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Old 31-08-11, 07:48 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 3rd, '11

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"I really wonder what is wrong with a legal system that says that if you are caught sharing copyrighted works, you could get a sentence as long as someone who killed someone." – Drew Wilson



































September 3rd, 2011




Telcos Ready for 'Three Strikes' Law Tomorrow
Alex Walls

The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act comes into force tomorrow and telcos have said they are ready.

The Amendment Act introduces a ‘three strikes’ process for alleged copyright infringement, where rights owners may send a series of three warning notices to internet account holders, ultimately resulting in a hearing before the Copyright Tribunal.

Under the Act, IPAPs, usually Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are required to match an identified IP address to an account holder if a copyright owner sends the ISP a notice alleging infringement.

ISPs must then send an infringement notice (either a detection, warning or enforcement notice, depending upon the number of notices received by the account holder previously) to the account holder within seven days of receiving the infringement notice.

Ready for the Act

Orcon head of brand and communications Quentin Reade said the company was ready for the act coming into force, but that it would be a manual process to begin with.

He said Orcon would not be monitoring user activity as this was not required by the Act. “All we have to do, and I say all we have to do, is make sure we know who’s using what IP address at any one time, which we do anyway, it was already in our system.”
A TelstraClear spokesman said it had put a significant amount of time and effort into putting in place a process to deal with the receipt of notices, and was prepared to receive them from September 1.

The company did not monitor downloads, and took no part in the process that enabled copyright owners to track IP addresses, he said, and pointed NBR to TelstraClear’s Facts and Questions page.

Senior media and communications consultant retail Anna Skerten said Telecom would be ready to comply with its obligations under the Act but that it was a manual and labour intensive process.

“Given the time constraints, we have set up systems that are as cost effective as possible.”

She said Telecom did not monitor customer downloads, since its obligation under the Act was to keep track of which customer had a specific IP address at any given time in the last 40 days.

Controversial Act

The Act is controversial, with claims including it favours a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach, that there is no legal provision detailing when rights owners must accept a challenge to an infringement notice, and that people who use peer-to-peer software legally can still incur a notice, despite never having illegally uploaded or downloaded a file.

Rights owners argue that the legislation will help deter copyright infringement and will protect New Zealand’s creative industries. These industries provide 22,000 jobs and contributes more than $2.5 billion to the country’s economy, New Zealand Film Commission chief executive Graeme Mason said in an New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZFACT) release.

NBR is seeking comment from NZFACT, Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) and the Ministry of Economic Development.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/telcos-...orrow-aw-99782





Leaks Show U.S. Swayed Canada on Copyright Bill
Michael Geist

Secret U.S. government cables show a stunning willingness by senior Canadian officials to appease American demands for a U.S.-style copyright law here.

The documents describe Canadian officials as encouraging American lobbying efforts. They also cite cabinet minister Maxime Bernier raising the possibility of showing U.S. officials a draft bill before tabling it in Parliament.

The cables, from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, even have a policy director for then industry minister Tony Clement suggesting it might help U.S. demands for a tough copyright law if Canada were placed among the worst offenders on an international piracy watch list. Days later, the U.S. placed Canada alongside China and Russia on the list.

The documents, released by WikiLeaks, are the backdrop to a 2010 Conservative copyright bill that virtually adopted the U.S. government's rigid enforcement of “digital locks” on DVDs, CDs and e-books.

Digital locks are the technology that, for example, prevent DVDs from being copied and make it impossible to view a disc from India on a North American disc player.

With few exceptions, American law makes it illegal to override digital locks in any way.

Many consumer groups describe the American approach as draconian.

When Canada proposed a similar law on digital locks in 2010, education groups noted that it would have prevented students from copying short segments of electronic books to use in classroom assignments.

The Canadian bill died when the May 2 election was called. A new copyright bill is expected to be introduced when Parliament resumes. Judging by past willingness to bow to U.S. pressure, few will be surprised if it mirrors the 2010 effort.

The U.S. cables describe a December 2006 meeting between Bernier, industry minister at the time, and then U.S. ambassador David Wilkins.

“Bernier also stated that the final copyright legislation ‘would be in line' with US (government) priorities, but was not specific,” says the U.S. Embassy cable.

“Bernier promised to keep the Ambassador informed on the copyright bill's progress, and indicated that US (government) officials might see the legislation after it is approved by Cabinet, but before it is introduced in Parliament,” the cable adds.

Bernier also “encouraged the Ambassador to speak publicly about the importance of (intellectual property rights) to the United States, saying such efforts would improve the chances of Cabinet and Parliament approving a good copyright bill,” the cable says.

Bernier never had a chance to leak the bill; he was shuffled to the foreign affairs portfolio before it was tabled. But other officials did provide the U.S. with confidential information.

A 2007 cable reveals that Ailish Johnson, working in the Privy Council Office, told U.S. officials that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's “mandate letters” to new industry minister Jim Prentice and new Canadian heritage minister Josée Verner charged both with introducing a copyright reform bill before the end of the year. The content of ministerial mandate letters is not public information.

A U.S. Embassy cable written in April 2009 describes a meeting between Zoe Addington, director of policy for then industry minister Clement, and U.S. officials.

“In contrast to the messages from other Canadian officials, she said that if Canada is elevated to the Special 301 Priority Watch List (PWL), it would not hamper — and might even help — the (government of Canada's) ability to enact copyright legislation,” the cable says.

Days later, Canada was elevated on the piracy watch list.

Several WikiLeaks cables released earlier this year chronicle the sustained U.S. lobbying effort on copyright.

In a June 2005 cable, the U.S. talks about the “need to engage the legislative branch as well as relevant departments.” It also proposes creating a bilateral working group and offers to conduct training sessions for Canadian officials.

A June 2006 cable discusses meetings with Bernier and then heritage minister Bev Oda. A March 2007 cable reports on repeated meetings and attempts to elevate the issue as a top priority.

The cables hint that the U.S. appears to be aware of legislative initiatives before almost anyone else.

Another previously unreleased confidential 2009 cable discusses Canadian plans for an intellectual property enforcement bill separate from the copyright reform bill.

The cable states that “the government has completed legislation to enhance Canada's IPR (intellectual property rights) enforcement measures. However, the government has no plans to introduce the bill in Parliament any time soon because no funding was linked to the legislation in the last budget.”

The source of that cable is unknown.

A confidential 2007 cable reveals Andris Zarins, the RCMP's former national coordinator for intellectual property crime, told U.S. Embassy officials that the government was drafting legislation to grant customs officers new seizure powers for counterfeit products, and that it planned to create a national coordination office on intellectual property crime.

The government has never confirmed or discussed the existence of such a bill.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/a...copyright-bill





French Report – Legal Punishment for Filesharing as Severe as Manslaughter
Drew Wilson

One of the criticisms of copyright laws has, for some time, been that the punishment is far too severe for the crime being committed. This debate is nothing new and it seems to be heating up in Europe right now. One French news site decided to compare the penalties of file-sharing to the penalties of other offenses. The results? They are a little scary.

The report comes from Numerama which was inspired by a recent conviction in Sweden. They asked, if someone could be put in jail for 3 years for file-sharing, what other crimes could someone commit and get either an equal sentence or less? They said (Google translated, original) said that the answers pretty much speak for themselves and I, for one, completely agree. Two things to keep in mind: this is all about French law and the laws are sourced nicely (job well done to Numerama in that department for sure). Here are some of the offenses that could earn you a jail sentence similar to that if you were convicted of copyright infringement on a file-sharing network:

• Manslaughter
• Repeatedly sending death threats on a transfixed medium
• Conducting biomedical procedures on someone without the consent of the patient
• Theft
• Breach of trust
• Some forms of obstruction of justice

Here are some of the offenses that could land you in jail for less time:

• Sexual exhibition in a public place
• Harassment in order to obtain sexual favors
• The desecration of a corpse in a cemetery/attacking a corpse
• Third party identity theft (note: this wasn’t entirely clear in the translation, but we are presuming that the translation meant “third party” since it simply says “by a third”)
• The abandonment of a child/infant
• Making sexual advances to a minor whether electronically or otherwise (if the minor is 15 years old or younger)
• Destruction of other people’s property
• Serious offenses related to animal abuse

I’m looking through this and I really wonder what is wrong with a legal system that says that if you are caught sharing copyrighted works, you could get a sentence as long as someone who killed someone. I personally can’t see how it should be possible in the first place.

Still, this has always been an extremely effective way of showing just how extreme the penalties have become for something so trivial as someone having a copyrighted work in their shared directory. I’m a music producer myself and I have always been all for the sharing of my works online for free. I think that even if I were hardcore all for copyright, I would have a hard time, at the very least, trying to explain to the public why someone who made sexual advances to a minor should serve less time than someone who is uploading an album on the Gnutella network. The thing is that with a lot of these offenses in the list are offenses where people are being directly harmed. For me, I don’t think anyone could make a convincing case that file-sharing is a crime that is as bad as killing someone.

Such comparisons have been made before. One great example in the US was looking at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – the largest oil spill in US history. According to one report, BP was facing a $21 Billion fine. Looking at the damages for infringement one can find out that the BP fine presented in that particular report can be the equivalent to downloading 140,000 songs or 70,000 songs in the case of willful infringement.

In any event, I think for French people, this really does put into perspective how high the penalties are for infringement. The day we start placing intellectual property on a higher level of value than life itself is the day I think society needs to seriously re-look at our values.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/95546/f...-manslaughter/





Politicians Start Getting Digital Copyright Right
Glyn Moody

As readers of this blog probably recall, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the last government, pushed through as it was with minimal debate, and largely at the behest of industry lobbyists.

If the present coalition had wanted to prove that it was making a clean break with the past, one way would have been to repeal the Digital Economy Act and to start again, taking things calmly and with input from all interested parties. Sadly, that has not happened, and disturbing evidence is emerging that, on the contrary, the current government is just as bad as the last lot, as James Firth's blog post reveals:

Leaked documents; or rather, sections redacted in previously-released official documents; now reveal at least one reason for further delays to the IOC [Initial Obligations Code - legislation which details exactly how the online copyright clamp-down under the Digital Economy Act will operate] is because the Government made a direct request to Ofcom that it should make it harder for people accused of copyright infringement to appeal the accusation.

The request comes under the guise of reducing costs of the scheme; however costs should not be of concern to government as the entire cost of running the measures are due to be met by copyright owners and, to a much lesser extent, by ISPs.

The request to narrow the grounds for appeal comes on top of the announcement at the start of this month that those wishing to appeal will have to pay an appeals fee before an appeal can be heard, renewing concerns from consumer groups that those on a low income will be denied access to justice.


Specifically, it seems:

The Government has asked Ofcom to remove a catch-all in the appeals process which allowed appeals to be made on "any other reasonable ground."

This catch-all was previously thought necessary, as the list of grounds for appeal was "non-exhaustive" and may need updating as technology evolves. Justice for internet subscribers is now dependent on Ofcom coming back with an exhaustive list of appeal grounds in the redrafted IOC; and, keeping this list up-to-date as technology evolves (and, presumably, updating the legislation in Parliament and notifying each update to the EC).

Ruling-out a public consultation makes it more likely that grounds will be overlooked.


This is not just appalling from a practical viewpoint, it is worrying from a political one: it shows that the UK government has no real interest in real justice or making the Digital Economy Act fair. Moreover, it appears to hell-bent on bringing in these changes in an underhand way that bespeaks nothing but contempt for the electorate.

So far, so conventional, you might think. But it doesn't have to be this way, as Labour politicians in New Zealand have just shown:

Tomorrow is the start date for the controversial new copyright law which provides owners of copyrighted works such as movies, TV shows and music a quicker and easier way to penalise people infringing their copyright via online file sharing

Labour voted for that law. Because at the time we thought it was the best thing to do. We’ve learnt from the experiences and we have moved on.

Today Labour announces copyright policy which significantly shifts our position.

If elected, we will introduce a Bill within 90 days to remove the termination clauses from the Copyright Act. Those clauses, which give the District Court the ability to impose account suspension as a remedy for infringing file sharing - can’t work in the long term.


Moreover:

Labour will also undertake a review of the Copyright Act, with the aim of introducing a new Copyright Bill within 18 months that updates and extends the framework for digital copyright in New Zealand.

The first phase of the review will be to commission an independent analysis of the problems with the status quo from an eminent expert, such as the review Professor Hargreaves has recently conducted for the UK Prime Minister, and then consultation on a draft Bill before it is introduced.


That, of course, is precisely what the UK government has just done (to its credit); but its continued support for the Digital Economy Act's punitive approach to copyright suggests that this is window-dressing to a certain extent - or, at the very least, that the UK government is confused.

If it is, it could do worse than to read the rest of the post I've quoted from above in order to gain a clue. It's by the New Zealand MP Clare Curran, who shows her real and deep understanding of what exactly the shift to digital means for copyright and law when she writes:

the digital environment has changed our world. The old business model - where big companies had control over the distribution of creative works - doesn’t apply anymore. Governments have to recognise that their citizens are hungry for information and creative material via the Internet.



What we are seeing is a digital revolution and it is our responsibility to ensure there is a balanced environment for creators and consumers in our country. New Zealand’s legal and regulatory framework needs to enable creative expression and the industries that rely on it, not just penalise people for accessing information.

We believe in this country becoming a nation of makers. We must invest in our own economy. Invest in content. Invest in innovation and decide how we want to look in 5 or 10 years time.

Labour will properly address the issues of copyright in the digital age - and we’ll involve New Zealanders in that discussion.


Kudos to Clare Curran for helping her fellow party members come to a better understanding of the Internet's impact on copyright, and kudos to the New Zealand Labour party for having the courage to admit that it was mistaken and to set about finding a new, workable policy in this area by involving the stakeholders who are the most important, but generally the least considered - the public. If only the UK government were half as brave or as insightful as their New Zealand colleagues.
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/ope...pyright-right/





Antipiracy Service Targets eBooks on File Sharing Sites
Maryann Yin

The Curtis Agency and E-Reads will tackle eBook piracy as a team, making it easier for authors to find pirated material and send take-down letters.

They have enlisted the technological assistance of Muso TNT, a company that targets piracy for other media industry clients. Muso developed a system that targets popular file sharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload.

Here’s more from the article: “Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine ‘spiders’ to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.”

