Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 19th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Because the Paley Center does not compress its files for quality purposes, it needs every bit of that storage power — it would take more than 17 standard DVDs to hold an hour of TV recorded to Paley’s standards." – David Roth


"Don’t you feel awfully sorry for actresses? Gone are the days of the black coffee and 10 Marlboro Reds lunch." – Bumble Ward


"There’s tremendous pressure on the IBM scientists. The pressure they had put on themselves. They’re the ones who decided to try and develop a computer system that can play ‘Jeopardy.’" – Alex Trebek


"The Justice Department is trying to cover this up. If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it." – Michael Flynn



































February 19th, 2011




House Passes Amendment to Block Funds for Net Neutrality Order
Juliana Gruenwald

The House passed an amendment Thursday that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from using any funding to implement the network-neutrality order it approved in December.

The amendment, approved on a 244-181 vote, was offered by Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., to legislation that would fund government agencies for the rest of fiscal year 2011.

Walden and other critics of the FCC's net-neutrality order argue it will stifle innovation and investment in broadband. The order aims to bar broadband providers from discriminating against Internet content, services, or applications.

"If left unchallenged, this claim of authority would allow the FCC to regulate any matter it discussed in the national broadband plan," Walden said.

If the defunding effort fails, Republicans are pursuing a second route to try to block the FCC's open-Internet order. Walden and other Republicans in both the House and the Senate introduced on Wednesday a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, which would give lawmakers a limited amount of time to try to block the FCC's net-neutrality rules.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a senior Energy and Commerce member, argued that by voting for the amendment, "you give control to the Broadband Barons ... and then you will see an inevitable decline in innovation, in investment, in the private sector, in the new products, the new technology, the new applications, these new devices, which are basically invented by hundreds and thousands of smaller companies in our country."

President Obama, who supports the FCC's net neutrality order, has threatened to veto the spending measure if it cuts government programs too deeply. He was on the West Coast meeting with leaders from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and other technology companies when the vote came in.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/house...order-20110217





Weak Copyright Laws? Recording Industry Files Massive Lawsuit Against isoHunt
Michael Geist

As the debate over Canada’s copyright reform legislation, Bill C-32,continues to rage before a legislative committee, one of the most frequently heard claims is that tough reforms are needed to counter Canada’s reputation as a "piracy haven". The presence of several well-known BitTorrent sites, most notably B.C.-based isoHunt, is cited as evidence for Canada’s supposedly lax laws that the industry says leaves it powerless.

When the bill was first introduced last June, the Canadian Recording Industry Association stated that "stronger rules are also needed to rein in Canadian-based peer-to-peer websites, which, according to IFPI,have become 'a major source of the world's piracy problem'."

Politicians have taken note of the concerns. Industry Minister Tony Clement said the new bill will target "wealth destroyers" and Liberal MP Dan McTeague has lamented that "the very existence of an isoHunt in Canada is problematic and is very much the result of what appears to be a legislative holiday for companies and other BitTorrent sites."

While the notion of a "legislative holiday" appears to be the impetus for some of the provisions on Bill C-32, my weekly technology law column (homepage version, Toronto Star version) notes that what is left unsaid - and thus far unreported - is that 26 of the world’s largest recording companies launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against isoHunt using existing Canadian copyright law just three weeks before the introduction of the bill.

The lawsuit, filed in B.C. courts in May 2010, alleges that isoHunt facilitates copyright infringement on a massive scale. It seeks millions of dollars in damages and an order that the site cease operating. The lawsuit alleges that isoHunt contributes to wide scale copyright infringement and that its activities violate and can be stopped by current Canadian law.

The lawsuit may come as a surprise to politicians and other observers accustomed to hearing that Canada does not have the legal tools to address online infringement, yet that perception has always been more myth than reality. As the isoHunt lawsuit demonstrates, the legal power to combat online infringement has existed within Canadian copyright law for years. It has been the industry’s reluctance to wield those powers – not their absence – that may have allowed infringing websites to call Canada home.

The claims in the isoHunt lawsuit must still be proven in court (as would any case using the new powers contemplated by Bill C-32), but past cases suggest that Canadian law is hardly toothless. In 2008, the recording industry filed a lawsuit against QuebecTorrent, a Quebec-based BitTorrent site. Within months, the Superior Court of Quebec handed down a permanent injunction against the site and it discontinued operation. Soon after, the industry targeted other sites with cease and desist letters, relying on existing law to demand that they stop operating.

Foreign organizations have also successfully used Canadian copyright law to counter alleged online infringement. Last month, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN announced that it had quietly shut down dozens of BitTorrent sites by filing copyright violation complaints with the sites' hosting providers. While BREIN keeps the names of the sites secret, it notes that Canada is one of the countries where it brings legal action.

The reality is that all major countries are home to some BitTorrent sites, including Canada. The question is not whether Canadian law is equipped to deal with these sites – recent history and the latest lawsuit demonstrate that it is – but rather why the industry has opted for a strategy of damaging Canada’s reputation by loudly claiming that it is unable to address online infringement using existing law while it quietly files court documents that suggest that the opposite is true.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5636/135/





Copyright Lawsuits Have a Hard Time in Texas, and Rightly So
Bert Knabe

My original plan for todays blog was to talk about the EFF's Deeplinks blog post, "Don't Mess With Texas: Another Texas Judge Scrutinizes Mass Copyright Litigation." But before I could do that, I saw "6,374 DISMISSED John Doe Defendants cheer as the LFP Internet Group lawsuits go down in flames," on the TorrentLawyer blog.

I'm proud of the Texas judges who are upholding civil liberties. I'm not defending illegal file sharing, but I am defending the right of the accused to due process. The plaintiff's lawyers in these cases try to treat it more like a racketeering case, filing one suit against all of the John Doe defendants. As Corynne McSherry of DeepLinks put it:

In his orders, Judge Furgeson notes an essential feature of mass copyright litigation: unlike the normal case, in which a defendant is notified of early case developments and can intervene to protect his or her interests (such as by opposing a plaintiff's request to send out subpoenas), the Does in these cases are unlikely to have any idea a lawsuit has been filed, much less that the plaintiff is seeking their identity. Appointing an attorney ad litem for limited purposes is one way to address that problem and help ensure that the Does receive the same constitutional protections that must apply to any defendant, in any litigation.

Filing one suit for hundreds, even thousands of John Does allows the plaintiff's attorneys to proceed with the case without paying filing fees for most of the defendants. Most of the defendants also don't have lawyers, so there is little opposition to whatever the plaintiffs lawyers do. One thing Judge Furgeson has done is consider appointing attorneys for the John Does. He also severed each of the John Does from the primary case. noting that the plaintiff has not offered any proof of conpiracy, and just because a group of people are doing the same thing does not mean they are conspiring or working together.

Because the judge severed each of the defendents, if the plaintiff wants to sue them he will have to sue each individually, paying the filing fees for each case. That will get expensive very quickly. They would also have to file in the correct jurisdiction, another problem with the John Doe cases that have been filed recently in movie sharing cases.

The RIAA and MPAA have a right to protect their interests, but they need to realize that this is not 1980. Although they could look back to the late '70's and early '80's and maybe learn a few things. Then it was the VCR that was the doom of the movie industry. A solution was found then, and once the RIAA and MPAA quit panicking one will be found now. Independent musicians and film makers are using the very things causing traditional content providers problems to promote themselves as they've never been able to before. Instead of suing current and potential customers they should be finding ways to turn make use of the new technologies. And in case nobodies noticed, all their encryption and lawsuits haven't even managed to slow down file sharing. Instead of trying to cut heads off the hydra, they should be seeking a way to harness the beast.
http://lubbockonline.com/interact/bl...and-rightly-so





Judge Rules Against China; 'Green Dam' Suit Heads to Trial
Mark Hachman

About a year after Cybersitter sued the Chinese government and several Asian OEMs for allegedly copying its code to create the "Green Dam" software, a U.S. federal judge has allowed the $2.3 billion suit to proceed.

Judge Josephine Staton Tucker, a California district judge, entered a judgement of default against the People's Republic of China on Wednesday, after PRC officials failed to respond to the ruling. Although the PRC's embassy sent a letter to the U.S. State Department protesting Cybersitter's suit, such a letter did not qualify as a formal response.

Cybersitter LLC does business as Solid Oak Software.

As a result, Cybersitter's suit against the PRC, Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Ltd., Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd. and PC OEMs Sony, Lenovo, Acer, Asustek, BenQ, and Haier, may proceed.

On Sept. 13, Sony filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the judgement entirely under a "forum non conveniens" argument, that it would be costly and inconvenient to send its executives to California for a trial, and that much of the evidence in the case resided in China.

The court denied Sony's motion, but did state in its ruling that China itself would qualify as "as an adequate alternative forum" for trial, instead of the United States.

The case now is set for trial sometime next year, said Elliott B. Gipson, a partner in Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, which are representing Cybersitter. "We will continue to prosecute our case against the remaining defendants and look forward to trying the case in U.S. District Court in March 2012," Gipson said in an email.

In its suit, Cybersitter refers to the case as "one of the largest cases of software piracy in history," in which Cybersitter accuses the PRC to have collaborated with Zhengzhou Jinhui and Beijing Dazheng to construct the "Green Dam" filtering software in 2009. According to a U. of Michigan study, the two contractors copied about 3,000 lines of code from Cybersitter and built them into the Green Dam software.

According to statistics compiled by Cybersitter from China, over 53 million PCs had been sold with the GreenDam software installed by June 2009, and the software had been downloaded an additional 3.27 millio n times. In December, Cybersitter/Solid Oak announced Cybersitter 11, which was completely rewritten to eliminate the code that was in Green Dam.

The Chinese government had ordered that OEMs doing business in the country install the software, which could be used to filter pornography, as the government claimed, but also other terms as well. To continue to do business in China, the OEMs initially agreed to install the Green Dam software, which made them liable under U.S. copyright laws, Cybersitter argued.

Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., a contractor which designed the software, denied the claims and threatened to sue. The scandal quickly boiled over into an international incident, forcing OEMs to decide between a potential contributory infringement lawsuit and alienating a lucrative market.

In its Nov. 29, 2010 letter to the State Department, the PRC's embassy said that China "expresses strong concern" over a summons and complaint that State Department officials served to China as part of a diplomatic note. "The Chinese side hereby expresses strong concern over it and firmly rejects it," the letter said, characterizing the software as a "public management activity to protect minors".

"According to the principle of soveriegn immunity universally recongnized in international law, the judicial authority of a State shall not exercize jurisdiction over another Sovereign State without the consent of the latter. The U.S. courts have no jurisdiction to accept or hear the so-called litigation filed by the U.S. company against the state of PRC."

When asked how Cybersitter planned to proceed against China to recoup its damages, Gipson declined to comment. But the case against the remaining defendants will proceed, he said.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380614,00.asp





U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’
Ernesto

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.

“Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their websites.

As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.

The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.

This banner was visible on the 84,000 sites

The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.”

Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.
One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involved in any of the alleged crimes.

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet. Adding mooo.com will produce a different image than picking a random domain, which conforms the seizure.

Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.

A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made.
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-governme...istake-110216/





MPAA Sues Hotfile.com For Promoting Internet Piracy
Graeme McMillan

The next front in the War on Internet Piracy? Online file sharing sites, apparently. The Motion Picture Association of America has filed a lawsuit against Hotfile.com on behalf of 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros, accusing the site of facilitating copyright infringement on "a staggering scale."

The lawsuit actually goes further, suggesting that the site not only encourages illegal filesharing, but that it also discourages personal filesharing by incentivizing popular files, and that its membership fees mean that it itself is profiting from the illegal filesharing that happens on the site. MPAA general counsel Daniel Mandil said in a statement,

In less than two years, Hotfile has become one of the 100 most trafficked sites in the world. That is a direct result of the massive digital theft that Hotfile promotes. The theft taking place on Hotfile is unmistakable. The files are indeed 'hot' as in 'stolen'.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday; similar sites such as RapidShare and MegaUpload are now at the center of rumors of future suits, and it's being reported that Google is also receiving legal warning from the MPAA over illegal torrrents being downloaded by those using its WiFi service.
http://techland.time.com/2011/02/11/...ternet-piracy/





Fast Says File-Sharing Legal Action Must Continue
Derek du Preez

The Federation Against Software Theft (Fast) has urged the UK courts to press ahead with 26 illegal file sharing cases to their natural conclusion, following the uproar caused by notorious law firm ACS Law pulling out of proceedings.

Last month, ACS Law declared it would no longer represent its partner company and copyright owner MediaCAT in challenging the 26 people who refused to pay after it was alleged that they had been illegally sharing pornographic movies.

ACS Law initiated the case but after the head of the solicitors' firm, Andrew Crossley, received death threats he told Judge Colin Birss that he no longer wanted to be involved.

Birss has given MediaCAT 14 days to find a new law firm before the case is struck out.

"Much press coverage is being given over to the problems, politics and methods employed to catch infringers, but what has been forgotten is that the appreciation of value in digital IP is so low, many think nothing of sharing paid-for product with friends and the world at large for free," said Julian Heathcote-Hobbins, general counsel, Fast.

Judge Birss has himself said: "I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in the court." He also explained that he did not want to drop the case simply to "avoid public scrutiny".

Heathcote-Hobbins went on to say that if someone does not want their product to be shared on a peer-to-peer platform, it should not be.

"Fast is simply not going to comment on the actions of the two companies involved. However in all the speculation, one fact has been overlooked and there is a need to pursue infringers from time to time. If there is no consequence, the behaviour is unlikely to change.

"Research conducted by media law firm Wiggin has found that over two-thirds of those who illegally download content from file-sharing sites would stop if asked by letter to do so. Sanctions have to be there.

"Our argument is that the cases therefore need to be seen to conclusion so that if the judiciary criticises the way in which this law is enforced it could be improved, meaning the innocent are not accused and those who persist in this activity can be held to account."
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/...ction-continue





Software Association Paid $57K in 2010 to Piracy Whistleblowers

In 2010, SIIA’s Corporate Anti-Piracy program paid out 16 rewards totaling $57,500.
Carolyn Duffy Marsan

In 2010, the Software and Information Industry Association received 157 reports of alleged corporate end user software piracy. Of the 157 reports, 42 (or 27%) were judged sufficiently reliable to pursue. Of these 16 qualified for rewards totaling $57,500.

The profile of sources reporting software piracy indicates that most reports come from former IT staff – these are the people who typically witness the illegal use of software. 75% of all reports come from IT staff or managers, 11% from the company’s senior management and 4% from outside consultants. More than 59% of those reporting are no longer employed by the target company. In fact, many of SIIA's sources report that their primary reason for leaving the target company was the company’s lack of ethical behavior related to software compliance.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

In 2010, the Software and Information Industry Association received 157 reports of alleged corporate end user software piracy. Of the 157 reports, 42 (or 27%) were judged sufficiently reliable to pursue. Of these 16 qualified for rewards totaling $57,500.

The profile of sources reporting software piracy indicates that most reports come from former IT staff – these are the people who typically witness the illegal use of software. 75% of all reports come from IT staff or managers, 11% from the company’s senior management and 4% from outside consultants. More than 59% of those reporting are no longer employed by the target company. In fact, many of SIIA's sources report that their primary reason for leaving the target company was the company’s lack of ethical behavior related to software compliance.

Nearly 94% of the reports were made online on SIIA's web reporting forms, and 4% were reported through SIIA’s Anti-Piracy hotline. The remaining share came in through fax, e-mail and postal mail.

Cases are not concentrated by industry – while 12% involve "IT", 10% involve healthcare and education, no other category rises above 7%. Most corporate cases pursued by SIIA represent relatively larger companies – the average number of employees is over 567 with average annual sales of nearly $441 million.

The largest states, naturally, are home to the largest number of corporate piracy cases. California and Florida lead with 15% each. Utah and Illinois follow behind with 10% and 7% respectively.

The largest number of software titles pirated fall in the Productivity category. This share is the percent of total titles audited in each category that were found to be unlicensed. The share of pirated software varies by category, as illustrated in the table below.

36 companies settled software and content infringement cases with SIIA over the past year.

In 2010, SIIA shut down over 41,000 online marketplace listings worldwide offering more than 4.5 million software products with a total value of more than US$90 million. The estimated value of listings enforced is calculated by the sum of the Buy It Now price multiplied the quantity for each listing per product.

SIIA settled its first cases involving graphics software (clip art) for over $200,000.

In all, SIIA filed 17 cases against online sellers in more than a dozen different states.

In 2010, SIIA sent approximately 1400 demand letters, collected close $40,000 in restitution. Source information from the sellers revealed that a majority of the software purchased by these sellers outside of the U.S. actually came from China through sites such as DHGate, Tradetang.com, and Alibaba.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...leblowers.html





File-Sharing at Tufts Leads to Record Number of Copyright Complaints

Over 200 students this year served with copyright infringement notices

As the ease of online file-sharing has grown, so too has the number of Tufts students facing disciplinary and legal action for copyright infringement violations.

A record 204 students last semester received complaints from copyright holders after engaging in illicit file sharing activity, enabled by protocols like BitTorrent and LimeWire, according to Tufts OnLine supervisor Judi Vellucci. Tufts OnLine is a student-run group that provides computer support.

Vellucci said that this represents a marked increase in complaints from the previous two academic years, during which a total across both semesters of 331 and 346 students, respectively, encountered disciplinary action.

"We're only halfway through the year and we're more than halfway through the amount of notifications we got in a full year, last year and the year before," Vellucci said. Complaints from copyright holders often come with pre-settlement letters requiring students to pay up to $1,500 for a first offense in order to avoid immediate further legal action, according to Vellucci. Last semester alone, 16 students received pre-settlement letters with their letters of complaint, according to Vellucci.

The university streamlined its disciplinary procedure for handling copyright infringement violations last fall in response to the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which requires colleges and universities to institute policies that deter and discipline file-sharing, Martin Oppenheimer, Tufts' senior counsel for business and corporate affairs, told the Daily in an e-mail. The law requires that institutions report their file-sharing policies to the federal government, Vellucci added.

"We have to educate, we have to inform, and we have to use technology to combat or block peer-to-peer," Vellucci said. "We also need to be able to report … our plan of action at the drop of a hat."

Tufts' policy blocks students found to have engaged in illegal transfer of information from using the Internet on campus. Violations are traced back to students' Internet Protocol (IP) address.

One-time violators' Internet privileges are reinstated only after they watch a short informational movie and pass a quiz on copyright laws. Subsequent violations result in consequences as severe as level-one disciplinary probation (pro-one), a one-semester ban from Internet use in residence halls or referral to the Dean of Students Office.

Dean of Judicial Affairs Veronica Carter said she has recently noticed a "little bit of an increase" in repeat violations of the university's file-sharing policy. She noted that students generally do not consider copyright infringement to be a serious issue until they are discovered.

"Students don't think it's a big deal until they come in and get their access restricted for a semester," Carter said. "Then they come in and they think it is a big deal."

Following the Tufts disciplinary procedure for a first-time offense and paying any required settlement does not completely protect students from future legal action, according to Vellucci.

"There's one line in those complaints: ‘reserve the right for legal action later,'" Vellucci said. "If you've come through the quiz … and gotten reinstated and you get sued later, unfortunately the university will turn your name and information over to the copyright holder, because it's the law."

In general, it does not seem as though the copyright holders have any intention of winning court cases against violators.

"No one has ever taken this to court and completely won," Vellucci said. "It's a lose-lose situation."

The ubiquity of file-sharing across college campuses makes it challenging to combat, Vellucci noted.

"[Students] look around in the dorm and they see someone downloading and uploading music themselves and they're thinking, ‘what am I doing on iTunes?'" Vellucci said.

BitTorrent and LimeWire are the most popular file-sharing protocols used by Tufts students to exchange music, movies and television shows, according to Vellucci.

The hazy legality of file sharing programs often makes it difficult for non-experts to determine the legitimacy of the exchange.

"LimeWire, at one point, was selling the software and saying [it was] perfectly legal," Vellucci said. "They're right, the software is perfectly legal, because there's a legitimate use for it. It's what you use it for that breaks the law."

The drawbacks of file-sharing for illegal entertainment purposes often overshadow the benefits of similar programs for academic use, Vellucci said.

Academic research, which often benefits from collaborative research, could be adversely affected were the university to completely block file-sharing programs, according to Vellucci.

"We're a research level one institution, and we firmly believe that there are legitimate reasons for students to use peer-to-peer," Vellucci said. "If we were to disable that it probably would disable a lot of our research work. … I don't think we'll ever see the day when we block everything."
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/file-shari...ints-1.2469286





Illegal Downloads at OU on Decline
Lilly Chapa

Copyright complaints against OU as a result of illegal downloading dropped 85 percent between fall 2009 and fall 2010, likely due to OU Information Technology’s copyright education efforts and blocking of file-sharing traffic.

Illegal downloading can influence tuition increases because the university foots the cost of investigating complaints filed by the Recording Industry Association of America and other watchdog organizations, said OU Information Technologies spokesman Nicholas Key.

“Each copyright complaint costs OU legal fees and the risk of lawsuits, which can really add up and ultimately cause a rise in tuition,” Key said.

OU IT officers began implementing measures to deter illegal downloading after the Higher Education Opportunity and Affordability Act was passed in 2008, which required universities to implement network filtering to stop peer-to-peer file sharing to help prevent tuition increases.

The university received 552 copyright complaints from the Recording Industry Association of America and other watchdog organizations in fall 2009.

The combination of this and the Higher Education Act pushed the university into action because there was too much financial and legal risk to OU and its students, Key said.

“Last fall, about 5 percent of the student body was illegally downloading,” Key said. “This fall we only had 82 complaints. We’re definitely happy with the results.”

In fall 2009, OU IT began copyright-education campaigns, and by spring 2010, users of OU’s wireless network, OUWIFI, were required to register their computers and take a copyright education quiz. OUWIFI also blocked peer-to-peer access that corresponds with illegal downloading, Key said.

“We don’t block websites, just peer-to-peer traffic,” Key said. “It’s not our job to get anyone in trouble or manage the content of the Internet. We just want to limit students’ liability.”

Key warned that students who illegally download files outside OU may still be caught.

“If a student does access illegal files off campus, their computer leaves traces that the watchdog organizations can find,” Key said. “They then turn the complaint over to OU, and we are legally obligated to research the complaint.”

If a student illegally downloads a file on his or her computer, the Recording Industry Association of America can get the information and the computer’s Internet Protocol address — a numeric address assigned to a computer connected to the Internet — and send a copyright complaint to OU.

The university finds the address owner, informs them of the complaint and investigates. Students are cut off from the wireless networks until they complete a series of steps to clear their name, said Andrea Kulsrud, Student Conduct Office director.

“The [Recording Industry Association of America] is generally satisfied with OU’s response to the copyright complaints,” Key said. “However, the agency can still decide to take further action on individual cases.”

OU computer engineering sophomore Jason Mead said he doesn’t think OU’s policy is too invasive or uncalled for.

“Well, it’s clear that their attempts to stop illegal file sharing have been successful,” Mead said. “And as far as I know, most students haven’t felt restrained by these Internet policies.”

Key said OU made sure to not impact students’ ability to collaborate and share academically and it allows the usage of bit torrents when connected to an Ethernet cord.

“Bit torrents are blocked on OU’s wireless networks for bandwidth purposes only,” Key said.

Key said OU IT is pleased with the success of the efforts to reduce copyright complaints.

Violation punishments

» First violation: Offender’s computer is blocked from OU’s network and they must complete a copyright quiz before Internet access is restored.

» Second violation: Offender must visit the Office of Student Conduct for a consultation and possible fee, in addition to retaking the copyright quiz..

» Third violation: Offender must pay a minimum $200 fee in addition to the previous steps.
http://www.oudaily.com/news/2011/feb...loads-decline/





Court Confirms: IP Addresses Aren't People (and P2P Lawyers Know It)
Matthew Lasar

Wrapping up the last of the United Kingdom's notorious copyright infringement "pay up" letter cases, a UK patent and copyright judge has had a major revelation. Just because some lawyer cites an Internet Protocol (IP) address where illegal file sharing may have taken place, that doesn't mean that the subscriber living there necessarily did the dirty deed. Or is responsible for others who may have done it.

"What if the defendant authorises another to use their Internet connection in general and, unknown to them, the authorised user uses P2P software and infringes copyright?" asked His Honour Judge Birss QC last Tuesday.

What indeed? The question comes in the case of MediaCAT Limited versus 27 defendants accused of sharing online porn. The copyright holding group is represented by lawyer Andrew Crossley of ACS law. He wants around £500 apiece from the accused, even though most of his cases show little evidence of individual guilt.

That's not the only legal snag Judge Birss noticed. He was particularly irritated over evidence that ACS was trying to withdraw the questionable complaints in a bid to sue the defendants again under better circumstances, and with a new firm: GCB.

"The GCB episode is damning in my judgment," Birss warned. "This shows that Media CAT is a party who, while coming to court to discontinue, is at the very same time trying to ram home claims formulated on exactly the same basis away from the gaze of the court. That will not do."

What does "unsecured" mean again?

But what makes the England and Wales Patent County Court ruling particularly interesting is the jurist's obvious skepticism about what has become the central dogma behind these suits—that a torrent share associated with a specific IP address is grounds for legal action against a specific human being. The lawyers argued that, even if the Internet subscriber hadn't done the deed, he or she had presumably let someone else use their network, and so were therefore responsible for this "authorized" use.

"Does the act of authorising use of an Internet connection turn the person doing the authorising into a person authorising the infringement within s16(2)?" Birss asked. "I am not aware of a case which decides that question either."

"s16(2)" is a reference to that section of the UK's Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of 1988. We've italicized the key word in play: "Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner does, or authorises another to do, any of the acts restricted by the copyright." But authorizing a guest to play some online game can hardly be seen as an authorization for that guest to start downloading copyrighted material; if that happens, why would the subscriber be responsible?

Birss had even more concerns:

Then there is the question of whether leaving an Internet connection "unsecured" opens up the door to liability for infringement by others piggy backing on the connection unbeknownst to the owner. Finally, what does "unsecured" mean? Wireless routers have different levels of security available and if the level of security is relevant to liability—where is the line to be drawn? No case has decided these issues but they are key to the claimant's ability to... say—one way or another there is infringement here.

Who knew?

All this may seem rather obvious to Ars readers, but these are key principles that are only now finding their way in major judicial opinions. The revelations could have some serious implications for the UK's Digital Economy Act, too. That law requires ISPs to forward P2P warning letters from copyright holders, and it opens the door to throttling and Internet disconnection for repeat infringement.

Central to the Act's enforcement logic is the idea that the activities associated with an IP address demonstrate the culpability of the address owner. Such is the official fealty to this precept that last year one UK government defender of the Act mistakenly called IP your "Intellectual Property" address.

But Judge Birss has clearly discovered that the digital emperor of this assumption has few if any garments. "Proof that a person owns a photocopier does not prove they have committed acts of copyright infringement," he continued:

All the IP address identifies is an internet connection, which is likely today to be a wireless home broadband router. All Media CAT's monitoring can identify is the person who has the contract with their ISP to have internet access. Assuming a case in Media CAT's favour that the IP address is indeed linked to wholesale infringements of the copyright in question... Media CAT do not know who did it and know that they do not know who did it.

Oops. The judge has given ACS:Law two weeks to continue the case or pay the defendants' legal expenses (or "wasted costs" as they're called in the UK). Crossley and MediaCAT have already closed up their operations, but they may still be targeted in a "group complaint" (like a class action here in the US) brought by defense lawyers at the major law firm Ralli.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...rs-know-it.ars





Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?
Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro

ARCHAEOLOGISTS finished a remarkable dig last summer in East London. Among their finds were seven earthenware knobs, physical evidence of a near perfect 16th-century experiment into the link between commerce and culture.

When William Shakespeare was growing up in rural Stratford-upon-Avon, carpenters at that East London site were erecting the walls of what some consider the first theater built in Europe since antiquity. Other playhouses soon rose around the city. Those who paid could enter and see the play; those who didn’t, couldn’t.

By the time Shakespeare turned to writing, these “cultural paywalls” were abundant in London: workers holding moneyboxes (bearing the distinctive knobs found by the archaeologists) stood at the entrances of a growing number of outdoor playhouses, collecting a penny for admission.

