively.

But the lessons here go beyond the fortunes of Husk Power. What the company illustrates is a different way to think about innovation — one that is suitable for global problems that stem from poor people’s lack of access to energy, water, housing and education. In many cases, success in these challenges hinges less on big new ideas than on collections of small old ideas well integrated and executed. “What’s replicable isn’t the distribution of electricity,” says Pandey. “It’s the whole process of how to take an old technology and apply it to local constraints. How to create a system out of the materials and labor that are readily available.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...ight-in-india/





Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum
Hilary Stout

SARAH WILSON was speaking proudly the other day when she declared: “My house is a little messy.”

Ms. Wilson lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., a small town in the Poconos. Many days, her home is strewn with dress-up clothes, art supplies and other artifacts from playtime with her two small children, Benjamin, 6, and Laura, 3. “I let them get it messy because that’s what it’s here for,” she said.

Ms. Wilson has embraced a growing movement to restore the sometimes-untidy business of play to the lives of children. Her interest was piqued when she toured her local elementary school last year, a few months before Benjamin was to enroll in kindergarten. She still remembered her own kindergarten classroom from 1985: it had a sandbox, blocks and toys. But this one had a wall of computers and little desks.

“There’s no imaginative play anymore, no pretend,” Ms. Wilson said with a sigh.

For several years, studies and statistics have been mounting that suggest the culture of play in the United States is vanishing. Children spend far too much time in front of a screen, educators and parents lament — 7 hours 38 minutes a day on average, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year. And only one in five children live within walking distance (a half-mile) of a park or playground, according to a 2010 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control, making them even less inclined to frolic outdoors.

Behind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades. Add to that parental safety concerns that hinder even true believers like Ms. Wilson.

“People are scared to let their kids outside, even where I live,” she said. “If I want my kids to go outside, I have to be with them.”

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, concluded, “Play is just a natural thing that animals do and humans do, but somehow we’ve driven it out of kids.”

Too little playtime may seem to rank far down on the list of society’s worries, but the scientists, psychologists, educators and others who are part of the play movement say that most of the social and intellectual skills one needs to succeed in life and work are first developed through childhood play. Children learn to control their impulses through games like Simon Says, play advocates believe, and they learn to solve problems, negotiate, think creatively and work as a team when they dig together in a sandbox or build a fort with sofa cushions. (The experts define play as a game or activity initiated and directed by children. So video games don’t count, they say, except perhaps ones that involve creating something, and neither, really, do the many educational toys that do things like sing the A B C’s with the push of a button.)

Much of the movement has focused on the educational value of play, and efforts to restore recess and unstructured playtime to early childhood and elementary school curriculums. But advocates are now starting to reach out to parents, recognizing that for the movement to succeed, parental attitudes must evolve as well — starting with a willingness to tolerate a little more unpredictability in children’s schedules and a little less structure at home. Building that fort, for example, probably involves disassembling the sofa and emptying the linen closet. (A sheet makes an excellent roof.)

“I think more than anything, adults are a little fearful of children’s play,” said Joan Almon, executive director of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit pro-play group. “Some people have a greater tolerance for chaos and have developed a hand for gently bringing it back into order. Others get really nervous about it.” Megan Rosker, a mother of three (ages 6, 3 and 2) in Redington Shores, Fla., has learned to embrace the disorder. She set aside the large sunroom in her home for the children and filled it with blocks, games, crayons, magazines to cut up and draw in, as well as toys and dress-up clothes. “I think a big part of free play is having space to do it in, a space that isn’t ruled over by adults,” she said.

“The other key is not to instruct kids how to play with something,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many board-game pieces have been turned into something else. But I let them do it because I figure their imagination is more valuable than the price of a board game.”

But, Ms. Rosker added, “I won’t claim any of this has been easy for me or my husband,” noting that her husband used to be “a total neat freak.” She said they have learned to live with disarray and to take other difficult steps, like strict limits on screen time.

Ms. Rosker has also campaigned, although unsuccessfully, to bring recess to her son’s elementary school. But school officials were too worried about potential injuries, unruliness and valuable time lost from academic pursuits to sign on to her idea and, she was surprised to find, many parents were similarly reluctant. “They said: ‘I’m not going to sign that. I’m sure there is a good reason why this is good for our kids — our school has good test scores.’ “

To try to reach more parents, a coalition called Play for Tomorrow this fall staged what amounted to a giant play date in Central Park. The event, known as the Ultimate Block Party, featured games like I Spy, mounds of Play-Doh, sidewalk chalk, building blocks, puzzles and more. The National Science Foundation was closely involved, advising organizers — and emphasizing to parents — the science and the educational value behind each of the carefully chosen activities. Organizers were hoping to attract 10,000 people to the event. They got more than 50,000.

“We were overwhelmed,” said Roberta Golinkoff, a developmental psychologist at the University of Delaware and a founder of the event along with Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. They are now working with other cities — Toronto, Atlanta, Baltimore and Houston, among them — to stage similar events, along with making the Central Park gathering an annual one.