According to Muso’s technological director Anthony Damasco, the system works well. In a period of 45 minutes, Damasco was able to track down 3,500 illegal files and give the orders to have them removed.

Some of the authors at the Curtis Agency include romance novelist Janet Dailey, crime fiction writer Colin Cotterill and YA fiction writer D.J. MacHale. Do you think major publishers and agents will sign up with Muso in the near future? (via Don Linn)
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat...g-sites_b37341





BitTorrent Users Don't "Act In Concert," So Judge Slashes Mass P2P Case
Nate Anderson

Steele Hansmeier, the antipiracy law firm that has been routinely hammered by judges in Illinois, is now getting hammered by judges in California. The firm has tried desperately to head off all the common objections to its mass file-sharing lawsuits over online porn, and has even taken to geolocating IP addresses before filing a lawsuit; its Hard Drive Productions case in California only went after 188 IP addresses that appeared to be located in the state. But the firm still had its entire case severed down to a single defendant last week.

Geolocation tools may help convince skeptical judges that a lawsuit is more than a national fishing expedition, one mainly targeting people outside a court's personal jurisdiction. (Judges in other jurisdictions have expressed annoyance such tools weren't first used to winnow the list of IP addresses.) But P2P lawsuits have other problems, including the fact that they generally "join" people who have little in common except for a taste in digital porn (in this case "Amateur Allure - Erin"). And increasingly savvy judges are now parsing claims about BitTorrent with a scholar's eye to see if these defendants really should be linked.

"The court remains unpersuaded that the peer-to-peer architecture of the BitTorrent technology justifies the joinder of otherwise unrelated defendants in a single action," wrote federal Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero last week before launching into a detailed analysis of how BitTorrent "swarm" activity might be mapped to existing legal notions about "acting in concert":

First, the Hansmeier declaration [about BitTorrent technology] argues at length about the "concerted activity" within a given swarm. Presumably he does so in response to the concern highlighted by Judge Ryu that users in different swarms have nothing in common other than downloading the same work, which as this court and others have noted is insufficient under our precedent. But the Hansmeier declaration itself offers overwhelming evidence that the IP addresses were in fact gathered from multiple swarms.

Second, even if the IP addresses at issue in this motion all came from a single swarm, there is no evidence to suggest that each of the addresses "acted in concert" with all of the others. In fact, the nearly six-week span covering the activity associated with each of the addresses calls into question whether there was ever common activity linking the addresses in this case. In this age of instant digital gratification, it is difficult to imagine, let alone believe, that an alleged infringer of the copyrighted work would patiently wait six weeks to collect the bits of the work necessary to watch the work as a whole. At the very least, there is no proof that bits from each of these addresses were ever assembled into a single swarm. As the court previously explained, under this court's precedent regarding other file sharing protocols, merely infringing the same copyrighted work over this period is not enough.

Finally, nothing in the BitTorrent architecture changes the fact that each defendant also will likely have a different defense.


This last point, a thoroughly practical rather than theoretical one, carried real weight with Spero. Even if all users were in his state, and even if they were all part of the same swarm, he still wasn't going to let them all be joined into a monolithic case.

The Court finds that permissive joinder of the Doe Defendants does not comport with the “notions of fundamental fairness,” and that it will likely cause prejudice to the putative defendants. The joinder would result in numerous hurdles that would prejudice the defendants. For example, even though they may be separated by many miles and have nothing in common other than the use of BitTorrent, each defendant must serve each other with all pleadings - a significant burden when, as here, many of the defendants will be appearing pro se and may not be e-filers. Each defendant would have the right to be at each other defendant’s deposition - creating a thoroughly unmanageable situation. The courtroom proceedings would be unworkable - with each of the 188 Does having the opportunity to be present and address the court at each case management conference or other event. Finally, each defendant’s defense would, in effect, require a mini-trial.

Spero thus severed 187 defendants from the case; he noted that this approach has become common among California federal judges, making the Golden State an unpromising place to pursue P2P litigation en masse. Suing people remains an option, but one that has to be exercised on a case-by-case basis with all the filing fees and massive increase in paperwork that this entails.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...s-p2p-case.ars





Movie Studio Takes Unprecedented Proactive Action To Stop Piracy
enigmax

A film studio is taking extreme steps to try and stop its latest movie from being pirated online. Reliance Entertainment has obtained a court order which restrains thousands of ISPs and websites from making available their film Bodyguard, a move which the company believes will reduce piracy by 60%. A similar but less broad effort last month is reported to have cut file-sharing by 40%.

In July, millions of Indians discovered they could not access their favorite file-sharing sites including popular hosters such as Mediafire, MegaUpload and Hotfile.

The chaos came about because movie studio Reliance Entertainment had obtained a court order from the Indian High Court which restrained many Internet services providers from offering, even indirectly, a pirate copy of the movie Singham.

Concerned by the consequences of breaching the court order, some ISPs blocked entire sites just to be safe, much to the disappointment of their users.

Despite the collateral damage, according to Reliance Entertainment Vice-President Music and Anti-Piracy, Sanjay Tandon, the aggressive action was worth it since the movie broke several box-office records.

“We were able to bring down piracy by 40 per cent,” Tondon reports.

Just a month later and Reliance Entertainment are back with a new movie called Bodyguard. It’s being premiered in theaters on Wednesday and encouraged by their success with Singham, the company says Bodyguard is going to be protected from unauthorized online distribution with every resource they have.

Measured alongside the after-the-fact DMCA takedowns of the West, the effort being made by the studio is unprecedented.

Reliance has obtained a proactive ‘John Doe Order’ from the Delhi High Court which forbids any ISP, site or service which potentially might be involved in infringement from offering Bodyguard, directly or indirectly. Already the company says it has forwarded the order to more than 2,000 ISPs and sites informing them of their legal obligations.

“The order is a measure to prevent piracy of Bodyguard. With this, we expect piracy levels for the film to come down by 60 per cent,” said Tandon, adding that the company has created an anti-piracy department especially for the job.

“For Bodyguard, the company has readied a team that will conduct raids to identify those infringing on the copyright,” he added.

Although the High Court order is only effective for restraining local services, it will be interesting to see how those affected respond.

File-hosting services outside the country won’t remove content unless they’re served with a takedown request which will then put pressure on local ISPs providing access to sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload. Will they blank out the sites altogether or will they spend time and energy surgically striking at specific URLs? We’ll find out on Wednesday.

BitSnoop, a torrent site which was asked to comply with last month’s court order, told TorrentFreak that thus far there has been no contact from Reliance or their lawyers over Bodyguard.

Aside from their aggressive and proactive online enforcement strategy, Reliance Entertainment is also taking another step to reduce piracy by addressing the issue of availability. In mid-September, just 6 weeks after Bodyguard premieres in 2,500 theaters, Reliance will release the official Bodyguard DVD.
https://torrentfreak.com/movie-studi...piracy-110829/





Hotfile Ordered To Share User Data With The MPAA
Ernesto

In their ongoing battle with the MPAA, the Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has suffered a major loss. A federal court has ordered Hotfile to disclose user data, the identities and revenues of their top affiliates, and financial information on the company itself. District Court Judge Adalberto Jordan argued that the MPAA needs this info to prove that Hotfile is promoting and profiting from copyright infringement.

As one of the ten largest file-sharing sites on the Internet, the file-hosting service Hotfile has become a prime target for Hollywood.

Earlier this year, five member companies of the MPAA filed a lawsuit against Hotfile and ever since the parties have been battling in court.

A few months ago the movie studios requested a substantial amount of information from the file-hosting service, including IP addresses of uploaders and downloaders, and the identities and earnings of top affiliates. In addition the MPAA asked for the source code of the site.

Hotfile protested these requests, arguing that some of the information, including the financials, is confidential. Also, the company claimed that handing over user data and detailed information on its top affiliates,would breach privacy law.

District Court Judge Adalberto Jordan reviewed the arguments from both sides and detailed his decision in a recent order, which is mostly negative for Hotfile. Except for the site’s source code, Judge Jordan ordered that Hotfile has to hand over all data requested by the MPAA.

Firstly this means that Hotfile has to disclose details on all files ever uploaded to Hotfile, including the title, number of downloads and the IP-addresses of the uploaders and downloaders.

Hotfile objected to this request because of privacy concerns, and the fact that it would include gathering data on millions of files that are not specific to the case. The judge, however, disagreed and sided with MPAA’s claim that the data is needed to do a proper statistical analysis on how much of Hotfile’s content is infringing.

“To prove this rampant infringement, the movie studios need to do a statistical analysis showing that most of the content uploaded and downloaded on hotfile.com infringes some copyright or another,” the judge writes.

In addition to all user data, Hotfile also has to handover detailed information on the site’s top 500 affiliates, including their identities and the payouts made to these persons or companies. In their request for the affiliate data the MPAA has described these persons as potential key-witnesses who could be used to gather further evidence on Hotfile’s operation.

Hotfile initially refused this request because it would be an unnecessary breach of privacy laws, but Judge Jordan concludes that they failed to show why this would be the case.

“Hotfile pays ‘affiliates’ when content that the affiliates uploaded is downloaded by others. The movie studios want information on the top 500 money-making affiliates. This information, the movie studios believe, may show that Hotfile and Mr. Titov profited from direct infringement or induced direct infringement. I agree,” the Judge writes.

The third request by the MPAA that Judge Jordan granted was that for the disclosure of the company’s financial information. Hotfile declined this request claiming that such information is confidential, but the judge concluded that despite the possible confidentiality the financial information is both relevant and necessary.

“Part of the movie studios’ case concerns Hotfile’s and Mr. Titov’s motives for allowing their users and affiliates to infringe copyright law. And Hotfile’s and Mr. Titov’s financial motivation may justify an inference of unlawful intent. Thus, the information is relevant,” the judge writes.

Hotfile has to hand over all the information above to the MPAA by September 12, and future filings will have to show how the MPAA plans to use this new intelligence.

For now, however, it doesn’t appear that the movie studios are going to use any of the user data to pursue legal action against individual uploaders or downloaders who are not affiliates. In previous court filings the MPAA stated that Hotfile could mask the last digits of users’ IP-addresses as long as they would be able to determine the country of the user.

The top affiliates on the other hand are more likely to be dragged into the lawsuit, as the MPAA noted that these persons or companies could be key witnesses. Whether this will indeed be the case has yet to be seen, but its safe to conclude that Hotfile and its top affiliates will be disappointed with the Judge’s decision.
https://torrentfreak.com/hotfile-ord...e-mpaa-110830/





Hurt by The Hurt Locker: Why IP Addresses Aren't Enough to Find File-Swappers
Nate Anderson

IP addresses have real uses when it comes to identifying Internet activity, but they work best when paired with targeted investigation rather than as “spray-and-pray” shotgun-style federal litigation. Case in point: The Hurt Locker lawsuit, in which film producers Voltage Pictures have partnered with Virginia lawyers Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver to pursue thousands of file-sharers who allegedly exchanged copies of the movie. The case has ground on for more than a year already, and the DC District Court’s docket is absolutely stuffed with letters from across the country, many claiming total innocence.

The letters have all fallen on the deaf ears of Beryl Howell, the RIAA lobbyist-turned-federal-judge who took over the case several months back. Howell has consistently denied these objections, saying that the only proper time to make them is later in the case after defendants have been individually named.

It’s impossible to vet the claims made in these letters, of course, but they do remind us just how opaque IP addresses can be; trying to use them like a window through which you can peek to see a particular downloader hunched over a screen is often futile. What you see instead is a machine—a router or wireless access point—that often tells you surprisingly little about who might have “done it.” Here’s a collection of just some of the many objections filling the Hurt Locker docket. Confusion is palpable in many of them as people wonder why they’re being targeted and struggle to figure out what an “open WiFi network” is and why it might cause them problems.

The Pinestead Reef Resort in Traverse City, Michigan:

We object to the suit given the fact that we operate a Timeshare resort named Pinstead Brief Resort that is 46 units all of which have a Wi-Fi connection using our IP address. We have numerous users at various times and are unable to monitor or control what they are doing on the computer in their room… I can assure you that the movie was not downloaded from any of the 5 computers that we use in our office on a daily basis.

Michelle from Farmington, Minnesota:

I did not download this movie. I had a wireless router on my computer at the time the Plaintiff alleges that their movie was downloaded by my IP address. Charter had notified me at that time that the download may have been done from my IP address and I removed the wireless router to avoid any further activity.

Steven from Cleveland, Tennessee:

I have no idea why my account info/IP address is associated with this action. I have not downloaded nor certainly have not [sic] distributed any copyrighted material such as “Hurt Locker,” named in this action.

MidAtlanticBroadband Hospitality Services of Baltimore, Maryland:

MidAtlanticBroadband Hospitality Services is filing an objection to provide information as our information is irrelevant, as we are not the end-user nor do we have any information related to the actual usage of this IP address.

Ryan from Waunakee, Wisconsin:

I have no knowledge of the alleged movie download. I had a problem with my network security settings in the past which has recently been upgraded and password-protected. I am sorry for any damages or misfortune the Plaintiff has incurred.

A woman named Sarah, no address given:

I am objecting to the disclosure and release of my identifying information by Charter Communications Inc. on the grounds that I’m not the owner nor have I ever owned the computer with the MAC IP address [sic] that they are claiming illegally downloaded the copyrighted work. When this download took place I was living in a college apartment with roommates and we all shared the wireless network. I had opened the account and my roommates each paid me a portion of the monthly bill since we all shared the same wireless network. When I contacted Charter Communications Inc. regarding the subpoena to inform them they had the wrong person named for the download they said it could have been anyone in the apartment complex and that I was named as a potential defendant due to my being the one that set up the account.

Ann from St. Louis, Missouri:

As a soon to be 70-year-old woman, I can assure the court that I have neither downloaded or distributed ANY copyrighted work as alleged in this lawsuit. Thank you for your consideration.

Rick from St. Louis, Missouri:

I did not download this movie. From a telephone conversation with Charter Communications’ technical customer service I learned it is possible someone outside my home may have compromised the IP address and downloaded the movie without my knowledge.

Charter further advised me to place a lock on the wireless router to help prevent people from hacking into the system and using my IP address. This has now been done.