At day’s end, actors and theater owners smashed open the earthenware moneyboxes and divided the daily take. From those proceeds dramatists were paid to write new plays. For the first time ever, it was possible to earn a living writing for the public.

Money changed everything. Almost overnight, a wave of brilliant dramatists emerged, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. These talents and many comparable and lesser lights had found the opportunity, the conditions and the money to pursue their craft.

The stark findings of this experiment? As with much else, literary talent often remains undeveloped unless markets reward it.

At the height of the Enlightenment, the cultural paywall went virtual, when British authors gained the right to create legally protected markets for their works. In 1709, expressly to combat book piracy and “for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books,” Britain enacted the world’s first copyright law. Eighty years later, America’s founders expanded on this, giving Congress the authority to enact copyright laws “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

Copyright, now powerfully linking authors, the printing press (and later technologies) and the market, would prove to be one of history’s great public policy successes. Books would attract investment of authors’ labor and publishers’ capital on a colossal scale, and our libraries and bookstores would fill with works that educated and entertained a thriving nation. Our poets, playwrights, novelists, historians, biographers and musicians were all underwritten by copyright’s markets.

Yet today, these markets are unraveling. Piracy is a lucrative, innovative, global enterprise. Clusters of overseas servers can undermine much of the commercial basis for creative work around the world, offering users the speedy, secret transmission of stolen goods.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday on “targeting Web sites dedicated to stealing American intellectual property,” and the White House has pledged to propose a new law to address rampant piracy within the year. But writers and other creative workers should still be worried.

The rise of the Internet has led to a view among many users and Web companies that copyright is a relic, suited only to the needs of out-of-step corporate behemoths. Just consider the dedicated “file-sharers” — actually, traffickers in stolen music movies and, increasingly, books — who transmit and receive copyrighted material without the slightest guilt.

They are abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It’s a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.

Certainly there’s a place for free creative work online, but that cannot be the end of it. A rich culture demands contributions from authors and artists who devote thousands of hours to a work and a lifetime to their craft. Since the Enlightenment, Western societies have been lulled into a belief that progress is inevitable. It never has been. It’s the result of abiding by rules that were carefully constructed and practices that were begun by people living in the long shadow of the Dark Ages. We tamper with those rules at our peril.

Last July, a small audience gathered at that London archaeological dig to hear two actors read from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the place of its debut, where theater’s most valuable walls once stood. While the foundations of the Theater (as it was known) remained, the walls themselves did not. When Shakespeare’s company lost its lease, the members dismantled the Theater’s timber frame and moved the walls to a new site across the Thames, naming their new playhouse the Globe. Shakespeare’s paywall traveled with him.

The Globe would later burn down (a cannon fired during a performance of “Henry VIII” touched off the blaze) and was quickly rebuilt. Its final end came in the mid-17th century, at the outset of a bloody civil war, when authorities ordered the walls pulled down. The regime wasn’t motivated by ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress. They simply wanted to silence the dramatists, who expressed a wide range of unsettling thoughts to paying audiences within.

The experiment was over. Dramatists’ ties to commerce were severed, and the greatest explosion of playwriting talent the modern world has ever seen ended. Just like that.

Scott Turow, a novelist, is the president of the Authors Guild. Paul Aiken is its executive director. James Shapiro, a member of the guild’s board, teaches Shakespeare at Columbia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15turow.html





At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs
David Carr

Some of the fizz, if not a great big bubble, seems to have returned to media, depending on how you define “media.”

There have been reports in The New York Times and elsewhere that Facebook is now valued at $50 billion, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter had been in low-level talks with both Google and Facebook, with some estimates putting the value of the company at $10 billion. Tumblr, the short-form blogging service, is storming along a similar, if more demure path, while Quora, a site built on user-generated questions and answers, seems to be on its way. And at the beginning of last week, The Huffington Post agreed to be sold for $315 million to AOL.

The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up? Most of the value was created by people working free.

The Huffington Post, perhaps partly in an effort to polish the silver before going on the market, did hire a number of A-list journalists, but the site’s ecosystem of citizen bloggers and its community of commenters represent some share of its value. (How much is open to debate, as Nate Silver pointed out on the FiveThirtyEight blog.) Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Quora have been positioned as social networks, but each of them hosts timely content that can also be a backdrop for advertising, which makes them much more like a media company than, say, a phone utility.

The Huffington Post, social networks and traditional media may all seem like different animals, but as advertising, the mother’s milk of all media, flows toward social and amateur media, low-cost and no-cost content is becoming the norm.

For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there is that, and more about the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero. (Content manufacturers like Demand Media that gin up $15 articles based on searches, put the price only slightly above that.) Old-line media companies that are not only forced to compete with the currency and sexiness of social media, but also burdened by a cost structure for professionally produced content, are left at a profound disadvantage.

For the media, this is a Tom Sawyer moment. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” he says to his friends, and sure enough, they are soon lined up for the privilege of doing his chores. That’s a bit like how social networks get built. (Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”)

“The technology of a lot of these sites is very seductive, and it lulls you into contributing,” said Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters. “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others.”

Last month, Mr. De Rosa wrote — on Tumblr, naturally — about how audiences became publishers, essentially painting the fence for the people who own the various platforms.

“We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” he wrote. “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.”

That may sound extreme, but think of Facebook, which is composed of half a billion freely given user profiles, along with a daily stream of videos, posts and messages. It is both a media site and a social network, and all of the content is provided free of charge. By creating a template for information and a frame around it, along with a community that also serves as an audience, this new generation of content companies have created the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food.

I ended up thinking about all this when I was encouraged to sign up for Quora, the burgeoning question-and-answer social site, by some of my more tech-minded friends. As I was going through the registration, I had a “hey, wait a minute” moment: right now, my in-box is full of all manners of questions and requests I can’t get to, some of them from my own family. What in the world am I doing wandering out into a community of strangers to answer and post questions?

It will be interesting to see how the legions of unpaid bloggers at The Huffington Post react to the merger with AOL. Typing away for an upstart blog — founded by the lefty pundit Arianna Huffington and the technology executive Kenneth Lerer — would seem to be a little different from cranking copy for AOL, a large American media company with a market capitalization of $2.2 billion.

(And it’s going to seem very different to some other media companies. The Huffington Post has perfected the art of — how shall we say it? — enthusiastic aggregation. Most of the news on the site is rewritten from other sources, then given a single link to the original. Many media companies, used to seeing their scoops get picked off by HuffPo and others, have decided that legal action isn’t worth the bother. They might feel differently now.)

Perhaps content will remain bifurcated into professional and amateur streams, but as social networks eat away at media mindshare and the advertising base, I’m not so sure. If it happens, I’ll have no one but myself to blame. Last time I checked, I had written or shared over 11,000 items on Twitter. It’s a nice collection of short-form work, and I’ve been rewarded with lot of followers ... and exactly no money. If and when the folks at Twitter cash out, some tiny fraction of that value will have been created by me.

The desire to create for the digital civic common stems from an ancient impulse, but finds remarkable expression in a digital age. Nobody knows more about that than Mayhill Fowler, the intrepid and unpaid citizen journalist working for The Huffington Post’s OffTheBus in the 2008 presidential campaign, who caught candidate Barack Obama talking about “bitter” voters who “cling to guns or religion.”

That scoop and tens of thousands of other posts are part of what AOL bought into and the owners of The Huffington Post cashed out on.

“I really don’t care that Arianna made all that money,” said Ms. Fowler. “More power to her. The original premise was not that we would get paid, so I didn’t expect to. But after the election and the fact that they nominated my work for a Pulitzer, I thought that might change. I talked to Arianna about getting paid for my work, and she strung me along for two years and then it never happened.”

Ms. Fowler no longer files free to The Huffington Post. Now, she prefers Twitter. The check is in the mail, Mayhill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/bu...ia/14carr.html





The True Cost of Publishing on the Amazon Kindle
Barry Collins

Ever wondered why newspapers and magazines published on the Amazon Kindle rarely contain photos? I’ve downloaded several copies of The Times and The Telegraph on my Kindle, and you’re lucky if you get more than one photo in the entire newspaper. The only periodical that appears to include photos or diagrams with each article as a matter of course is the magnificent Economist.

True, the 16-level grayscale screen hardly lends itself to stunning photography, but newspapers prospered for a century or two with black-and-white photos, so it’s hardly a problem unique to the Kindle.

The answer lies buried in the terms and conditions for Kindle periodical publishers. Scroll down to the section where it reveals how the revenue for publishers is calculated and you’ll find the devil is most definitely lurking in the detail.

The amount of revenue each publisher earns for their Kindle newspaper/magazine is calculated thus:

(Price – delivery costs) x 70%

“Delivery costs?” I hear you cry. This is the wonderful world of electronic publishing: Amazon hasn’t got an army of paperboys popping the newspapers through letterboxes each morning.

It does, however, pay for “free” 3G connections in the souped-up version of the Kindle, and someone has to pay for that data. And that someone is largely (70%) the publishers, particularly those who want to include anything other than plain text in their periodicals.

Amazon charges 10p per MB for delivery of newspapers and magazines in the UK. By Amazon’s own estimates, a “typical newspaper” with 100 articles and 15 to 20 images would have a file size of between 0.5MB and 1MB – or around 10% of the overall revenue, considering most newspapers sell for 99p per day. It would be an even greater share of the publisher’s profits if users signed up for a cheaper subscription.

For a magazine like PC Pro those costs would be significantly greater. Each issue of the magazine has somewhere around 75 new reviews – each with a picture – plus dozens more articles and features. An issue of PC Pro with around 150 separate articles, and 100 photos would likely incur delivery costs of 50p-60p an issue. We can pop a magazine in the post to subscribers for significantly less than that.

What’s more, Amazon says that “delivery costs apply if we deliver content via a paid distribution method, such as over Whispernet” – which could technically include downloads made over Wi-Fi, which come at a tiny fraction of the cost of 3G distribution. We’ve asked Amazon to confirm if Wi-Fi downloads are charged or not, but the company hadn’t got back to us at the time of publication. (Update: Amazon has got in touch and confirmed that only newspapers/magazines delivered via 3G are liable for the delivery charge.)

Setting the price

Of course, people (with some justification) expect electronic publications to be cheaper than physical magazines/newspapers. But even if publishers were prepared to take a hit on the Amazon delivery costs, they have absolutely no control over how much their newspapers or magazines cost in the Kindle Store.

“Amazon.com determines the Kindle edition price,” Amazon’s T&Cs state. “Publishers will receive an email notification with the pricing details prior to launch of the publication.”

So if Amazon decides to publish PC Pro at the bargain price of £1.99 per issue, not only are we taking the hit on the delivery costs, but we’re severely under-cutting our print magazine too. (Update: And as Dennis Publishing’s chief technology officer reminds me, VAT is charged on electronic magazines, but not on paper.)

Conversely, if Amazon decides to push for maximum profit – The Economist costs £9.99 per month on The Kindle store, almost £20 more expensive over the course of 12 months than a print subscription that also gives access to the digital editions (excluding Kindle) – the publisher gets in the neck from angry customers. Check out the number of people complaining about the price of The Economist on the Amazon reviews, which average at only two stars out of five.

No wonder most newspapers and magazines have decided to play it safe with minimal images, or avoid publishing on The Kindle at all.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/02...amazon-kindle/





In Digital Era, Music Spotters Feed a Machine
Jenna Wortham

Sure, Shazam, the popular music-spotting cellphone application, can identify that Rihanna track. But what about the new song from the Sandwitches, a Bay Area folk-rock band?

That is where Charles Slomovitz comes in.

Mr. Slomovitz was roaming the aisles of a record store here recently when he spotted a flame-haired clerk. It was Grace Cooper, one-third of the Sandwitches, which had just put out a single that was getting attention on music blogs.

“She’s got that sound that’s getting to be big,” he said as she handed him a copy of the song, “so I’ve got to have it.”

Mr. Slomovitz, a music industry veteran, spends his days tracking down hot new artists — but not for a big record label. Instead, he works for Shazam, maker of the application of the same name that can figure out what song is playing in a bar, a clothing boutique or a TV commercial.

“It’s like a scavenger hunt in real time,” said Mr. Slomovitz, 42. “It never stops.”

Mr. Slomovitz’s job is one of the more unusual in the new digital music era, as he and the dozen or so other “music sourcers” at Shazam try to ensure that any songs the app’s users might want to identify are ready and waiting in the company’s database.

As the major record labels shrink, Shazam and other start-ups are thriving by offering people new ways to discover and listen to music. That is creating new kinds of jobs in the music business, from foragers like Mr. Slomovitz to the developers building software that recommends the perfect song for a particular listener.

“We used to have D.J.’s, record store clerks and A.& R. types” — the music industry’s talent scouts — to help discover music, said Paul Lamere, director of the developer community at Echo Nest, which builds music search services. “But now, because so much music is available, the challenge is surfacing relevant music to listeners.”

He added: “We’re living in a world where technologists and programmers are becoming the new gatekeepers for new music.”

If the programmers are going to create a useful music site or service, they need data, and in some cases, that involves hiring humans to gather it. Pandora, the popular music streaming service, has so-called musicologists, who analyze songs based on a long list of characteristics, like the complexity of the rhythm or whether it sounds Hawaiian.

At Shazam, the music sourcers’ challenge goes beyond just getting a copy of the latest single from Kanye West. Shazam also wants the latest club tracks, Internet mix tapes and whatever is playing on college radio, anything that might inspire curious listeners to pull out their phones and fire up the app.

“When people use a service like Shazam, they expect it to work all the time,” said Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s chief executive.

At stake, Mr. Fisher said, is the loyalty of the service’s audience, whose members use it three million times a day. If Shazam cannot recognize a song, a user may simply turn to another app that can.

Shazam, which says it has 100 million users, has the biggest share of the market for applications that identify music. But competitors, most notably SoundHound, have moved into similar territory. SoundHound has been adding features that Shazam has yet to match, including allowing people to identify a song by humming a few bars of it into their phones.

Shazam’s music sourcers feed songs into the company’s system so it can give each one a unique “fingerprint” that can be matched with the sound captured by its mobile app. Some of the songs come directly from record labels, which view Shazam as a useful partner.

“It’s another avenue through which our musicians can be discovered, which is always a good thing,” said Seth Hubbard, a manager at Polyvinyl Records in San Francisco, which works with Shazam to put its songs into the database even before they are released.

But a good portion of the music-gathering requires more work.

“If we don’t have a song that is being played in nightclubs because it is only on vinyl that isn’t signed to a label, or was created on a computer,” Mr. Fisher said, “hundreds of people could be tagging that song and getting a nil result.” He declined to disclose the service’s failure rate.

The hunt keeps Mr. Slomovitz on his toes. Every morning, he skims dozens of music blogs, checking for new releases he might have missed, as well as the iTunes, Amazon.com and Billboard charts, and blog aggregators like the Hype Machine.

Most weeks he also goes to local record stores to see if there is something in stock he has not heard of, or if older albums are being remastered or reissued. And he listens to local radio stations, especially near universities.

“If all the college radio stations are playing something new that’s coming out of a school in Connecticut, that should be in there,” he said.

On a recent visit to the Polyvinyl offices, Mr. Slomovitz got down on his knees to scan a shelf of freshly pressed records. He excitedly pulled one out and held it up.

“Found it,” he yelped, pushing a hand through his scruffy head of hair. “It’s the new Matt Pond PA. Their song ‘Snow Day’ is going to be featured in a Starbucks commercial, so we’ve got to have that.”

New music has infiltrated many popular television shows, like “Gossip Girl” and children’s shows like “Yo Gabba Gabba!” Mr. Slomovitz says he pays close attention to which bands and songs are playing on those shows and a handful of others.

When he finds a song he wants to add to the database, he contacts the artist or label to get a copy of the track.

Shazam executives say their mission is to catalog every song in the world. But it would be impossible to feed the machine with each and every song released by a tiny label or a bedroom studio.

Instead, Mr. Slomovitz has to try to think like a music tastemaker, guessing which songs might get attention and potentially stump Shazam’s servers.

“They’re our A.& R. to find anything that might be played,” said David Jones, a vice president at Shazam.

Because Shazam, which is based in London, is available in more than 200 countries, the company has a lot of ground to cover. “We have people in London, Japan, China, Indonesia,” Mr. Jones said.

Mr. Slomovitz and his fellow sourcers are an important part of the company’s strategy. He describes himself as a “freak about music” and has spent most of his career in the music business. He spent several years at Virgin Records, handling promotion and marketing for artists like Lenny Kravitz and the Smashing Pumpkins. But he said years in the daily grind of the industry wore him out.

“I found that the higher I got on the food chain, it was less about the music and more about sales numbers,” he said. He was a few years into running a tiny record label when the listing for the Shazam job sailed into his in-box. It was a perfect fit, he said.

“I get to do what I love, listen to new music and find new artists,” he said “I get to go to town.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/te.../14shazam.html





The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
David Segal

PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.

But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another.

If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.

But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.

Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.

Often drastically. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”

BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”

J. C. Penney, it seems, will not suffer the same fate. But starting Wednesday, it was the subject of what Google calls “corrective action.”

Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com.

He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.

He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.

“Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”

Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger. You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.

That said, he added, “I don’t think I could do my job well if in some sense I was not offended by things that were bad for Google users.”

“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”

And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.

The next it was essentially buried.

PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.

Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position.”

She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she stated, came from partnerships with companies like Yahoo and Time Warner, from new mobile applications and from in-store kiosks.

Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.

How valuable was that? A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.

The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for “dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and the size of each sale, only Penney would know.

But in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”

There was considerable pressure from investors for Penney to deliver strong holiday results. It has been struggling through one of the more trying times of its century of retailing. The $17.8 billion in revenue it reported last year is the exact same figure it reported in 2001. It announced in January that it would close a handful of underperforming stores, as well as two of its five call centers and 19 outlets that sell excess catalog merchandise.

Adding to the company’s woes is the demise of its catalog business. Penney has phased out what it called its Big Book and poured money into its Web site. But so far, the loss of the catalog has not been offset by the expansion of the Web site. At its peak, the catalog brought in about $4 billion in revenue. In 2009, the site brought in $1.5 billion.

“For the last 35 years, Penney has tried to be accepted as a department store, and during unusually good times, it does very well,” said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Gilford Securities. “But in bad times, it gets punished by shoppers who pull back after having spent aspirationally.”

MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included cocaman.ch. (“Geekness — closer to the world” is the cryptic header atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel, a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.

The word “dresses” appears in a small collection of links in the middle of a largely blank Cocaman page. Asked about that link, Mr. Camichel said his records show that it turned up on his site last April, though he said it might have been earlier than that.

The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.

“You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money.”

Efforts to reach TNX itself last week via e-mail were not successful.

Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat. He did so on the condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a few months ago.

“It was my fault,” Mr. Stevens said. “I posted a job opening on a Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some Google employees saw it.”

In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google search.

“Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and we did not turn up. Anywhere. You’d find us if you knew our Web address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared.”

The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101 in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.

Mr. Stevens agreed to meet in mid-January for a dinner paid for by The Times. Asked to pick a “fine restaurant” in his neighborhood, he rather cheekily selected a modern French bistro in Palo Alto offering an eight-course prix fixe meal for $118. Liquid nitrogen and “fairy tale pumpkin” were two of the featured ingredients.

Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.

“The key is to roll the campaign out slowly,” he said as he nibbled at seared duck foie gras. “A lot of companies are in a rush. They want as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few hundred in a week.”

The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems, are afraid they’ll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites — the kind with low PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site’s quality. The higher the PageRank, the more “Google juice” a site offers others to which it is linked.

“The sites that TNX uses mostly have low PageRanks,” Mr. Stevens said.

Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled entirely over the Web.

Publishers can reject certain keywords and links — Mr. Stevens said some balked at a lingerie link — but for the most part the system is on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to publishers is handled via PayPal.

You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.

So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?

“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”

To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.

WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?

Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.

“Spammers never stop,” he said. Battling those spammers is a never-ending job, and one that he believes Google keeps getting better and better at.

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts said, “I’ll give a categorical denial.” He then made an impassioned case for Google’s commitment to separating the money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero influence on the latter, he said.

“If you asked me for the names of five people in advertising engineering, I don’t think I could give you the names,” he said. “There is a very long history at Google of saying ‘We are not going to worry about short-term revenue.’ ” He added: “We rely on the trust of our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users.”

He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (The tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate.)

True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In “comforter sets,” Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In “sweater dresses,” from No. 1 to No. 10.

But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.

On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4.

By Feb. 10, it was 52.

MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a company publicly, because Google’s goal is to preserve the integrity of results, not to embarrass people.

“But just because we don’t talk about it,” he said, “doesn’t mean we won’t take strong action.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/bu.../13search.html





New Chrome Extension: Block Sites from Google’s Web Search Results

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

You can download the extension and start blocking sites now. It looks like this:

When you block a site with the extension, you won’t see results from that domain again in your Google search results. You can always revoke a blocked site at the bottom of the search results, so it's easy to undo blocks:

You can also edit your list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension's icon in the top right of the Chrome window.

This is an early test, but the extension is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. We hope this extension improves your search experience, and thanks in advance for participating in this experiment. If you’re a tech-savvy Chrome user, please download and try the Personal Blocklist extension today.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/...ites-from.html





Netbooks Lose Status as Tablets Like the iPad Rise
Steve Lohr

Remember the Last Big Thing in computing? You’ll be forgiven for having forgotten it was the netbook — a small notebook computer with a slender price tag, about $300.

Today, tablets are all the rage, including the iPad from Apple and a host of new entries starting to come from rivals like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Research In Motion and Samsung. But less than two years ago, in 2009, netbooks were seen as the earth-shaking force in the industry, potentially changing the economics of the business and undermining the technology leaders, Intel and Microsoft.

Things didn’t work out that way. Netbook sales were meteoric in 2009, jumping eightfold in the United States, to 7.5 million devices, and tripling worldwide to 34 million. Yet the torrid growth stalled last year.

The extent of the changed fortunes for the product became truly evident recently, when year-end sales tallies were calculated. In the holiday season, for example, retail sales of netbook computers in America fell 38 percent from a year earlier, according to the market research firm NPD.

The netbook story, according to industry executives and analysts, offers real-world lessons in technology innovation, business strategy and marketing.

To some degree, the new thing — the iPad — supplanted the not-so-new thing — netbooks. Still, analysts say, the tablet effect is only part of the answer. Sales of netbooks, they note, were slowing even before the iPad went on sale in April. And the products themselves are hardly substitutes for each other; one is all no-frills efficiency, the other more an appealing luxury, priced at $500 and up.

Instead, it is more likely that makers of netbooks oversold a product that underperformed. In the United States, analysts say, early adopters of new technology helped propel the netbook surge, attracted by the new entrant’s feather-light weight and low cost. But early adopter buyers, analysts say, tend to be picky consumers. The netbooks they bought were underpowered PCs that performed sluggishly and could not handle many popular software applications.

“The seduction was ultraportable, inexpensive computing, but consumers found there were too many tradeoffs,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Ultimately, it just fell short.”

The vision of a very low cost, portable personal computer has been around for decades. But the impetus that prodded the development of today’s netbook computers came, as it does so often, from outside the established industry. In this case, it was a nonprofit, One Laptop Per Child, which in 2005 declared its intention to make $100 computers for children in poor countries, without using technology from the industry’s dominant chip and software suppliers, Intel and Microsoft. It was a stretch goal, and still is, with the rugged laptops for children costing about $200. But it was an appealing idea that attracted corporate support and a team of scientists, and spurred the industry to rethink its designs and pricing.

Intel and Microsoft first resisted the idea of such very inexpensive computing, for the obvious reason that it would potentially put a dent in their profits. But eventually, they embraced the concept, tailored for a broader commercial market. Intel deftly coined the term “netbook,” as a new category of “companion PCs” segregated from its more profitable notebook PC business.

Both Intel and Microsoft created lower-cost offerings — Intel’s stripped-down Atom processor, introduced in 2008, and Microsoft’s expanded menu of software versions at varying prices.

One result was a sharp drop in the price of notebook computers, also known as laptop computers. In 2005, notebooks on average cost roughly $1,000. Today, the average price is about $465 (that excludes Apple’s higher-priced notebooks, which account for about 5 percent of the market worldwide).

“We had an impact across the broader industry by helping drive prices way down,” said Mary Lou Jepsen, former chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child. “We showed that innovation can come up from the bottom.”

For the most part, analysts say, netbooks enlarged the computer market rather than eating into sales of conventional notebooks. And the industry leaders, Intel and Microsoft, succeeded in adapting to the netbook challenge, assimilating it and containing it, preserving their lucrative profits.

The PC powers, said Bob O’Donnell, an analyst at IDC, were “deathly afraid of the cannibalization of the regular notebook market, but it really didn’t happen.”

While sales are slowing, the netbook business is far from dead. The market research firm IDC predicts that worldwide sales will fall in 2011 by about 7 percent, but that would still be 32.9 million netbooks. They account for roughly 10 percent of the total PC market.

But the engine of growth for netbooks, the technology enthusiasts, analysts say, disappeared. Ryan Champlin, vice president for operations at Cook Children’s Health Care System in Fort Worth, considered buying a netbook and tried out a few owned by colleagues. But Mr. Champlin, who has a conventional notebook and a smartphone, decided against the purchase, seeing it as an underpowered PC.

Six months ago, though, he did buy an iPad because, he says, it provides a different computing experience. “I turn on my iPad and my e-mail is just there, no waiting for a PC to boot up,” said Mr. Champlin, who uses the tablet for e-mail, Web browsing, watching movies and playing the popular game Angry Birds.

Netbooks continue to enjoy brisk sales in cost-conscious markets, including China and Latin America, and in sales to schools, which want an affordable way to equip students with computers.

Companies are pursuing new netbook technology and software support, and industry executives say those advances could reinvigorate the category. The AppUp online store from Intel, which offers software downloads for programs that run on Intel chips, last month added a netbook version of Angry Birds. Intel keeps improving its Atom chips for netbooks. The Fusion chip sets from Advanced Micro Devices, introduced in January, promise to bring sophisticated graphics-processing to the netbook market.

Indeed, A.M.D. executives say the time has come to bury the name “netbook.” “The marketing no longer needs to suggest ‘buyer beware,’ ” said John Taylor, director of product marketing at A.M.D.

In the future, Mr. Taylor says, most PC sales will be machines costing $200 to $500, notebooks of varied sizes and designs, that deliver impressive performance, low energy consumption and 10 hours or more of battery life.

Does that mean $1,000 notebooks become extinct? Not at all, Mr. Taylor replied. But the more costly machines, he said, will have to move to new horizons of computing. Artificial intelligence features like computers that understand speech, gestures and facial expressions, he said, may become part of everyday computing. You talk to your computer, or direct it with hand gestures, while making coffee in the morning, for example.

“You finally transform the user interface, among other things,” Mr. Taylor said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/te...14netbook.html





Verizon iPhone Sales Fail to Meet Expectations
Jonathan S. Geller

One of our Apple sources has shared some very sensitive information on first-week Verizon iPhone launch sales with us. It’s quite interesting — we’re being told sales are performing a little under what Apple and Verizon anticipated, and we have the data to show it. Below are unit sales totals from five Apple stores combined (including two very, very prominent Apple stores) showing both Verizon and AT&T iPhone 4 sales during the Verizon iPhone’s first five days of availability:

* Thursday: Verizon = 909, AT&T = 539
* Friday: Verizon = 916, AT&T = 680
* Saturday: Verizon = 660, AT&T = 471
* Sunday: Verizon = 796, AT&T = 701
* Monday: Verizon = 711, AT&T = 618

Additionally, we have been told that online pre-orders between Verizon and Apple amounted to around 550,000 units. We also have some statistics on who’s buying Verizon iPhones to share with you: 30% of people buying Verizon iPhones were Android users, just over 25% of people buying iPhone 4 were BlackBerry users, and only 14% of people buying the Verizon iPhone were AT&T iPhone owners. The remaining percent didn’t want to say, didn’t have a smartphone, or didn’t have a phone prior to making their iPhone 4 purchases last week.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/16/exclus...-expectations/





Less-Pricey iPhone in the Works
Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ethan Smith

Apple Inc. is working on the first of a new line of less-expensive iPhones and an overhaul of software services for the devices, people familiar with the matter said, moving to accelerate sales of its smartphones amid growing competition.