The goal, in some ways, is to return to the old days.

“When I was growing up, there was a culture of childhood that children maintained,” said Jim Hunn, vice president for mass action at KaBOOM, a nonprofit group that is a leading voice in reducing what it terms the “play deficit.” He noted that he learned games like Capture the Flag from other children. To revive that culture, he said: “Parents have to reassert themselves in this process and teach them how to play. It’s critical that parents take some ownership and get out and play with their children.”

But promoting play can be surprisingly challenging to parents. Emily Paster, a mother of two in River Forest, Ill., a Chicago suburb, tries to discourage screen time and encourage her children to play imaginatively. That usually works fine for her 7-year-old daughter, who is happy to play in her room with her dolls for hours. But her 4-year-old son is a different story, especially in the cold weather when he’s cooped up.

“If he wants to play, he always wants me to play with him,” Ms. Paster said. “This child has a million toys. Every kind of train you can imagine. But he really wants a partner. If I’m meant to get anything accomplished — dinner, laundry, a phone call — then it’s really difficult.”

Encouraging brother and sister to play together only goes so far. “It seems like there’s a ticking time bomb,” Ms. Paster said. “Someone’s going to decide they’re done before the other one’s ready.” Sometimes, a video screen is the unwelcome but necessary alternative.

“If I want to get anything done it’s like, ‘Here’s the Leapster,’ “ she admitted, referring to a Leapster Explorer, a video-like device for preschoolers.

But once they’re used to it, Mr. Hunn said, children will direct their play themselves — a situation Ms. Almon recalls from her own childhood. “Our neighborhood gang organized a lot of softball games,” she said. “There was no adult around. We adjusted the rules as we needed them. Once the adults are involved it becomes: Here are the rules, and we have to follow these rules. It still can be a good activity but stops being play.”

In the vast world of organized children’s sports, a few parent-coaches are getting that hands-off message. Ms. Almon knows of a soccer coach who started allowing children to organize their own scrimmages during practice while he stood silently on the sidelines, and a hockey coach in Chicago who ends practices by shooing all the adults off the ice and letting the kids skate as they please.

There are more formal efforts, in addition to the Ultimate Block Party initiatives. The US Play Coalition, a group of doctors, educators and parks and recreation officials, plans a conference next month at Clemson University on the value of outdoor play. KaBOOM has built 1,900 playgrounds across the country, most in low-income neighborhoods, and in September helped organize “Play Days” in 1,600 communities. It also has added do-it-yourself tools on its Web site to help parents organize and create neighborhood play spaces themselves. Another Web site scheduled to start this spring, LearningResourceNetwork.net, aims to create a broad educational source for parents and teachers.

“Our first big push will be on play,” said Susan Magsamen, the executive director of the group.

An important part of the movement is teaching children themselves how to play. The average 3-year-old can pick up an iPhone and expertly scroll through the menu of apps, but how many 7-year-olds can organize a kickball game with the neighborhood kids?

Toward that end, at the Central Park event, parents were given a 75-page “Playbook” outlining research on play and offering children ideas for playful pursuits — things that generations past did without prompting and that may evoke in today’s parents feelings of recognition and nostalgia.

“Climb on the couch with your friends and pretend you are sailing on a ship to a distant land,” reads one idea. Another, from the section on construction play: “Lay a toy on the floor and figure out how to build a bridge going over the toy with blocks.”

“Make paper doll cutouts from old newspapers and magazines,” a third suggests, “and let your imagination fly!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06play.html





¡Increíble! Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conversation Interpreter
MG Siegler

When it came to translations, you used to either need an interpreter or a book to navigate another language. That was either costly or cumbersome, respectively. Then the Internet came along and made things significantly easier. Except you had to be chained to your computer to translate something. A year ago, Google made things easier again by launching their Translate app for Android. But that’s nothing compared to what they’re releasing today.

The latest version of Google Translate for Android comes with a few updates to celebrate the one-year anniversary. Most of these are to the user interface. But there’s also one new feature they’re previewing in alpha mode. And it’s awesome: Conversation Mode.

Essentially, this allows you to speak in one language into your phone and the app will read it out loud translated into the language of the person you’re speaking with. That person can then respond and it will translate it back into your language. Yes, amazing.

Google actually demoed this on stage at a conference in Berlin back in September of last year. There, after a few minor hiccups, an English to German conversation was had pretty quickly. At the time, they noted that hopefully it would be available to consumers in a few months. And now here it is — with some limitations.

First of all, Google is quick to note that this is very much an alpha feature. In other words, expect a lot of hiccups. They note that background noise, thick accents, and quick speech can all trip up the app. Further, it only works for English and Spanish currently. But I don’t care — this is still amazing. And you know they’ll improve it rapidly.

Google also notes that the overall app is now seeing daily usage from more than 150 countries around the world. Currently, it supports 53 languages for text input and 15 for voice input (though that’s different from this conversation mode). They also say that the majority of usage comes outside the U.S. right now, which probably shouldn’t be too surprising given what it does.