Take pay cuts over the past years, having a disabled wife and struggling to support a family, I do not have the money to hire an attorney to protect myself especially in this case where I did nothing wrong.

Ed from Sauk Rapids, Minnesota:

Up until currently my wireless router had only the default security set and no encryption enabled. I live in a large neighborhood where many people could have purposely or inadvertently connected to this access point. My children are 11 and 7 and are not computer savvy to be able to do this. I have also spoken to them about piracy of media since. I do apologize to the complainant that connection [sic] was involved in this activity.

Gabriel from San Gabriel, California:

All of the equipments [sic] in our home have been provided and connected by Charter Communications, Inc. I do not own any wireless equipment. I do not download movies or music from any computer or any equipment. I do not engage in copying music or movies. I am not in the business of selling any form of media. I have not had any guests that engage in any illegal activities. I strongly oppose all illegal copying of any copyrighted materials.

Arcadiana Cable Advertising from Opelousas, Louisiana:

We’re a small company with 6 employees, and do not have any sort of IT personnel, therefore, our wireless router is not a password-protected router. We have seen several individuals in the parking lot obviously using our unprotected service. Furthermore, the time of infringement was 7:40 AM. Our business opens daily at 8:30 AM, thereby making that time highly suspect.

Richard from Peru, New York:

[Explaining a problem with his Vonage setup that Routinely required a router reset.] This process would open up our wireless network to anyone since it removed the encryption to our wireless network. Our wireless router could be open to the public for days before I would notice that it was not protected areas would normally caught my attention, that are wireless network was open, was how slow it was during typical web browsing…

I truly believe that no person that is part of my family downloaded the copyrighted work known as Hurt Locker. I have searched all the computers within my residence and have not found a file or folder with that name. I also know that is NOT a typical movie that my family members would watch. Being a Gulf War Veteran, I have no desire to watch such a movie. Just like the movie Blackhawk Down, I heard it was a good movie but I will never watch it, another movie that is too close to home.

Currently we have purchased just over 500 DVD and Blue Ray [sic] movies which in itself should indicate that we support the movie industry. We also have a current Netflix account and a Charter account.

A clue

The issue isn’t limited to P2P litigation, either. The Electronic Frontier Foundation this week pointed out the story of a US resident raided by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for running a Tor exit node—a computer that dumps anonymized traffic from the Tor network back onto the public Internet. Officers traced some offending Internet activity back to the exit node’s IP address, but that traffic had nothing to do with the man who ran the node.

”An IP address doesn't automatically identify a criminal suspect,” wrote the EFF’s Marcia Hofmann. “Sometimes a router's IP address might correspond fairly well to a specific user—for example, a person who lives alone and has a password-protected wireless network… But in many situations, an IP address isn't personally identifying at all.”

Calling an IP address no more than a “clue,” Hofmann suggests that “an IP address alone is not probable cause that a person has committed a crime. Furthermore, search warrants executed solely on the basis of IP addresses have a significant likelihood of wasting officers' time and resources rather than producing helpful leads.”

We’ve seen plenty of serious investigations, often involving child pornography, in which IP addresses proved decisive in linking a forum user’s online username to a real person. Others, unfortunately, have led to raids on the wrong home.

An IP address is a starting point for investigation, not evidence of guilt, but the current string of massive P2P file-sharing cases across the country aren’t relying on thorough investigation to make their claims; the “settle up now or risk $150,000 in court judgements and legal fees” letters fly out of the law offices behind these cases, and it is these settlements that are the true business model behind such fishing expeditions. When non-technical people are threatened with thousands of dollars in legal fees simply to assert their own innocence or even the court’s total lack of jurisdiction, settlement can look like a rational option even if you know nothing about the charges. Based on an IP address, this hardly sounds like robust justice, and it's no wonder that plenty of other judges not formerly employed by the entertainment industry have cut these cases off wholesale.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...e-swappers.ars





15-Year-Old Swede Beats Filesharing Charges

A 15-year-old boy who had been reported to police by his school for violating Sweden's copyright laws was acquitted by the Gothenburg District Court on Tuesday in what prosecutors called an “absurd” ruling.

The boy was put on trial for having downloaded at least 24 films from the internet and then sharing them with others.

He was considered to be the youngest person ever to be put on trial in Sweden for filesharing crimes.

The boy was reported to police by his school principal after the school's IT department discovered the downloaded films on his computer.

They made the find after having identified the boy's computer as the source of a virus that had infected the school's computer system.

While he admitted to downloading the films, the 15-year-old claimed he was unaware that his actions were criminal.

Two lay judges who heard the case believed the boy's defence, while the head judge and another lay judge were in favour of a conviction, the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) reported.

However, the split among the judges was sufficient for an acquittal.

Ahead of the trial, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told The Local he was confident the boy would be convicted. Following the court's ruling, however, he vowed to appeal the non-guilty verdict.

“I can't do anything other than appeal. This is an absurd ruling, quite simply,” he told the TT news agency.

The trial, which gained wide attention in the Swedish press because of the defendant's young age, was also watched closely by the Pirate Party, a political party which wants to see reforms of copyright laws.

“I can only imagine how it must feel to be a 15-year-old who is dragged into court for doing one of the greatest things one can do, sharing culture,” Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg said in a statement.
http://www.thelocal.se/35856/20110830/





60-Year Old File-Sharer Gets 2 Years Probation and Fine
Ernesto

A 60-year-old Swedish man who admitted to sharing 2,880 music tracks on Direct Connect has been sentenced after he stood trial last week.

The file-sharer received a so called “day fine” which equals 40 days’ worth of his income, and 2-years probation.

Although this man probably escapes jail time, others in a similar position may actually end up in jail. It is therefore no surprise that the case once again opens the debate whether jail time is an appropriate punishment for sharing songs.

Former Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge puts things in perspective on his blog, and notes that other crimes such as sexual abuse of a child, rape and armed robbery have received lower sentences.

“I have no words. This needs to come to senses. The copyright monopoly needs to dismantle, the worst pieces first. One of those worst pieces is obviously the one that could put a man in jail for two years for sharing music,” Falkvinge writes.

“Two years ago, when these and similar laws were written, I said that the politicians are acting like drunken blindfolded elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility. Now, we are starting to see the results.”
https://torrentfreak.com/60-year-old...d-fine-110831/





Wikileaks Cable Outs Secret iiTrial Background
Renai LeMay

A document published by Wikileaks appearing to be a US diplomatic cable appears to have revealed much of the previously hidden background behind the iiNet/AFACT court case, including the Motion Picture Association of America’s prime mover role and US Embassy fears the trial could become portrayed as “giant American bullies versus little Aussie battlers”.

The case, which is expected to shortly be escalated to the High Court following a second appeal, has since November 2008 seen a local organisation known as the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) squaring off against local ISP iiNet, over alleged copyright infringement over file-sharing networks like BitTorrent by iiNet’s customers.

AFACT is known to represent a number of US-based movie studios in the case, including Walt Disney Pictures, for example, as well as industry associations such as the Motion Picture Association of America and local companies such as the Seven Network.

However, this week Wikileaks published what appeared to be a leaked cable sent from the US Embassy in Canberra (under the name of then-US Ambassador Robert McCallum) to a number of US Government diplomatic branches on 30 November 2008, revealing what appeared to be further details of the case. The cable, seen by Delimiter, claims that although the case against iiNet was filed by a number of local and US content owners and distributors, the prime mover behind it was the MPAA, which has been active in copyright enforcement in the US.

The relative governments which have suffered leaks under the Wikileaks case have repeatedly declined to comment on the substance of the cables leaked over the past year, although they are believed to be genuine. AFACT and iiNet have been contacted tonight for a response to the leaked cable.

An executive from the MPAA, the cable claimed, had briefed the US Ambassador on the matter, confirming it was the mover behind the case, with AFACT essentially functioning as a sub-contractor to the MPAA in the matter and the MPAA having no formal presence in Australia. However, the cable claimed that the MPAA would prefer its role not be made public.

“AFACT and MPAA worked hard to get Village Roadshow and the Seven Network to agree to be the public Australian faces on the case to make it clear there are Australian equities at stake, and this isn’t just Hollywood “bullying some poor little Australian ISP,” the cable quoted the US Embassy as writing.

iiNet, the cable claimed, had been targeted because the ISP was “big enough to be important”, as the third-largest ISP in Australia. The MPAA didn’t go after Telstra, the cable claimed, because the telco was “the big guns” and had “the financial resources and demonstrated willingness to fight hard and dirty, in court and out”. In addition, iiNet users had a particularly high copyright violation rate, the cable claimed, and its management had been “consistently unhelpful on copyright infringements”.

Confidence

The cable also claims that the MPAA believed its case against iiNet to be very strong, as the organisation had delivered a significant chunk of evidence to the ISP revealing copyright violations on the part of its users. However, the ISP did “nothing” to address the issue.

Consequently, to prosecute the case, according to the document, AFACT hired “Australia’s top copyright lawyer” from specialist IP/IT law firm Gilbert & Tobin — a lawyer with experience in previous copyright infringement cases in Australia.

And Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was also consulted, according to the document, with the MPAA speaking with the Labor Senator a few months before the case. At the time, Conroy stated that he had “other priorities” such as the National Broadband Network policy. The MPAA, according to the cable, did not see any role for the US Embassy in that context at that time, but wanted to keep it informed of developments.

In addition, according to the cable, the MPAA saw the iiNet case as potentially “not necessarily their final legal move” in Australia with respect to the issue of online copyright infringement. Although the iiNet case has not yet been concluded in the High Court, AFACT has this year begun again reaching out to Australian ISPs to attempt a dialogue on the issue of copyright infringement.

The US Embassy, according to the document, noted that Australia had “very high rates of illegal movie and television show downloads”, in part because of “the sometimes long gaps between their release in the US and their arrival in Australian theaters or on local television”. The Australian legal action could be followed up by similar moves in other Commonwealth countries, according to the cable.

The US Embassy, according to the document, concluded its report on the issue by noting it would watch the case closely — both for its intellectual property rights implications, as well as “to see whether or not the “AFACT vs the local ISP” featured attraction spawns a “giant American bullies vs little Aussie battlers” sequel”.

opinion/analysis

If the details in the cable are correct, and bear in the mind that they represent the US Ambassador’s interpretation of what the cable says he was told by the MPAA, they would certainly be consistent with many of the guesses which observers of the iiNet versus AFACT case have already made.

It seems very likely — with its key role in this area in the US — that it is indeed the MPAA that is the prime mover behind AFACT, and the trial itself, and that Telstra and SingTel-backed Optus were targets too big for the organisation to go after in Australia. Secondly, it is true that AFACT has been relatively confident of its case against iiNet all the way throughout the trial in Australia’s Federal Court — and still remains quite confident going into its High Court appeal.

It remains true, of course, that there are definitely two sides to the iiTrial. iiNet has a very valid point with respect to its right to not be held accountable for the actions of its users — as the builders of a road would not be held responsible for stolen goods shipped on that road. However, AFACT also has a point — under current copyright law it is illegal to simply download movies via BitTorrent, and targeting ISPs like iiNet would appear to be one effective way to attempt to have that law enforced.

However, there is also the court of public opinion — the public which consumes the content which the studios own and companies like the Seven Network distribute in Australia.

I would bet that the publication of this cable will not aid the case of AFACT and the MPAA in wooing that public opinion. As the cable notes, one of the underlying issues beneath copyright infringement in Australia remains the reluctance by some parties to release their content locally at the same time as the US. I suspect that if that issue was resolved, and online distribution centres such as Hulu extended to Australia, much of the online copyright infringement problem would disappear.

iiNet, and other ISPs, are certainly currently attempting to push the film and TV studios down this path with the release of IPTV offerings.
http://delimiter.com.au/2011/08/30/w...al-background/





WikiLeaks Cables Detail Apple's Battle with Counterfeits in China
Mark Milian

Apple was slow to act against the booming counterfeit industry in China and other Asian countries, according to cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The technology giant eventually organized a team in March 2008 to curtail the explosion of knockoff iPods and iPhones, according to an electronic memo from the Beijing embassy dated September 2008.

Yet, three years after Apple moved to crack down on widespread counterfeiting and put pressure on China, progress has been slow. Gadget piracy isn't a high priority for the Chinese government, the U.S. reports and experts say.

Members of Apple's recently formed global security team were recruited from Pfizer after they executed a series of crackdowns on counterfeit Viagra production in Asia, the report says.

John Theriault, formerly Pfizer's security chief and, before that, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, leads Apple's global security unit. Don Shruhan, who worked for Theriault at Pfizer, is now a director on Apple's security team in Hong Kong.

Shruhan told the Beijing embassy official that his group at Pfizer spent five years planning raids on counterfeit drug rings, the cable says. He said he's "afraid" of the volume of imitation Apple products being produced in China and about the inexperience of Apple's lawyers in dealing with Chinese authorities, the report says.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A Pfizer spokeswoman, who declined to comment on personnel matters, said the company has a strong global security team to handle the increase in counterfeit medicine worldwide.

WikiLeaks, a group that publishes private government documents, posted tens of thousands of previously unreleased U.S. diplomatic cables last week. The reports from the Beijing embassy detailing Apple's piracy crackdown were unclassified, but many were described as "sensitive" and "not for Internet distribution."

In December, Apple said it removed an application from its mobile store that let people browse WikiLeaks documents from their iPhones "because it violated developer guidelines." The company suggested that the app broke laws or could be harmful to people, but many free-speech advocates cried censorship, as they have in the past when Apple has pulled apps.

The fresh WikiLeaks documents shed new light on Apple's struggles with intellectual-property theft in China, but the subject hasn't completely flown under the radar.

Last month, international news media were rapt after discovering that China is home not only to fake Apple gadgets but also to imitation Apple stores, which had many of Apple's signatures. The Chinese government ordered two of the five unofficial stores to close because they had not secured proper business permits, but a spokesman for China's Kunming government defended the others, saying they sell authentic Apple merchandise, according to Reuters.

Apple owns and operates four stores in China. The three in Beijing and the one in Shanghai are Apple's highest trafficked and top grossing stores in the world, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's financial chief, said in an earnings call in January.

But the hunger for Apple products is insatiable there. That's why stores have begun to sell the products without Apple's permission, while others are hawking cheaper, lower-quality gadgets that are aesthetically similar and bear the chic Apple logo.