One of the people, who saw a prototype of the phone late last year, said it is intended for sale alongside Apple's existing line. The new device would be about half the size of the iPhone 4, which is the current model.

The new phone—one of its code names is N97—would be available to carriers at about half the price of the main iPhones. That would allow carriers to subsidize most or all of the retail price, putting the iPhone in the same mass-market price range as rival smartphones, the person said. Apple currently sells iPhones to carriers for $625 each on average. With carrier subsidies, consumers can buy iPhones for as little as $199 with a two-year contract.

Where the new line would be introduced couldn't be learned, but Apple recently has released products first in the U.S. and a few other markets before rolling out the devices more broadly.

Three weeks into his medical leave, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is staying closely involved in the company's decisions and product development, Yukari Kane reports.

Apple also is exploring a major revamp of its MobileMe online storage service, the people familiar with the matter said. The service, which lets users store data in a central location and synchronize their calendars and contacts among computers and other devices, currently has an individual annual subscription fee of $99. Apple is considering making MobileMe a free service that would serve as a "locker" for personal memorabilia such as photos, music and videos, eliminating the need for devices to carry a lot of memory, the people familiar with the situation said.

MobileMe, part of an industry wave known as cloud computing, also could become a focal point for a new online music service that Apple has been developing for more than a year, the people said. Social networking would be another key component, one of the people said.

MobileMe and the new line of iPhones are among the top priorities of Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, one of the people said. Though Mr. Jobs, 55 years old, went on medical leave for an undisclosed health issue last month, he has been closely involved in the development efforts, the person said.

The new line of iPhones and the revamped MobileMe are intended for release this summer, though those plans could change, the person said.

Mr. Jobs by email declined comment. An Apple spokeswoman also declined comment.

Bloomberg News reported earlier that Apple was working on a smaller, less-expensive iPhone.

Apple's work on the iPhone and MobileMe come as the cellphone market is heating up. Nokia Corp. last week said it would adopt Microsoft Corp,'s Windows Phone as the Finnish company's main smartphone operating system. Hewlett - Packard Co. meanwhile unveiled a tablet computer and smartphones based on a platform the company acquired last year.

Cellphone makers are expected to introduce an array of new models at an industry conference this week in Barcelona. Many of them will likely run on Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Research company IDC expects global sales of smartphones to rise 39% this year to 421 million units.

The iPhone has led much of the cellphone industry's innovation, and 84.2 million units have been sold since the device was introduced in 2007. Still, the iPhone's industry-wide global market share was just 3.4% last year, according to IDC, in part because of the device's higher price compared with many other phones.

IPhones nevertheless are critical for Apple, generating 39% of the $26.7 billion in company revenue for the latest quarter. Apple last week began selling its iPhone 4 through Verizon Wireless, a move that could add seven to 13 million units in sales this year, according to analysts. The carrier is a joint venture of Vodafone Group PLC and Verizon Communications Inc.

The person who saw the prototype of the new iPhone said the device was significantly lighter than the iPhone 4 and had an edge-to-edge screen that could be manipulated by touch, as well as a virtual keyboard and voice-based navigation. The person said Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., also plans to upgrade the iPhone 4.

The new MobileMe file-storage and music service could be available as early as June, depending on the progress of licensing talks that are in their preliminary stages, the people familiar with the situation said. Apple had planned for the service to roll out a year earlier.

The new service would give users access to their iTunes libraries from, say, an iPhone or iPad, instead of requiring that the devices be synced by cable with a computer and use space to store the actual files, the people said. The new service likely would be compatible with the iPhone 4, one of the people said.

Some MobileMe features, such as a service that locates lost or stolen iPads and iPhones, already are free.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...842435544.html





BitTorrent Considers Release of World Broadband ISP P2P Performance Report
MarkJ

BitTorrent, a technology company which is perhaps best known for its hugely popular Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing protocol (over 20 million average daily active users), has hinted that they could eventually release performance data for over 9,000 broadband ISPs around the world.

At present their unnamed project is still in the very early stages of development but could one day serve as a global ISP performance report. Several international content providers, such as Akamai, already release similar statistics but BitTorrent claims to have "data that is miles better--miles, miles better".

BitTorrent's VP of Products, Simon Morris, said (FastCompany):

"We have download traffic, upload traffic, BitTorrent traffic, and we have HTTP traffic. So we can answer questions like: I live in this city in the world--it could be anywhere, literally anywhere--which ISP should I use? Which is the fastest? Which ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic? Because we have this data, we can see the difference in speeds by time of day."

In one example Morris was able to show that most UK ISPs "aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night", with speeds suddenly going "off a cliff". Suffice to say that such information could prove to be very useful for consumers and advocates of Net Neutrality (the principal of treating all internet traffic as equal).

At present BitTorrent is keen to stress that it doesn't want to pick a fight with ISPs and hasn't decided upon how best to use the data, although it would most likely be targeted towards "helpful and constructive" purposes. In any case the project itself is still a long way from completion. For now the firm is just using the information to improve its own technology.

We'd love to see this information released and the idea of being able to offer a nearly real-time web-based ISPreview.co.uk performance monitor of internet traffic across UK ISPs would be incredibly useful. However, with most of the traffic being P2P based and thus open to throttling, its application as an overall internet ISP performance monitoring service remains uncertain.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...ce-report.html





AT&T iPhone Beats Verizon in Nationwide 3G Speed Tests
Brian X. Chen

The Verizon iPhone and AT&T iPhone have gone head-to-head in thousands of broadband tests, and the numbers tell the story you’d expect: AT&T’s network is much faster.

Ookla, creators of the Speedtest.net broadband test, compiled data from tests run by iPhone customers using the Speedtest.net app on both AT&T and Verizon. On average, the reported AT&T iPhone transfer rates were roughly two times faster than the Verizon iPhone’s.

The AT&T iPhone’s average download speed was 1,769 Kbps, and the average upload speed was 730 Kbps. By way of comparison, the Verizon iPhone’s average download speed was 848 Kbps, and the average upload speed was 506 Kbps.

The results come from 43,000 AT&T iPhones and 14,000 Verizon iPhones all over the United States. Most Speedtest.net app users ran the tests multiple times, totaling 106,000 results from AT&T iPhone users and 49,000 results from Verizon iPhone users.

The Speedtest.net results did not provide data on coverage reliability or dropped connections.

From my benchmarking of the Verizon iPhone versus the AT&T iPhone, I also found that the AT&T iPhone’s 3G transfer rates were much faster than Verizon’s. However, the AT&T iPhone sometimes could not complete tests because it did not have a connection, whereas the Verizon iPhone successfully completed every test. In short, I found the Verizon iPhone to be slower with network transfers but more reliable with coverage. Reviewers at other publications had the same results.

“I think that’s the story I expected to see,” said Doug Suttles, co-founder of Ookla. “Verizon has never talked up their speed, but they always talk up coverage and reliability…. I think the story is quality versus throughput: What are you after?”

Speedtest.net’s nationwide results back my verdict: You should get a Verizon iPhone if you really care about voice quality and calls, but the AT&T iPhone is better as a media-consumption device (Netflix movies, photo downloads and uploads, etc.) because of its faster speeds.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/...one-speedtest/





A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans
John Markoff

At the dawn of the modern computer era, two Pentagon-financed laboratories bracketed Stanford University. At one laboratory, a small group of scientists and engineers worked to replace the human mind, while at the other, a similar group worked to augment it.

In 1963 the mathematician-turned-computer scientist John McCarthy started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researchers believed that it would take only a decade to create a thinking machine.

Also that year the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart formed what would become the Augmentation Research Center to pursue a radically different goal — designing a computing system that would instead “bootstrap” the human intelligence of small groups of scientists and engineers.

For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation — A.I. versus I.A. — has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world.

Now, as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, it has become increasingly possible to design computing systems that enhance the human experience, or now — in a growing number of cases — completely dispense with it.

The implications of progress in A.I. are being brought into sharp relief now by the broadcasting of a recorded competition pitting the I.B.M. computing system named Watson against the two best human Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Watson is an effort by I.B.M. researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides striking evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.

If, as many predict, Watson defeats its human opponents on Wednesday, much will be made of the philosophical consequences of the machine’s achievement. Moreover, the I.B.M. demonstration also foretells profound sociological and economic changes.

Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to outpace any job-killing technologies. For example, over the past century and a half the shift from being a largely agrarian society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as evidence of the economy’s ability to reinvent itself.

That, however, was before machines began to “understand” human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.

“As designers of tools and products and technologies we should think more about these issues,” said Pattie Maes, a computer scientist at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Not only do designers face ethical issues, she argues, but increasingly as skills that were once exclusively human are simulated by machines, their designers are faced with the challenge of rethinking what it means to be human.

I.B.M.’s executives have said they intend to commercialize Watson to provide a new class of question-answering systems in business, education and medicine. The repercussions of such technology are unknown, but it is possible, for example, to envision systems that replace not only human experts, but hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout the economy and around the globe. Virtually any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen.

To be sure, anyone who has spent time waiting on hold for technical support, or trying to change an airline reservation, may welcome that day. However, there is also a growing unease about the advances in natural language understanding that are being heralded in systems like Watson. As rapidly as A.I.-based systems are proliferating, there are equally compelling examples of the power of I.A. — systems that extend the capability of the human mind.

Google itself is perhaps the most significant example of using software to mine the collective intelligence of humans and then making it freely available in the form of a digital library. The search engine was originally based on a software algorithm called PageRank that mined human choices in picking Web pages that contained answers to a particular typed query and then quickly ranked the matches by relevance.

The Internet is widely used for applications that employ a range of human capabilities. For example, experiments in Web-based games designed to harness the human ability to recognize patterns — which still greatly exceeds what is possible by computer — are generating a new set of scientific tools. Games like FoldIt, EteRNA and Galaxy Zoo make it possible for individuals to compete and collaborate in fields like astronomy to biology, medicine and possibly even material science.

Personal computing was the first step toward intelligence augmentation that reached a broad audience. It created a generation of “information workers,” and equipped them with a set of tools for gathering, producing and sharing information. Now there is a cyborg quality to the changes that are taking place as personal computing has evolved from desktop to laptop and now to the smartphones that have quickly become ubiquitous.

The smartphone is not just a navigation and communication tool. It has rapidly become an almost seamless extension of almost all of our senses. It is not only a reference tool but is quickly evolving to be an “information concierge” that can respond to typed or spoken queries or simply volunteer advice.

Further advances in both A.I. and I.A. will increasingly confront the engineers and computer scientists with clear choices about how technology is used. “There needs to be an explicit social contract between the engineers and society to create not just jobs but better jobs,” said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of “You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”

The consequences of human design decisions can be clearly seen in the competing online news systems developed here in Silicon Valley.

Each day Katherine Ho sits at a computer and observes which news articles millions of Yahoo users are reading.

Her computer monitor displays the results of a cluster of software programs giving her almost instant updates on precisely how popular each of the news articles on the company’s home page is, based on her readers’ tastes and interests.

Ms. Ho is a 21st-century version of a traditional newspaper wire editor. Instead of gut and instinct, her decisions on which articles to put on the Yahoo home page are based on the cues generated by the software algorithms.

Throughout the day she constantly reorders the news articles that are displayed for dozens of demographic subgroups that make up the Yahoo readership. An article that isn’t drawing much interest may last only minutes before she “spikes” it electronically. Popular articles stay online for days and sometimes draw tens of millions of readers.

Just five miles north at Yahoo’s rival Google, however, the news is produced in an entirely different manner. Spotlight, a popular feature on Google’s news site, is run entirely by a software algorithm which performs essentially the same duties as Ms. Ho does.

Google’s software prowls the Web looking for articles deemed interesting, employing a process that is similar to the company’s PageRank search engine ranking system to make decisions on which articles to present to readers.

In one case, software-based technologies are being used to extend the skills of a human worker, in another case technology replaces her entirely.

Similar design decisions about how machines are used and whether they will enhance or replace human qualities are now being played out in a multitude of ways, and the real value of Watson may ultimately be in forcing society to consider where the line between human and machine should be drawn.

Indeed, for the computer scientist John Seely Brown, machines that are facile at answering questions only serve to obscure what remains fundamentally human.

“The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15essay.html





Researchers: 100 Percent Green Energy Possible By 2050
John Voelcker

We approach energy policy with care here, since GreenCarReports is largely about ... well, cars.

But a recent article claims it could take just 40 years to convert the bulk of the world's global energy usage from fossil fuels to renewable energy, primarily wind and solar power.

That's not only vehicle fuel, but also electric-power generation, home heating, and the many other global activities that rely on the remarkably high energy density of the hydrocarbon molecules in coal, oil, and natural gas.

Researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis published their analysis in the journal Energy Policy.

Measuring costs vs benefits

The main challenges, say the authors, will be summoning the global will to make the conversion. "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor, saying it is only a question of "whether we have the societal and political will."

Another challenge: accurately accounting for both the costs (which are comparatively easy to tally and project) and the benefits (which are tougher).

When looking at the cost of junking half a century's worth of existing power plants, for example, how can electric utilities benefit from the tens of billions of dollars in public health costs that will be avoided in the future once those emissions are no longer being generated?

Those public-health benefits might include saving 2.5 to 3 million lives each year.

And then there's the benefit of halting climate change, not to mention reductions in water pollution, and increased energy security as more of each nation's energy is generated from within its own borders.

Step One: New generation from renewables

The authors assessed the costs, benefits, and materials requirements necessary to convert the bulk of the world's energy usage to renewable sources.

Just as it will do over the next few decades for cars, electricity will play an increasingly large role, with 90 percent from wind turbines and various forms of solar generation.

Hydroelectric and geothermal sources would each provide about 4 percent of the total, with another 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles would run either on electricity provided by the power grid, or hydrogen stored under high pressure and converted to electricity in a fuel cell. Airplanes would be fueled with liquid hydrogen. But, crucially, the hydrogen would all be produced electrically, with the electricity coming from those same renewable sources: wind, sun, and water.

The analysis shows that the land and raw materials needed won't pose a problem. What will be needed is a much more robust electrical grid. By 2030, say the authors, all new generating capacity can be provided by renewable sources, with no further fossil-fuel plants built globally.

Step Two: Shutting down the old stuff

Then comes the second stage: starting to convert existing generating plants from fossil fuels to renewables. That, say the authors, will take another two decades.

End game: By 2050, fossil fuels will have been replaced for more than 90 percent of global energy use. The world's citizens will do more things electrically, from heating their homes to commuting to work, and the carbon footprint of industry, transportation, and other sectors will be approaching zero.

Is it real? We're not capable of assessing the paper, which you can read here.

For cars, electricity and gasoline

But for cars and other vehicles, the conversion to electricity is real. It's just starting now, but electric cars will expand substantially this decade, and become a substantial part of total vehicle production after 2020. During this decade, the two "fuels of the future" will be electricity and gasoline.

Beyond that, we can't project. Carmakers will presumably have reduced the cost of hydrogen fuel cells by then to parity with gasoline engines, piggybacking on the work done in electric propulsion for battery electric cars. Then there's just the distribution problem for hydrogen.

Still, it's nice to know that smart people believe a largely green energy future is possible, and achievable, and offers enormous measurable benefits to offset the obvious costs and challenges.

So here's the question: Do we have the will to do it, as a country and, even more importantly, globally?
http://www.greencarreports.com/blog/...ssible-by-2050





Soaking Up the Sun to Squeeze Bills to Zero
Kirk Johnson

The west-facing windows by Jim Duffield’s desk started automatically tinting blue at 2:50 p.m. on a recent Friday as the midwinter sun settled low over the Rocky Mountain foothills.

Around his plant-strewn work cubicle, low whirring air sounds emanated from speakers in the floor, meant to mimic the whoosh of conventional heating and air-conditioning systems, neither of which his 222,000-square-foot office building has, or needs, even here at 5,300 feet elevation. The generic white noise of pretend ductwork is purely for background and workplace psychology — managers found that workers needed something more than silence.

Meanwhile, the photovoltaic roof array was beating a retreat in the fading, low-angled light. It had until 1:35 p.m. been producing more electricity than the building could use — a three-hour energy budget surplus — interrupted only around noon by a passing cloud formation.

For Mr. Duffield, 62, it was just another day in what was designed, in painstaking detail, to be the largest net-zero energy office building in the nation. He’s still adjusting, six months after he and 800 engineers and managers and support staff from the National Renewable Energy Lab moved in to the $64 million building, which the federal agency has offered up as a template for how to do affordable, super-energy-efficient construction.

“It’s sort of a wonderland,” said Mr. Duffield, an administrative support worker, as the window shading system reached maximum.

Most office buildings are divorced, in a way, from their surroundings. Each day in the mechanical trenches of heating, cooling and data processing is much the same as another but for the cost of paying for the energy used.

The energy lab’s Research Support Facility building is more like a mirror, or perhaps a sponge, to its surroundings. From the light-bending window louvers that cast rays up into the interior office spaces, to the giant concrete maze in the sub-basement for holding and storing radiant heat, every day is completely different.

This is the story of one randomly selected day in the still-new building’s life: Jan. 28, 2011.

It was mostly sunny, above-average temperatures peaking in the mid-60s, light winds from the west-northwest. The sun rose at 7:12 a.m.

By that moment, the central computer was already hard at work, tracking every watt in and out, seeking, always, the balance of zero net use over 24 hours — a goal that managers say probably won’t be attainable until early next year, when the third wing of the project and a parking complex are completed.

With daylight, the building’s pulse quickened. The photovoltaic panels kicked in with electricity at 7:20 a.m.

As employees began arriving, electricity use — from cellphone chargers to elevators — began to increase. Total demand, including the 65-watt maximum budget per workspace for all uses, lighting to computing, peaked at 9:40 a.m.

Meanwhile, the basement data center, which handles processing needs for the 300-acre campus, was in full swing, peaking in electricity use at 10:10 a.m., as e-mail and research spreadsheets began firing through the circuitry.

For Mr. Duffield and his co-workers, that was a good-news bad-news moment: The data center is by far the biggest energy user in the complex, but also one of its biggest producers of heat, which is captured and used to warm the rest of the building. If there is a secret clubhouse for the world’s energy and efficiency geeks, it probably looks and feels just about like this.

“Nothing in this building was built the way it usually is,” said Jerry Blocher, a senior project manager at Haselden Construction, the general contractor for the project.

The backdrop to everything here is that office buildings are, to people like Mr. Blocher, the unpicked fruit of energy conservation. Commercial buildings use about 18 percent of the nation’s total energy each year, and many of those buildings, especially in years past, were designed with barely a thought to energy savings, let alone zero net use.

The answer at the research energy laboratory, a unit of the federal Department of Energy, is not gee-whiz science. There is no giant, expensive solar array that could mask a multitude of traditional design sins, but rather a rethinking of everything, down to the smallest elements, all aligned in a watt-by-watt march toward a new kind of building.

Managers even pride themselves on the fact that hardly anything in their building, at least in its individual component pieces, is really new.

Off-the-shelf technology, cost-efficient as well as energy-efficient, was the mantra to finding what designers repeatedly call the sweet spot — zero energy that doesn’t break a sweat, or the bank. More than 400 tour groups, from government agency planners to corporations to architects, have trouped through since the first employees moved in last summer.

“It’s all doable technology,” said Jeffrey M. Baker, the director of laboratory operations at the Department of Energy’s Golden field office. “It’s a living laboratory.”

Some of those techniques and tricks are as old as the great cathedrals of Europe (mass holds heat like a battery, which led to the concrete labyrinth in the subbasement). Light, as builders since the pyramids have known, can be bent to suit need, with louvers that fling sunbeams to white panels over the office workers heads’ to minimize electricity.

There are certainly some things that workers here are still getting used to. In nudging the building toward zero net electricity over 24 hours, lighting was a main target. That forced designers to lower the partition walls between work cubicles to only 42 or 54 inches (height decided by compass, or perhaps sundial, in maximizing the flow of natural light and ventilation), which raised privacy concerns among workers. Even the managers’ offices have no ceilings — again to allow the flow of natural light, as cast from the ceiling.

“The open office is different,” said Andrew Parker, an engineer. “You want to be next to someone quiet.”

Getting to the highest certification level in green building technology at reasonable cost also required an armada of creative decisions, large and small. The round steel structural columns that hold the building up? They came from 3,000 feet of natural gas pipe — built for the old energy economy and never used. The wood trim in the lobby? Lodgepole pine trees — 310 of them — killed by a bark beetle that has infested millions of acres of forest in the West.

Ultimately, construction costs were brought in at only $259 a square foot, nearly $77 below the average cost of a new super-efficient commercial office building, according to figures from Haselden Construction, the builder. Other components of the design are based on observation of human nature.

People print less paper when they share a central printer that requires a walk to the copy room. People also use less energy, managers say, when they know how much they’re using. A monitor in the lobby offers real-time feedback on eight different measures.

The feedback comes right down to a worker’s computer screen, where a little icon pops up when the building’s central computer says conditions are optimal to crank the hand-opened windows. (Other windows, harder to reach, open by computer command.)

Rethinking work shifts can also contribute. Here, the custodial staff comes in at 5 p.m., two or three hours earlier than in most traditional office buildings, saving on the use of lights.

The management of energy behavior, like the technology, is an experiment in progress.

“Right now people are on their best behavior,” said Ron Judkoff, a lab program manager. “Time will answer the question of whether you can really train people, or whether a coffee maker or something starts showing up.”

If Anthony Castellano is a measure, the training regimen has clearly taken root. Mr. Castellano, who joined the research laboratory last year as a Web designer after years in private industry, said the immersion in energy consciousness goes home with him at night.

“My kids are yelling at me because I’m turning off all the lights,” Mr. Castellano said.

At 5:05 p.m., the solar cells stopped producing. Declining daylight in turn produced a brief spike in lighting use, at 5:55 p.m. Five minutes later, the building management system began shutting off lights in a rolling two-hour cycle (the computer gives a few friendly blinks, as a signal in case a late-working employee wants to leave the lights on.)

Mr. Duffield, whose work space is surrounded by a miniature greenhouse of plants he has brought, said his desk has become a regular stop on the group tours. If the building is a living experiment, he said, then his garden is the experiment within the experiment. Co-workers stop by, joking in geek-speak about his plants, but also seriously checking up on them as a measure of building health.

“They refer to this as the building’s carbon sink,” he said.

And Mr. Duffield’s babies — amaryllis, African violet, a pink trumpet vine — are very happy with all the refracted, reflected light they get, he said.

“The tropical trumpet vine in my house stops growing for the winter,” he said. “Here it has continued to grow, and when the days starting getting longer it might even bloom.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/sc...5building.html












Rumor: AMD is Up for Sale, Dell May be Interested
Emil Protalinski

As far as the stock market is concerned, Advanced Micro Devices may be up for sale. AMD's shares were significantly up yesterday, apparently on rumors that Dell is interested in buying the American multinational semiconductor company. Barron's reported on the rumor first:

“I would say the recent departures of senior executives — COO Robert Rivet last week, CEO Dirk Meyer back in January — is still unexplained and can lead to all kinds of speculation. There's not a lot of color on the rumor at this point. Is Dell considering making a more integrated kind of product line? Talk about a change in strategy.”

CFO Thomas Seifert is acting as interim CEO but he has said that he doesn't want the promotion to be permanent. Bloomberg followed up on the rumor with quotes from an industry analyst:

"There is no management team there," said Patrick Wang, an analyst at Wedbush Securities in New York. There is some "chatter" that the company is up for sale, he said. "It's a far- fetched possibility."

If AMD ends up being bought out, the purchase by Dell, or any other company for that matter, would be among the biggest the technology industry has seen. It would be of course bigger than when AMD bought ATI in 2006.
http://www.techspot.com/news/42411-r...nterested.html





"Two-Way" Radio Breakthrough Doubles Wi-Fi Performance
Stewart Mitchell

Wi-Fi and mobile phone radio network speeds could double after scientists showed radio is able to send and receive over the same frequency at the same time.

The technology would overcome the problem best exemplified by pilots having to say “over” each time they take turns in talking over radio, but it could also be applied to wireless data networks, scientists at Stanford University said.

"Textbooks say you can't do it," said Philip Levis, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed. Unlike radio before it has the unique ability that it can receive and transmit at the same time.”

The technique mimics the way humans are able to screen out the sound of our own voices during a conversation.

"It's like two people shouting messages to each other at the same time," said Levis. "If both people are shouting at the same time, neither of them will hear the other."

"When a radio is transmitting, its own transmission is millions, even billions of times stronger than anything else it might hear [from another radio]," Levis said. "It's like trying to hear a whisper while you yourself are shouting."

According to the researchers, the breakthrough uses two transmitters in the hardware at each end of a conversation, with the two transmitters working in a similar way to noise-cancelling headphones.

“The two transmit signals interfere destructively at the receive antenna to create a dead signal that the receiver can’t ‘hear’,” said Levis. “So you create this null position where the receiver can’t hear that signal and so is able to receive packets from other areas.”

The researchers claim this immediately makes radio equipment twice as fast as existing technology, and with further tweaking could lead to even faster and more efficient networks.

Current phone networks allow users to talk and listen simultaneously but, the scientists said, they use a work-around that is expensive and requires careful planning.

The researchers have not detailed when the technology might appear in hardware, but said they had applied for a patent and were working to commercialise it and improve signal strength to make it more suitable for Wi-Fi networks.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/365275/t...fi-performance





WikiLeaks Angry About Ex-Staff Member’s Book
Ravi Somaiya

WikiLeaks said it is taking “legal action” over a tell-all book to be released Friday by a former staffer that is critical of its founder, Julian Assange, and says the Web site was disabled by a spate of defections last year.

In “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website,” the former staffer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer scientist who was WikiLeaks’ second-in-command before falling out with Mr. Assange last summer, writes of tensions between WikiLeaks’ core members and Mr. Assange. They disagreed, he writes, over Mr. Assange’s leadership style, his paranoia — he asserts that Mr. Assange began to travel with bodyguards in late 2010 — and the way he managed WikiLeaks’ finances.

When he and other core members left WikiLeaks, he writes, they decided to take much of its leaked material and a crucial system they had worked on that allows for the secure submission of new leaks. Mr. Domscheit-Berg wrote that they took the material from Mr. Assange because “children shouldn’t play with guns.”

Though Mr. Domscheit-Berg and the other defectors have started another leaking site, OpenLeaks, he writes that he does not intend to release the material himself, but will return it when Mr. Assange “can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly.”

The excerpts emerged in leaked pages of the book, to be released officially on Friday in Germany and on Tuesday in the United States. The leaked passages were confirmed as genuine by Chloe Johnson-Hill, a spokeswoman for the book’s publisher, Random House.

In response to the extracts, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, released a statement to Forbes magazine that said WikiLeaks “has been taking legal action” against Mr. Domscheit-Berg. The spokesman also said that Mr. Domscheit-Berg did not hold significant roles within WikiLeaks and that his assertions were “based upon limited information or malicious falsifications.” WikiLeaks accuses him of “sabotage” in relation to the submissions system.

Mr. Hrafnsson did not immediately respond to a request for clarification, and Mr. Assange’s British lawyer, Mark Stephens, said he was “not in a position to comment.” Mr. Domscheit-Berg confirmed that he had received a legal letter, but said it did not specify any action.

Separately, Mr. Assange will appear in a London court on Friday for the close of a hearing to determine whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual misconduct made by two women there.

Mr. Assange has repeatedly denied the accusations, saying they are part of “a smear campaign” directed by unidentified forces in an effort to silence him. But extracts from Mr. Domscheit-Berg’s book are likely to be damaging on that subject. He writes that Mr. Assange boasted of fathering children around the world and that he enjoyed the idea “of lots and lots of little Julians, one on every continent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/wo...wikileaks.html





Australia Appeals to Sweden Over Assange

Australia's ambassador in Stockholm has written an appeal to Sweden's justice minister for assurances that Julian Assange, an Australian national, will be treated fairly should the WikiLeaks founder be extradited to Sweden.

In a letter sent to Justice Minister Beatrice Ask last week, Australian ambassador Paul Stephens took up Assange's case, which the ambassador termed as "high profile".

"I am writing in relation to the situation concerning Mr. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who is facing extradition to Sweden from the United Kingdom under the terms of a European Arrest Warrant," Stephens wrote to Ask last Friday.