Again, this feature is Android-only for now in alpha. And it should be available shortly in the latest Google Translate app update.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/12/android-translations/





RapidShare Threatens to Sue Over Piracy Allegations
Mark Hachman

RapidShare, named as a contributor to digital piracy by a MarkMonitor report, has threatened to sue for defamation.

In a statement from the company, RapidShare called the accusations "absurd". MarkMonitor, for its own part, said it stood by its published research.

"This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor," RapidShare said in a statement. "RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers."

MarkMonitor, a Web site that specializes in "enterprise brand protection," said in a Tuesday study that the most-trafficked domains engaged in digital piracy included three sites - rapidshare.com, megavideo.com, and megaupload.com - that combined yielded 21 billion pageviews per year.

As a whole, the collection of sites which MarkMonitor classified as "digital piracy" represented 146 million page views per day, or 53 billion page views per year. Even the least-visited sites in the category drove 781 million hits per year, the firm's study found.

"Apart from getting wrong what the company's business model is, there are some serious questions about the study's methodology," RapidShare added. "For example, the authors conclude that RapidShare has to be the biggest digital piracy site from looking at the number of page visits, totally ignoring the fact that millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes. Private customers use RapidShare to share their personal pictures, videos and documents or to make backup copies of their hard drives. Business clients rely on our services to exchange large files with colleagues at different sites, with clients or with service providers or to make available free programmes or programme updates to its customers."

MarkMonitor said that it had noted that point.

"It's important to point out that the report did specify that some of the sites do comply with takedown requests and that those requests need to be issued by the content owner," a MarkMonitor spokeswoman said in an email. "We felt that was an important point to make and, in fact, I recall making it in conversation with reporters.

"We stand by the research we performed and the findings of our study," the MarkMonitor spokeswoman said. "We believe the topic is important and deserves a healthy discussion." RapidShare's terms of service specifically prohibits "works the download of which violates third-party copyrights". But the site also says that it does not open and view the files of its users, and contains no search function so that other users may look for content. Instead, each file is linked to directly by the uploader.

RapidShare acknowledged that copyrighted files do get uploaded. "However, these users are in the absolute minority compared with those who use our services to pursue perfectly legitimate interests," the site said.

Those same arguments have been previously applied to software programs like BitTorrent and LimeWire, which shut down earlier this year, and later replaced by a spinoff technology. Claims of indexed pirated files have also been applied to Google, although in December Google launched an updated plan to combat piracy.

RapidShare said that the study had validated its intention to raise awareness of its business model, and that it had hired a Washington D.C.-based lobbyist firm a short time ago.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375638,00.asp





French ISP Throttles Direct Download Website Megaupload
Desire Athow

In what might be the first of many, French Internet Service Provider Orange has been caught throttling traffic to one of the world's biggest direct download websites, Megaupload.

The site, which also operates Megavideo, states that Orange, which is owned by France Telecom, is preventing its users from accessing its downloading and video streaming service freely and says that it can prove it.

As a result, Megaupload has issued a statement to its users encouraging them to contact the Orange's call center and tell them that they can't connect to websites hosted on Cogent and TATA.

Even more surprising (and perhaps showing how miffed they are), Megaupload calls on its uses to move to another "friendlier" ISP like Free or SFR.

A spokesperson for Orange told the French newspaper Le point, that the company was very surprised of the accusations, blaming Megaupload for having chosen "unreliable" peering partners before adding that Orange's was not to be blamed for Megaupload's failures.

Furthermore, Orange says that Megaupload is deliberately using more "reliable" service providers to convey data to competing network operators.

Traffic from France to these direct download websites has significantly increased after the French government adopted the controversial antipiracy law called Hadopi.

Megaupload and Megavideo are both located in Hong Kong, which allows them to broker cheap deals with internet service providers.

Given that their business models rely mostly on advertising, it does make sense for them to go for the most affordable peering partner.

However, both Cogent and Tata are both highly rated. Cogent is the second largest carrier of internet traffic in the world with roughly one in every six bytes running through its cables.

Furthermore, its AS174 backbone has one of the highest-ranked connectivity degrees on the internet. It would not be the first time that France Telecom and Cogent have had a dispute though.

Back in 2005, France Telecom severed all network links with Cogent in dispute over low bandwidth pricing.
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/01/1...te-megaupload/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[multi]

Righthaven extends copyright lawsuit campaign to individual Web posters
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011...campaign-indi/

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by multi

Righthaven extends copyright lawsuit campaign to individual Web posters
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011...campaign-indi/

Court: Republishing Entire Newspaper Story is Fair Use
Eric Goldman

The defendants run a website on immigration issues. They posted to their website 100% of a 33 paragraph Las Vegas Review-Journal story on Las Vegas police targeting minorities.

The post attributed the story to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Righthaven then acquired the copyright to the story and, following its standard tactics, sued the defendants for copyright infringement without sending a takedown notice.

The defendants asserted a fair use defense, and the court granted it on summary judgment.
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives...lishing_en.htm