China's Guangdong province, the country's most populous region, has become a hub for manufacturing and selling counterfeit Apple products, two of the newly surfaced cables say. The Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles products for Apple, operates factories in Guangdong.

Workers typically smuggle parts from the facilities in order to make replicas, said Lilach Nachum, an international business professor for Baruch College in New York who travels frequently to Asia. It's the cost of doing business in China, where many American companies go for inexpensive labor and efficient industrial plants, she said.

"Not to go to China is not really an option," Nachum said. "Companies cannot afford to do that. No one can afford to do that."

China's counterfeiting ring is responsible for supplying India with fake Apple products, the 2008 cable says. In raids, Indian officials uncovered shipments that had moved from China through Hong Kong, the report says.

Apple's early plans to go after counterfeiters, according to a cable, involved first targeting offending retailers and street vendors; next, Apple would work with police to raid manufacturing facilities; and finally, the company would pursue online resellers. The plans closely resemble Pfizer's successful strategy, the cable says, citing Shruhan, the Apple director.

"Shruhan said that low-profile retail raids are a good option for Apple, a company that wants to stay away from too much publicity surrounding this issue," the cable says. Theriault, Shruhan's boss, briefed Steve Jobs, then CEO, on the plans in 2008, the cable says.

But Apple is having limited success. In countless stores and at tables setup on streets, merchants purporting to sell iPods, iPhones and iPads at deeply discounted prices are prevalent, said Wini Chen, a student in San Francisco who recently returned from studying abroad in Beijing.

"They'll say, 'Yeah, we have iPad. We'll give you a really good deal,'" Chen recalled from her shopping trips. "If I really want to buy a knockoff Apple product, I could probably do that in 15 minutes."

Chinese officials readily cooperated with pharmaceutical companies on their raids, but that hasn't translated to software, as Microsoft has discovered, or electronics, as Apple is learning, said Nachum, the professor. Whereas a defective pill could cause sickness or death, a shoddy iPod has less dire consequences.

Apple had planned to strengthen its case with the government by arguing that defective batteries could blow up and injure people, and that lost tax revenue could have a significant economic impact, the cable says.

The arguments weren't very effective. China's government declined to investigate a facility in March 2009 that was manufacturing imitation Apple laptops because it threatened local jobs, says a cable dated April 2009. A different arm of China's government scrapped plans for a raid on an electronics mall in the Guangdong province because it could have driven away shoppers, the cable says.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming....ple.wikileaks/





Concerns Over New Copyright Laws
Gerard Campbell

Imagine that the new season of your favourite television show has just started screening in the United States but you know it will be at least a year - maybe more – until it screens in New Zealand. If at all.

You have a few choices: Wait patiently until one of the New Zealand networks deigns to air the show here or spend cash to buy or rent the DVD, if available.

Or you can head online, find a website that lets you illegally download the programme, then watch it.

That's what many New Zealand television and movie fans do. They illegally download HBO's fantastic new series Game of Thrones or the new seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's estimated that 10,000 copyrighted items are downloaded in New Zealand every day.
But come Thursday, things suddenly change and new laws passed in April means owners of copyrighted material can come down harder on offenders.

The new legislation is called the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 and it amends the Copyright Act 1994 to provide owners of copyrighted works such as movies, TV shows and music an easier way to penalise people found downloading copyrighted material using online file-sharing services such as Gnutella, BitTorrent, FrostWire, LimeWire and Vuze.

Those programs use what is called a peer-to-peer (P2P) network – two or more computers connected together, sharing resources, without going through a central server computer.

The act, branded the "three-strikes law" by many commentators, works like this: If you're suspected of downloading copyrighted material from a peer-to-peer site, you'll get an notice from your internet service provider (ISP) that you have been detected downloading copyrighted material. If you continue to download illegally, the next notice you'll receive from your ISP will be a warning notice –stop downloading copyrighted material or else! The third notice is the enforcement notice. It allows the copyright owner to take you to the Copyright Tribunal. If found guilty, you could be fined as little as $275 or up to $15,000, payable to the copyright owner. You can challenge any notice at any time.

Although the act doesn't come into force until Thursday, copyright owners started monitoring under the act on August 11.

The Ministry of Economic Development says the law doesn't apply to direct downloads, video/music streaming websites such as YouTube or online file lockers.

"What this means is that watching videos on YouTube or via blinkx, streaming music from Grooveshark, and downloading from online file lockers like MediaFire and 4shared will not be subject to the changes," said InternetNZ's chief executive Vikram Kumar.

But where things get murky is that it's the person – or company – that owns the internet connection that is liable for any infringement, not the downloader.

Paul Brislen, chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (Tuanz), said while the act is enforceable, it was a "complete waste of time and money" that supported an antiquated business model.

"This is about an old business model that does not work today. The old model was that if I had a physical film to distribute worldwide I'd stagger the rollout from country to country. But now distribution is through file transfer.

"All the hype about the film has already come to New Zealand through marketing but the company says, `We'll release the movie in six months time'.

"People here say, 'Stuff you. I'll get it offline for free'."

Brislen said New Zealand was served poorly by both free-to-air and paid TV channels, "especially when networks drop high-rating shows partway through the season or the shows just don't make it here". A recent example is TV show Justified which was dropped from TV One's line just a few weeks after it started screening, replaced by a reality TV show about highway police in Britain. Justified returns this Wednesday, but at 11pm.

Brislen expects the first infringement notices to start appearing in letter boxes from early November because of the time it takes to work through the stringent procedure rights holders had to go through to get ISPs to issue infringement notices. He expected that copyright holders would most likely target people who downloaded a lot of copyrighted material. But there are American cases where copyright holders had "vigorously targeted grandmothers whose grandchildren had been downloading stuff". In the early months, ISPs could send between 5000 and 10,000 infringement notices a month.

Copyright holders have to follow a specific 13-criteria process before an ISP will issue a notice, Brislen said, including what time an illegal download was made (down to the second), and each notice would cost the rights holders $25 to process, but Brislen had been told that it could actually cost the ISP as much as $40 per notice.

He understood that while the act would target only torrent downloads "there is nothing in the act that says they won't target any form of file sharing".

There was also a huge debate over whether the act will hurt free wi-fi provided by places such as McDonald's, public libraries and cafes.

"They are stuck and are legally responsible for what goes on over their network. Can they identify the people using their free network over wi-fi? Probably not. You might find a lot of places that provide free wi-fi might decide not to do so. If a public library, for instance, receives three infringement notices for a variety of offences they will just stop providing free wi-fi," he says.

Brislen said the power of the internet was such that people could decide when they wanted to watch something and it made no sense for a television network to buy content then sit on it for months or years, as currently happens. "The days of TV networks being able to decide when viewers watch something are over. People will pay for content if they have the choice and they can get it."

Brislen said Netflixs, a US subscription-based service that lets users download and rent movies and TV shows, accounted for around 33 per cent of all data traffic in the United States and was expected to hit 50 per cent by year's end.

"Netflixs really is the answer to this problem. This amendment won't make a blind bit of difference but here's a radical idea: Let people pay for the content they want.

"Give us Netflixs or Hulu (a similar service). People will pay to watch good content online. Give people what they want," said Brislen.

A variety of websites are sprouting up offering helpful advice over the new amendment but none of them condone illegal file sharing and aren't offering ways for people to work around the new law.

One of the most helpful I've seen is 3Strikes.net.nz, which has practical advice for people on what the law is about and what it means for people. There's also a comprehensive FAQ, which is well worth a read.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/di...copyright-laws





Is Copyright Only For the Big Guys?
Ben Jones

Over the last two weeks, two interesting copyright-related stories have appeared in online news reports. Both involve big media companies and small users, but not in the way we usually expect. In both instances, the large media companies “pirated” content instead of the users, and they seem to get away with it. This begs the question; is copyright only for the Big Guys?

When it comes to copyright, we’re constantly hearing how the big companies are spending untold amount of money to ‘create’ content, only for it to be ‘stolen’ by people downloading it. Less often we hear of the reverse; big companies infringing the copyright of regular people. But it’s more common than you might think.

Let’s take a look at two of these stories that surfaced recently, starting with the BBC.

When the BBC reported on the riots in London, it frequently used pictures that were shared by Twitter users witnessing the events. This wouldn’t be that bad as the BBC would at least credit the people who took the pictures. Yet, in its reporting, the BBC completely failed to attribute any of the images it used, instead attributing them to Twitter.

When a complaint was made, the first response back included the following outrageous statement:

I understand you were unhappy that pictures from Twitter are used on BBC programmes as you feel it may be a breach of copyright. Twitter is a social network platform which is available to most people who have a computer and therefore any content on it is not subject to the same copyright laws as it is already in the public domain. The BBC is aware of copyright issues and is careful to abide by these laws.

Everyone reading this knows that to be untrue and the BBC did too, as Chris Hamilton (BBC News Social Media Editor) later admitted.

It’s not the position of BBC News, he said, adding that that the BBC tries to clear photos before using them but if there are time constraints that may not be possible. Unfortunately, UK law doesn’t allow fair dealing exceptions for this at present. So time constraints or not, it’s still a copyright violation.

And the BBC is not the only major news outfit to bend the copyright rules this month, the Daily Mail has been at it as well. This time, though, they probably picked the worst target possible, the wife of OpenRightsGroup founder and noted blogger Cory Doctorow.

In reporting on a story about Gap and their anorexic lines of jeans, the Daily Mail contacted Doctorow’s wife, Alice Taylor, asking for permission to use her work. She then offered the photos in exchange for £250 to a charity of her choice but the Mail declined this offer as ‘too expensive’.

Instead of buying it The Mail simply lifted the picture from the Washington Post, to whom Taylor had licensed it for use on their own site.

Only after numerous emails and an outraged crowd of commenters the newspaper promised to send a £1000 donation to the OpenRightsGroup and another £1000 to a charity dealing with eating disorders. We’ll wait to see if that happens.

This isn’t an isolated incident though. The net is awash with cases of the Daily Mail infringing copyright, and one photo agency is even suing them for more than £1M in damages.

The Digital Economy Act could have made a big difference here. Under the Act, after a certain number of accusations a website could have been taken offline. Thankfully, that’s now been taken out of consideration, but how much of that was down to judicial proportionality and feasibility, and how much was down to pressure from groups like the BBC and the Daily Mail (who belatedly realised that a major aspect of their business could be quite easily curtailed by the legislation) remains unclear.

The BBC is certainly no innocent in this, as it repeatedly pushed for strong punishments for copyright violators, even noting in some consultations that even more needs to be done than is being proposed. And who can forget the piece on a prime time BBC show, where they ‘reported‘ on a study, that we had poked major holes in weeks earlier, and yet had only ‘Industry’ participants. A complaint to the BBC had the response that it was “balanced”.

The issue is that few individuals can afford to pay for lawyers to file a copyright lawsuit, especially against large media companies such as the BBC. In effect, current copyright law is a tool for the rich allowing major companies to infringe frequently for commercial gain, yet face little sanction.

It would seem that in the end, we’re left with one question. Is copyright just for the Big Guys?
https://torrentfreak.com/is-copyrigh...g-guys-110828/





Legislator Calls for Clarifying Copyright Law
Larry Rohter

Arguing that Congress has an obligation “to preserve fairness and justice for artists,” the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has called for a revision of United States copyright law to remove ambiguities in the current statute about who is eligible to reclaim ownership rights to songs and sound recordings.

“For too long the work of musicians has been used to create enormous profits for record labels, radio stations and others, without fairly distributing these profits to the artists,” said Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, who was chairman of the committee until January. Because “copyrights are a tool to be used by creators to earn a living from their work,” he added, it is important to ensure “a fair marketplace.”

When copyright law was revised in 1976, recording artists and songwriters were granted “termination rights,” which enable them to regain control of their work after 35 years. But with musicians and songwriters now moving to assert that control, the provision threatens to leave the four major record companies, which have made billions of dollars from such recordings and songs, out in the cold.

As a result the major record labels — Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner — are now fighting the efforts of recording artists and songwriters to invoke those rights. The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the interests of the labels, maintains that most sound recordings are not eligible for termination rights because they are “works for hire,” collective works or compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, employees of the labels.

With years of costly litigation looming, groups that represent the interests of recording artists and songwriters said they found Mr. Conyers’s remarks encouraging. But given the issue’s legislative history any amendment process in Congress is likely to be long and complicated.

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, whose more than 70,000 members include many recording artists and composers, said it was “deeply appreciative” of Mr. Conyers’s “continued focus in working to ensure that our copyright system recognizes the rights of artists for their creative contributions and which fairly compensates artists for the exploitation of their music.” In a statement the group’s national executive director, Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, said it looked “forward to learning more about any recommendations to enhance the rights of artists as they prepared to reclaim their rights in their musical works, and we are working to ensure that there is an effective system by which musical artists fully benefit from their rights under law.”

But the Republicans are the majority party in the House, and some lawyers and artist managers see them as more friendly to the record labels and other big media companies. For that reason the lawyers and managers have expressed doubts that a bipartisan agreement can be reached on the main issues relating to music copyrights, like defining who qualifies as the author of a work and under what circumstances, if any, a song or sound recording should be considered a work for hire.

“Since I’m going to have to be working with them, I don’t want to tell you they are conservative and corporate oriented,” Mr. Conyers said when asked about the Republican position. “That won’t help. I’ll be going to Lamar Smith after Labor Day to talk to him about this, about getting a little fairness into the entertainment industry,” he said, referring to his Republican successor as the committee’s chairman.

Mr. Smith, of Texas, declined a request for an interview. Instead, his staff issued a general statement in his name, saying that legislation that “stimulates U.S. job growth and furthers the interests of creators, innovators and consumers is a top priority of the Judiciary Committee,” and that Mr. Smith was personally committed to legislation that “protects America’s innovators.”

Those creators and innovators could presumably include both recording artists and songwriters. But Mr. Smith’s staff did not respond to a request to clarify his views or to arrange an interview with Republican staff members on the committee who might be able to explain the party’s position on termination rights and related copyright matters.

When Congress passed the copyright bill in 1976, it created an important exception to the general principle that the person who creates a work of art is its author. At the behest of book publishers and other companies that feared their interests would be adversely affected, the law declared that when a work has been “made for hire,” the employer, not an employee, should be considered its author.