Stephens explained that Assange "has been detained in his absence" by a Swedish court on suspicions of having committed "a criminal offence".

"I wish to convey the Australian Government's expectation that, should Mr. Assange be brought into Swedish jurisdiction, his case would proceed in accordance with due process and the provisions prescribed under Swedish law," the Australian ambassador.

He emphasised as well that he expected Assange's case to adhere to "applicable European and international laws, including relevant human rights norms".

The letter was written on the same day as Assange's last court appearance at the end of three days of legal arguments in his extradition trial.

He has been ordered to return to a London court next Thursday to learn if he will be extradited to Sweden to face questioning over sex crime allegations.

Last week, his lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson launched a scathing attack against Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt after he made comments saying that Sweden does not take women's rights lightly.

Ask's press secretary Martin Valfridsson told The Local that Sweden's justice minister is legally prohibited from interfering in the legal process.

"The minister of justice is not involved in the trial, nor did she ask for the arrest warrant that has been submitted by the Swedish prosecutors," he told The Local.

"She can't give any comment on it, but I can confirm that the letter has arrived. We can't comment on the ongoing process. She is forbidden by the Swedish constitution to have any influence on the ongoing case."

Assange's mother Christine has previously appealed to the Australian government for assistance since her son's arrest.

"Julian did not even get the laptop you had publicly promised him which he needed to prepare for his case while he was in Wandsworth Prison," she wrote to former Australian prime minister and current Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Attempts by The Local on Thursday to reach a representative at the Australian embassy in Stockholm for comment were unsuccessful.
http://www.thelocal.se/32112/20110217/





HBGary Execs Run For Cover As Hacking Scandal Escalates
Andy Greenberg

Rarely in the history of the cybersecurity industry has a company become so toxic so quickly as HBGary Federal. Over the last week, many of the firm’s closest partners and largest clients have cut ties with the Sacramento startup. And now it’s cancelled all public appearances by its executives at the industry’s biggest conference in the hopes of ducking a scandal that seems to grow daily as more of its questionable practices come to light.

Last week, the hacker group Anonymous released more than 40,000 of HBGary Federal’s emails, followed by another 27,000 from its sister company, HBGary, over the weekend. Those files, stolen in retaliation for an attempt by HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr to penetrate Anonymous and identify its members, revealed a long list of borderline illegal tactics. Ars Technica has posted a well-constructed narrative of the firm’s bad behavior. The short version: It proposed services to clients like a law firm working with Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that included cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns, phishing emails and fake social networking profiles, pressuring journalists and intimidating the financial donors to clients’ enemies including WikiLeaks, unions and non-profits that opposed the Chamber.

HBGary responded Monday with a statement on its website that it’s “continuing to work intensely with law enforcement on this matter and hopes to bring those responsible to justice.” In the mean time, the firm is canceling all its executives’ talks at the RSA conference, the largest cybersecurity industry confab of the year, taking place this week in San Francisco. HBGary chief executive Greg Hoglund had planned to give two presentations at the conference. HBGary Federal CEO Barr last week canceled his talk at the simultaneous B-Sides conference, which would have focused on his expose on Anonymous. The company said in its statement that it had been subject to numerous threats of violence, including some received at its RSA marketing booth.

I’ve written earlier about HBGary’s proposal to Bank of America’s law firm, in partnership with fellow security firms Palantir and Berico Technologies, to weaken WikiLeaks with cyberattacks and false documents as well as tracing and threatening its donors and supporters. But new information surfaced Monday about other shady approaches the firm suggested. As part of the company’s pitch to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, HBGary Federal’s Barr offered tactics like mining Classmates.com for information about a target individual’s friends, then building fake Facebook pages to gain access to subject’s personal details. He and Hoglund also discussed using spear phishing, a technique that typically plants malicious software on a user’s machine with a carefully spoofed email message.

Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, Palantir and Berico have all since released statements that say they’ve ended their relationship or never had a formal relationship with the company.

Barr spoke with Forbes reporter Parmy Olson last week, when the scandal had only reached a small fraction of its eventual size. “I had expected some potential retribution,” Barr said then. “I knew some folks would take my research as some kind of personal attack which it absolutely was not. I thought they might take down our Web site with a DDoS attack. I did not prepare for them to do what they did.”

“I’m going to contact people I’ve exchanged e-mails with and just tell them what’s going on,” he added with regard to his tens of thousands of spilled emails. “The rest I’ll deal with as it comes.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...dal-escalates/





Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks
Nate Anderson

When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the US Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: "Scare the sh*t out of them!"

In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients—and quickly—as the startup business hemorrhaged cash. To do so, he had no problem with trying to "scare the sh*t out of them." When working with a major DC law firm in late 2010 on a potential deal involving social media, for instance, Barr decided that scraping Facebook to stalk a key partner and his family might be a good idea. When he sent his law firm contact a note filled with personal information about the partner, his wife, her family, and her photography business, the result was immediate.

"Thanks. I am not sure I will share what you sent last night—he might freak out."

This rather creepy behavior became common; Barr used it as a sign of his social media prowess. Another target of his investigations went to "a Jewish Church in DC, the Temple Micah." Someone else "married @ the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, MD (non-denominational ceremony)." Barr was even willing to helpfully guesstimate the ages of children in photographs ("they have 2 kids, son and daughter look to be 7 and 4").

With one potential client, Barr sifted the man's social media data and then noted that "I am tempted to create a person from his highschool and send him a request, but that might be overstepping it."

As the money ran out on HBGary Federal, Barr increasingly had no problem "overstepping it." In November, when a major US bank wanted a strategy for taking down WikiLeaks, Barr immediately drafted a presentation in which he suggested "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France, putting a team together to get access is more straightforward."

Faking documents seemed like a good idea, too, documents which could later be "called out" so as to make WikiLeaks look unreliable.

And Barr wanted to go further, pushing on people like civil liberties Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald—apparently hoping to threaten their livelihoods. "These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals," he wrote. "Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold."

When the US Chamber of Commerce wanted to look into some of its opponents, Barr teamed with two other security companies and went nuts, proposing that the Chamber create an absurdly expensive "fusion cell" of the kind "developed and utilized by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)"—and costing $2 million a month. And if the fusion cell couldn't turn up enough opposition research, the security firms would be happy to create honeypot websites to lure the Chamber's union-loving opponents in order to grab more data from them.

The security companies even began grabbing tweets from liberal activists and mapping the connections between people using advanced link analysis software most often used by the intelligence community. (Some of the Chamber material was unearthed by ThinkProgress and other liberal bloggers, while The Tech Herald and Crowdleaks.org first wrote about the proposed WikiLeaks attacks.)

While waiting to see if his proposals would result in work for HBGary Federal, Barr turned in January to unmask the leadership of the hacker collective Anonymous. This part of the story is well known by now (read our investigative feature): when Barr went public with his findings, Anonymous took down his website, stole his e-mails, deleted the company's backup data, trashed Barr's Twitter account, and remotely wiped his iPad.

In the days since the attack and the publication of Barr's e-mails, his partners at other security firms threw him under the bus. "I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary," said the CEO of Palantir.

Berico Technologies, another private security firm, said that it "does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal."

Glenn Greenwald unleashed both barrels of his own, claiming that "what is set forth in these proposal... quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws."

How did Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing "reconnaissance" on the largest nuclear power company in the US? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations "suck the lifeblood out of humanity"? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?

Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on November 23, 2009.

"A" players attract "A" players

That's when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it, and Barr was brought in from Northrup Grumman to launch the operation.

In an e-mail announcing Barr's move, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told his company that "these two are A+ players in the DoD contracting space and are able to 'walk the halls' in customer spaces. Some very big players made offers to Ted and Aaron last week, and instead they chose HBGary. This reflects extremely well on our company. 'A' players attract 'A' players."

Barr at first loved the job. In December, he sent an e-mail at 1:30am; it was the "3rd night in a row I have woken up in the middle of the night and can't sleep because my mind is racing. It's nice to be excited about work, but I need some sleep."

Barr had a huge list of contacts, but turning those contacts into contracts for government work with a fledgling company proved challenging. Less than a year into the job, HBGary Federal looked like it might go bust.

On October 3, 2010, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told Aaron that "we should have a pow-wow about the future of HBGary Federal. [HBGary President] Penny and I both agree that it hasn't really been a success... You guys are basically out of money and none of the work you had planned has come in."

Aaron agreed. "This has not worked out as any of us have planned to date and we are nearly out of money," he said.

While he worked on government contracts, Barr drummed up a little business doing social media training for corporations using, in one of his slides, a bit of research into one Steven Paul Jobs.

The training sessions, following the old "scare the sh*t out of them" approach, showed people just how simple it was to dredge up personal information by correlating data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. At $1,000 per person, the training could pull in tens of thousands of dollars a day, but it was sporadic. More was needed; contracts were needed, preferably multi-year ones.

The parent company also had issues. A few weeks after the discussions about closing up HBGary Federal, HBGary President Penny Leavy-Hoglund (Greg's wife), sent an e-mail to her sales team, telling them "to work a quota and to bring in revenue in a timely manner. It's not 'optional' as to when it needs to close, if you haven't met your number, the closing needs to happen now, not later. You need to live, eat, breath and ensure you meet your number, not kind of hit it, MEET IT... Guys, no one is making their quota."

She concluded darkly, "I have some serious doubts about some people's ability to do their job. There will be changes coming shortly and those decisions will be new people's to make."

And then, unexpectedly, came the hope of salvation.

"Bond, Q, and Monneypenny"

By October 2010, Barr was under considerable stress. His CEO job was under threat, and the e-mails show that the specter of divorce loomed over his personal life.

On October 19, a note arrived. HBGary Federal might be able to provide part of "a complete intelligence solution to a law firm that approached us." That law firm was DC-based powerhouse Hunton & Williams, which boasted 1,000 attorneys and terrific contacts. They had a client who wanted to do a little corporate investigative work, and three small security firms thought they might band together to win the deal.

Palantir would provide its expensive link analysis software running on a hosted server, while Berico would "prime the contract supplying the project management, development resources, and process/methodology development." HBGary Federal would come alongside to provide "digital intelligence collection" and "social media exploitation"—Barr's strengths.

The three companies needed a name for their joint operation. One early suggestion: a "Corporate Threat Analysis Cell." Eventually, a sexier name was chosen:

Barr went to work immediately, tracking down all the information he could find on the team's H&W contact. This was the result of few hours' work:

A bit of what I have on [redacted]. He was hard to find on Facebook as he has taken some precautions to be found. He isn't even linked with his wife but I found him. I also have a list of his friends and have defined an angle if I was to target him. He has attachment to UVA, a member of multiple associations dealing with IP, e-discovery, and nearly all of this facebook friends are of people from high school. So I would hit him from one of these three angles. I am tempted to create a person from his highschool and send him a request, but that might be overstepping it. I don't want to embarrass him, so I think I will just talk about it and he can decide for himself if I would have been successful or not.

Team Themis didn't quite understand what H&W wanted them to do, so Barr's example was simply a way to show "expertise." But it soon became clear what this was about: the US Chamber of Commerce wanted to know if certain groups attacking them were "astroturf" groups funded by the large unions.

"They further suspect that most of the actions and coordination take place through online means—forums, blogs, message boards, social networking, and other parts of the 'deep web,'" a team member explained later. "But they want to marry those online, 'cyber' sources with traditional open source data—tax records, fundraising records, donation records, letters of incorporation, etc. I believe they want to trace all the way from board structure down to the individuals carrying out actions."

H&W was putting together a proposal for the Chamber, work that Team Themis hoped to win. (It remains unclear how much the Chamber knew about any of this; it claimed later never to have paid a cent either to Team Themis or to H&W in this matter.)

Barr's plan was to dig up data from background checks, LexisNexis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, and Web searches and dump it into Palantir for analysis. Hopefully, the tool could shed light on connections between the various anti-Chamber forces.

Once that was done, Team Themis staffers could start churning out intelligence reports for the Chamber. The team wrote up a set of "sample reports" filled with action ideas like:

* Create a false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information, and monitor to see if US Chamber Watch acquires it. Afterward, present explicit evidence proving that such transactions never occurred. Also, create a fake insider persona and generate communications with [union-backed Change to Win]. Afterward, release the actual documents at a specified time and explain the activity as a CtW contrived operation.
* If needed, create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second. Such work is complicated, but a well-thought out approach will give way to a variety of strategies that can sufficiently aid the formation of vetting questions US Chamber Watch will likely ask.
* Create a humor piece about the leaders of CtW.

The whole team had been infected with some kind of spy movie virus, one which led them to think in terms of military intelligence operations and ham-handed attacks. The attitude could be seen in e-mails which exhorted Team Themis to "make [H&W] think that we are Bond, Q, and money penny [sic] all packaged up with a bow."

Two million a month

But what to charge for this cloak-and-dagger work? Some team members worried that the asking price for an initial deployment was too high for H&W; someone else fired back, "Their client is loaded!" Besides, that money would buy access to Palantir, Berico, and "super sleuth Aaron Barr."

As the Team Themis proposal went to one of the top H&W lawyers for potential approval, Barr continued his social media dumpster diving. He dug up information on H&W employees, Chamber opponents, even the H&W partner whose approval was needed to move this proposal forward. That last bit of data collection, which Barr sent on to H&W, led to the e-mail about how it might "freak out" the partner.

If the deal came through, Barr told his HBGary colleagues, it might salvage the HBGary Federal business. "This will put us in a healthy position to chart our direction with a healthy war chest," he wrote.

Indeed it would; Team Themis decided to ask for $2 million per month, for six months, for the first phase of the project, putting $500,000 to $700,000 per month in HBGary Federal's pocket.

But the three companies disagreed about how to split the pie. In the end, Palantir agreed to take less money, but that decision had to go "way up the chain (as you can imagine)," wrote the Palantir contact for Team Themis. "The short of it is that we got approval from Dr. Karp and the Board to go ahead with the modified 40/30/30 breakdown proposed. These were not fun conversations, but we are committed to this team and we can optimize the cost structure in the long term (let's demonstrate success and then take over this market :))."

The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice. Palantir wasn't kidding around with this contract; if selected by H&W and the Chamber, Palantir planned to staff the project with an experienced intelligence operative, a man who "ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election. As a commander, [he] ran the entire intelligence cycle: identified high-level terrorists, planned missions to kill or capture them, led the missions personally, then exploited the intelligence and evidence gathered on target to defeat broader enemy networks."

(Update: a reader points to additional emails which suggest that the "foreign fighter campaign" operative would not actually be working on the Team Themis project. Instead, Berico and Palantir would list him and another top person as "key personnel," drawing on their "creds to show our strengths," but might actually staff the project with others.)

"I don't think we can make it any further"

But the cash, which "will seem like money falling from the sky for those of us used to working in the govt sector," was not forthcoming. H&W didn't make a decision in November. Barr began to worry.

"All things we are chasing continue to get pushed to the right or just hang in limbo," he wrote. "I don't think we can make it any further. We are behind in our taxes trying to keep us afloat until a few things came through, but they are not happening fast enough." He noted that Palantir was asking "way too much money" from H&W.

As the weeks dragged on, Team Themis decided to lower its price. It sent an e-mail to H&W, saying that the three companies were "prepared to offer our services as Team Themis at a significantly lower cost (much closer to the original "Phase I" proposed costs). Does this sound like a more reasonable range in terms of pricing?"

But before H&W made a decision on Chamber of Commerce plan, it had another urgent request for Team Themis: a major US bank had come to H&W seeking help against WikiLeaks (the bank has been widely assumed to be Bank of America, which has long been rumored to be a future WikiLeaks target.)

"We want to sell this team as part of what we are talking about," said the team's H&W contact. "I need a favor. I need five to six slides on Wikileaks—who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank. Please advise if you can help get me something ASAP. My call is at noon."

"Attack their weak points"

By 11:30pm on the evening of December 2, Barr had cranked out a PowerPoint presentation. It called for "disinformation," "cyber attacks," and a "media campaign" against WikiLeaks.

What could HBGary Federal do?

* Computer Network Attack/Exploitation
* Influence and Deception Operations
* Social Media Collection, Analysis, Exploitation
* Digital Media Forensic Analysis

This attack capability wasn't mere bluster. HBGary had long publicized to clients its cache of 0-day exploits—attacks for which there is no existing patch. A slide from a year earlier showed that HBGary claimed unpublished 0-day exploits in everything from Flash to Java to Windows 2000.

Another slide made clear that the company had expertise in "computer network attack," "custom malware development," and "persistent software implants."

In October 2010, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund had tossed out a random idea for Barr, one that did not apparently seem unusual: "I suggest we create a large set of unlicensed windows-7 themes for video games and movies appropriate for middle east & asia. These theme packs would contain back doors."

Barr's ideas about WikiLeaks went beyond attacks on their infrastructure. He wrote in a separate document that WikiLeaks was having trouble getting money because its payment sources were being blocked. "Also need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them," he wrote.
"Transaction records are easily identifiable."

As an idea that Barr knew was being prepared for a major US bank, the suggestion is chilling. Barr also reiterated the need to "get to the Swedish document submission server" that allowed people to upload leaked documents.

At 7:30am the next morning, Barr had another great idea—find some way to make WikiLeaks supporters like Glenn Greenwald feel like their jobs might be at stake for supporting the organization.

"One other thing," he wrote in his morning message. "I think we need to highlight people like Glenn Greenwald. Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH [data center] transition and helped WikiLeaks provide access to information during the transition. It is this level of support we need to attack. These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals. Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold."

This seems an absurd claim on a number of levels, but it also upped the "creep factor" dramatically. Barr was now suggesting that a major US corporation find ways to lean on a civil liberties lawyer who held a particular view of WikiLeaks, pressuring him into silence on the topic. Barr, the former Navy SIGINT officer who had traveled around the world to defend the US right to freedom of speech, had no apparent qualms about his idea.

"Discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal"

The fallout rained down quickly enough. In January, with H&W still not signing off on any big-dollar deals, Barr decided to work on a talk for the BSides security conference in San Francisco. He hoped to build on all of the social media work he was doing to identify the main participants in the Anonymous hacker collective—and by doing so to drum up business.

The decision seems to have stemmed from Barr's work on WikiLeaks. Anonymous defended WikiLeaks on several occasions in 2010, even attacking the websites of Visa and MasterCard when the companies refused to process WikiLeaks donations. But Barr also liked the thrill of chasing a dangerous quarry.

For instance, to make his point about the vulnerabilities of social media, Barr spent some time in 2010 digging into the power company Exelon and its US nuclear plants. "I am going to target the largest nuclear operator in the United States, Exelon, and I am going to do a social media targeted collection, reconnaissance against them," he wrote.

Once Barr had his social media map of connections, he could attack. As he wrote elsewhere:

Example. If I want to gain access to the Exelon plant up in Pottsdown PA I only have to go as far as LinkedIn to identify Nuclear engineers being employed by Exelon in that location. Jump over to Facebook to start doing link analysis and profiling. Add data from twitter and other social media services. I have enough information to develop a highly targeted exploitation effort.

I can and have gained access to various government and government contractor groups in the social media space using this technique (more detailed but you get the point). Given that people work from home, access home services from work—getting access to the target is just a matter of time and nominal effort.

Knowing about a target's spouse and college and business and friends makes it relatively easy to engage in a "spear phishing" attack against that person—say, a fake e-mail from an old friend, in which the target eventually reveals useful information.

Ironically, when Anonymous later commandeered Greg Hoglund's separate security site rootkit.com, it did so through a spear phishing e-mail attack on Hoglund's site administrator—who promptly turned off the site's defenses and issued a new password ("Changeme123") for a user he believed was Hoglund. Minutes later, the site was compromised.

After the Anonymous attacks and the release of Barr's e-mails, his partners furiously distanced themselves from Barr's work. Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp wrote, "We do not provide—nor do we have any plans to develop—offensive cyber capabilities... The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters."

Berico said that it "does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal."

But both of the Team Themis leads at these companies knew exactly what was being proposed (such knowledge may not have run to the top). They saw Barr's e-mails, and they used his work. His ideas on attacking WikiLeaks made it almost verbatim into a Palantir slide about "proactive tactics."

And Palantir had no problem scraping tweets from union supporters and creating linkages from them.

As for targeting American organizations, it was a Berico analyst who sent out the Team Themis "sample reports," the documents suggesting that the US Chamber of Commerce create false documents and false personae in its effort to "discredit the organization" US Chamber Watch.

The US Chamber of Commerce expressed shock when the Team Themis work came to light. "We’re incredulous that anyone would attempt to associate such activities with the Chamber as we’ve seen today from the Center for American Progress," said Tom Collamore on February 10. "The security firm referenced by ThinkProgress was not hired by the Chamber or by anyone else on the Chamber’s behalf. We have never seen the document in question nor has it ever been discussed with us."

Indeed, the meeting between H&W and the Chamber on this issue was set to take place today, February 14. On February 11, the Chamber went further, issuing a new statement saying that "it never hired or solicited proposals from HBGary, Palantir or Berico, the security firms being talked about on the Web... The leaked e-mails appear to show that HBGary was willing to propose questionable actions in an attempt to drum up business, but the Chamber was not aware of these proposals until HBGary’s e-mails leaked."
"No money, for any purpose, was paid to any of those three private security firms by the Chamber, or by anyone on behalf of the Chamber, including Hunton & Williams."

As for Hunton & Williams, they have yet to comment publicly. On February 7, however, the firm celebrated its top ranking in Computerworld's report on "Best Privacy Advisers."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...wikileaks.ars/





Anonymous Speaks: the Inside Story of the HBGary Hack
Peter Bright

It has been an embarrassing week for security firm HBGary and its HBGary Federal offshoot. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.

When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.

Over the last week, I've talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary's defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet.

Anonymous: More Than Kids

HBGary and HBGary Federal position themselves as experts in computer security. The companies offer both software and services to both the public and private sectors. On the software side, HBGary has a range of computer forensics and malware analysis tools to enable the detection, isolation, and analysis of worms, viruses, and trojans. On the services side, it offers expertise in implementing intrusion detection systems and secure networking, and performs vulnerability assessment and penetration testing of systems and software. A variety of three letter agencies, including the NSA, appeared to be in regular contact with the HBGary companies, as did Interpol, and HBGary also worked with well-known security firm McAfee. At one time, even Apple expressed an interest in the company's products or services.

Greg Hoglund's rootkit.com is a respected resource for discussion and analysis of rootkits (software that tampers with operating systems at a low level to evade detection) and related technology; over the years, his site has been targeted by disgruntled hackers aggrieved that their wares have been discussed, dissected, and often disparaged as badly written bits of code.

One might think that such an esteemed organization would prove an insurmountable challenge for a bunch of disaffected kids to hack. World-renowned, government-recognized experts against Anonymous? HBGary should be able to take their efforts in stride.

Unfortunately for HBGary, neither the characterization of Anonymous nor the assumption of competence on the security company's part are accurate, as the story of how HBGary was hacked will make clear.

Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.

It's true that most of the operations performed under the Anonymous branding have been relatively unsophisticated, albeit effective: the attacks made on MasterCard and others were distributed denial-of-service attacks using a modified version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) load-testing tool. The modified LOIC enables the creation of large botnets that each user opts into: the software can be configured to take its instructions from connections to Internet relay chat (IRC) chat servers, allowing attack organizers to remotely control hundreds of slave machines and hence control large-scale attacks that can readily knock websites offline.

According to the leaked e-mails, Aaron Barr believed that HBGary's website was itself subject to a denial-of-service attack shortly after he exposed himself to someone he believed to be a top Anonymous leader. But the person I spoke about this denied any involvement in such an attack. Which is not to say that the attack didn't happen—simply that this person didn't know about or participate in it. In any case, the Anonymous plans were more advanced than a brute force DDoS.

Time for an Injection

HBGary Federal's website, hbgaryfederal.com, was powered by a content management system (CMS). CMSes are a common component of content-driven sites; they make it easy to add and update content to the site without having to mess about with HTML and making sure everything gets linked up and so on and so forth. Rather than using an off-the-shelf CMS (of which there are many, used in the many blogs and news sites that exist on the Web), HBGary—for reasons best known to its staff—decided to commission a custom CMS system from a third-party developer.

Unfortunately for HBGary, this third-party CMS was poorly written. In fact, it had what can only be described as a pretty gaping bug in it. A standard, off-the-shelf CMS would be no panacea in this regard—security flaws crop up in all of them from time to time—but it would have the advantage of many thousands of users and regular bugfixes, resulting in a much lesser chance of extant security flaws.

The custom solution on HBGary's site, alas, appeared to lack this kind of support. And if HBGary conducted any kind of vulnerability assessment of the software—which is, after all, one of the services the company offers—then its assessment overlooked a substantial flaw.

The hbgaryfederal.com CMS was susceptible to a kind of attack called SQL injection. In common with other CMSes, the hbgaryfederal.com CMS stores its data in an SQL database, retrieving data from that database with suitable queries. Some queries are fixed—an integral part of the CMS application itself. Others, however, need parameters. For example, a query to retrieve an article from the CMS will generally need a parameter corresponding to the article ID number. These parameters are, in turn, generally passed from the Web front-end to the CMS.

SQL injection is possible when the code that deals with these parameters is faulty. Many applications join the parameters from the Web front-end with hard-coded queries, then pass the whole concatenated lot to the database. Often, they do this without verifying the validity of those parameters. This exposes the systems to SQL injection. Attackers can pass in specially crafted parameters that cause the database to execute queries of the attackers' own choosing.

The exact URL used to break into hbgaryfederal.com was http://www.hbgaryfederal.com/pages.p...eNav=2&page=27. The URL has two parameters named pageNav and page, set to the values 2 and 27, respectively. One or other or both of these was handled incorrectly by the CMS, allowing the hackers to retrieve data from the database that they shouldn't have been able to get.

Rainbow Tables

Specifically, the attackers grabbed the user database from the CMS—the list of usernames, e-mail addresses, and password hashes for the HBGary employees authorized to make changes to the CMS. In spite of the rudimentary SQL injection flaw, the designers of the CMS system were not completely oblivious to security best practices; the user database did not store plain readable passwords. It stored only hashed passwords—passwords that have been mathematically processed with a hash function to yield a number from which the original password can't be deciphered.

The key part is that you can't go backwards—you can't take the hash value and convert it back into a password. With a hash algorithm, traditionally the only way to figure out the original password was to try every single possible password in turn, and see which one matched the hash value you have. So, one would try "a," then "b," then "c"... then "z," then "aa," "ab," and so on and so forth.

To make this more difficult, hash algorithms are often quite slow (deliberately), and users are encouraged to use long passwords which mix lower case, upper case, numbers, and symbols, so that these brute force attacks have to try even more potential passwords until they find the right one. Given the number of passwords to try, and the slowness of hash algorithms, this normally takes a very long time. Password cracking software to perform this kind of brute force attack has long been available, but its success at cracking complex passwords is low.

However, a technique first published in 2003 (itself a refinement of a technique described in 1980) gave password crackers an alternative approach. By pre-computing large sets of data and generating what are known as rainbow tables, the attackers can make a trade-off: they get much faster password cracks in return for using much more space. The rainbow table lets the password cracker pre-compute and store a large number of hash values and the passwords that generated them. An attacker can then look up the hash value that they are interested in and see if it's in the table. If it is, they can then read out the password.

To make cracking harder, good password hash implementations will use a couple of additional techniques. The first is iterative hashing: simply put, the output of the hash function is itself hashed with the hash function, and this process is repeated thousands of times. This makes the hashing process considerably slower, hindering both brute-force attacks and rainbow table generation.

The second technique is salting; a small amount of random data is added to the password before hashing it, greatly expanding the size of rainbow table that would be required to get the password.

In principle, any hash function can be used to generate rainbow tables. However, it takes more time to generate rainbow tables for slow hash functions than it does for fast ones, and hash functions that produce a short hash value require less storage than ones that produce long hash values. So in practice, only a few hash algorithms have widely available rainbow table software available. The best known and most widely supported of these is probably MD5, which is quick to compute and produces an output that is only 128 bits (16 bytes) per hash. These factors together make it particularly vulnerable to rainbow table attacks. A number of software projects exist that allow the generation or downloading of MD5 rainbow tables, and their subsequent use to crack passwords.