The law generally defined a work made for hire as anything “prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment,” like a newspaper article. It also stated that “a work specially ordered or commissioned as a contribution to a collective work,” like a motion picture, a translation or an atlas, should be considered a work for hire. Sound recordings, however, were left off of that list.

But in 1999 language that would have explicitly included sound recordings as works for hire was inserted into an omnibus bill and was approved virtually without debate. A few months later the congressional aide reported to be responsible for that action, Mitchell Glazier, then the copyright counsel to the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, moved to the recording industry association to become its chief lobbyist, and he continues to work for the group.

“That amendment was essentially passed in the middle of the night,” said William F. Patry, a former law professor and congressional staffer who is the author of several books on copyright. Congressional procedure allows for such changes, but only if they are merely technical matters, he said, “and clearly this wasn’t technical.”

In response recording artists, led by Don Henley of the Eagles and the singer Sheryl Crow, mobilized to overturn the amendment, which would have given the record labels control over their master recordings in perpetuity. A year later the artists were able to persuade Congress to undo the work-for-hire language for songs and recordings, and that seemed to have settled the issue.

“We were concerned with a lot of issues in recording contracts that we considered to be unfair, and this was one of the most glaring,” Mr. Henley said in a recent interview. “Work for hire was never intended to apply to sound recordings. That came about because of movies and books,” he continued, and “sound recordings somehow got added to the list and then taken off again.”

But the recording industry group, which declined to make Mr. Glazier available for an interview, does not see it that way. “By its own terms the statutory language makes clear that the law on termination was simply being restored to its previous state, and that Congress’s action was to have no effect on its interpretation,” the group said in a written statement.

Neither the record companies nor the artists seems to be relishing a confrontation in court. For the labels, already reeling from the sharp decline in sales of CDs over the past decade, any definitive judicial ruling that is adverse could be especially costly.

“It’s not in anybody’s interests to have years and years of litigation,” said Lisa A. Alter, a lawyer with the New York City firm of Alter & Rosen who represents numerous artists or artists’ estates on copyright matters. “The intent of Congress was clearly to protect authors who make bad deals in their eagerness to get their work out there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/a...-revision.html





Bayfiles: The Pirate Bay Founders Launch File-Hosting Site
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay founders have launched a new file-sharing platform today. After leaving the world famous torrent site, two of the original founders are now back with a one-click file-hosting service called Bayfiles. Although Hollywood wont be cheering them on, unlike The Pirate Bay the new service is dedicated to respecting copyrights while offering its users a great platform to store and share files.

In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’.

In the years that followed the BitTorrent site made history as it grew to become one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

At a time where cyberlockers are quickly catching up with BitTorrent as the preferred way to share files online, today the founders of The Pirate Bay launch a brand new file-sharing venture called Bayfiles. One of the main reasons for this move is to provide users with a more reliable option for sharing and storing files.

“BitTorrent is increasingly throttled or even filtered by ISPs, HTTP usually is not,” Bayfiles co-founder Fredrik Neij tells TorrentFreak.

“Storage and transfers on Bayfiles also preserve users’ privacy. And another advantage is that users can be sure that content stays up, which is important for personal backups. It also guarantees that other personal files such as your MP3 collection are always accessible, so users are able to stream it live to any device,” Fredrik says.

Bayfiles works similarly to other one-click-hosting services such as Megaupload, RapidShare and Hotfile. With just a single click, users can upload files to the Bayfiles server, and then easily share them with the online public. The site itself offers no search functionality or file directory to find content that other people have uploaded.

A novelty, compared to The Pirate Bay, is that Bayfiles will respect the DMCA and accept copyright infringement notices. The terms of service clearly state that content that “violates third-party copyrights” is not permitted to be uploaded. It further states that repeat infringers will have their account disabled “regardless of proof of infringement.”

How strictly the above policy will be enforced is yet to be seen, but co-founder Fredrik Neij told TorrentFreak that their Hong Kong based company Bayfiles Limited has officially registered DMCA agents. After all the trouble they had to go through in court for The Pirate Bay, Fredrik and former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde want to avoid running into more trouble with their new venture.

Looking forward, Neij told TorrentFreak that Bayfiles will be much more than just a simple cyberlocker. There are ideas to expand it into a more feature rich cloud hosting service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. As with The Pirate Bay, the ultimate goal is to make sharing both effortless and efficient.

As for the features, unregistered users can share files up to 250MB, regular members have a limit of 500MB and premium members can upload files as large as 5GB with unlimited storage. The premium accounts do come at a price, 5 euros per month or 45 euros for a full year. Unlike other cyberlockers, Bayfiles does not offer a reward program where uploaders of popular content can be paid for their services.

In the past The Pirate Bay founders have launched many side-projects, with varying success. None of these projects ever rivalled the popularity of The Pirate Bay, but if one site can outgrow the famous BitTorrent site in terms of users, it certainly is Bayfiles.

The popularity of cyberlockers has increased exponentially in recent years. Just a few days ago we reported that 8 of the 10 largest English language file-sharing sites are related to cyberlockers, each with hundreds of millions of pageviews a month. It is not unthinkable that Bayfiles will join this list in the future.

In terms of copyright law, Bayfiles is a perfectly legal operation as long as the site doesn’t encourage or promote copyright infringement. Previously a U.S. federal court ruled that RapidShare, a competing file-hosting service, is not liable for any copyright infringements its users may commit.

That said, we doubt whether Hollywood will be happy with this new venture from a team of people who’ve been their arch rivals for more than half a decade. Exciting times ahead.
https://torrentfreak.com/bayfiles-th...g-site-110829/





Steve Jobs's Greatest Legacy: Persuading the World to Pay for Content

Apple's CEO always wanted to get something great to the customer without any obstacles – except that they should pay
Charles Arthur

Ten years is, of course, a long time in media. Ten years ago, if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA. There were legal services, but they were so dire they wouldn't pass much muster today: there was PressPlay and MusicNet (from rival groups of record companies), which required $15 a month subscriptions for low-quality streaming (when most people had dialup connections, not today's broadband). You couldn't burn to CD. They were stuffed with restrictive software to prevent you sharing the songs.

What happened? Steve Jobs happened, mainly. The hardware and design team at Apple came up with the iPod (initially intended to be a way to sell more Macintosh computers), and then followed the iTunes Music Store – a great way to tie people to Apple by selling music. In 2003 Jobs persuaded the music companies – which wouldn't license their songs to bigger names like Microsoft – to go with him because, he said, Apple was tiny (which it was, at the time). The risk if people did start sharing songs from the store was minimal, he argued. The record labels looked at Apple's tiny market share (a few per cent of the PC market) and reckoned they'd sell about a million songs a year, so they signed up.

Apple sold a million in the first week of the iTunes Music Store being open (and only in the US). It sold 3m within a month. It's never looked back.

Nowadays Apple sells TV shows, films, books, apps, as well as music. We take the explosion in available content for granted. But without Jobs, it's likely we wouldn't be here at all; his negotiating skill is the thing that Apple, and possibly the media industry, will miss the most, because he got them to open up to new delivery mechanisms.

Content companies have been reluctant to let their products move to new formats if they aren't the inventors, or at least midwives. Witness Blu-ray, a Sony idea which wraps up the content so you can't ever get it off the disc (at least in theory); or 3D films. Yet neither is quite living up to its promise, and part of that comes down to people wanting to be able to move the content around – on an iPod, iPhone, iPad or even a computer – in ways the content doesn't allow. Apps downloaded directly to your mobile? Carriers would never have allowed it five years ago. Flat-rate data plans? Ditto. But all good for content creators.

Jobs pried open many content companies' thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google's Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven't heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google's offerings.

Jobs's resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it's also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven't set the world alight (yet?) isn't a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod's life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It's more like a reflection of our times.

So if you're wondering how Jobs's departure affects the media world, consider that it's the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who's going to replace that?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/orga...gacy-apple-ceo





Netflix Offered $300 Million-Plus, But Starz Wanted Higher Consumer Prices
Ben Fritz, Joe Flint and Dawn C. Chmielewski

Starz didn't just want Netflix to pay more money for its content. It wanted Netflix consumers to pay more too.

Netflix offered Starz more than $300 million per year to renew their agreement, but the pay cable channel was insistent on so-called tiered pricing, according to people close to the negotiations but not authorized to speak on the record. Tiered pricing would require Netflix subscribers who want movies and television shows from Starz and other premium providers to pay more than the standard $8 per month.

That demand was apparently a key sticking point in talks that fell apart Thursday, meaning the two companies' deal, which began in 2008, will expire at the end of February.

Starz wanted Netflix to charge a premium price for its content in order to put the popular online video service more in line with cable and satellite providers. Protecting relationships with multiplatform video programming distributors (MVPDs) like DirecTV and Time Warner Cable is critical to Starz. The MVPDs are wary of Netflix because they fear customers will "cut the cord" if enough fresh content is available online at a lower price.

Netflix was apparently unwilling to introduce higher prices for access to certain content on its streaming service. The company's chief content officer Ted Sarandos, who led negotiations, declined to comment beyond an official statement that did not address the issue.

However, the company was willing to pay a very high price for access to the movies from Walt Disney Pictures and Sony Pictures that Starz controls, as well as original series like "Camelot." It offered more than $300 million annually, a person close to the talks said, more than 10 times the rate that it currently pays.

Netflix must determine how to maintain its rip-roaring subscriber growth despite the impending loss of popular first-run movies like "Tangled" and "The Karate Kid." Starz, meanwhile, must find a way to make up for the $300 million-plus that it gave up -- with its traditional television business or a deal with another digital subscription video provider such as Amazon.com.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ente...er-prices.html





Now Can We All Agree that the “High Quality Web Content” Experiment has Failed?
Paul Carr

It’s hard to imagine anything more perfect than Slate’s decision to lay off its respected media critic Jack Shafer. Not perfect in a good way — I count myself amongst Shafer’s legions of fans — but perfect in the way that Alanis Morissette not understanding the meaning of ‘Ironic’ is perfect, or the way that a safety inspector falling out of a tenth story window would be perfect.

“I tolllldddd yyoooouuu sooooooo…”

I mean, what better illustration could there be of online media’s woes than an ezine laying off its media critic because the economics of web content don’t support a writer of his stature and specialism? At least Shafer can take some satisfaction in the fact that his departure is in and of itself an absolutely perfect piece of media criticism: Jack Shafer as both medium and message.

Slate’s admission that, even with a minuscule staff of 60 and the financial “might” of the Washington Post company, it can’t make money from online content is also perfect. The perfect opportunity, that is, to acknowledge once and for all that the grand experiment in free online content has failed.

Over on Forbes.com, Jeff Bercovici nails the problem thus…

“General interest is a pretty good concept for a physical product that gets delivered to your doorstep, where getting all those disparate sections bundled together makes sense. It’s not such a great concept on the web. The web hates artificial bundles. If you’re going to do a general-interest news product online, you have to be prepared to do it on the cheap, as Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington do (or at least used to do, in the latter case). Conversely, if you want to put out an expensively produced, professionally-edited product, it’s better to stick to a niche, preferably one with a demographic that advertisers want to reach, like technology or business.”

…and he’s right. Up to a point. In fact, many niche publications are feeling the pinch too. It wasn’t long ago that Bercovici’s own employer, Forbes, abandoned its status as a professionally written and edited financial publication and decided to style itself as a kind of HuffPost for finance; embracing cheap guest-posters regardless of what conflicts they might churn up. Meantime, it would be petty of me to name those of our rivals in the technology blogosphere who have embraced bullshit slideshows and top ten lists over their more costly cousins: actual fucking reporting. (So far TechCrunch’s acquisition by AOL hasn’t lead to our editorial arm having to choose between God and Mammon, but a cynic might say it’s only a matter of time until we too are tested.)

The blunt truth is, online advertising is a numbers game. And, even on niche sites, the number of salable page impressions required to even break even is huge. There are just too many pages of content being produced for advertising to remain a viable long-term business model. The New York Times can’t make money online, the Guardian can’t, Slate can’t and Salon barely can. As Bercovici points out, even Slate’s attempts to launch verticals aimed at business readers, and women, were relative failures.

There are maybe two general-interest publications which can reasonably claim to have cracked the free content code: The Daily Mail and the Huffington Post. But in truth the only way those publications can afford to pay their growing armies of real, grown-up editors is by selling millions of pages of animal stories and celebrity fluff, churned out by underpaid hacks. (One day I want to produce a HuffPost slideshow of the best Daily Mail celebrity slideshows — it’ll clean up.)

AND YET. It’s easy to wail and moan about how the Internet is killing journalism, but that dystopian future only exists if we assume that the Internet is the only place that editorial content can possibly live. In fact, over the next five years or so what we’re likely to see is a bifurcation in digital content.

On one side, those content producers who choose to stay on the free-and-open web will be forced into making more and more ethically dubious decisions to stay profitable. Out will go professional writers and church-and-state separation of content and commerce; in will come more Groupon-style “reader offers”, affiliate links behind every keyword and an Idiocracy of dumber and dumber linkbait. Ten ways to make extra income with Lady Gaga Sony Porn — Kittens!

But on the other side? The fact that the Economist’s North American circulation has just reached its highest ever level tells us that the audience for quality content isn’t going away. It also suggests that those of us who prefer our content unsullied by payola, and who appreciate the beauty of a well-crafted headline are turning our backs on the web. Increasingly the best writing and reporting is to be found in books and Kindle Singles, where readers are happy to pay directly for high-quality information and entertainment. As web content continues to get dumber, and more ethically compromised, the market for high quality content away from the web will continue to grow.

Of course, it would be idiotic to suggest that publishers should rush back to print, in the hope of emulating the Economist. But nor should they be wasting money publishing their content on the web. As any wildly profitable app developer will tell you, the web is a great marketing tool, but it’s on dedicated portable devices that the real money, and attention spans, are found. A smart publisher looking to launch a new magazine today — focusing on business, technology, or just about anything else — would be wise to develop it specifically for e-readers rather than wasting more money chasing the dumb eyeballs of the web. Oh, and they should hire Jack Shafer. He’s brilliant.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/27/who...ht-it-figures/





Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks are a Bad Idea on a DSL-Based Internet.
Kragen Javier Sitaker kragen

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are inefficient on ADSL networks. ADSL networks
are almost twice as efficient as SDSL networks. Better alternatives require
redesigning the physical layer.

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are inefficient on ADSL networks.
---------------------------------------------------------------

I was reading an article by Steven Levy about Google not buying
[Skype][], and I was appalled by what Wesley Chan was quoted as
saying:

> He concluded that one of Skype’s key assets – its peer-to-peer
> technology — was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer
> paradigm of cloud computing. “The worst thing about peer-to-peer is
> that it doesn’t work well with Google,” [Wesley] Chan told me
> [Steven Levy] during an amazing interview for IN THE PLEX in
> February 2010. “Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right,
> it’s like the old technology.”

I was so disgusted that I made a note: “Google may not ‘be evil’, but
Wesley Chan surely is!” As long as we’re stuck in the paradigm of
cloud computing, where we depend on software running within the data
centers of Google and companies like that instead of on our own
machines, we’re very vulnerable to abuses.

But upon some thought, I concluded that I was putting the blame in the
wrong place. It’s ADSL’s fault, not Wesley Chan’s. He’s just
observing the incentive structure created by ADSL.

**ADSL**: an ADSL line is a connection to the rest of the network that
is statically partitioned between a high-bandwidth part outwards for
data being sent *to* you, and a low-bandwidth part inwards for data
being sent *from* you, typically about an order of magnitude smaller.
In this environment, peer-to-peer programs really are inherently
inefficient: on average, they use just as much of your inwards
bandwidth as your outwards bandwidth, but your inwards bandwidth costs
you ten times as much.

So, **on an ADSL network, peer-to-peer networking is an order of
magnitude less efficient** than data-center-based applications.

But it gets worse.

[Skype]: http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/...-not-own-skype
(Why Google does not own Skype, 2011-05-10, by Steven Levy)

ADSL networks are almost twice as efficient as SDSL networks.
-------------------------------------------------------------

When ADSL started to roll out in the late 1990s, I was horrified and
opposed. It seemed like an unthinkable violation of the egalitarian
ethics of the internet, designed for brainless consumers of “content”
rather than full participants.

In July 2011, I changed my mind. Here’s why.

### Content-centric networking models actual internet use better than TCP. ###

Van Jacobson’s “Content-Centric Networking” work is based on the
premise that almost all of our internet usage today consists not of
people connecting to remote computers that provide them some service
(the designed purpose of TELNET) or sending a message to a single
other person (like email or Skype or other VOIP) but rather retrieving
named pieces of data from some cloud storage space, or adding them to
it.

That is, it’s much more publish-and-retrieve (and possibly subscribe)
than request-response or send-and-receive; it’s one-to-many
communication spread over time, rather than synchronous one-to-one
communication. But it’s built on top of the distributed synchronous
one-to-one communications provided by TCP and UDP, plus a lot of
ad-hoc barely-working multi-centralized server software, so it doesn’t
work as well as it could. VJ’s plan is to put the
publish-and-retrieve into the network as much as possible instead of
endpoints.

I believe he is correct.

### SDSL is almost twice as costly as ADSL for content-centric use. ###

Let’s look at a simplified egalitarian internet. *All* the
communication is ultimately between ordinary people in their houses,
looking at each other’s cat photos and home videos; none of it is to
Hulu. They are connected to interconnected telephone central offices
over long and expensive limited-bandwidth “last mile” links; the
central offices themselves are interconnected over
much-higher-bandwidth links.

How can we design our internet to make efficient use of scarce
resources?

One scarce resource in this scenario is last-mile bandwidth. Assume
that the bandwidth of the last mile must be partitioned statically
between inwards (towards the CO) and outwards (towards the house)
directions, rather than negotiated dynamically.

The SDSL home-server story is that the bandwidth should be symmetric
because every time I download a cat photo on the outward half of my
connection, someone else has to upload it on the inward half of
theirs, so the average number of cat photos per second is the same on
inward and outward links.

But wait! Consider all the cat photos that at least one person has
looked at over the internet. Most of them have been looked at by only
one person over the internet. But many of them have been looked at by
more than one person over the internet. (None of them, by definition,
have been looked at by less than one person over the internet.)

That means that the **average number of views-over-the-internet per
photo** is greater than 1. In fact, it’s probably substantially
greater than 1. Say, 5 or 10.

In the SDSL home-server scenario, when people look at a particular cat
photo 5 times, the home server sends the cat photo inwards to the
central office 5 times, which then sends it outwards to the
link-clicker.

But that’s silly. It would be more efficient to cache the cat photo
in the central office the first time it gets sent out from the home
server, then serve it from cache. You’d get better latency and, at
least in theory, better reliability. Right now we do this by storing
the cat photo in a data center on the disk of some broken-ass web app
that’s probably built on top of MySQL (Facebook, say), but you could
do it with Van Jacobson’s content-centric networking protocols, too,
or by putting a Varnish instance in front of the inward half of your
connection.

But, once you do this caching, however you do it, you have several
times as much bandwidth being used outward as being used inward.
Every cat photo only goes over an inward link a single time, and on
average goes outward several times, like 5 or 10. Most of your inward
bandwidth necessarily goes idle.

This isn’t limited to asynchronous communication like posting a cat
photo on your page and hoping people will look at it later. The same
thing holds for things like chat rooms: it uses less last-mile
bandwidth to have a server in a data center receive a single copy of
your line of chat, then send copies of it to everyone else in the chat
room, rather than forcing your client on your machine to send a copy
directly to each of the people in the room over your DSL connection.
(Multi-person videoconferencing is probably a more compelling
example.)

So, as long as you have to allocate the last-mile bandwidth
statically, you might as well allocate most of it to outward
bandwidth, rather than inward bandwidth.

The horrifying existence of abominations like Hulu and the iTunes
Music Store, then, is not the root of ADSL. ADSL is just a more
efficient way of allocating limited last-mile bandwidth, but it
requires that the bulk of communications between people be mediated
through some kind of co-located “cloud” that avoids the need to upload
more than one copy of each file over your limited last-mile
connection.

The current legal and social structure of the “cloud” is far more
horrific than Hulu, though. Instead of having a content-neutral
distributed publish-and-retrieve facility, we have Facebook
arbitrarily deleting photos of women breastfeeding and discussion
groups where Saudi women advocate for public transit in Riyadh,
YouTube selling your eyeballs to the highest bidder, and MySpace
forcing “terms of service” on you that you can’t possibly have time to
read, but which Lori Drew was nevertheless criminally prosecuted for
violating.

Better alternatives require redesigning the physical layer.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Both ADSL and SDSL are inefficient compared to the way Wi-Fi works,
which is typical of radio networking. In Wi-Fi, data is only
traveling in one direction over the connection at any time: either
inwards or outwards. That means that you don’t have to settle for
uploading your cat photos at 10% or 50% of the link’s bandwidth; you
can use 100%. (In theory, anyway. Wi-Fi itself has a lot of protocol
overhead.)

The static FDM bandwidth allocation used in SDSL and ADSL, in which
some frequency channels are reserved for each direction of the
communication, is primitive, obsolete 20th-century technology. New
equipment that used adaptive CDMA or dynamic TDMA could provide
marginally better downstream bandwidth when upstream is little-used,
and dramatically better upstream bandwidth when needed. I don’t know
of any such equipment in the market.

Another alternative, better adapted to the realities of
content-centric networking, is to adopt a more physically-based
topology. As an example, it’s absurd that the block I live on has
hundreds of separate 3MHz copper pairs to it, perhaps totaling a
gigabit, mostly carrying duplicate traffic: many of the same cat
photos, news stories, and Wikipedia articles everyone else is reading.
Properly-thought-out content-centric networking --- still a pipe-dream
--- would enable us to cache those items locally and securely,
communicate with each other when necessary without routing our packets
through a phone-company central office, and use the entire bandwidth
of that gigabit when it’s left idle. We ought to be able to use
multi-gigabit LAN connections to back up encrypted copies of our
important files to each other’s computers so that we don’t lose them.
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail...st/000935.html





Government Sues to Block AT&T, T-Mobile Merger
Joelle Tessler

The Justice Department filed suit Wednesday to block AT&T's $39 billion deal to buy T-Mobile USA on grounds that it would raise prices for consumers.

The government contends that the acquisition of the No. 4 wireless carrier in the country by No. 2 AT&T would reduce competition and that would lead to price increases.

At a news conference, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the combination would result in "tens of millions of consumers all across the United States facing higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products for mobile wireless services."

The lawsuit seeks to ensure that everyone can continue to receive the benefits of competition, said Cole.

AT&T said it would fight and ask for an expedited court hearing "so the enormous benefits of this merger can be fully reviewed." The company said the government "has the burden of proving alleged anti-competitive effects, and we intend to vigorously contest this matter in court."

Four nationwide providers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint — account for more than 90 percent of mobile wireless connections.

T-Mobile has been an important source of competition, including through innovation and quality enhancements such as the roll-out of the first nationwide high-speed data network, according to Sharis Pozen, acting chief of Justice's antitrust division.

Mobile wireless telecom services play an increasing role in day-to-day communications, with more than 300 million smart phones, data cards, tablets and other mobile wireless devices in use.

Deutsche Telekom, the owner of T-Mobile, had no immediate comment.

The proposed cash-and-stock transaction would catapult AT&T past Verizon Wireless to become the nation's largest wireless provider, and leave Sprint Nextel Corp. as a distant number three.

In a statement, Sprint said the Justice Department's lawsuit "delivered a decisive victory for consumers, competition and our country. By filing suit to block AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile, the DOJ has put consumers' interests first."

AT&T and T-Mobile compete nationwide, in 97 of the largest 100 cellular marketing areas, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. They also vie for business and government customers.

The Justice Department suit says AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile would eliminate a company that has been a competitive factor through low pricing and innovation. T-Mobile had the first handset using the Android operating system, Blackberry wireless email, the Sidekick smart phone, national Wi-Fi "hotspot" access and a variety of unlimited service plans.

In support of its case, the Justice Department quoted an unidentified AT&T employee on a competitive issue — sophisticated wireless broadband devices that can provide high-speed data connections. The AT&T employee, said the lawsuit, noted that T-Mobile was first to have such devices in their portfolio and that "we added them in reaction to potential loss of speed claims."

Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski said the record before the FCC "raises serious concerns about the impact of the proposed transaction on competition." The FCC's separate review of the proposed merger is not yet complete.

FCC member Michael Copps, a Democrat and a staunch opponent of industry consolidation, said that he shares "the concerns about competition and have numerous other concerns about the public interest effects of the proposed transaction, including consumer choice and innovation."

Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, who heads the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, said the suit was an effort to protect consumers "in a powerful and growing industry that reaches virtually every American."

The suit used some of T-Mobile's own documents describing its role in the market to explain why the merger shouldn't take place. In those documents, the company calls itself "the No. 1 challenger of the established big guys in the market and as well positioned in a consolidated 4-player national market."

T-Mobile said its strategy is to attack other companies and find innovative ways to overcome the fact that it is a smaller company.

T-Mobile "will be faster, more agile and scrappy, with diligence on decisions and costs both big and small," one company document said. "Our approach to market will not be conventional, and we will push to the boundaries where possible."

The suit also says the anti-competitive problems a merger would cause cannot be overcome by regional companies.

Regional companies lack national networks, so are limited in their ability to compete with the four national carriers, the lawsuit states.

___

Online:

Justice Department's lawsuit: http://tinyurl.com/44lx4qo

http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...er-2149121.php





AT&T Responds To DoJ: The Facts Will Prevail In Court
Jordan Crook

Following today’s reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a complaint opposing the $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T, the big blue carrier has issued a response stating plans to ask for an expedited hearing “so that the enormous benefits of this merger can be fully reviewed.”

The DOJ cites antitrust issues in its complaint, saying “AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market.”

Though FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski says that the review process is not yet complete, this is still another large obstacle for AT&T and T-Mobile in their road to matrimony. Should this prove too large an obstacle to overcome, AT&T will have to pay T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom upwards of $6 billion. In other words, AT&T isn’t having the best day.

The following is a statement provided by Wayne Watts, AT&T senior executive VP and general counsel:

We are surprised and disappointed by today’s action, particularly since we have met repeatedly with the Department of Justice and there was no indication from the DOJ that this action was being contemplated. We plan to ask for an expedited hearing so the enormous benefits of this merger can be fully reviewed. The DOJ has the burden of proving alleged anti-competitive affects and we intend to vigorously contest this matter in court.

At the end of the day, we believe facts will guide any final decision and the facts are clear. This merger will:

• Help solve our nation’s spectrum exhaust situation and improve wireless service for millions.
• Allow AT&T to expand 4G mobile broadband to another 55 million Americans, or 97% of the population.
• Result in billions of additional investment and tens of thousands of jobs, at a time when our nation needs them most.

We remain confident that this merger is in the best interest of consumers and our country, and the facts will prevail in court.


http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/att...vail-in-court/





Statement by FCC Chair Genachowski on AT&T/T-Mobile Deal

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said, "By filing suit today, the Department of Justice has concluded that AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile would substantially lessen competition in violation of the antitrust laws. Competition is an essential component of the FCC's statutory public interest analysis, and although our process is not complete, the record before this agency also raises serious concerns about the impact of the proposed transaction on competition. Vibrant competition in wireless services is vital to innovation, investment, economic growth and job creation, and to drive our global leadership in mobile. Competition fosters consumer benefits, including more choices, better service and lower prices."
http://www.streetinsider.com/Corpora...l/6754416.html





Addiction? Video Games Crowded Out Man's Real Life
Tamara Lush

At the height of what he calls his addiction, Ryan Van Cleave would stand in the grocery store checkout line with his milk and bread and baby food for his little girls and for a split second think he was living inside a video game.

It sounds crazy, but it's true: Something would catch his attention out of the corner of his eye — maybe another shopper would make a sudden move for a Hershey bar — and he was mentally and emotionally transported to another world.

World of Warcraft, to be exact.

It was his favorite video game, the one he played every night, every day, sometimes all weekend. The sudden movement in the store triggered a response similar to when he was in front of the computer screen, battling dragons and monsters for up to 60 hours a week. Van Cleave's heart pounded. His breathing quickened.

But then the thirtysomething family man would catch his breath and come back to reality. Sort of.