As luck would have it, the hbgaryfederal.com CMS used MD5. What's worse is that it used MD5 badly: there was no iterative hashing and no salting. The result was that the downloaded passwords were highly susceptible to rainbow table-based attacks, performed using a rainbow table-based password cracking website. And so this is precisely what the attackers did; they used a rainbow table cracking tool to crack the hbgaryfederal.com CMS passwords.

Even with the flawed usage of MD5, HBGary could have been safe thanks to a key limitation of rainbow tables: each table only spans a given "pattern" for the password. So for example, some tables may support "passwords of 1-8 characters made of a mix of lower case and numbers," while other can handle only "passwords of 1-12 characters using upper case only."

A password that uses the full range of the standard 95 typeable characters (upper and lower case letters, numbers, and the standard symbols found on a keyboard) and which is unusually long (say, 14 or more characters) is unlikely to be found in a rainbow table, because the rainbow table required for such passwords will be too big and take too long to generate.

Alas, two HBGary Federal employees—CEO Aaron Barr and COO Ted Vera—used passwords that were very simple; each was just six lower case letters and two numbers. Such simple combinations are likely to be found in any respectable rainbow table, and so it was that their passwords were trivially compromised.

For a security company to use a CMS that was so flawed is remarkable. Proper handling of passwords—iterative hashing, using salts and slow algorithms—and protection against SQL injection attacks are basic errors. Their system did not fall prey to some subtle, complex issue: it was broken into with basic, well-known techniques. And though not all the passwords were retrieved through the rainbow tables, two were, because they were so poorly chosen.

HBGary owner Penny Leavy said in a later IRC chat with Anonymous that the company responsible for implementing the CMS has since been fired.

Password Problems

Still, badly chosen passwords aren't such a big deal, are they? They might have allowed someone to deface the hbgaryfederal.com website—admittedly embarrassing—but since everybody knows that you shouldn't reuse passwords across different systems, that should have been the extent of the damage, surely?

Unfortunately for HBGary Federal, it was not. Neither Aaron nor Ted followed best practices. Instead, they used the same password in a whole bunch of different places, including e-mail, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn. For both men, the passwords allowed retrieval of e-mail. However, that was not all they revealed. Let's start with Ted's password first.

Along with its webserver, HBGary had a Linux machine, support.hbgary.com, on which many HBGary employees had shell accounts with ssh access, each with a password used to authenticate the user. One of these employees was Ted Vera, and his ssh password was identical to the cracked password he used in the CMS. This gave the hackers immediate access to the support machine.

ssh doesn't have to use passwords for authentication. Passwords are certainly common, but they're also susceptible to this kind of problem (among others). To combat this, many organizations and users, particularly those with security concerns, do not use passwords for ssh authentication. Instead, they use public key cryptography: each user has a key made up of a private part and a public part. The public part is associated with their account, and the private part is kept, well, private. ssh then uses these two keys to authenticate the user.

Since these private keys are not as easily compromised as passwords—servers don't store them, and in fact they never leave the client machine—and aren't readily re-used (one set of keys might be used to authenticate with several servers, but they can't be used to log in to a website, say), they are a much more secure option. Had they been used for HBGary's server, it would have been safe. But they weren't, so it wasn't.

Although attackers could log on to this machine, the ability to look around and break stuff was curtailed: Ted was only a regular non-superuser. Being restricted to a user account can be enormously confining on a Linux machine. It spoils all your fun; you can't read other users' data, you can't delete files you don't own, you can't cover up the evidence of your own break-in. It's a total downer for hackers.

The only way they can have some fun is to elevate privileges through exploiting a privilege escalation vulnerability. These crop up from time to time and generally exploit flaws in the operating system kernel or its system libraries to trick it into giving the user more access to the system than should be allowed. By a stroke of luck, the HBGary system was vulnerable to just such a flaw. The error was published in October last year, conveniently with a full, working exploit. By November, most distributions had patches available, and there was no good reason to be running the exploitable code in February 2011.

Exploitation of this flaw gave the Anonymous attackers full access to HBGary's system. It was then that they discovered many gigabytes of backups and research data, which they duly purged from the system.

Aaron's password yielded even more fruit. HBGary used Google Apps for its e-mail services, and for both Aaron and Ted, the password cracking provided access to their mail. But Aaron was no mere user of Google Apps: his account was also the administrator of the company's mail. With his higher access, he could reset the passwords of any mailbox and hence gain access to all the company's mail—not just his own. It's this capability that yielded access to Greg Hoglund's mail.

And what was done with Greg's mail?

A little bit of social engineering, that's what.

A Little Help From My Friends

Contained within Greg's mail were two bits of useful information. One: the root password to the machine running Greg's rootkit.com site was either "88j4bb3rw0cky88" or "88Scr3am3r88". Two: Jussi Jaakonaho, "Chief Security Specialist" at Nokia, had root access. Vandalizing the website stored on the machine was now within reach.

The attackers just needed a little bit more information: they needed a regular, non-root user account to log in with, because as a standard security procedure, direct ssh access with the root account is disabled. Armed with the two pieces of knowledge above, and with Greg's e-mail account in their control, the social engineers set about their task. The e-mail correspondence tells the whole story:

From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: need to ssh into rootkit
im in europe and need to ssh into the server. can you drop open up
firewall and allow ssh through port 59022 or something vague?
and is our root password still 88j4bb3rw0cky88 or did we change to
88Scr3am3r88 ?
thanks

-------------------------------------

From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
hi, do you have public ip? or should i just drop fw?
and it is w0cky - tho no remote root access allowed

-------------------------------------

From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
no i dont have the public ip with me at the moment because im ready
for a small meeting and im in a rush.
if anything just reset my password to changeme123 and give me public
ip and ill ssh in and reset my pw.

-------------------------------------

From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
ok,
it should now accept from anywhere to 47152 as ssh. i am doing
testing so that it works for sure.
your password is changeme123

i am online so just shoot me if you need something.

in europe, but not in finland? :-)

_jussi

-------------------------------------

From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
if i can squeeze out time maybe we can catch up.. ill be in germany
for a little bit.

anyway I can't ssh into rootkit. you sure the ips still
65.74.181.141?

thanks

-------------------------------------

From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
does it work now?

-------------------------------------

From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
yes jussi thanks

did you reset the user greg or?

-------------------------------------

From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
nope. your account is named as hoglund

-------------------------------------

From: Greg
To: Jussi
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
yup im logged in thanks ill email you in a few, im backed up

thanks

Thanks indeed. To be fair to Jussi, the fake Greg appeared to know the root password and, well, the e-mails were coming from Greg's own e-mail address. But over the course of a few e-mails it was clear that "Greg" had forgotten both his username and his password. And Jussi handed them to him on a platter.

Later on, Jussi did appear to notice something was up:

From: Jussi
To: Greg
Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit
did you open something running on high port?

As with the HBGary machine, this could have been avoided if keys had been used instead of passwords. But they weren't. Rootkit.com was now compromised.

Standard Practice

Once the username and password were known, defacing the site was easy. Log in as Greg, switch to root, and deface away! The attackers went one better than this, however: they dumped the user database for rootkit.com, listing the e-mail addresses and password hashes for everyone who'd ever registered on the site. And, as with the hbgaryfederal.com CMS system, the passwords were hashed with a single naive use of MD5, meaning that once again they were susceptible to rainbow table-based password cracking. So the crackable passwords were cracked, too.

So what do we have in total? A Web application with SQL injection flaws and insecure passwords. Passwords that were badly chosen. Passwords that were reused. Servers that allowed password-based authentication. Systems that weren't patched. And an astonishing willingness to hand out credentials over e-mail, even when the person being asked for them should have realized something was up.

The thing is, none of this is unusual. Quite the opposite. The Anonymous hack was not exceptional: the hackers used standard, widely known techniques to break into systems, find as much information as possible, and use that information to compromise further systems. They didn't have to, for example, use any non-public vulnerabilities or perform any carefully targeted social engineering. And because of their desire to cause significant public disruption, they did not have to go to any great lengths to hide their activity.

Nonetheless, their attack was highly effective, and it was well-executed. The desire was to cause trouble for HBGary, and that they did. Especially in the social engineering attack against Jussi, they used the right information in the right way to seem credible.

Most frustrating for HBGary must be the knowledge that they know what they did wrong, and they were perfectly aware of best practices; they just didn't actually use them. Everybody knows you don't use easy-to-crack passwords, but some employees did. Everybody knows you don't re-use passwords, but some of them did. Everybody knows that you should patch servers to keep them free of known security flaws, but they didn't.

And HBGary isn't alone. Analysis of the passwords leaked from rootkit.com and Gawker shows that password re-use is extremely widespread, with something like 30 percent of users re-using their passwords. HBGary won't be the last site to suffer from SQL injection, either, and people will continue to use password authentication for secure systems because it's so much more convenient than key-based authentication.

So there are clearly two lessons to be learned here. The first is that the standard advice is good advice. If all best practices had been followed then none of this would have happened. Even if the SQL injection error was still present, it wouldn't have caused the cascade of failures that followed.

The second lesson, however, is that the standard advice isn't good enough. Even recognized security experts who should know better won't follow it. What hope does that leave for the rest of us?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...bgary-hack.ars





Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet
James Glanz and John Markoff

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments — many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails — may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

But now, as Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence and their own knowledge of the Egyptian Internet’s construction, they are beginning to understand what, in effect, hit them. Interviews with many of those engineers, as well as an examination of data collected around the world during the blackout, indicate that the government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.

For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.

Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.

Over the past several days, activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have seen strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests there. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are particularly high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic.

A Double Knockout

The attack in Egypt relied on a double knockout, the engineers say. As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals that are tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. But the cutoff also revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on moment-to-moment information from systems that exist only outside the country — including e-mail servers at companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

The government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry somehow remained accessible.

“They drilled unexpectedly all the way down to the bottom layer of the Internet and stopped all traffic flowing,” said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a network management company based in New Hampshire that has closely monitored Internet traffic from Egypt. “With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event.”

The engineers say that a focal point of the attack was an imposing building at 26 Ramses Street in Cairo, just two and a half miles from the epicenter of the protests, Tahrir Square. At one time purely a telephone network switching center, the building now houses the crucial Internet exchange that serves as the connection point for fiber-optic links provided by five major network companies that provide the bulk of the Internet connectivity going into and out of the country.

“In Egypt the actual physical and logical connections to the rest of the world are few, and they are licensed by the government and they are tightly controlled,” said Wael Amin, president of ITWorx, a large software development company based in Cairo.

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Mr. Cowie noted that the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them — and that it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country. But he added that, inevitably, some autocrats would conclude that Mr. Mubarak had simply waited too long to bring down the curtain.

“Probably there are people who will look at this and say, it really worked pretty well, he just blew the timing,” Mr. Cowie said.

Speaking of the Egyptian shutdown and the earlier experience in Tunisia, whose censorship methods were less comprehensive, a senior State Department official said that “governments will draw different conclusions.”

“Some may take measures to tighten communications networks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Others may conclude that these things are woven so deeply into the culture and commerce of their country that they interfere at their peril. Regardless, it is certainly being widely discussed in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Vulnerable Choke Points

In Egypt, where the government still has not explained how the Internet was taken down, engineers across the country are putting together clues from their own observations to understand what happened this time, and to find out whether a future cutoff could be circumvented on a much wider scale than it was when Mr. Mubarak set his attack in motion.

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.

China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.

But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world.

But either way, the international portals were shut, and the domestic system reeled from the blow.

The Lines Go Dead

The first hints of the blackout had actually emerged the day before, Jan. 27, as opposition leaders prepared for a “Friday of anger,” with huge demonstrations expected. Ahmed ElShabrawy, who runs a company called EgyptNetwork, noticed that the government had begun blocking individual sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just after midnight on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Amin’s iPhone beeped with an alert that international connections to his consulting company’s Internet system had vanished — and then the iPhone itself stopped receiving e-mail. A few minutes later, Mr. ElShabrawy received an urgent call telling him that all Internet lines running to his company were dead.

It was not long before Ayman Bahaa, director of Egyptian Universities Network, which developed the country’s Internet nearly two decades ago, was scrambling to figure out how the system had all but collapsed between the strokes of 12 and 1.

The system had been crushed so completely that when a network engineer who does repairs in Cairo woke in the morning, he said to his family, “I feel we are in the 1800s.”

Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off.

The most telling bit of evidence was that some Internet services inside the country were still working, at least sporadically. American University in Cairo, frantically trying to relocate students and faculty members away from troubled areas, was unable to use e-mail, cellphones — which were also shut down — or even a radio frequency reserved for security teams. But the university was able to update its Web site, hosted on a server inside Egypt, and at least some people were able to pull up the site and follow the emergency instructions.

“The servers were up,” said Nagwa Nicola, the chief technology officer at American University in Cairo. “You could reach up to the Internet provider itself, but you wouldn’t get out of the country.” Ms. Nicola said that no notice had been given, and she depicted an operation that appeared to have been carried out with great secrecy.

“When we called the providers, they said, ‘Um, hang on, we just have a few problems and we’ll be on again,’ ” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us it was out.”

She added, “It wasn’t expected at all that something like that would happen.”

Told to Shut Down or Else

Individual Internet service providers were also called on the carpet and ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing agreements if the government so decrees.

According to an Egyptian engineer and an international telecom expert who both spoke on the condition of anonymity, at least one provider, Vodafone, expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told that if it did not comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt infrastructure — a method that would be much more time-consuming to reverse. Other exchanges, like an important one in Alexandria, may also have been involved.

Still, even major providers received little notice that the moves were afoot, said an Egyptian with close knowledge of the telecom industry who would speak only anonymously.

“You don’t get a couple of days with something like this,” he said. “It was less than an hour.”

After the Internet collapsed, Mr. ElShabrawy, 35, whose company provides Internet service to 2,000 subscribers and develops software for foreign and domestic customers, made urgent inquiries with the Ministry of Communications, to no avail. So he scrambled to re-establish his own communications.

When he, too, noticed that domestic fiber-optic cables were open, he had a moment of exhilaration, remembering that he could link up servers directly and establish messaging using an older system called Internet Relay Chat. But then it dawned on him that he had always assumed he could download the necessary software via the Internet and had saved no copy.

“You don’t have your tools — you don’t have anything,” Mr. ElShabrawy said he realized as he stared at the dead lines at his main office in Mansoura, about 60 miles outside Cairo.

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.

Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/te...6internet.html





Israeli General Claims Stuxnet Attacks as One of His Successes

The latest results of a Symnatec study concentrating on the Stuxnet worm revealed that its developers knew what they were doing - once finished, it took only 12 hours to infect the first target.

The study also concluded that the Stuxnet attacks can be dated back to June 2009 - more than a year prior to it being first discovered by security experts - and that its intial targets were five separate organizations that have a presence in Iran and most of which have been attacked at various points through 2009 and 2010.

Last month, The New York Times ran a story about Stuxnet having been developed by the Americans and the Israelis as a part of a joint project, but it was based on the claims by confidential sources and there was only circumstantial evidence that would corroborate them.

But, it now seems that the information from these sources was correct. The Haaretz - Israel's oldest daily newspaper - reports (via Google Translate) about the a surprising video that was played at a party organized for General Gabi Ashkenazi's last day on the job.

The video contained references to the successes he achieved during his stint as chief of staff, and enumerated among them was the Stuxnet worm attack on Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

There is always the possibility that this was just a way of magnifying the General's achievements, but it is also possible it is true. As we all know, Israel has never commented on the speculations about its involvement in the attacks.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10596





Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government
Greg Weston

An unprecedented cyberattack on the Canadian government, apparently from China, has given foreign hackers access to highly classified federal information and forced at least two key departments off the internet, CBC News has learned.

The attack, first detected in early January, left Canadian counter-espionage agents scrambling to determine how much sensitive government information may have been stolen and by whom.

Other hacking cases

February 2011: U.S. computer security firm McAfee reports hackers operating from China stole sensitive information from Western oil companies in the United States, Taiwan, Greece and Kazakhstan, beginning in November 2009.

March 2010: Citizen Lab and the SecDev Group discover computers at embassies and government departments in 103 countries, including the Dalai Lama's office and India, were compromised by an attack originating from servers in China. They dub the network involved "GhostNet."

January 2010: Google claims cyberattacks from China have hit it and at least 20 other companies. Google shuts down its China operations.

June 2009: A top-secret memo by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warns that cyber attacks on government, university and industry computers have been growing "substantially."

February 2008: Quebec provincial police say they dismantled a computer hacking network that targeted unprotected computers around the world, including government computers.

Highly placed sources tell CBC News the cyberattacks were traced back to computer servers in China.

They caution, however, that there is no way of knowing whether the hackers are Chinese, or some other nationality routing their cybercrimes through China to cover their tracks.

So far, officials in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government have been all but mum on the extraordinary breach of security.

The government initially issued a terse statement, passing it all off as merely an "attempt to access" federal networks. It has refused to release any further information.

Finance, Treasury Board

Sources have confirmed, however, that the attackers successfully penetrated the computer systems at the federal government's two main economic nerve centres, the Finance Department and Treasury Board.

The hackers apparently managed to take control of computers in the offices of senior government executives as part of a scheme to steal the key passwords that unlock entire government data systems.

It is unclear whether the attackers were able to compromise other departmental computer networks, including those that contain Canadians' sensitive personal information such as tax and health records.

Once the attack was detected in early January, government cybersecurity officials immediately shut down all internet access in both departments in an attempt to stop stolen information from being sent back to the hackers over the net.

The move left thousands of public servants without internet access, although officials in both affected departments report service has slowly been returning to normal since the attack.

While the government is trying to keep the embarrassing security breach under tight wraps, even from its own employees, a number of sources involved in the investigation agreed to speak to CBC News on condition of anonymity.

Canadian techno-gurus

This extraordinary tale of the Canadian government being targeted in cyber warfare actually began in 2009 with an international investigation by a group of Canadian techno-gurus whose findings shook the security world.

The group, called the Information Warfare Monitor, reported that an electronic spy network based mainly in China had hacked into almost 1,300 government computers in 103 countries.

They called the massive and now-infamous cyberspying operation GhostNet.

While many countries immediately moved to strengthen their defences against potential cyberattacks, it wasn't until the fall of 2010 that the Canadian government went on high-alert against potential electronic intruders.

Leading that task was the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE), a little-known branch of the military, and the country's only electronic eavesdropping agency.

Sources say the agency hired the same Canadian cyber-gurus who had busted GhostNet, specifically to go hunting for any signs the federal government networks might have been compromised.

Turns out they had.

At least two departments, Finance and Treasury Board, had been compromised exactly the same way the China-based hackers behind GhostNet had penetrated more than 100 other governments around the world.

How it was done

In the world of cybercops, it is called "executive spear-phishing."

Here's how it worked:

Sources say hackers using servers in China gained control of a number of Canadian government computers belonging to top federal officials.

The hackers, then posing as the federal executives, sent emails to departmental technical staffers, conning them into providing key passwords unlocking access to government networks.

At the same time, the hackers sent other staff seemingly innocuous memos as attachments.

The moment an attachment was opened by a recipient, a viral program was unleashed on the network.

The program hunts for specific kinds of classified government information, and sends it back to the hackers over the internet.

One source involved in the investigation said spear-phishing is deadly in its simplicity: "There is nothing particularly innovative about it. It's just that it is dreadfully effective."

Effective indeed, especially against a government cybersecurity system that has long been described as a sieve.

Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, for one, first raised the alarm in 2002 when she warned "there are weaknesses in the system.

"There are access controls that need to be fixed; there are a whole series of minimum security issues that are not being dealt with. There are vulnerabilities. Government needs to fix them."

Three years later, Fraser checked again and found not much had changed.

"It is important that these things be dealt with and be fixed — the government is vulnerable to attacks."

Evidently, it still is.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...n-hacking.html





Microsoft has a Change of Heart on How to Keep Internet Safe

Microsoft's security chief used to think that ISPs could quarantine infected PCs. Now he's changed his mind
Robert McMillan

Should ISPs be the ones who keep hacked PCs off the Internet? Microsoft's chief security executive used to think so, but now he's had a change of heart.

Speaking at the RSA Conference Tuesday, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney said that he no longer thought it was a good idea for service providers to be the ones on the hook for keeping infected PCs from the rest of the Internet.

"Last year at RSA I said, 'You know we need to think about ISPs being the CIO for the public sector, and we need to think about them scanning consumer machines and making sure they're clean and maybe quarantining them from the Internet,'" he said. "But in the course of the last year as I thought a lot more about this I realized that there are many flaws with that model."

Consumers may see security scans as invasive and a violation of privacy, and with more and more people using the Internet as their telephone, quarantining a PC could amount to cutting off someone's 911 service, he said. "You see the scenario, right: a heart attack, I run for my computer, it says you need to install four patches and reboot before you can access the Internet. That's not the experience we strive for."

Then there's the biggest problem of all. ISPs would have to bear the cost. "It puts a lot of burden on the ISPs, because they're the ones who are gating access to the Internet," Charney said.

ISPs have experimented with different ways to cut down on infected computers. Comcast, for example, has a service called Constant Guard that warns customers when they have a security problem.

But cutting off service to infected customers is an expensive proposition. "It just takes one phone call from a consumer for you to lose your profit margin for the year" on that user, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist with network monitoring firm Arbor Networks, in a telephone interview.

Labovitz said that technology companies have been coming up with new ways to rid the world of infected machines for about two decades now, without success. "Even if we do force end users to keep their patches updated there are still a huge number of zero days," he said, referring to unpatched software flaws that can be used to take over a fully patched PC. "It's an arms race that keeps going. There certainly isn't any single bullet."

Still, Charney thinks that there are ways to improve things.
http://www.itworld.com/security/1371...-internet-safe





Obama Seeks Big Boost in Cybersecurity Spending

Besides push for IT security spending in the wake of WikiLeaks, requests in budget for increased outlay on robotics, manufacturing tech
Patrick Thibodeau

The White House is proposing a big increase in cybersecurity research and development in next year's budget to improve, in part, its ability to reduce the risk of insider threats and ensure the safety of control systems such as those used at power plants.

In detailing their 2012 budget proposal on Monday, White House officials didn't mention WikiLeaks and its release of tens of thousands of diplomatic cables and military documents, or the ability of the Stuxnet worm to damage Iran's nuclear control systems. But the fingerprints of both those incidents on this budget proposal seemed clear enough.

Philip Coyle, associate director for national security, said at the budget briefing on Monday that the administration is proposing "considerable growth" in cybersecurity research. When all the cybersecurity spending plans across the board are added together, cybersecurity research and development spending will increase 35% to $548 million next year, he said.

Stuxnet illustrated how a cyberattack could corrupt a specifically targeted critical control system -- in this case, Iran's nuclear centrifuges. But attacks on critical facilities in the U.S. have been a longstanding concern.

The Department of Homeland Security formed teams last year to test power plants for cybersecurity weaknesses.

Other cybersecurity initiatives that are funded in this spending plan include new research programs at the National Science Foundation, as well as research on a trusted identity system. Day-to-day spending on cybersecurity by federal agencies is not part of this research budget.

The cybersecurity research spending is part of an overall R&D budget proposal for next year that includes across-the-board increases for a range of research efforts, including robotics and climate change, and funding to expand the supply and capabilities of science, technology, engineering and math teachers.

Overall, the budget seeks $66.1 billion for basic and applied research across all areas, an 11.6% increase. "The aim of that is to develop the solutions -- the innovative solutions to the many challenges we face," John Holdren, Obama's top science adviser, said at the budget briefing.

Peter Harsha, director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association, wrote in a blog post that the White House proposal "is essentially 'dead on arrival' as far as the House is concerned."

"But it's still important to have a good request from the President and the agencies on record when we go advocating for the science agencies," he wrote. CRA members include many universities, such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard, as well as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and many other companies.

President Barack Obama has made science and research funding a high priority and has repeatedly said that the U.S. is facing a new "Sputnik moment."

But the White House budget faces Republican lawmakers in the House who have already proposed more than $2 billion in cuts to science in this year's budget.

Holdren said at the budget briefing that if the Republicans' proposed cuts were to happen, "they would cripple our ability to advance innovation."

The White House research proposal will provide, among other things, $7.8 billion to the National Science Foundation, 13% more than was approved this year. The Department of Energy's Office of Science would see $5.4 billion, a 10.7% increase.

The federal budget proposal specifically seeks new research in advanced manufacturing technologies, including nano-manufacturing and robotics.

The White House believes that robotics is "nearing a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility" and initiated a grant proposal last fall to seek robotics proposals.

The government is seeking development of "co-robots," systems "that can safely coexist in close proximity to or in physical contact with humans in the pursuit of mundane, dangerous, precise or expensive tasks," according to the grant announcement.

Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. government's CTO, told Computerworld that a number of agencies are interested in the role robotics might play in manufacturing, and in productivity gains they may bring.

"We believe there is an opportunity to take a fresh look, and a more energizing look at robotics," Chopra said. "We want to run the spectrum on robotics -- that which can deliver breakthroughs on current technologies that are applied in new and novel ways, as well as building blocks of future capabilities that are just still nascent."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...axonomyId=7 0





So, Why Does the Air Force Want Hundreds of Fake Online Identities on Social Media? [Update]
Erik Sherman

Bad enough that spammers are creating fake Facebook accounts that acquire connections with unsuspecting people, then inundate them with crap. Now, though, the U.S. military is looking for software and services to manage upwards of 500 fake online personas designed to interact with social media, presumably including such sites as Facebook and Twitter. Last year, the U.S. Air Force created the document, which resides in the federal government’s contract database:

Here’s the description of the basic service sought:

0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

In normal language, the Air Force wants software to create and control fictitious online identities, with up to 50 users controlling as many as 10 identities each. Each identity could use social media sites and other online services, giving the impression of an individual but really being a false face for the military.

As the rest of the contract explains, the Air Force would be able to manipulate IP addresses to make these “individuals” appear to be located in any part of the world. That is explicitly to protect the “identity of government agencies and enterprise organizations,” otherwise known as large defense contractors. The system would be used at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa as well as in Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad, Iraq.

In 2005, the U.S. military was involved in a multimillion covert operation to plant propaganda in the Iraqi media. So what could the government do with fake online personalities that could use social media sites and services? A number of things come to mind, including the following:

• Play a part in antiterrorism activities.
• Offer an outlet to disseminate propaganda as though it were the opinions of disinterested individuals.
• Keep tabs on what military personnel do online.

What makes this story more complex is that one of the vendors interested in the contract was HBGary Federal, a division of HBGary allegedly hired by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to attack Chamber critics, as my BNET colleague Alain Sherter writes. Bank of America (BAC) allegedly also hired HBGary Federal to develop plans to attack WikiLeaks, which had rumored to be readying a release of internal BoA documents.

[Update: Slashdot reader AHuxley (musings from a Brave New World?) pointed out an AP investigation showing that the U.S. military spends billions to affect public opinion, both domestic and international, including employing almost as many people in 2009 as the size of the entire State Department for recruitment, advertising, and public relations. There is a long history of government law enforcement and military agencies infiltrating groups that they deemed suspect or dangerous, including the old FBI COINTELPRO program that worked its way into civil rights organizations, among others, from the 1950s through early 70s. And the FBI has also infiltrated mosques more recently.]
http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-...ia-update/8728





U.S. Policy to Address Internet Freedom
Mark Landler

Days after Facebook and Twitter added fuel to a revolt in Egypt, the Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Internet freedom, designed to help people get around barriers in cyberspace while making it harder for autocratic governments to use the same technology to repress dissent.

The State Department’s policy, a year in the making, has been bogged down by fierce debates over which projects it should support, and even more basically, whether to view the Internet primarily as a weapon to topple repressive regimes or as a tool that autocrats can use to root out and crush dissent.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will lay out the policy in a speech on Tuesday, acknowledged the Internet’s dual role in an address a year ago, and administration officials said she would touch on that theme again, noting how social networks were used by both protesters and governments in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries.

The State Department plans to finance programs like circumvention services, which enable users to evade Internet firewalls, and training for human rights workers on how to secure their e-mail from surveillance or wipe incriminating data from cellphones if they are detained by the police.

Though the policy has been on the drawing board for months, it has new urgency in light of the turmoil in the Arab world, because it will be part of a larger debate over how the United States weighs its alliances with entrenched leaders against the young people inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Administration officials say that the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but is not a “magic bullet” that brings down repressive regimes.