World of Warcraft began to crowd out everything in Van Cleave's world. His wife. His children. His job as a university English professor.

Before teaching class or late at night while his family slept, he'd squeeze in time at the computer screen, playing. He'd often eat meals at the computer — microwave burritos, energy drinks, Hot Pockets, foods that required only one hand, leaving the other free to work the keyboard and the mouse.

Living inside World of Warcraft seemed preferable to the drudgery of everyday life. Especially when the life involved fighting with his wife about how much time he spent on the computer.

"Playing 'World of Warcraft' makes me feel godlike," Van Cleave wrote. "I have ultimate control and can do what I want with few real repercussions. The real world makes me feel impotent ... a computer malfunction, a sobbing child, a suddenly dead cell phone battery — the littlest hitch in daily living feels profoundly disempowering."

Despite thoughts like this, despite the dissociative episodes in supermarkets, he did not think he had a problem IRL — gamerspeak for In Real Life. But he did, and a reckoning was coming.

__

Van Cleave grew up in suburban Chicago. He was adopted, which he said always made him feel like an outsider in his own home and in the world. As a kid, he was more interested in guitars and computers.

In high school, each year brought more exciting games with better graphics, but his parents didn't see a problem because all teen boys seemed to play video games. And their son also played guitar in a band, so video games weren't the only thing in his life.

Same with college. "Gaming 15-20 hours a week in college is no big deal," said Van Cleave, who graduated from Northern Illinois University with a degree in English. "The problem occurred after that, when I got into the real world."

He earned a master's degree and a PhD in creative writing at Florida State, was named a poetry fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and found a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Then in the fall of 2003, he was offered a tenure-track position at Clemson University in South Carolina — his dream job.

His wife, Victoria, became pregnant for the first time; the baby was unplanned and Van Cleave admitted being shocked at the idea of becoming a father. He and his wife were late for her first ultrasound because Van Cleave was playing Madden Football, a sports game.

It was around this time that World of Warcraft entered his life.

Van Cleave ended up playing one entire weekend, stealing away to the computer while his family was sleeping or while his parents, who were visiting, played with his baby daughter.

Victoria used one word to describe her feelings: "disgusted."

She felt abandoned. "I couldn't believe that someone could choose a virtual family over a real one."

One reason Van Cleave was so captivated: It offered different perspectives. Previously, most games Van Cleave played were seen from a bird's eye view, looking down at the action. In WoW, a player can zoom, pan and look at a scene exactly how a human does in real life.

Three years into his job at Clemson, Van Cleave's life began to fall apart. His four dogs died, one after another from various causes. His wife was pregnant again. Then Van Cleave began to get the impression that other faculty disliked him and wanted him gone. But he didn't try to repair the rifts, instead channeling his anxieties into WoW, a virtual world he could control.

"All that tethered me to anything meaningful during this time was WoW, which I clung to for dear life," he wrote.

For millions who play, the lure of games like WoW is hard to resist.

Players create an "avatar," or online character, who operates within a startlingly detailed storyline and graphics. Playing makes the gamer feel like the star of a really awesome sci-fi movie.

While in-game, characters form "guilds," or teams, and go on "quests" to find items, conquer lands or achieve new levels. They occasionally fight with other players or guilds, slay zombies, clash with evil elves or kill monsters. Players talk to each other in the game via headsets and often form intense friendships.

"People play those games often in a desire to meet their social needs," said Hilarie Cash, a Washington state therapist who runs a six-bed inpatient program for Internet and video game addicts. "There's a sense of friendship and self-esteem you develop with your teammates, you can compete and be cooperative. It really feels as though it meets your social needs."

Unlike other games, WoW didn't end. It went on and on, with characters roaming through different realms and meeting new people along the way. When Van Cleave had reached the apex of one world and hit the maximum points a character could possess, there were always other characters to create and more loot to amass. Meanwhile, the game makers offered expansions every year, which meant new worlds to explore, new levels to achieve.

"There was always something better and cooler," he said. "You can never have enough in-game money, enough armor, enough support. You've got to keep up with the virtual Joneses."

The maker of World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

In the past five years, news stories have described people suffering exhaustion after playing a game for 50 hours straight, of teens killing their parents after having games taken away and of parents neglecting infants while mesmerized by the online world.

Yet not all authorities believe the games are addictive.

"I do not believe that the concept of 'addiction' is useful; it only describes strong temptations; it does not explain strong temptations. What makes the temptation so strong? The memory of past pleasant experiences with the behavior that we are talking about — in this case videogames," wrote Jackson Toby, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University, in an email to The Associated Press. "I don't believe that someone can be addicted to videogames."

The American Psychiatric Association will not list video game addiction as a mental disorder in the 2012 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, the APA said there is a possibility that a group of reward-seeking behavioral disorders — including video game addiction and Internet addiction — will be included in an appendix of DSM-5 to "encourage further study."

Van Cleave and others insist video game addiction is similar to gambling addiction.

By the time his second baby was born in 2007, Van Cleave was playing some 60 hours a week.

A few months later, Clemson didn't renew his contract and said he would not achieve tenure. He was hired for a one-year fellowship at George Washington University, teaching one class, but that meant he had more time for gaming while the stress of finding a long-term, full-time job ratcheted up.

He spent money on gaming and bought two new computers so he could see better game graphics.

In 2007, Van Cleave had three different World of Warcraft accounts (each at a cost of $14.95 a month). A secret Paypal account paid for two of the accounts so his wife wouldn't hound him about the cost.

He spent $224 in real money to buy fake gold, so he could get an in-game "epic-level sword" and some "top-tier armor" for his avatar.

Changes in Van Cleave's personality began to appear. Among those who noticed was his best friend from high school, Rob Opitz, who lived in another state but played "World of Warcraft" with him for years.

"When things in IRL — in real life — would interrupt what was going on in the game, he would get very loud very quickly about those things," Opitz recalled. "During that time, it's kind of like everything was completely over the top. It wasn't that he was a little mad, he was in a full-blown rage."

Van Cleave was about to hit bottom.

___

It was Dec. 31, 2007. Van Cleave was halfway through his yearlong fellowship at George Washington University. Yet there he was, standing on the Arlington Memorial Bridge. He was thinking about jumping into the icy water.

He had been gaming for 18 hours straight and wasn't feeling well. He had told his wife that he was going to buy cough drops for his sore throat. But his misery was not just physical.

"My kids hate me. My wife is threatening (again) to leave me," Van Cleave would write in his book. "I haven't written anything in countless months. I have no prospects for the next academic year. And I am perpetually exhausted from skipping sleep so I can play more Warcraft."

That night marked the first time Van Cleave realized he had a problem.

The self-examination pulled him back from the bridge railing. He went home and deleted the game from his computer.

For the next week, his stomach and head hurt and he was drenched in sweat — like an addict withdrawing from drugs.

Staying away from WoW was difficult, but he didn't re-install the game.

And he started rebuilding — In Real Life.

Said his wife: "I didn't believe him. I had heard it all before and had no confidence that he would stop."

Van Cleave worked on his professional life. He freelanced, wrote poems and young adult books. He wrote the tell-all about his addiction, titled "Unplugged" and published last year.

He set his sights on a job, sending out 182 resumes.

In 2010, he was hired as an English professor at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota. Van Cleave and his family bought a beige stucco home in a quiet subdivision.

It's an irony in Van Cleave's new, game-free life that Ringling is one of the nation's top schools for video game designers.

He knows his students spend much of their lives online, and he worries about them. "I don't think video games are evil," said Van Cleave. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I think games are fine if they are part of a balanced life."

Last semester, he had two students in class who talked about WoW non-stop. It made Van Cleave anxious.

Over the past year, he has talked about out-of-control gaming to various mental health groups.

But even now, four years after he stopped gaming, Van Cleave thinks about World of Warcraft.

Then there are his dreams.

In them, he is playing one of his former characters, running through the virtual world. When he wakes, sweating and out of breath, he always has the same impulse: to rush to the computer and log into the game.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...fe-2143936.php





News Corp. Hunkers Down: Murdochs to Testify Under Oath
Adam Clark Estes

The British judge tasked with leading the phone hacking investigation in London plans to interrogate Rupert and James Murdoch under oath in the Royal Courts of Justice. According to The Telegraph's Christopher Hope, Lord Justice Leveson will begin the hearings in October and is expected to call for testimonies not only from the Murdochs but also former News International chief Rebekah Brooks, former News of the World editor Andy and possibly even Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered the original inquiry. The list of anticipated witnesses and basic facts about the hearings were revealed when Leveson announced the inquiry in July, but some new details reiterate the seriousness of the proceedings.

"Lord Justice Leveson is thought to be keen for the proceedings to be broadcast live to ensure they are seen to be transparent," Hope reports. "The prospect of courtroom evidence will increase the impression that the Leveson inquiry is an unofficial 'trial' of key players in the phone hacking scandal."

As the courts move forward with the judicial inquiry into phone hacking, News Corp. is expanding their internal investigation into the practice. Under the leadership of former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, the investigation team has already interviewed journalists with the The Sun tabloid and plans to start interviewing journalists at The Sunday Times in September. Reuters reports that preparing for an American investigation is a top priority for News Corp. lawyers:

Attorneys for Linklaters, the large London law firm leading the probe, will be looking for anything that U.S. government investigators might be able to construe as evidence the company violated American law, particularly the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits corrupt payments to foreign officials, a source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

In addition to conducting personal interviews with selected journalists, lawyers will also be looking at email and financial records, said this source.


Meanwhile, the political theater of the ongoing probe has not been lost on London's thespian community. A group of writers is already working on an experimental play that aims to hack the phones of real-life volunteers. "We wanted to explore what was actually at the root of people's outrage," said Theatre503's associated director Derek Bond. "It wasn't just celebrities--it was grieving parents, missing teenagers, everybody. What if it was you?"
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/globa...fy-under-oath/





Masked Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Bottom Line
Nick Bilton

Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.

When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

The hackers wear the mask when they protest outside of Scientology buildings. And they wore it during a short-lived protest this month in San Francisco of the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s decision to cut off cell service to thwart an earlier protest inside train stations.

“It’s a symbol of what Anonymous stands for, of fighting evil governments,” said one of the mask-wearers at that protest. The Anonymous member declined to share his name, noting that the entire concept of the mask was to remain anonymous. “You can get a mask and join the fight, too! But I heard the costume store is sold out until Friday,” he said.

Indeed, with the help of Anonymous, the mask has become one of the most popular disguises and — in a small way — has added to the $28 billion in revenue Time Warner accumulated last year. It is the top-selling mask on Amazon.com, beating out masks of Batman, Harry Potter and Darth Vader.

“We sell over 100,000 of these masks a year, and it’s by far the best-selling mask that we sell,” said Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie’s Costume, a New York costume company that produces the mask. “In comparison, we usually only sell 5,000 or so of our other masks.” The Vendetta mask, which sells for about $6 at many retailers, is made in Mexico or China, Mr. Beige said.

Mr. Beige said he did not know why the mask was so popular until recently. “We just thought people liked the ‘V for Vendetta’ movie. Then one morning I saw a picture of these protesters wearing the mask in an online news article,” he said. “I quickly showed my sales manager.”

Guy Fawkes is not well known in the United States, except perhaps through the movie. But in Britain, the foiling of his antigovernment plot — he was put to death — is celebrated as a holiday, Nov. 5 or Guy Fawkes Day, and is commemorated with bonfires and fireworks.

Although the Time Warner-owned image of Guy Fawkes appeared in 2006, it did not take on its new life until much later. That occurred after members of an online message board known as 4Chan showed a crudely drawn stick figure known as “Epic Fail Guy” peering into a trash can and reappearing wearing the mask.

Then in 2008, Anonymous embraced it, explained Gabriella Coleman, an assistant professor at New York University’s department of media, culture and communication. “Thousands of members came out from behind their computer and went into the streets to protest the Church of Scientology,” she said. “Anonymous knew if they were going to meet in a visibly public space for the first time, they needed to conceal their identity. They inevitably chose the ‘V for Vendetta’ mask to do this.”

“It had a chilling effect. There were literally thousands of people standing silently in front of the Church of Scientology wearing the same Guy Fawkes mask,” Ms. Coleman said. “The photos and videos that appeared in the news from the protests cemented the mask as the symbol of Anonymous.”

Warner Brothers did not respond to a request for comment on the mask’s newfound popularity as a tool of protesters.

Alan Moore, the author of the graphic novel on which the movie is based, could not be reached for comment, but in a 2008 interview with Entertainment Weekly, he expressed how proud he was of the mask’s role in the protests of the Church of Scientology.

“That pleased me,” he said. “That gave me a warm little glow.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/t...s-profits.html





In Unsettled Times, Media Can Be a Call to Action, or a Distraction
Noam Cohen

THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt.

His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.

To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

It is a conclusion that counters the widely held belief that the social media helped spur the protests. Mr. Hassanpour used press accounts of outbreaks of unrest in Egypt to show that after Jan. 28, the protests became more spread around Cairo and the country. There were not necessarily more protesters, but the movement spread to more parts of the population.

He called this a “localization process.” “You can say it would be hard to measure that,” he added, talking about his research, “but you can test it, what happens when a disruption goes into effect.”

“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” he writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”

In an interview, he described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.

Mr. Mubarak’s government collapsed and the former president, at age 83, now finds himself being wheeled into a Cairo court on a hospital bed to face charges of corruption and complicity in the killing of protesters.

Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, a company that assesses the way the Internet is operating across the world, believes that another besieged leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, may have taken note of the Egyptian experience.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, “What Libya Learned From Egypt,” Mr. Cowie writes that in March, Libya toyed with the idea of pulling the switch on its Internet service.

Libya’s leaders “faced this same decision in the run-up to civil war,” he wrote, “and each time, perhaps learning from the Egyptian example, they backed down from implementing a multiday all-routes blackout.”

Sophisticated governments will realize that “shutting down radicalizes things,” he said in a phone interview. What is more useful to governments, he said, was “bandwidth throttling,” recognizing that “Internet is something you can meter out.” This “metering out” is meant to make the experience less reliable and responsive, he said, so that video streaming is hesitant and Web pages are slow to load.

Iran, Mr. Cowie said, was one of a number of countries that have realized that “you don’t turn off the Internet anywhere — you make it less useful,” controlling which neighborhoods get it, for example.