“People are so enamored of the technology,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “People have a view that technology will make us free. No, people will make us free.”

Critics say the administration has dawdled for more than a year, holding back $30 million in Congressional financing that could have gone to circumvention technology, a proven method that allows Internet users to evade government firewalls by routing their traffic through proxy servers in other countries.

Some of these services have received modest financing from the government, but their backers say they need much more to install networks capable of handling millions of users in China, Iran and other countries.

A report by the Republican minority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be released Tuesday, said the State Department’s performance was so inadequate that the job of financing Internet freedom initiatives — at least those related to China — should be moved to another agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

“Certainly, the State Department took an awfully long time to get this out,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN correspondent and expert on Internet freedom issues who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “They got so besieged by the politics of what they should be funding.”

Still, Ms. MacKinnon said that she believed the State Department’s deliberations had been thoughtful and the plan “is going to be effective if it’s couched within a broader set of policies.”

There are other contradictions in the State Department’s agenda: it champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.

In the long months the government has wrestled with these issues, critics said, the Iranian government was able to keep censoring the Internet, helping it muffle the protests that followed its disputed presidential election in 2009.

Mr. Posner, a longtime human rights advocate, acknowledges that the process has been long and occasionally messy. But he contends that over the past year, the administration has developed a coherent policy that takes account of the rapidly evolving role the Internet plays in closed societies.

The State Department has received 68 proposals for nearly six times the $30 million in available funds. The department said it would take at least two months to evaluate proposals before handing out money.

Among the kinds of things that excite officials are “circuit riders,” experts who tour Internet cafes in Myanmar teaching people how to set up secure e-mail accounts, and new ways of dealing with denial-of-service attacks.

This does not satisfy critics, who say the lawmakers intended the $30 million to be used quickly — and on circumvention.

“The department’s failure to follow Congressional intent created the false impression among Iranian demonstrators that the regime had the power to disrupt access to Facebook and Twitter,” said Michael J. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who lobbies on behalf of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a circumvention service with ties to Falun Gong.

Mr. Horowitz has organized demonstrations of the service for legislators, journalists and others. On Jan. 27, the day before the Egyptian government cut off access to the Internet, he said there were more than 7.8 million page views by Egyptians on UltraSurf, one of two consumer services under the umbrella of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. That was a huge increase from only 76,000 on Jan. 22.

The trouble, Mr. Horowitz said, is that UltraSurf and its sister service, Freegate, do not have enough capacity to handle sudden spikes in usage during political crises. That causes the speed to slow to a crawl, which discourages users. The companies need tens of millions of dollars to install an adequate network, he said. Under a previous government grant, the group received $1.5 million.

But the experience in Egypt points up the limits of circumvention. By shutting down the entire Internet, the authorities were able to make such systems moot. Administration officials point out that circumvention is also of little value in countries like Russia, which does not block the Internet but dispatches the police to pursue bloggers, or in Myanmar, which has sophisticated ways to monitor e-mail accounts.

Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said that governments had been shifting from blocking the Internet to hacking and disabling it. Even in the United States, he noted, the Senate is considering a bill that would allow the president to switch off the Internet in the event of a catastrophic cyberattack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/15clinton.html





Clinton Calls for "Ground Rules" Protecting Internet Freedom and Security
Lalit K. Jha

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for ground rules to protect the World Wide Web against wrongdoing and harm after the world watched as Egyptian authorities cut Internet access during its recent political crisis.

"For the United States, the choice is clear; on the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness," Clinton said. "Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs."

"Achieving both liberty and security; protecting both transparency and confidentiality; protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility; are the three major challenges facing the Internet today," Clinton said in an address to students at George Washington University.

Clinton added that Internet freedom isn't about protecting any one particular activity online. It's about ensuring that the Internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day, she argued.

"We want to keep the Internet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the Internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world," Clinton said.

The goal, she said, is not to tell people how to use the Internet any more than to tell people how to use any public square, whether it's Tahrir Square or Times Square. If in a country like Egypt, Internet has been successfully used to bring change, in countries like China and Iran it is being used as a toll to suppress people and restricting their freedom, she said.

"In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global Internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down," Clinton said.

Similarly, terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal e-mail accounts, she said.

In a statement soon after Clinton's speech, Sen. Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the Obama Administration to step up its initiatives to ensure freedom of the Internet around the world.

"I applaud the continuing efforts of Secretary of State Clinton and everything the Department of State is doing to counter authoritarian governments and their designs to control access to the Internet," he said.

Lugar, however, expressed concern that the State Department has not been moving quickly enough to contract out the funding Congress appropriated for developing tools to counter Internet censorship.

He called on the Secretary to transfer "no less than $8 million" in unspent funds to the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and other international information services.
http://www.dbune.com/news/tech/4409-...-security.html





Patriot Act Clears its House Speed-Bump....
Steve Benen

Last week, the House Republican leadership brought up the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, assuming it would quickly clear the chamber. It didn't go well -- a contingent of Republicans balked and the bill fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed at the time.

Late yesterday, the House GOP had more success.

The House on Monday voted to reauthorize and extend through Dec. 8 three ways in which Congress expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counterterrorism powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week, an effort to extend these provisions of the so-called Patriot Act and a related intelligence law failed to pass after falling just short of the two-thirds' majority needed under a special rule. On Monday, however, the bill was able to pass with only a simple majority -- and it did so, 275 to 144.

Looking at the roll call, 27 Republicans broke party ranks and opposed the measure, and 65 Democrats did the opposite. In general, most Republicans supported Patriot Act reauthorization, and most Democrats opposed it. This is nearly identical to last week's vote totals, but this time, only a simple majority was needed for passage.

There was, incidentally, an interesting motion to recommit from House Democrats.

Every Member of Congress takes an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. While Members of Congress are all united in their commitment to protect our country against its enemies, they should be equally united to uphold the Constitution.

Today, Democrats offered a motion to recommit on legislation to extend expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act to ensure that PATRIOT Act powers are not used to violate the Constitutional freedoms and protections guaranteed to all Americans. The motion included two parts:

No Constitutional shortcuts. When investigating American citizens, the government must comply with the Constitution, even in national security investigations

Challenging unconstitutional action. If a citizen challenges the government's use of PATRIOT Act power in a court of law, the case must be expedited to ensure the individual's rights are upheld.

A total of two House Republicans -- Texas' Ron Paul and North Carolina's Walter Jones -- voted for this, while 234 did not.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/arc..._02/028006.php





Obama Administration Says It Can Spy On Americans, But Can't Tell You What Law Allows It
Mike Masnick

Remember how President Obama, while campaigning, promised to reject the questionable spying practices of the federal government of President Bush? Yeah, forget all that. Over the past two years, we've seen time and time again that he's actually extended those abuses even further. The latest to come out is that the Justice Department is now claiming that the FBI has the right to get phone records on any call made from inside the US to an international number without any oversight. You may recall a few years back that there was a similar controversy, when it came out that the FBI would regularly just call up phone companies and ask for records -- despite the fact that this violates certain laws designed to protect consumer privacy. Sometimes, they would just use post-it notes.

Apparently, a year ago, McClatchy newspapers put in a FOIA request, asking for the details of a particular Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo that was mentioned in the (previously released, but highly redacted) report that showed how frequently the FBI abused the law in this manner. The OLC took its sweet time responding, but finally responded, and in the cover letter admitted that the Obama administration believes it is perfectly legal for the FBI to route around the in-place oversight for getting access to such records and claimed that the law said so.

Which law says so? Oh, see, that they can't say. Yes, the part of the letter that explains which law lets the FBI get these records without oversight was redacted.

It's a secret law! And here I thought, in the US, if the government was going to base actions on a particular law, at the very least, they were supposed to tell you what law. Apparently, the Justice Department under the Obama administration does not believe that to be the case.

Basically, what this means is that the federal government believes that it's free to request information without first getting court approval -- and without telling the public what law says they're allowed to get this information. That's not what the laws on the books seem to say at all. But, of course, big telcos such as AT&T, who are so closely tied to the government, are going to roll over and give the government such info (or, perhaps, give them direct access to the info), even if it violates other laws. Why do you think President Obama voted to support giving telcos retroactive immunity on this issue, while he was running for President despite having earlier said he was against it? Now that he's in power, he apparently is perfectly happy to let the FBI twist the clear intentions of the law to spy on Americans without oversight, and then to refuse to reveal what law he's relying on to make such spying on Americans without oversight legal.

McClatchy quotes Michael German, a former FBI agent, who now works for the ACLU pointing out the obvious:

"It's wrong that they're withholding a legal rationale that has to do with the authorities of the FBI to collect information that affects the rights of American citizens here and abroad.... The law should never be secret. We should all understand what rules we're operating under and particularly when it comes to an agency that has a long history of abuse in its collection activities."

And so far, it doesn't seem like most people care. About the only politician who really seems concerned about this is Senator Wyden, who says this level of secrecy "is a serious problem" and he's "continuing to press the executive branch to disclose more information to the public about what their government thinks the law means." Once again, kudos to Senator Wyden for being one of a very small number of politicians who seems to consistently be concerned about the rights of individuals. But it's sad that the rest of our elected officials aren't up in arms about this. The government shouldn't be spying on Americans, and if it is, it should at least have to tell Americans what law it's basing that decision on.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...03013075.shtml





Lawmaker Reintroduces WikiLeaks Prosecution Bill

The legislation would make it easier to prosecute Julian Assange for espionage
Grant Gross

New legislation in the U.S. Congress targets WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage prosecution.

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, introduced the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination, or SHIELD, Act on Tuesday. The bill would clarify U.S. law by saying that it is an act of espionage to publish the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the U.S military or intelligence community.

King introduced similar legislation in 2010. Senators John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, introduced similar legislation in the Senate last week.

King has called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Assange for espionage. The new bill would give the U.S. Department of Justice greater authority for prosecuting intelligence leaks, King said in a news release.

"Julian Assange and his associates who have operated and supported WikiLeaks not only damaged U.S. national security with their releases of classified documents, but also placed at risk countless lives, including those of our nation’s intelligence sources around the world," King said in a statement.

Some WikiLeaks associates are planning a new website called OpenLeaks, "dedicated to the same dangerous conduct," King added. "These organizations are a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States. Julian Assange and his compatriots are enemies of the U.S and should be prosecuted ..."

Critics of the SHIELD Act have said it appears to be aimed at publishers, not leakers.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...secution_bill/





China's Microbloggers on New Front of Internet Battle
Michael Martina and Chris Buckley

China's Internet controls, under challenge again from Washington, may face an even tougher time from the 125 million Chinese people who have embraced online microblogs to gossip, rant and mobilize.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that China faces a "dictator's dilemma" on Internet censorship, and risks being outrun by the spread of online opinion. The Internet-fueled toppling of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia showed governments could not pick and choose which freedoms to grant heir citizens, she said.

Last year, Beijing and Washington bickered over Internet censorship that eventually prompted Google to shift its chief Chinese-language from mainland China to Hong Kong.

The latest battleground over Internet control under China's ruling Communist Party are Twitter-like local websites where users shoot out bursts of 140 or so Chinese characters of often strongly worded opinion. Twitter itself is blocked in China, along with Facebook and other websites that are popular abroad.

Beijing's censors are in control for now, and most Chinese people use microblogs to follow celebrities. But activist users can be wily.

"Those that have potential to shape public opinion are wired and looking for leads, but they also have a keen sense of where the limit is," Liu Yawei, head of the Carter Center's China program in Atlanta, said of China's microbloggers.

Microbloggers on popular Sina.com and other Chinese websites recently spread debate about Egypt, often using oblique references to get around filters attempting to block discussion of the unrest that unsettled officials.

"Initially, the government agencies maybe didn't expect microblogs would be so powerful," said Li Yonggang, an expert on society and the Internet at Nanjing University in eastern China.

"Because microblog entries are very brief and fast, people have become adept at expressing themselves so that people in the know understand what's being said, but those who aren't can miss the point," he said in a telephone interview.

Officially, Chinese microblog sites are operating on only a "trial" basis. Regulators could withhold final approval or revoke the provisional clearance to pressure these sites into more self-censorship, said Li.

Save The Kids

For now, some Chinese officials are also figuring out ways to use microblogs to get out their message.

Local police forces have recently joined in a microblog campaign to stop children being recruited into begging that has sparked widespread attention and media coverage in China.

The campaign's site by Wednesday had 235,641 followers.

But microblog activism can also turn on the government and suddenly make officials a target of unrelenting online ire.

Communist Party officials in north China's Hebei province were hit by microbloggers' fury after a deadly drunk driving accident in October in which the driver, a son of a police official, invoked his father's name in an effort to escape arrest. The driver was later sentenced to six years in prison.

Unlike conventional print media and slower-moving Internet blogs, microblogs can spread information before censors have an opportunity to block it, said Li, the professor.

Thirty-seven percent of China's Internet users, or about 125 million people, use microblogging sites, said a December report from iResearch, a Chinese consulting firm.

A much lower proportion of Americans use Twitter.

"Citizens may have fewer channels for participation, and that alone may help explain the large proportion of microblog users in China," said Jia Xijin, an associate professor at Tsignhua University's School of Public Policy and Management in Beijing.

At least 65 million of them use Sina, the company said in September, and the company expects that figure to rise to nearly 100 million. Its most popular microblog is by the Chinese actress Yao Chen, who has 5.7 million fans signed up to her page.

Tencent Holdings, which already boasts millions of instant messenger users, is trying to catch up with Sina and has launched a big promotion campaign based on Chinese celebrities.

"But when it comes to sensitive subjects like Egypt, the government can still control even microblogs," said Chen Yongmiao, a Beijing-based political activist who often publishes microblog comments lashing the government.

"If one day there's turmoil and microblogs become a powerful force, then it could wipe them out," he said.

(Additional reporting by Sarbrina Mao; Editing by Ken Wills and Sanjeev Miglani)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71F1XE20110216





Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You
Jim Dwyer

On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said.

“They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”

The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he said. “It stores everything you care about.”

Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.

“We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” he said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”

Not many law professors have Mr. Moglen’s credentials as lawyer and geek, or, for that matter, his record as an early advocate for what looked like very long shots.

Growing up on the West Side of Manhattan, he began fooling around with computers as a boy. In 1973, at age 14, he was employed writing programs for the Scientific Time Sharing Corporation. At 26, he was a young lawyer, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. Later, he got a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He was also the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard M. Stallman, which aggressively — and successfully — protected the ability of computer scientists, hackers and hobbyists to build software that was not tied up by copyright, licensing and patents.

In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.

This month, Mr. Moglen, who now runs the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke to a convention of 2,000 free-software programmers in Brussels, urging them to get to work on the Freedom Box.

Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year have been building a decentralized social network called Diaspora.

Mr. Moglen said that if he could raise “slightly north of $500,000,” Freedom Box 1.0 would be ready in one year.

“We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression,” Mr. Moglen said. “Being connected works.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html





Dubious Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen

For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.

The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr. Montgomery is at the center of a tale that features terrorism scares, secret White House briefings, backing from prominent Republicans, backdoor deal-making and fantastic-sounding computer technology.

Interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and business associates and a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show.

Mr. Montgomery’s former lawyer, Michael Flynn — who now describes Mr. Montgomery as a “con man” — says he believes that the administration has been shutting off scrutiny of Mr. Montgomery’s business for fear of revealing that the government has been duped.

“The Justice Department is trying to cover this up,” Mr. Flynn said. “If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it.”

Justice Department officials declined to discuss the government’s dealings with Mr. Montgomery, 57, who is in bankruptcy and living outside Palm Springs, Calif. Mr. Montgomery is about to go on trial in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos, but he has not been charged with wrongdoing in the federal contracts, nor has the government tried to get back any of the money it paid. He and his current lawyer declined to comment.

The computer codes he patented — codes that he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.

The codes led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.

“Dennis would always say, ‘My technology is real, and it’s worth a fortune,’ ” recounted Steve Crisman, a filmmaker who oversaw business operations for Mr. Montgomery and a partner until a few years ago. “In the end, I’m convinced it wasn’t real.”

Government officials, with billions of dollars in new counterterrorism financing after Sept. 11, eagerly embraced the promise of new tools against militants.

C.I.A. officials, though, came to believe that Mr. Montgomery’s technology was fake in 2003, but their conclusions apparently were not relayed to the military’s Special Operations Command, which had contracted with his firm. In 2006, F.B.I. investigators were told by co-workers of Mr. Montgomery that he had repeatedly doctored test results at presentations for government officials. But Mr. Montgomery still landed more business.

In 2009, the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software, according to e-mails obtained by The New York Times.

Hints of fraud by Mr. Montgomery, previously raised by Bloomberg Markets and Playboy, provide a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of government contracting. A Pentagon study in January found that it had paid $285 billion in three years to more than 120 contractors accused of fraud or wrongdoing.

“We’ve seen so many folks with a really great idea, who truly believe their technology is a breakthrough, but it turns out not to be,” said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr. of the Air Force, who retired last year as the commander of the military’s Northern Command. “In this complex intelligence world,” he said, “they can’t deliver on what they say.”

Getting Attention

Mr. Montgomery described himself a few years ago in a sworn court statement as a patriotic scientist who gave the government his software “to stop terrorist attacks and save American lives.” His alliance with the government, at least, would prove a boon to a small company, eTreppidTechnologies, that he helped found in 1998.

He and his partner — a Nevada investor, Warren Trepp, who had been a top trader for the junk-bond king Michael Milken — hoped to colorize movies by using a technology Mr. Montgomery claimed he had invented that identified patterns and isolated images. Hollywood had little interest, but in 2002, the company found other customers.

With the help of Representative Jim Gibbons, a Republican who would become Nevada’s governor and was a longtime friend of Mr. Trepp’s, the company won the attention of intelligence officials in Washington. It did so with a remarkable claim: Mr. Montgomery had found coded messages hidden in broadcasts by Al Jazeera, and his technology could decipher them to identify specific threats.

The software so excited C.I.A. officials that, for a few months at least, it was considered “the most important, most sensitive” intelligence tool the agency had, according to a former agency official, who like several others would speak only on the condition of anonymity because the technology was classified. ETreppid was soon awarded almost $10 million in contracts with the military’s Special Operations Command and the Air Force, which were interested in software that Mr. Montgomery promised could identify human and other targets from videos on Predator drones.

In December 2003, Mr. Montgomery reported alarming news: hidden in the crawl bars broadcast by Al Jazeera, someone had planted information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets.

C.I.A. officials rushed the information to Mr. Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded before they could enter American airspace.

“The intelligence people were telling us this was real and credible, and we had to do something to act on it,” recalled Asa Hutchinson, who oversaw federal aviation safety at the time. Senior administration officials even talked about shooting down planes identified as targets because they feared that supposed hijackers would use the planes to attack the United States, according to a former senior intelligence official who was at a meeting where the idea was discussed. The official later called the idea of firing on the planes “crazy.”

French officials, upset that their planes were being grounded, commissioned a secret study concluding that the technology was a fabrication. Presented with the findings soon after the 2003 episode, Bush administration officials began to suspect that “we got played,” a former counterterrorism official said.

The C.I.A. never did an assessment to determine how a ruse had turned into a full-blown international incident, officials said, nor was anyone held accountable. In fact, agency officials who oversaw the technology directorate — including Donald Kerr, who helped persuade George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the software was credible — were promoted, former officials said. “Nobody was blamed,” a former C.I.A. official said. “They acted like it never happened.”

After a bitter falling out between Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Trepp in 2006 led to a series of lawsuits, the F.B.I. and the Air Force sent investigators to eTreppid to look into accusations that Mr. Montgomery had stolen digital data from the company’s systems. In interviews, several employees claimed that Mr. Montgomery had manipulated tests in demonstrations with military officials to make it appear that his video recognition software had worked, according to government memorandums. The investigation collapsed, though, when a judge ruled that the F.B.I. had conducted an improper search of his home.

Software and Secrets

The litigation worried intelligence officials. The Bush administration declared that some classified details about the use of Mr. Montgomery’s software were a “state secret” that could cause grave harm if disclosed in court. In 2008, the government spent three days “scrubbing” the home computers of Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer of all references to the technology. And this past fall, federal judges in Montana and Nevada who are overseeing several of the lawsuits issued protective orders shielding certain classified material.

The secrecy was so great that at a deposition Mr. Montgomery gave in November, two government officials showed up to monitor the questioning but refused to give their full names or the agencies they worked for.

Years of legal wrangling did not deter Mr. Montgomery from passing supposed intelligence to the government, according to intelligence officials, including an assertion in 2006 that his software was able to identify some of the men suspected of trying to plant liquid bombs on planes in Britain — a claim immediately disputed by United States intelligence officials. And he soon found a new backer: Edra Blixseth, a onetime billionaire who with her former husband had run the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Montana.

Hoping to win more government money, Ms. Blixseth turned to some influential friends, like Jack Kemp, the former New York congressman and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Conrad Burns, then a Republican senator from Montana. They became minority stakeholders in the venture, called Blxware.

‘We Are All Toast’

In an interview, Mr. Burns recalled how impressed he was by a video presentation that Mr. Montgomery gave to a cable company. “He talked a hell of a game,” the former senator said.

Mr. Kemp, meanwhile, used his friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney to set up a meeting in 2006 at which Mr. Kemp, Mr. Montgomery and Ms. Blixseth met with a top Cheney adviser, Samantha Ravich, to talk about expanding the government’s use of the Blxware software, officials said. She was noncommittal.

Mr. Flynn, who was still Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer at the time, sent an angry letter to Mr. Cheney in May 2007. He accused the White House of abandoning a tool shown to “save lives,” and warned that if the administration failed to block a Montana judge from making confidential details public, Mr. Montgomery would have to “reveal the names of the individuals he worked with at the C.I.A.” (After a falling out with Mr. Montgomery, Mr. Flynn now represents another party in one of the lawsuits.)

But Mr. Montgomery’s company still had an ally at the Air Force, which in late 2008 began negotiating a $3 million contract with Blxware.

In e-mails to Mr. Montgomery and other company officials, an Air Force contracting officer, Joseph Liberatore, described himself as one of the “believers” in the technology, despite skepticism from the C.I.A. and problems with the no-bid contract.

If other agencies examined the deal, he said in a December 2008 e-mail, “we are all toast.”

“Honestly I do not care about being fired,” Mr. Liberatore wrote, but he said he did care about “moving the effort forward — we are too close.” (The Air Force declined to make Mr. Liberatore available for comment.)

The day after Mr. Obama’s inauguration, Mr. Liberatore wrote that government officials were thanking Mr. Montgomery’s company for its support. The Air Force appears to have used his technology to try to identify the Somalis it believed were plotting to disrupt the inauguration, but within days, intelligence officials publicly stated that the threat had never existed. In May 2009, the Air Force canceled the company’s contract because it had failed to meet its expectations.

Mr. Montgomery is not saying much these days. At his deposition in November, when he was asked if his software was a “complete fraud,” he answered, “I’m going to assert my right under the Fifth Amendment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us...cs/20data.html





FBI Pushes for Surveillance Backdoors in Web 2.0 Tools
Ryan Singel

The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.

FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.

“Addressing the Going Dark problem does not require fundamental changes in encryption technology,” Caproni said in her written testimony. “We understand that there are situations in which encryption will require law enforcement to develop individualized solutions.”

(“Going Dark” is the FBI’s codename for its multimillion-dollar project to extend its ability to wiretap communications as they happen.)

That’s a far cry from what Caproni told The New York Times last fall:

“No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a U.S. court order,” Ms. Caproni said. “They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.”

Those remarks indicated the FBI seemed to want to revisit the encryption wars of the 1990s. That largely ended with the government scrapping its plans to mandate backdoors in encryption, after security researchers discovered flaws in the idea, and the National Research Council concluded that strong encryption made the country safer.

But that retreat didn’t satisfy Susan Landau, a privacy and cryptography expert who testified alongside Caproni in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee Thursday.

That’s because the FBI is still pushing for more online-communications companies to build real-time spying capabilities into their software, which Landau said will harm innovation and introduce security flaws that will be used against American companies, government agencies and citizens.

Innovation happens too fast on the internet to require companies that provide chat and voice-calling capabilities, which these days includes online games, social networking sites and a myriad of online chat and photo-sharing services, to comply with detailed wiretapping specifications that cost hundreds of dollars just to read, according to Landau.

“Requiring that internet applications with communications systems — [which] means anything from speak-to-tweet to Second Life to software supporting music-jam sessions — be vetted first will put American innovation at a global disadvantage,” Landau said. “For American competitiveness it is critical that we preserve the ease and speed with which innovative new communications technologies can be developed.”

And she added the wiretapping holes are serious security risks.

“Building wiretapping into communications infrastructure creates serious risk that the communications system will be subverted either by trusted insiders or skilled outsiders, including foreign governments, hackers, identity thieves and perpetrators of economic espionage,” Landau said in her written testimony (.pdf), pointing to incidents in Greece, Italy and the United States where equipment built to comply with U.S. wiretapping rules were subverted. Those rules, known as CALEA, were enacted in 1994 to require phone companies to engineer their networks to be wiretap-compliant. The rules were expanded by the FCC in the George W. Bush Administration to apply to ISPs as well.

The FBI’s further push for expanded powers to wiretap online communications in real time comes against the backdrop of revolutions in the Middle East that relied heavily on social media communication tools and as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for worldwide internet freedom.

“I urge countries everywhere to join the United States in our bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries,” Clinton said Tuesday, speaking at George Washington University.

But Caproni argued that law enforcement officials are occasionally running into cases where criminals are using online communication tools that aren’t wiretappable in real-time, because the provider had not built-in that capability. Caproni did not mention that the FBI has not encountered a single case of encryption hampering its criminal investigations for the past four years, according to reports to Congress, nor that the FBI has never run into a single case over the last 10 years where it could not get the plaintext of a target’s communications.

Landau told Congress the FBI was overlooking some very good news.

“While there is a genuine problem with intercepting some communications, the FBI now has access to more
communications, and more metadata about communications, than ever before in history,” Landau said.

But Caproni said that’s not enough and the FBI needs to find new technical solutions — though she did add that the Obama administration has no “formal position at this time” about needed changes to the law.

But she warned Congress that the country was in danger from a surveillance gap.

“As the gap between authority and capability widens, the government is increasingly unable to collect valuable evidence in cases ranging from child exploitation and pornography to organized crime and drug trafficking to terrorism and espionage –- evidence that a court has authorized the government to collect,” Caproni said. “This gap poses a growing threat to public safety.”

Also on Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released some government documents about the FBI’s so-called Going Dark program, which it got under the Freedom of Information Act. Those documents show the project dates to 2006, and that the FBI had hired high-powered consultants from the Rand Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton to help come up with solutions.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/fbi-backdoors/





Lessons Learned from Europe's Data Retention Laws
Liam Tung

Australia's Attorney General's Department might want to find a more successful international precedent to justify an introduction of data retention laws for telcos and ISPs than in Europe.

Late Friday, ZDNet reported that the Attorney General's department had cited the European Directive on Data Retention "to consider whether such a regime is appropriate within Australia's law enforcement and security context."

The proposal - which would see carriers and ISPs asked to store the browsing and calling logs of Australian subscribers for three months at a time, has been the talking point of the long weekend.

While law enforcement and government believe the framework may bring a new era of responsibility to the internet, others fear it could become an Orwellian tool for a 'big brother' state.

But if Australia did copy Europe's model to the letter, what would Australians face?

The EU example

The EU Directive aims to enable law enforcement authroities to ascertain the identity of a person using a public network to communicate by mobile, fixed line, email, or internet telephony.

The directive defines "data" to be collected as "traffic data and location data and the related data necessary to identify the subscriber or user".

Everything a customer would see on a typical phone bill - numbers called, time and duration of call, customer name - would have to be recorded and stored for between six months and two years and made available to law enforcement in "serious crime" investigations.

In the case of a mobile user, a record would be kept of where a call was made from and to whom it was intended to reach.

The directive extends data collection to internet communication, such as email and internet telephony, which in effect would enable the creation of a superficial image of an email account's inbox and sent folder (excluding contents).

In the case of internet telephony, a log is required to be kept of who was called, when, from where and for how long. But again, not the content of the call.

The directive also obliges carriers to retain the IP address, dynamic or static, and its allocation to a user account. Carriers would also be required to record user sessions, such as a record of when an account is logged-in and logged-out.

In short, any data, except the content of a communication, would be required to be collected if it could help authorities identify individuals behind a thread of communications that was deemed worthy of investigation.

Checks, balances, limitations

For access to be granted to stored data under the EU directive, a request must meet requirements under Section 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

"Interference by public authorities with privacy rights must meet the requirements of necessity and proportionality and must therefore serve specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and be exercised in a manner that is adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose of the interference," Section 8 states.

The EU directive allows only "competent authorities" to access data under national laws and also sets out clear boundaries on what and from which sources data can be collected.

"In particular, as regards the retention of data relating to Internet e-mail and Internet telephony, the obligation to retain data may apply only in respect of data from the providers' or the network providers' own services," the directive states. It would also be data "generated or processed in the process of supplying their communications services."

In other words, the EU directive stakes claim to information generated in the process of facilitating a call, text, email or other internet-based communication, but not information that has been generated on the end-user's device.

It also explicitly excludes search queries, page requests and the content of communications. "It shall not apply to the content of electronic communications, including information consulted using an electronic communications network."

Resistance and rejection

Despite these measures to ensure privacy is maintained, the directive has met resistance in Europe with just 17 of the 31 countries that should have implemented the directive having done so.

Those that have implemented it agreed to do so partially by 2007, but all were supposed to have implemented it in full by March 2009.

Shortly after the early 2009 deadline, the EU was reported by Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet to have threatened Sweden with legal action for failing to implement thr directive.

The directive, supported by the incumbent Social Democrat government in 2006, was unpopular with its new moderate government which came to power in October that year.

More recently, in March this year, Germany's 2007 implementation of the directive was repealed after it was successfully challenged in the Federal Constitutional Court as as unconstitutional. German carriers were asked to delete data they had collected as the nation now determines how to re-implement the law with amendments.

Germanys's Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung (Working group on data retention) had argued that wholesale data collection infringed on the "secrecy of telecommunications and the right to informational self-determination", and that data could be used to create personality profiles and track people's movements.

The court found that Germany's implementation failed to limit the "purposes of use of the data" and lacked transparency. Its statement noted that the storage required under its law "constitutes a particularly serious encroachment with an effect broader that anything in the legal system to date".

But it was not the collection of each piece of data that so concerned it; rather how each piece together could be used by law enforcement.

"Even though the storage does not extend to the contents of the communications, these data may be used to draw content-related conclusions that extend into the users' private sphere."

The observation over time of recipient data, dates, times and the place of phone conversations, it continued, "permit detailed information to be obtained on social or political affiliations and on personal preferences, inclinations and weaknesses."

"It also increases the risk of citizens to be exposed to further investigations without themselves having given occasion for this."

The data retention divide

• Implemented (in part or fully): UK, France, Finland, Denmark, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Liechtenstein (non-EU), Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland (non-EU)

• Not yet or no: Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Luxemburg, Norway (non-EU)

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/215135...tion-laws.aspx





Kids Who Skip School are Tracked by GPS

Anaheim Union district tracks students chronically absent from school using technology.
Eric Carpenter

Frustrated by students habitually skipping class, police and school officials in Anaheim are turning to GPS tracking to ensure they come to class.

The Anaheim Union High School District is the first in California to test Global Positioning System technology as part of a six-week pilot program that began last week, officials said.

Seventh- and eighth-graders with four unexcused absences or more this school year are assigned to carry a handheld GPS device, about the size of a cell phone.

Each morning on schooldays, they get an automated phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time.

Then, five times a day, they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations – as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8 p.m.

The students are also assigned an adult coach who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to class on time.

Students and their parents volunteer for the monitoring as a way to avoid continuation school or prosecution with a potential stay in juvenile hall.

"The idea is for this not to feel like a punishment, but an intervention to help them develop better habits and get to school," said Miller Sylvan, regional director for AIM Truancy Solutions.

The GPS devices cost $300-$400 each. Overall, the six-week program costs about $8 per day for each student, or $18,000.

The program is paid for by a state grant. Students who routinely skip school are prime candidates to join gangs, police say.

Because schools lose about $35 per day for each absent student, the program can pay for itself and more if students return to class consistently, Miller said.

It has been well received in places like San Antonio and Baltimore. Where the GPS technology has been implemented, average attendance among the chronically truant jumped from 77 percent up to 95 percent during the six-week program.

That attendance rate dips slightly once students no longer carry the tracking device, Miller said, but many learn new habits that help them. The coaches continue talking to them for a year.

Local school administrators say they are thrilled by the concept.

"This is their last chance at an intervention," said Kristen Levitin, principal at Dale Junior High in west Anaheim. "Anything that can help these kids get to class is a good thing."

In all, about 75 students from Dale and South junior high schools are taking part in the pilot program. District officials will decide later whether to expand it to high schools and other junior highs.

Earlier this week, parents and students came to the Anaheim Family Justice Center to get the devices and talk to police and counselors.

Not all parents were supportive.

"I feel like they come at us too hard, and making kids carry around something that tracks them seems extreme," said Raphael Garcia, whose 6th grader has six unexcused absences.

Chronically truant students in grades 4-6, and their parents, also were required to attend and, while they won't be required to carry a GPS device, they were warned about what they could face if they continue to skip school.

"This makes us seem like common criminals," Garcia said.

Police Investigator Armando Pardo reminded parents that letting kids skip school without a valid reason is, in fact, a crime.

If the District Attorney chooses to prosecute, truant students could be sentenced to juvenile hall and parents could face up to a $2,000 fine, Pardo said.

Hoping to keep their child at Dale Junior High, the Cruz family brought their son, Juan, to get a GPS.

He's has five excused and five unexcused absences already this year; his recent report card showed his highest grade is a C and he's failing several classes.

Miller, who showed Juan Cruz, 13, how to operate the device and tried to encourage him, asked why he wasn't going to school.

"Sometimes I'm sick and, other times, I just don't feel like going," he said.

"This will be good," Miller told Cruz. "You looking forward to it?"

"No," Juan Cruz said, shaking his head. "I'm going to keep it in my pocket, though, so I don't lose it."

Parents will be responsible for paying for lost devices. But Miller said that rarely happens. They are tracking devices and typically can be found immediately.

Juan Cruz's mom, Cristina, said she supports the program and hopes it helps her son get to school – and stay there.

"I understand that he's been missing class. He's one of six children, and we can't always keep an eye on him," she said in Spanish. "I think this is a good idea that will help him."
http://www.ocregister.com/news/schoo...s-program.html





Police Chief to Parents: Hack Your Kids’ Facebook Accounts
Matt Liebowitz

Rather than wondering which websites your kids are checking out, or whom they’re meeting and talking to on Facebook, why not just hack into their computers and find out for yourself?

James Batelli, the police chief of Mahwah, N.J., and his detectives conduct seminars during which they teach parents how to outfit a computer with keystroke logging software, which inconspicuously captures and stores every action performed on that machine.

Batelli explained that kids put themselves in potentially dangerous situations online every day, especially on Facebook, where they run the risk of coming into contact with child predators who troll the social networking site.

“Read the paper any day of the week and you’ll see an abduction [or] a sexual assault that’s the result of an Internet interaction or a Facebook comment,” Batelli told NBC New York.

Using keystroke logging software, parents can obtain their children's passwords, giving them access to the full spectrum of the kids' online activities.

“When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I don’t think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children,” said Batelli, the father of a teenage daughter. “If it means buying an $80 package of software and putting it on and seeing some inappropriate words you don’t want your child to say. Then that’s part of society.”

Edi Goodman, chief privacy officer for Identity Theft 911, expressed mixed feelings about this high-tech parenting method. He called it an updated version of rifling through kids’ drawers and closets.

“It’s a slippery slope to spy on your kids,” said Goodman, who has two young children. “Hopefully I can teach my kids the skill sets to be aware about these [online] dangers, because I can’t be with them all the time.”

Goodman told SecurityNewsDaily he isn’t completely opposed to Batelli’s spying idea but thinks it should be applied on a case-by-case basis. Although he doesn’t see himself doing it, he said he could understand what might drive other parents to track what their children are doing on the Web.
http://www.livescience.com/12906-pol...-accounts.html





New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users
Kate Murphy

You may think the only people capable of snooping on your Internet activity are government intelligence agents or possibly a talented teenage hacker holed up in his parents’ basement. But some simple software lets just about anyone sitting next to you at your local coffee shop watch you browse the Web and even assume your identity online.

“Like it or not, we are now living in a cyberpunk novel,” said Darren Kitchen, a systems administrator for an aerospace company in Richmond, Calif., and the host of Hak5, a video podcast about computer hacking and security. “When people find out how trivial and easy it is to see and even modify what you do online, they are shocked.”

Until recently, only determined and knowledgeable hackers with fancy tools and lots of time on their hands could spy while you used your laptop or smartphone at Wi-Fi hot spots. But a free program called Firesheep, released in October, has made it simple to see what other users of an unsecured Wi-Fi network are doing and then log on as them at the sites they visited.

Without issuing any warnings of the possible threat, Web site administrators have since been scrambling to provide added protections.

“I released Firesheep to show that a core and widespread issue in Web site security is being ignored,” said Eric Butler, a freelance software developer in Seattle who created the program. “It points out the lack of end-to-end encryption.”

What he means is that while the password you initially enter on Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Amazon, eBay and The New York Times is encrypted, the Web browser’s cookie, a bit of code that that identifies your computer, your settings on the site or other private information, is often not encrypted. Firesheep grabs that cookie, allowing nosy or malicious users to, in essence, be you on the site and have full access to your account.

More than a million people have downloaded the program in the last three months (including this reporter, who is not exactly a computer genius). And it is easy to use.

The only sites that are safe from snoopers are those that employ the cryptographic protocol transport layer security or its predecessor, secure sockets layer, throughout your session. PayPal and many banks do this, but a startling number of sites that people trust to safeguard their privacy do not. You know you are shielded from prying eyes if a little lock appears in the corner of your browser or the Web address starts with “https” rather than “http.”

“The usual reason Web sites give for not encrypting all communication is that it will slow down the site and would be a huge engineering expense,” said Chris Palmer, technology director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic rights advocacy group based in San Francisco. “Yes, there are operational hurdles, but they are solvable.”

Indeed, Gmail made end-to-end encryption its default mode in January 2010. Facebook began to offer the same protection as an opt-in security feature last month, though it is so far available only to a small percentage of users and has limitations. For example, it doesn’t work with many third-party applications.

“It’s worth noting that Facebook took this step, but it’s too early to congratulate them,” said Mr. Butler, who is frustrated that “https” is not the site’s default setting. “Most people aren’t going to know about it or won’t think it’s important or won’t want to use it when they find out that it disables major applications.”

Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook, said the company was engaged in a “deliberative rollout process,” to access and address any unforeseen difficulties. “We hope to have it available for all users in the next several weeks,” he said, adding that the company was also working to address problems with third-party applications and to make “https” the default setting.

Many Web sites offer some support for encryption via “https,” but they make it difficult to use. To address these problems, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in collaboration with the Tor Project, another group concerned with Internet privacy, released in June an add-on to the browser Firefox, called Https Everywhere. The extension, which can be downloaded at eff.org/https-everywhere, makes “https” the stubbornly unchangeable default on all sites that support it.

Since not all Web sites have “https” capability, Bill Pennington, chief strategy officer with the Web site risk management firm WhiteHat Security in Santa Clara, Calif., said: “I tell people that if you’re doing things with sensitive data, don’t do it at a Wi-Fi hot spot. Do it at home.”

But home wireless networks may not be all that safe either, because of free and widely available Wi-Fi cracking programs like Gerix WiFi Cracker, Aircrack-ng and Wifite. The programs work by faking legitimate user activity to collect a series of so-called weak keys or clues to the password. The process is wholly automated, said Mr. Kitchen at Hak5, allowing even techno-ignoramuses to recover a wireless router’s password in a matter of seconds. “I’ve yet to find a WEP-protected network not susceptible to this kind of attack,” Mr. Kitchen said.

A WEP-encrypted password (for wired equivalent privacy) is not as strong as a WPA (or Wi-Fi protected access) password, so it’s best to use a WPA password instead. Even so, hackers can use the same free software programs to get on WPA password-protected networks as well. It just takes much longer (think weeks) and more computer expertise.

Using such programs along with high-powered Wi-Fi antennas that cost less than $90, hackers can pull in signals from home networks two to three miles away. There are also some computerized cracking devices with built-in antennas on the market, like WifiRobin ($156). But experts said they were not as fast or effective as the latest free cracking programs, because the devices worked only on WEP-protected networks.

To protect yourself, changing the Service Set Identifier or SSID of your wireless network from the default name of your router (like Linksys or Netgear) to something less predictable helps, as does choosing a lengthy and complicated alphanumeric password.
Setting up a virtual private network, or V.P.N., which encrypts all communications you transmit wirelessly whether on your home network or at a hot spot, is even more secure. The data looks like gibberish to a snooper as it travels from your computer to a secure server before it is blasted onto the Internet.

Popular V.P.N. providers include VyperVPN, HotSpotVPN and LogMeIn Hamachi. Some are free; others are as much as $18 a month, depending on how much data is encrypted. Free versions tend to encrypt only Web activity and not e-mail exchanges.

However, Mr. Palmer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation blames poorly designed Web sites, not vulnerable Wi-Fi connections, for security lapses. “Many popular sites were not designed for security from the beginning, and now we are suffering the consequences,” he said. “People need to demand ‘https’ so Web sites will do the painful integration work that needs to be done.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/te.../17basics.html





Irish Artist Bids to Copyright Guevara Image
Conor Humphries

The Irish artist whose poster of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara became one of the most reproduced images of the 20th century, said he has decided to copyright the image to block "crass commercial" use.

Jim Fitzpatrick produced the classic red and black print of the long-haired Che wearing a soldier's beret with a single star in 1968 and distributed it copyright-free for use by revolutionary groups in Europe.

It was quickly adopted by left-wing students, whose t-shirts and posters helped turn the image into a global sign of rebellion.

But the image of the Marxist revolutionary, who helped bring Fidel Castro to power in 1959, has since been co-opted by makers of mugs, baseball caps and even lingerie. The image is emblazoned across Cuban-themed restaurants around the world.

"It's not about making money, it's to make sure that it is used properly... that it's not used for crass commercial purposes," said Fitzpatrick, a Celtic artist who has produced album covers for Irish groups Thin Lizzy and Sinead O'Connor.

After four decades of allowing the image to be reproduced free of charge, Fitzpatrick said he has applied for documentation to prove that he is the copyright holder.

He intends to travel to Havana later in the year to hand the ownership rights to Guevara's family.

"I have no problem seeing it on mass numbers of t-shirts. I just don't want someone to be making vast amounts of money from it when that money could be used for a children's hospital in Havana," he said.

Complicating the issue is the fact that Fitzpatrick's artwork was based on a photograph taken by the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda at a funeral in Havana.

Korda successfully sued a London advertising agency for using a version of the Guevara image in an advertising campaign for vodka brand Smirnoff. Korda's daughter later moved to block the use of the image by critics of the Cuban regime.

Fitzpatrick said earlier precedents from the pop art era of the 1960s made him confident that his print would be recognized as a separate work of art from the photograph.

Either way, the families of both Korda and Guevara are united in their wish to frustrate commercial uses of the image that would likely be anathema to the communist revolutionary, Fitzpatrick said.

"I simply want to hand it over and give the family the rights to the image that I created and let them decide what to do with it," he said.

"I caused the problem and now I am seeking to rectify it."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71G5UG20110217





Goodbye, HD Component Video: Hollywood Hastens the 'Analog Sunset'
James K. Willcox

Listen—do you hear that creaking sound? Don't be too alarmed. It's only the coffin lid slowly closing on your ability to get high-definition video via the analog component-video connections on your Blu-ray player.

After decades of effort, Hollywood is finally "plugging the analog hole," as it's inelegantly been called, thanks to new restrictions imposed by the licensing administrator for the AACS, the copy-protection scheme used in Blu-ray players.

For example, as of January 1st of this year, manufacturers have not been permitted to make new Blu-ray players with component-video jacks capable of outputting high-definition (HD) video; instead, video sent via the component outputs is limited to SD (standard definition, either 480i or 576i). Existing models in the lineup with HD component-video connections can be sold through 2013, but starting in 2014, no new models will have any analog video outputs. Hence the term "analog sunset."

If you already own a Blu-ray player with active HD component-video outputs, you might think you're safe. Sadly, that's not the case, because of another piece of technology called the Image Constraint Token (ICT), which can be embedded in the video stream of a Blu-ray movie. When activated by a Hollywood studio, the ICT can down-rez (reduce the resolution of) the quality of the video sent via the component-video output.

The reasoning behind these changes is the belief that analog video is easier to copy than digital video. All Blu-ray players use the AACS (short for Advanced Access Content System) copy-protection scheme, which employs a technology called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. Since component video is analog, it doesn't support HDCP. So theoretically, someone could make an analog high-def copy, then create a digital version that could be replicated and distributed via the Web. (Ironically, though, the AACS encryption system has already been cracked.)

To thwart this activity, Hollywood studios now have the right to insert an ICT "flag" into a Blu-ray movie; if it detects that a player is using an analog connection that doesn't support HDCP, it downconverts the video's 1080p (1920 by 1080) native resolution to 960 by 540 (540p): better than DVD quality but only about one-quarter of full HD quality. This ensure that high-def video is available only through the copy-protected HDMI outputs.

There are some ICT limitations. For one, the use of an ICT has to be clearly disclosed on a Blu-ray disc's packaging. For another, the ICT is applied on a title-by-title basis by each studio, so some movies may contain it while others don't. And the ICT can't be applied retroactively to titles already released. Finally, since the use of the ICT may be politically unpopular with Blu-ray customers, many studios might be reluctant to implement it.

Although these efforts to kill off high-def analog video—along with the FCC's recent decision to allow cable companies to disable a set-top box's analog-video outputs when showing first-run movies—may seem unpalatable, the reality is that most of us are probably already using HDMI connections in our newer gear whenever possible. Some features, such as video upconverting on DVD and Blu-ray players, work only via HDMI outputs.

But these recent initiatives could affect those of us with older TVs that don't have HDMI inputs—about 3 million sets, according to estimates I've seen—or who connect their source components to a receiver that has only component-video outputs. And based on past experiences (hello, music industry!), it's likely that all these efforts will have far more effect on consumers who are legally using and enjoying HD analog video than on actual pirates. For most of us, the analog sunset is one of the few we won't enjoy experiencing.
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/ele...og-sunset.html





Saving the Big Game on Your DVR? Better Think Twice
David Roth

When the long-lost broadcast of the first Super Bowl arrived at the Paley Center for the Media in midtown Manhattan, it was in a shopping bag, on reels of two-inch videotape that weighed 20-ish pounds apiece.

Given that Super Bowl I was played on Jan. 15, 1967, that was the only way a recording of the game was going to get to anyone. Back then, video-recording devices were the size of Sub-Zero refrigerators (and much noisier) and networks routinely taped over things like soon-to-be-historic sports broadcasts in order to save tape stock.

That even one recording of the first Super Bowl’s two national broadcasts survived, then, is something of a fluke event — and one that took 44 years to come to light.

In the intervening period, the holy grail of NFL game tapes spent 38 years in a Pennsylvania attic, underwent a top-to-bottom restoration in the summer of 2005, and was transferred to Betacam SP video. None of those media, of course, are anyone’s idea of state of the art. Super Bowl I’s decades in the wilderness are enough to make anyone appreciate that safe, silent digital video recorder sitting by the TV.

Maybe too much so.

Caveman-ish though the technology might seem, the cartridges holding Super Bowl I endured longer on dusty, heat-warped videotape than will the digital recordings on most home DVRs. The Super Bowl I recording lasted nearly 44 years longer than did Mike Alltmont’s recording of the New Orleans Saints’ win in Super Bowl XLIV, which would have celebrated its first birthday a few weeks ago.

Alltmont, a New Orleans native and lifelong Saints fan, lost his recording of a game he’d waited his whole life to see, as well as his recording of the anarchic post-game local coverage — “The live shots of the French Quarter,” he says, “stuff that, even if you buy the DVD, you wouldn’t get that moment” — when his Dish Network DVR conked out last winter. The box was one of what he estimates were four that melted down over a two-year period.

Technologically speaking, Alltmont’s DVR is a marvel: a tiny, powerful microcomputer that can record numerous programs at once, and save them until he (or his fiancée) deletes them. In practical terms, though, Alltmont’s problem reflects a larger issue. As the world transfers to high-definition digital formats and we all learn to live by whatever the hyperspeed version of Moore’s law currently obtains, our ability to keep what we record has been both greatly enhanced in the short term and subtly, surprisingly diminished in the longer term. A magical box with months of television living inside it is just one of the commonplace tech miracles of the last decade, but given the fragility of those files and the devices that retain them, it could be argued that those recordings might be more future-proof on good old analog tape.

The Paley Center (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) is digitizing its massive archives, but it is also moving terabytes of information onto data tape, which uses a supercharged version of the magnetic tape in your moldering VCR cassettes — LTO-5 data tape, the current state of the art, can hold 1.5 terabytes of information. Because the Paley Center does not compress its files for quality purposes, it needs every bit of that storage power — it would take more than 17 standard DVDs to hold an hour of TV recorded to Paley’s standards.

Doug Warner, Paley’s director of engineering, acknowledges that relying on actual physical tape creates storage-space issues — kind of an inherent risk when the goal is archiving every hour of television, ever — but he argues that analog technologies have their benefits.

“Think about the Super Bowl I tape,” Warner said. “That sat in an attic for 40 years, extreme heat and cold, basically the worst conditions possible. But we can watch it.” In contrast, he adds, “if I download a file over FTP and it wasn’t uploaded properly, it can become corrupted. Even as a technologist, you can see how fragile data is, relative to the old analog methods.”

Anyone old enough to have squinted through a third-generation VHS dub knows that there’s something to be said for the robust visual splendor of high-def recordings. But factor in the fragility of digital files and a lack of standardization — there are currently more than 10 HD formats in the United States, with no standardization between them — and whoever has Warner’s job three decades from now is likely to face some industrial-strength headaches.

Believing in the HD future is a leap of faith most amateur sports fan archivists have no choice but to make. And given the number of people recording each game and the efforts of institutions such as the Paley Center, it’s unlikely that any future Super Bowl will suffer the lost-to-the-ages fate of the 1958 NFL Championship, which currently ranks as football’s most-wanted MIA broadcast.

But Alltmont, among many others, can attest that “Save Until I Delete” is not always a guarantee. And even DVRs that don’t melt down don’t guarantee decades of rewatchability, given how quickly state-of-the-art digital technology becomes punchline-grade obsolete.

“The other day someone brought in Pele’s old soccer tapes, which were on Betamax, and we transferred it for him,” Warner said. “It was easy. But if he’d showed up with a 5.25-inch floppy disc, we would have been in trouble.”
http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/0...ing-dvr-sports





For Actresses, Is a Big Appetite Part of the Show?
Jeff Gordinier

MINKA KELLY, the “sexiest woman alive,” slides a fork into a tangle of spaghetti carbonara. Zoë Saldana has a basket of fried calamari. Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar nominee for her leading role in “Winter’s Bone,” wants it known that a skimpy morning repast is not going to satisfy her.

“I’m freakish about breakfast,” she explains to an Esquire magazine writer there to interview her. “You’re not gonna order, like, fruit or something, are you? Because I’m gonna eat.” We then learn that Ms. Lawrence “orders the eggs Benedict without looking at the menu.”

For regular readers of glossy magazines — which depend on interviews with famous people to generate chatter and goose newsstand sales — such situations have become increasingly familiar. (Especially over the last year or so, and most persistently in Esquire, the source of the three preceding examples, as well as Ms. Kelly’s November 2010 crown of sexiness.) A writer meets a starlet for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The starlet, usually of slim and gamine proportions, appears to thwart our expectations by ordering and consuming, with conspicuous relish, a meal that might satisfy a hungry dockworker.

Such passages are widespread enough in the pages of American periodicals that at least one longtime film publicist, Jeremy Walker, has coined a term of art for them: the documented instance of public eating, or DIPE. Consider, for example, Cate Blanchett impulse-ordering a side of Parmesan-fried zucchini at a restaurant in London and impishly telling a writer from Vogue that she doesn’t intend to share: “I think we’d each better get our own, or things could get ugly.”

Even when an actress doesn’t overtly chow down, it is not unusual for her to gush about her fondness for doing so. “I actually really love to lie in bed, watch TV, be a total sloth, and eat my favorite food: Kraft macaroni and cheese,” Drew Barrymore told Harper’s Bazaar in the October 2010 issue. “Last night I was watching ‘The Next Food Network Star,’ eating mac and cheese, and feeling grand.” Cameron Diaz, it seems, cannot resist a burger and fries. Gearing up to play Etta James in “Cadillac Records,” Beyoncé Knowles relied on butter pecan ice cream. “I just learned what guanciale is, when I was in New Orleans,” Christina Hendricks mused in Esquire in 2009. “It’s the pig jowl. I went to this butcher there, and I came home with lots of sausages: a big andouille and a blood sausage.”

From a practical standpoint, this fixation on celebrity nourishment is surely a byproduct of restricted access. Publicists, wary of prying questions, have become skilled at compressing conversations with reporters to a bare minimum of minutes. “In the old days you wouldn’t just spend an hour with someone,” said Kevin Sessums, a writer for publications like Vanity Fair. “In the old days you’d spend three or four days with someone.”

Given such paltry resources, journalists who write about celebrities probably can’t be blamed for succumbing to an amateur lesson in gastronomic semiotics — one in which each bite is supposed to yield a tiny goldmine of insight. Mr. Sessums, though, sees the restaurant rendezvous as a kind of Hollywood filibuster. “I prefer to have their mouths free for conversation,” he said. “If she puts mayonnaise and mustard on a hamburger instead of relish and pickle, that doesn’t tell me a thing about the person I’m trying to talk to.”

Or does it? In a news media arena where an actress like Keira Knightley is taken to task for her bony angularity while Ms. Hendricks of “Mad Men” is fetishized for her throwback curves, it is clear that the topic of how beautiful women eat has become something of a chronic national obsession. Any individual DIPE may not shed much light on the inner life of the latest actress, but collectively, their frequency seems to tell us something about societal standards, judgments and yearnings.

“Don’t you feel awfully sorry for actresses?” said Bumble Ward, who spent years as a Hollywood publicist before leaving to write a blog and work on a novel. “They’re so sure that people assume they have an eating disorder that they’re forced to wolf down caveman-like portions of ‘comfort food’ in order to appear normal. And worse, they feel they have to comment on how much they’re enjoying themselves. Gone are the days of the black coffee and 10 Marlboro Reds lunch.”

Maybe it shouldn’t come as a shock that the DIPE seems to appear with the greatest regularity in men’s magazines. After all, as Padma Lakshmi can tell you, “it’s just a male fantasy,” one in which one manifestation of finger-licking desire serves as a symbolic surrogate for another. Ms. Lakshmi, the “Top Chef” host and cookbook author, is no stranger to the medium, having appeared in a GQ spread that found her rhapsodizing about bacon and playfully nibbling ribs in a boudoir.

“I mean, do I eat spaghetti in bed?” she said with a laugh. “Yes, I do. But I probably don’t eat ribs in a negligee at the foot of my bed. Look, the two things we need to survive in life are food and sex or love. Food for our bodies, and love for our hearts. So what is better than the archetypical image of a woman eating succulent, dripping, greasy, comforting food?”

She will get no argument from Bobby Flay. As a restaurateur who is married to the actress Stephanie March, Mr. Flay has firsthand experience with the allure of the DIPE. “Stephanie’s from Texas, so she loves things like fried chicken and chicken-fried steak and huevos rancheros,” Mr. Flay said by phone. “I said to Stephanie, ‘Basically my real job is, I’m a short-order cook for you,’ ” he said. “It really helps fulfill my life that I can cook for her whatever she wants, and it’s not a bunch of salads.”

For decades, a dependably saucy pop-culture trope has been the image of a woman wearing nothing more than a man’s oxford shirt. The implied suggestion was: she’s wearing your clothes. Lately, for whatever reason, the male gaze seems to have found a stirring corollary: she’s eating your cooking.

Jon Shook, an owner of Animal, the meat- and fat-centric restaurant in Los Angeles, becomes effusive when he talks about coaxing his girlfriend, Shiri Appleby, a television actress and a former vegan, into eating his fried pork chops. “She’s like 110 pounds, maybe, in wet clothes, and when she’s with me, we eat everything and anything,” he said on the phone. “On our first date, I was like, ‘Hey, why’d you stop being a vegan?’ And she was like, ‘What kind of guy’s going to date a vegan?’ And I was like, ‘You’re awesome.’ ”

Actresses are reportedly human. That they depend on food for survival should not come as a surprise. Nevertheless, putting a spotlight on what they eat for lunch during an interview seems to arouse a fair amount of skepticism.

“I don’t actually think that actresses eat — I really don’t,” said Sara Jenkins, who runs two restaurants in Manhattan, Porchetta and Porsena, where luxurious pasta and pork fat are held in high esteem. “When I see them chowing down on fried chicken and hamburgers, I guess it is code for ‘she’s just a normal person.’ But why do they have to be down-home, ordinary people? They’re not, you know? They’re glamorous.”

Not that Ms. Jenkins would mind if an otherworldly actress happened to float into Porchetta for a sandwich. “Oooo,” she said, “I’d be delighted.”

For a cultural observer like Carol J. Adams — a vegan-feminist intellectual who, in books like “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” has devoted much of her life to culling and analyzing images of women and food — the DIPE amounts to more than a playful wink. Sexualizing food, she argues, is a method of distracting carnivores from the gruesome reality of how their food is made.

“These images of women, whether they’re ads or they’re in magazines, they’re all saying the same thing: traditional consumption of women’s bodies and animals’ bodies is O.K.,” Ms. Adams said by phone from her home in Texas. “It’s like fraternity culture gone viral. ‘Consume what you want.’ And, ‘What you want to consume actually wants to be consumed.’ ”

Ultimately, the DIPE is meant to convey the impression that a starlet is relaxed, approachable and game, but it’s hard to tell whether the strategy really works anymore. Anna Holmes, a founding (and former) editor of Jezebel, a culture-deconstructing Web site that singles out women, casts a cold eye on such moments of documented feasting. “I’m usually pretty cynical about it,” she said. “When the writer has made special mention of what the actress is eating, especially if it’s something incredibly high-calorie or fattening, I do roll my eyes. Because I assume that it’s planted.”

There is one type of DIPE, however, that Ms. Holmes said she wouldn’t mind seeing in print: “We would all appreciate it if you had an interview with an actress who says: ‘You know what? It’s my job to be a certain size, and it takes a lot of work for me to do so. I tend to eat very healthy, small portions, but once in a while I splurge,’ I would like to hear that. That it’s not easy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/di...interview.html





Joanne Siegel, the Model for Lois Lane, Dies at 93
Bruce Weber


Joanne Siegel in the 1940s, left, and in a drawing by Joe Shuster, who with Ms. Siegel’s husband, Jerry,
created Superman.

Joanne Siegel, who as a Cleveland teenager during the Depression hired herself out as a model to an aspiring comic book artist, Joe Shuster, and thus became the first physical incarnation of Lois Lane, Superman’s love interest, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 93.

Ms. Siegel was married to Shuster’s partner and Superman co-creator, the writer Jerry Siegel. Their daughter, Laura Siegel Larson, confirmed her death.

A high school girl with an ambitious nature and stars in her eyes, young Joanne, like teenagers everywhere, was seeking a way to earn some money when she posed for the first time as Lois Lane. It was probably 1935, her daughter said, and “somebody had told her modeling was easy,” so she placed a brief ad in the classified section of The Plain Dealer, declaring herself available for modeling work and confessing that she had no experience. Most of the responses to the ad were requests for dates, but one at least seemed serious, and she presented herself to Shuster and Siegel, who were then developing Superman. (The first Superman comic was published in 1938.)

By that point the character was well along in Siegel’s mind; he knew he wanted her to be a journalist, and his model was a film character, a clever reporter named Torchy Blane who had been featured in a series of B movies, played by Glenda Farrell. (In the 1938 film “Torchy Blane in Panama,” the title character was played by Lola Lane, a singer and actress who some sources — including Ms. Larson — say influenced the name of Superman’s leading lady.)

In any case, during the modeling session Joanne struck various poses — draping herself over the arms of a chair, for example, to show how she might look being carried by Superman in flight — and she and the two men, who were barely in their 20s, became friends. Shuster’s drawings reproduced her hairstyle and her facial features, though in the most famous of the original drawings, Lois is considerably more voluptuous than her model was.

“Joe might have taken a few liberties,” Ms. Larson said with a laugh. She added that her mother’s irrepressibility, ambition and spunk informed her father’s development of the character: “My dad always said he wrote Lois with my mom’s personality in mind.”

The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, she was born Jolan Kovacs in Cleveland on Dec. 1, 1917; classmates and teachers who couldn’t or wouldn’t pronounce her name properly — YO-lan — called her Joan or Joanne, and the second name is the one that eventually stuck.

After her Lois Lane debut, she was an artist’s model in Boston and elsewhere. (For a time she used the name Joanne Carter.) During World War II she worked for a California ship builder, supporting the war effort. Returning to New York, she re-established a connection with Siegel at a fund-raising ball for cartoonists at which, according to family lore, the costumes were judged by Marlon Brando, then in the middle of his Broadway run in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Both had been married; she was divorced and he was soon to be. They married in 1948 and lived in Connecticut and on Long Island before moving to California in the 1960s. In addition to her daughter, who lives in the Los Angeles area, she is survived by a sister, Sophie Halko of Cleveland, and two grandsons.

Ms. Siegel worked at a number of jobs during her marriage — as one of California’s early car saleswomen, she sold new and used Chevys from a lot in Santa Monica — but much of her life was taken up trying to reclaim the original Superman copyright that Shuster and her husband sold to Detective Comics in 1937 for $130.

Of course, since then Superman as a character had become the central figure in comic books, television shows and blockbuster movies, not to mention the progenitor of legions of other superheroes. Ms. Siegel was the first in a long line of Lois Lanes, who have included Phyllis Coates, Noel Neill, Teri Hatcher, and Erica Durance on television and Margot Kidder in the movies.

The story of the plight of Shuster and Siegel, whose lives were marked by privation, is one of the cautionary tales in the annals of intellectual property. In a series of legal and public relations battles that began in 1947, the families eventually won some compensation from DC Comics (the successor to Detective Comics), and in 2008 a federal judge restored Siegel’s co-authorship share of the original Superman copyrights, though how much money the Siegel family is entitled to is still being adjudicated.

“All her life she carried the torch for Jerry and Joe — and other artists,” said Marc Toberoff, the lawyer for both the Siegel and Shuster families. “There was a lot of Lois Lane in Joanne Siegel.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/arts/16siegel.html





David F. Friedman, Horror Film Pioneer, Dies at 87
Bruce Weber

David F. Friedman, a film producer who cheerfully and cheesily exploited an audience’s hunger for bare-breasted women and blood-dripping corpses in lucrative low-budget films like “Blood Feast” and “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.,” died on Monday in Anniston, Ala. He was 87.

The cause was heart failure, said Mica Brook Everett, a relative who was also his caretaker. Mr. Friedman had lost his hearing and his eyesight about 10 years ago, she said.

Part carnival barker, part adman, part good-natured, dirty-minded adolescent, Mr. Friedman plumbed the low-rent depths of the movie business with a sense of boldness and a sense of fun. In the early 1960s he and a partner, the director Herschell Gordon Lewis, made a handful of films in a genre known as “nudie-cuties,” in which young women would perform ordinary household tasks or cavort in sun-dappled settings half-dressed or entirely undressed. (Some of the films were shot at Florida nudist colonies.) These movies were not openly erotic — there was no sex — but in their deadpan presentation of public nudity, they delivered a naughty, subversive wink at censorship standards.

In 1963, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis made the gleefully gore-soaked “Blood Feast,” considered by many to be a groundbreaking film in the horror genre, the first so-called splatter film. It tells the story of a murderous Egyptian caterer in Miami who is especially fond of decapitating women. To promote the film, Mr. Friedman warned viewers that it might be sickening and supplied theaters with airline vomit bags to distribute to customers. Made for $24,500, the film reportedly earned millions.

Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis followed “Blood Feast” with two other gore fests that are exemplars of their ilk: “Two Thousand Maniacs!,” which takes place in a Southern town during a Civil War centennial celebration in which the townspeople take their revenge for losing the war on visiting Yankees; and “Color Me Blood Red,” about a painter who gets his distinctive reds from the blood of his murder victims.

Mr. Friedman made films in the soft-porn vein — they had titles like “Trader Hornee” and “The Erotic Adventures of Zorro” — and eventually, while serving as chairman of the Adult Film Association, made a handful of hard-core movies as well. Perhaps his most famous title was “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.,” about a sadistic and insatiable female Nazi prison guard, generally considered a campy classic of sexploitation.

David Frank Friedman was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 24, 1923. His father worked for The Birmingham News; his mother was a musician. After his parents divorced, she moved to Anniston, and young Dave — “Don’t say David, he hated David, it was always Dave,” Mica Everett said — often unsupervised, became interested in carnivals, card games and scams.

Mr. Friedman started college at Cornell — “He sat next to Kurt Vonnegut in a calculus class,” Ms. Everett said — and worked for a time as a film booker and projectionist in Buffalo before serving in the Army during World War II. It was in Army signal school that he was taught the technical basics of movie making. Eventually he went to work for Kroger Babb, a producer and a bit of a huckster whose best-known film, “Mom and Dad,” was a 1940s sensation, using medical footage of actual births and walking a line between sex education and sexploitation.

Mr. Friedman’s wife, Carol Virginia Everett, whom he met when they were both children in Anniston, died in 2001. Aside from Mica Everett and other members of his wife’s family, he leaves no survivors. Over the past 20 years, since his films started to reappear on video, Mr. Friedman enjoyed a bit of cult celebrity, appearing frequently at conferences and film festivals.

“He partied like an animal,” said Mike Vraney, whose company, Something Weird Video, distributed Mr. Friedman’s films. “He ate huge meals, drank and smoked enormous cigars. He lived with gusto.”

Mr. Friedman was proud of his work, in a manner of speaking.

“ ‘Blood Feast’ is probably the most maligned motion picture American critics have ever ripped asunder,” he wrote boastfully in his 1990 autobiography, “A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.” He went on to quote the review in Variety:

“Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, ‘Blood Feast’ is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences. The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments.”

Mr. Friedman then wrote: “Herschell and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/mo...5friedman.html





Paper Publishes Shocking Pictures of Skeletal Steve Jobs Claiming 'Cancer-Stricken Apple Boss May Have Just Six Weeks to Live'

Apple founder Steve Jobs has lost an alarming amount of weight and is reportedly sicker than has been previously admitted.

The 55-year-old computer genius announced in late January that 'at my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health'.

Since then, Apple employees have claimed that he can still be seen at the company's headquarters in California and is also calling all the strategic shots from his home.

But yesterday shocking new pictures were published in the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer which suggests things are worse than Apple would have the world believe.

The Enquirer claims that the man behind the iPod, iPhone and iPad is stricken with pancreatic cancer and may have just six weeks to live.

The new photos show Mr Jobs looking painfully frail and weak, with his jeans and dark top hanging loosely on his 6ft 2in, rail-thin body.

However, he is well enough to meet today with Barack Obama in San Francisco.

The president is visiting Intel Corp, where he will also talk to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO, Eric Schmidt to draw attention to the role of education in preparing Americans for new high-tech jobs.

The National Enquirer pictures are not yet available online and so far the graphic images have not had an effect on Apple's share price which today closed up slightly at 363.13.

Mr Jobs's weight is said to have dropped from a pre-cancer 175lb to 130lb now, according to the National Enquirer.

His thinning hair is a sign of the effects of the advanced chemotherapy usually used to treat the disease.

The photos, which were taken on February 8, showed Mr Jobs going for breakfast with his wife Laurene Powell before heading to the Stanford Cancer Centre in California.

Dr Jerome Spunberg said: 'Mr Jobs is most likely getting outpatient chemotherapy at Stanford because the cancer has recurred.'

Dr Gabe Mirkin, a physician with 40 years' experience, said: 'He is terminal. What you are seeing is extreme muscle wasting from calorie deprivation, most likely caused by cancer. He has no muscle left in his buttocks, which is the last place to go.

'He definitely appears to be in the terminal stages of his life from these photos. I would be surprised if he weighed more than 130lb.'

Critical care physician Dr Samuel Jacobson also told the Enquirer: 'Judging from the photos, he is close to terminal. I would say he has six weeks.

'He is emaciated and looks to have lost a lot of muscle mass, which spells a poor prognosis.'

A source who recently saw Mr Jobs added: 'He is very frail, moving like a weak, feeble old man.'

'He weaves back and forth when he walks, as if he is having trouble keeping his balance, and the pain of every step is evident on his face.'

The Apple CEO, who is worth $6billion, is putting up an amazingly brave battle and even did a full day's work on February 7, the day before he went to the Cancer Centre.

He is determined to continue with plans to build a new $8million home after finally winning permission to demolish his home in Woodside, California, following a ten-year battle with preservationists.

Mr Jobs, who is currently on his third medical leave, has battled a rare form of pancreatic cancer for seven years and had a liver transplant in 2009.

He travelled to Switzerland that year for treatments unavailable in the U.S.

Only about 4 per cent of patients with any form of pancreatic cancer live longer than five years, the Enquirer reports.

Actor Patrick Swayze died in September 2009 of the same disease. Like Mr Jobs, he bravely fought it and worked on his memoirs right up until his death.

Medical experts, however, say Mr Jobs's disease is a much slower moving form of cancer than the type that killed the popular star of movies such as Dirty Dancing and Ghost.

The photos were published a day after Apple unveiled its new subscription policy which enables newspaper and magazine publishers to sell subscriptions by the week, month, year or other period of time, instead of asking readers to buy each issue separately.

The extra convenience should help publishers sell more digital copies as they look to smartphones and tablet computers to replace some of the revenue that has been lost in recent years as readers and advertisers migrate from print editions.

Mr Jobs put out a statement yesterday saying: 'We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.'

Mail Online last week reported how Apple had almost $10billion wiped off its value in just four minutes after investors took a bite out of the tech giant.

Market analysts blamed the flash plunge on unsubstantiated rumours that Apple founder Steve Jobs was in hospital.

An Apple spokesman did not comment on the new photos.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...eeks-live.html





'Apple Just F***** Over Online Music Subs for the iPhone' -- Last.fm Co-Founder on Apple's 30% Cut
Sebastian Anthony

Speaking rather frankly on IRC, Last.fm's co-founder Richard Jones has condemned Apple's move to grab 30% of content-based subscription fees: "Apple just f***** over online music subs for the iPhone."

Jones' apoplectic outburst is just one of many, too. Rhapsody yesterday said it won't bow to Apple's subscription policy, and CEO of on-demand music streamer we7, speaking to paidContent, thinks that the 30% share "makes music subscriptions economically unviable." If big-hitters like Spotify and Rdio can't produce the 30% that High Lord Jobs demands, how can they possibly continue to provide their services to iOS apps without increasing their price? The crazy thing is, because of Apple's price-matching ultimatum, everyone -- including users of other smartphone platforms -- will have to pay the higher price.

On another front entirely, according to some law professors quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Apple's move could even be kiboshed by antitrust and anticompetitive legislation. These could be interesting times indeed.

While leveraging its massive and wealthy userbase to get a slice of the subscription pie might've sounded great on paper, 30% might simply be too much to ask for. At the very least, it looks like Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, Last.fm and Rdio users are destined to pay a few dollars more per month. Or perhaps content providers will simply stick it to iOS and decamp to Google's dirty, bohemian app ecosystem.
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/20...iphone-lastfm/





TiVo To Brick All Remaining UK PVRs On June 1
handelaar

Perhaps in order to 'encourage' existing users of UK Tivo units to change their TV service to Virgin Media, pay £149 for a new 'Virgin TiVo' that they won't actually own, plus £34.50 per month in service charges, Tivo is to cancel all EPG data service to all the Tivos still in use in the country — and existing units will become basically nonfunctional at that time. The faithful aren't amused, having stuck by the company for several years, and mostly paying £120 per annum for service until now. 50% of UK residents aren't able to avail of this generous upgrade offer even if they want to — the cable company in question only covers about half the country.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...une-1#comments





Qualcomm Enables Instant Streaming of Netflix Movies on Android
Dean Takahashi

Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon mobile processors will enable future Android devices to be able to instantly stream TV shows and movies from Netflix.

Instant streaming is the hottest new way to get movies into the hands of users. It has been possible on connected home machines such as video game consoles, Blu-ray players, and connected TVs. But mobile devices haven’t really been capable of streaming movies and TV shows in a reliable way.

With the new Qualcomm technology, users will be able to watch their movies with instant gratification — no more waiting for long downloads. Currently, the experience of watching streamed movies on mobile phones is anything but instantaneous.

The technology is aimed at upcoming Android smartphones and tablets using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips.The newest Snapdragon processors, debuting as early as the second quarter, can run at 2.5 gigahertz and process data 150 percent faster than some of today’s fastest mobile chips.

Qualcomm said it has received certification from Netflix and that the video processing is handled by highly efficient dedicated hardware inside the chip. That means it can play movies at high quality without draining battery life. Qualcomm is showing off the technology at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/13/qu...es-on-android/





Androids to Run in World's 1st Robot Marathon
AP

A technology company is organizing the world's first marathon for robots in Japan, a country known for its love of gizmos.

So far, five robots have entered the event, expected to last four days next week. Organizer Vstone Co. said Wednesday that five it will demonstrate the machines' durability and maneuverability.

The "Robo Mara Full" race kicks off Feb. 24 and is open only to androids with two legs. The robots must complete 422 laps around a 110-yard (100-meter) indoor racetrack to cover 26 miles (42 kilometers). Survivors of the nonstop race — except for battery changes and repairs — are expected to hit the finish line on Feb. 27, when their human counterparts run in the popular Tokyo marathon.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=12929067





Spoiler Alert: Don't Read Unless You Want to Know If IBM Won `Jeopardy'
Katie Hoffmann

Machine bested man yesterday, as International Business Machines Corp.’s computer beat two former “Jeopardy!” champions at the TV quiz show.

“Watson,” IBM’s computer named after its founder Thomas J. Watson, finished the three-day tournament with $77,147. Ken Jennings came in second with $24,000, followed by Brad Rutter with $21,600.

With a $25,000 lead going into the final match, Watson doubled his advantage by answering questions on subjects from “The Simpsons” to Bram Stoker accurately. The win gives IBM a highly publicized victory in artificial intelligence -- and a boost as it moves to market the technology to its corporate customers.

“Machines are evolving with breathtaking speed,” said Paul Saffo, managing director at investment adviser Discern Analytics in San Francisco. “We don’t have artificial intelligence that can go mano a mano with humans on general things, but this technology seems to be headed that way.”

IBM built Watson to tackle a challenge in artificial intelligence: making a machine that could understand natural human language, as opposed to the keyword searches used in the search engines of Google Inc. or Microsoft Corp. IBM wanted the effort to have real-world applications. “Jeopardy,” with its word plays, innuendos and penalties for inaccuracy, proved a good test.
Jennings and Rutter

Watson faced two of the best-known players in the show’s history. Jennings, who won 74 straight games in 2004, holds the record for number of victories, while Rutter had pulled in more money than any player on Jeopardy and beat Jennings in a tournament in 2005.

Going into yesterday’s final game, Watson led with $35,734, with Rutter at $10,400 and Jennings at $4,800. The first game was played over the first two days of the tournament, which was broadcast from IBM’s lab in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Watson, who appears on film as a round avatar on a screen, has a custom-made database created from journals, newspapers and other resources. The computer received questions through typed entries at the same time as host Alex Trebek read them out loud. It scanned the database with algorithms and calculated its degree of confidence in an answer. If its confidence crossed a certain threshold, a mechanical thumb buzzed in and Watson spoke the answer.
Mistakes: Toronto, The New Yorker

The computer made some gaffes. In the first round, it repeated an incorrect answer Jennings had given moments before. In the second day’s Final Jeopardy, the last round of each game that often involves word play, Watson identified Toronto as a U.S. city. Its answer was followed by question marks, indicating how unsure it was of its answer.

In yesterday’s match, Watson missed a Daily Double, which lets contestants wager as much money as they want. The clue asked what work reviewed by The New Yorker in 1959 praised its brevity and clarity. Watson, which had bet more than $2,000, answered Dorothy Parker, missing the correct response: “The Elements of Style.”

The computer was successful on topics from pop culture to literature. When Trebek queried about a Fox show featuring characters named Itchy and Scratchy, Watson responded “The Simpsons,” the correct answer.

The machine also redeemed itself in the second Final Jeopardy, with a clue of William Wilkinson’s “An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia” inspired this author’s most famous novel.

Watson, along with Jennings and Rutter, gave the correct answer: Who is Bram Stoker?
IBM Pressure

IBM, which spends about $6 billion annually on research and development, invested four years developing the technology, with 25 scientists focused on the challenge. Trebek said he saw a researcher crying before the competition, which was taped last month.
“There’s tremendous pressure on the IBM scientists,” Trebek said in an interview last week. “The pressure they had put on themselves. They’re the ones who decided to try and develop a computer system that can play ‘Jeopardy.’”

The project built on IBM’s work in artificial intelligence, including the Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match. IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider, decided to try another challenge that would pique the public’s interest -- and this time with commercial applications.

Business Applications

The machine has generated interest from businesses in various sectors, especially customer support and health care, Dave Ferrucci, IBM’s lead scientist on the project, said in an interview last year. The computer runs on IBM’s Power 7 server system.

“The Holy Grail here is to create a technology that can understand what you’re asking, the way you’re asking it,” he said. “People want to do more with all the content we have.”

Watson won $1 million for first place. Jennings and Rutter won $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. IBM will donate all its winnings to charity, while Rutter and Jennings plan to give away half.

IBM rose 56 cents to $163.40 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading yesterday. The shares have gained 11 percent this year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...jeopardy-.html





On ‘Jeopardy,’ Watson’s a Natural
John Markoff


Ken Jennings, left, Brad Rutter and a computer named Watson competed on “Jeopardy” at I.B.M.’s campus
in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-sized I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a “Simpsons” episode.

From now on, the answer to “What is the name of the computer champion on ‘Jeopardy!’?” will be “Watson.”

For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them.

Watson, specifically, is a “question answering machine” of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades — a computer akin to the one on “Star Trek” that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them.
Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at I.B.M. and other companies are already developing uses for Watson’s technologies that could have significant impact on the way doctors practice and consumers buy products.

“Cast your mind back 20 years and who would have thought this was possible?” said Edward Feigenbaum, a Stanford University computer scientist and a pioneer in the field.

In its “Jeopardy!” project, I.B.M. researchers were tackling a game that requires not only encyclopedic recall, but the ability to untangle convoluted and often opaque statements, a modicum of luck, and quick, strategic button pressing.

The contest, which was taped in January here at the company’s T. J. Watson Research Laboratory before an audience of I.B.M. executives and company clients, played out over three evenings, and at the end of the first day put Watson in a tie with Brad Rutter, another ace human player, at $5,000 each, with Mr. Jennings trailing with $2,000.

But on Tuesday, Watson went on a tear. By night’s end, Watson had a commanding lead with a total of $35,734, compared to Mr. Rutter’s $10,400 and Mr. Jennings’ $4,800.

But victory was not cemented until late in the third match, when Watson was in Nonfiction. “Same category for $1,200” it said in a manufactured tenor, and lucked into a Daily Double. Mr. Jennings grimaced.

Even later in the match however, had Mr. Jennings won another key Daily Double it might have come down to Final Jeopardy, IBM researchers acknowledged.

The final tally was $77,147 to Mr. Jennings’ $24,000 and Mr. Rutter’s $21,600.

More than anything, the contest was a vindication for the academic field of computer science, which began with great promise in the 1960s with the vision of creating a thinking machine and which became the laughing stock of Silicon Valley in the 1980s, when a series of heavily funded start-up companies went bankrupt.

Despite its intellectual prowess, Watson was by no means omniscient. On Tuesday evening during Final Jeopardy, the category was U.S. Cities and the clue was: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.”

Watson drew guffaws from many in the television audience when it responded “What is Toronto?????”

The string of question marks indicated that the system had very low confidence in its response, I.B.M. researchers said, but because it was Final Jeopardy, it was forced to give a response. The machine did not suffer much damage. It had wagered just $947 on its result.

“We failed to deeply understand what was going on there,” said David Ferrucci, an I.B.M. researcher who led the development of Watson. “The reality is that there’s lots of data where the title is U.S. cities and the answers are countries, European cities, people, mayors. Even though it says U.S. cities, we had very little confidence that that’s the distinguishing feature.”

The researchers also acknowledged that the machine had benefited from the “buzzer factor.”

Both Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter are accomplished at anticipating the light that signals it is possible to “buzz in,” and can sometimes get in with virtually zero lag time. The danger is to buzz too early, in which case the contestant is penalized and “locked out” for roughly a quarter of a second.

Watson, on the other hand, does not anticipate the light, but has a weighted scheme that allows it, when it is highly confident, to buzz in as quickly as 10 milliseconds, making it very hard for humans to beat. When it was less confident, it buzzed more slowly. In the second round, Watson beat the others to the buzzer in 24 out of 30 Double Jeopardy questions.

“It sort of wants to get beaten when it doesn’t have high confidence,” Dr. Ferrucci said. “It doesn’t want to look stupid.”

Both human players said that Watson’s button pushing skill was not necessarily an unfair advantage. “I beat Watson a couple of times,” said Rutter said.

When Watson did buzz in, it made the most of it. Showing the ability to parse language, it responded to, “A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called This of the Hedgehog,” with “What is Elegance?”

It showed its facility with medical diagnosis. With the answer: “You just need a nap. You don’t have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up,” Watson replied, “What is narcolepsy?”

The coup de grâce came with the answer, “William Wilkenson’s ‘An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’ inspired this author’s most famous novel.” Mr. Jennings wrote, correctly, “Bram Stoker,” but realized he could not catch up with Watson’s winnings and wrote out his surrender.

Both players took the contest and its outcome philosophically.

“I had a great time and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” said Mr. Jennings. “It’s not about the results; this is about being part of the future.”

For I.B.M., the future will happen very quickly, company executives said. On Thursday it plans to announce that it will collaborate with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to create a physicians assistant service that will allow doctors to query a cybernetic assistant. The company also plans to work with Nuance Communications Inc. to add voice recognition to the physician’s assistant, possibly making the service available in as little as 18 months.

“I have been in medical education for 40 years and we’re still a very memory-based curriculum,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University who is working with I.B.M. on the physicians’ assistant. “The power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.”

I.B.M. executives also said they are in discussions with a major consumer electronics retailer to develop a version of Watson, named after I.B.M.’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, that would be able to interact with consumers on a variety of subjects like buying decisions and technical support.

Dr. Ferrucci sees none of the fears that have been expressed by theorists and science fiction writers about the potential of computers to usurp humans.

“People ask me if this is HAL,” he said, referring to the computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “Hal’s not the focus, the focus is on the computer on Star Trek, where you have this intelligent information seek dialog, where you can ask follow-up questions and the computer can look at all the evidence and tries to ask follow-up questions. That’s very cool.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/sc...dy-watson.html





Reddit Hosts Q&A With Team Behind IBM's Jeopardy-Winning Watson Supercomputer
Mike Melanson



This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done? What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

The Q&A is being held in the IAmA subreddit, where users of the site often offer themselves up to the community to field questions about whatever they feel others might be interested in. (A "subreddit", by the way, is a user-created subsection of Reddit that caters to a particular topic.) "IAmA" is a shortened way of saying "I am a..." and can also be interchanged with "AMA," which stands for "ask me anything." The IAmA subreddit is full of user-created interviews other Redditors, celebrities, academics, scientists and more.

Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA "is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit," wrote Ohanian.

To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and fire away.

Oh, and currently, the number one question? "Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?" The answer? "We're working on it ;)"
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...opardy-win.php
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

February 12th, February 5th, January 29th, January 22nd

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black