Mr. Hassanpour, who was born and raised in Iran, agreed: “Iran does it in a localized way.”

So what is going on here? Certainly, blocking the ability of protesters to use the Internet and cellphones to plot has appeal for all kinds of leaders. In response to recent riots, the British government likewise was trying to figure out a way to gain access to social-networking services like Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry’s messenger system, to stop potential rioters from organizing.

Speaking to Parliament this month, Prime Minister David Cameron made the case for a clampdown: “We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

That proposal, which the British government has backed away from recently, prompted defenders of social networking to point out that not all the organizing was for ill. Others point out that social networking can allow the authorities to follow what is being planned, and try to respond.

Mr. Hassanpour said he was inspired to ask his questions by the insight of a 2009 paper by Holger Lutz Kern of Yale and Jens Hainmueller of M.I.T. that looked at Germany during the cold war and tried to determine the effect of exposure to West German media on East Germans who were able to see West German TV.

The authors took some of the earnest interpretations of the supposed influence of Western media — like, the media gave “people behind the Iron Curtain hope and the assurance that the Free World hadn’t forgotten them,” and allowed Germans to “compare Communist propaganda with credible information from abroad” — and exposed these ideas to basic scrutiny.

Their conclusion, based on formerly classified East German surveys of young people and visa applications to leave East Germany, adjusted for other factors, was that “exposure to West German television increased support for the East German regime.”

“It offered them a vicarious escape from the scarcities, the queues and the ideological indoctrination, making life under communism more bearable and the East German regime more tolerable,” they wrote in their paper, “Opium for the Masses: How Foreign Media Can Stabilize Authoritarian Regimes.”

“We do not necessarily argue that West German television’s political content did not undermine public support for the East German regime at all,” they wrote. “However, the evidence shows that the net effect of West German television exposure was an increase in regime support.”

This conclusion can come as a relief to those who see technology given more importance than ideas, organizations and on-the-ground conditions.

Todd Wolfson, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers and a community organizer in Philadelphia, said that there was, indeed, “an accelerant role for social media,” but that it “cannot and does not create that kind of mass motion.”

He cited the writer Frantz Fanon, who discussed the role of radio in the Algerian revolt against the French in the 1950s. When the French tried to block their transmissions, Fanon wrote in his 1959 book, “A Dying Colonialism,” the rebels had even more power, because the listeners were no longer passive. Fanon’s description recalls “the strange darkness” Mr. Hassanpour mentioned:

“For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles.”

Its “phantom-like character,” Fanon concluded paradoxically, “gave to the combat its maximum of reality.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/b...straction.html





China State Paper Urges Internet Rethink to Gag Foes
Chris Buckley

China's Communist Party control is at risk unless the government takes firmer steps to stop Internet opinion being shaped by increasingly organized political foes, a team of party writers warned in a commentary published on Friday.

The long commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, the main newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, added to signs that Beijing, jolted by the growing audience and influence of Twitter-like microblogging websites, is weighing fresh ways to tame and channel online opinion.

Chinese officials and media have recently complained about the spread of damaging and unfounded "rumors" on the Internet. [ID:nL4E7JU152] But this commentary raised the political stakes by arguing that organized, subversive opponents are exploiting tardy regulation to inflame opinion and spread their views.

The commentary urged changes in how China controls Internet innovations.

"Internet opinion is spontaneous, but increasingly shows signs of becoming organized," said the commentary, written by a team of writers for the Communist Party's top theoretical journal, "Qiushi," which means "Seeking Truth."

"Among the many controversies stirred up on the Internet, many are organized, with goals and meticulous planning and direction, and some clearly have commercial interests or political intentions in the background," said the commentary.

"Unless administration is vigorous, criminal forces, hostile forces, terrorist organizations and others could manipulate public sentiment by manufacturing bogus opinion on the Internet, damaging social stability and national security."

A commentary in the People's Daily does not amount to a government policy pronouncement, and indeed this one may reflect a more conservative current in official debate. But it adds to signals that Beijing is leaning to tougher controls.

China already heavily filters the Internet, and blocks popular foreign sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The People's Daily commentary did not single out the explosive growth of microblog, or "weibo," users, who reached 195 million by the end of June, an increase of 209 percent on the number at the end of 2010.

But a preface to the newspaper commentary singled out a recent string of public uproars that have spread through microblogs, especially the "Weibo" site of Sina Corp, which dominates the sector in China.

Those uproars included a bullet train crash in July that drew outrage aimed at government officials over evasive statements, safety failures and the feverish expansion of high-speed rail.

A "Light" Hand

That sort of growth is a key reason why investors remain cautiously optimistic -- for the long term -- on Internet and social-media players such as Sina, Tencent and RenRen Inc, billed as a Chinese version of Facebook.

Wall Street hopes that rapid growth in mobile and social-media adoption in -- the world's second-largest Internet market and already the biggest social-media playground by users -- will offset persistent fears about a widespread crackdown on Weibo or other rapidly expanding media.

Sina's shares on the Nasdaq slid more than 3 percent to $100.95 in afternoon trading, while RenRen was off 1 percent.

"The concern is valid, but the probability is low. The social media market has grown to such a size that it is almost impossible for government to shut down all the platforms," CLSA's head of telecoms and Internet research Asia, Elinor Leung, argued in a Thursday report on the industry.

Various government agencies in fact employ Weibo, she said, much like Twitter is used as a communications tool in the United States.

"The government is likely to continue to rely on Internet companies to curtail rumors and sensitive information, rather than suppress them."

Sina and other Chinese microblog operators already deploy technicians and software to monitor content, and block and remove comments deemed unacceptable, especially about protests, scandals and party leaders. But the torrent of information and combative views can be hard to tame.

"In Internet battles, usually negative views crush positive ones," said the People's Daily, adding that extreme online opinion abounded with "unvarying suspicion of government policies, official statements, mainstream viewpoints, the social elite and the well-off."

Officially, at least, Sina's Weibo and other Chinese microblog sites are still in "trial" mode.

In comment's that appeared aimed at such microblogs, the People's Daily commentary said the Chinese government had shot itself in the foot by letting Internet technologies take off and win huge followings before effective control was in place.

That must change, it said.

"We have failed to take into sufficient account just how much the Internet is a double-edged sword, and have a problem of allowing technology to advance while administration and regulation lag," said the commentary.

Once the government tries to control an Internet technology that has already become popular, it faces "fierce resistance and a backlash" from users, and also international criticism, said the newspaper.

"Clearly, in the future when developing and applying new Internet technologies, there must first be a thorough assessment, adopting even more prudent policies and enhancing foresight and forward thinking in administration," it said.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78110S20110902





China Says to Get Tougher in Fight Against Hacking

China's Supreme Court and prosecutors office will step up the fight against computer hacking by toughening penalties for those caught doing it, state media said on Monday.

Under rules coming into effect from September 1, people who "knowingly purchase, sell or cover-up illegally obtained data or network control will be subject to criminal penalties," the official Xinhua news agency cited a statement as saying.

"Such activities have become increasingly unrestrained, even giving rise to large online transaction platforms. Penalizing these violations helps sever the profit chain of hacking and other related crimes," it added.

While the United States says many hacking attacks appear to come from China, often targeting human rights groups as well as U.S. companies, China says that it is one of the world's biggest victims of hacking attacks.

"A crime endangering information network security poses a threat not only to network security but also to national security and public interests," the news agency said, adding that the new rules were aimed at cracking down on such crimes with greater force.

In 2009, more than 42,000 Chinese websites were "distorted" by hackers, Xinhua said.

Data from the Ministry of Public Security shows that the number of viruses circulating on the internet has surged 80 percent from a year earlier in the past five years, Xinhua said. The ministry also estimates that eight out of 10 internet-connected computers are controlled by hackers, it added.

In its annual report to Congress on China's military last Wednesday, the Pentagon warned that hacking attacks from China could one day be used for overt military means, rather than just trying to access data.

Last week, footage emerged online of a brief clip on Chinese state television of purported cyber hacking attacks launched by the country's military, despite long-standing official denials that the government engages in such activity.

Google, the world's largest search engine, partially pulled out of China last year after concerns of censorship and a serious hacking episode.

Google, who said the attacks originated from China, was one of the dozens of high profile companies targeted in an ultra-sophisticated cyberattack named "Operation Aurora" that took place in the second half of 2009. Yahoo, Adobe and Dow Chemical were also reportedly among the targets.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77S38W20110829





Software Tracking Could Turn Chinese Piracy Into Revenue

Enterprise software makers have a better chance of fighting piracy in China, according to experts
Michael Kan

China has long been a major hotspot for software piracy. Efforts to track unlicensed software use, however, are giving companies a chance to find the offenders and turn them into customers. Or in some cases, targets for lawsuits.

V.i. Labs, a U.S. firm, helps makers of engineering and design software track the unlicensed use of their products. Pirated software from 12 V.i. Labs clients had a market value of US$1.2 billion in June 2011, half of it in China, said Vic DeMarines, vice president of products for the company.

"China has been a big issue," DeMarines said. "A lot of companies have written piracy off in China because they don't think you can do anything about it."

While the Chinese government is working toward eliminating piracy in the country, weak penalties and a lack of enforcement have led to a high usage of unlicensed software products, according to experts. In 2010, the market value of pirated software in China totalled US$7.7 billion, putting the country second behind the U.S., according to estimates from the Business Software Alliance.

In spite of the challenges, enterprise software makers are better positioned to turn some of those pirated copies into sales, DeMarines said. This is because their products are generally used by larger companies, which are easier to track and can afford to purchase licensed copies of the software.

"We think that's a better way to reduce piracy overall," DeMarines said "You need to target the organizations that should have the ability to pay license versus going after individual users or the people who crack the software."

Even if vendors add security to their products, software pirates need only 30 to 90 days to make unlicensed copies available over the Internet, DeMarines said.

V.i. Labs offers code its clients can integrate with their apps to track usage. Forty of them use V.i. Labs code to track when an installed application shows signs its a pirated copy. The data collected makes a record of what organizations in China are using unlicensed copies across how many different PCs. In Beijing alone, the company has found more than 5,000 different computers using unlicensed CAD software.

Clients have then used the data to reach out to the potential customers, who might not be aware they are using unlicensed software, DeMarines said. In China, most of the pirated software V.i. Labs finds is being used by manufacturers, design companies and universities.

V.i. Labs reports its clients recovering from 10 to 25 percent additional annual license revenue because of the data provided. In China, the most successful cases involve clients targeting firms that have a presence in the U.S. or are already active customers.

But offenders are not willing to pay in all cases, forcing some companies to take legal action.

Xiang Wang is a lawyer with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which has been involved with more than a hundred intellectual property rights lawsuits in China. "We try to find the big fish, the companies that can pay or have enough cash to buy the software," he said. Software tracking helps pinpoint offenders. But finding the additional evidence is more challenging, he said.

In contrast with the U.S., Chinese law has no discovery process, meaning the burden of finding evidence falls largely on the plaintiff. Chinese courts will also not admit evidence obtained from private investigators, Wang said.

Instead, his law firm works by sending private investigators to go undercover and infiltrate companies that are allegedly using unlicensed software. The investigators will then supply whatever information they find to Chinese government regulators, which have the authority to conduct investigative raids. If a raid is conducted against a company, whatever evidence found is then admissible in Chinese courts, Wang said.

But even if a case is won, the penalties are still low for offenders, sometimes only at US$10,000, Wang said. "We have done over 100 cases, but the government has never been willing to shut down a factory because of piracy," he said. "The government still wants to keep people employed."

Given the difficulties with China's legal system, more companies are trying to take their piracy related lawsuits to the U.S., Wang said. A recent case occurred when U.S. based AWR, an electronic design automation software company, filed a lawsuit in California against Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier ZTE and its U.S. subsidiary.

The lawsuit alleged ZTE had used AWR's software with unauthorized key codes. For evidence, AWR relied on usage records obtained through a "phone home" feature in the software that linked it with AWR's servers via the Internet.

In June, AWR won a partial summary judgement from the court that held ZTE liable for breaching the license agreements of the software. The two parties have recently settled the case, but the terms of it are confidential, said AWR executive vice president Ted Miracco.

ZTE did not respond for comment.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...piracy-revenue





Hackers May Have Stolen Over 200 SSL Certificates

Source say DigiNotar breach generated fraudulent certs for Mozilla, Yahoo and Tor, not just Google
Gregg Keizer

Hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project, a security researcher reported today.

The count is considerably higher than DigiNotar has acknowledged. Earlier this week, a company spokesman said that "several dozen" certificates had been acquired by the attackers.

"About 200 certificates were generated by the attackers," said Hans Van de Looy, principal security consultant and founder of Madison Gurka, a Dutch security company, citing a source he said wished to remain confidential.

Among the certificates acquired by the attackers in a mid-July hack of DigiNotar, Van de Looy's source said, were ones valid for mozilla.com, yahoo.com and torproject.org.

Tor is a system that lets people connect to the Web anonymously, and is often used in countries where governments monitor their citizens' online activities.

Mozilla confirmed that a certificate for its add-on site had been obtained by the DigiNotar attackers. "DigiNotar informed us that they issued fraudulent certs for addons.mozilla.org in July, and revoked them within a few days of issue," said Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, in a statement today.

Looy's number is similar to the tally of certificates that Google has blacklisted in Chrome.

An entry in the Chromium bug-tracking database lists 247 certificates that the project blacklisted yesterday. Chromium is the open-source project that feeds code to the Chrome browser and Chrome OS.

"Were these all issued by DigiNotar? It is difficult to tell," said Chet Wisniewski, a security researcher with U.K.-based Sophos, in a blog post Tuesday. "However, considering only 10 were blocked previously, this is a strong indication that these additional blacklisted certificates were most likely part of this incident."

DigiNotar, a Dutch firm that was acquired by U.S.-based Vasco earlier this year, discovered the network breach on July 19, and has confirmed intruders issued themselves valid certificates for a number of domains.

The company claimed that it had revoked all the fraudulent certificates, but then realized it had overlooked one that could be used to impersonate any Google service, including Gmail. DigiNotar went public with its mea culpa only after users reported their findings to Google last week.

Security researchers now wonder what else DigiNotar hasn't told users.

"They say they found all but the [certificate for] google.com," said Wisniewski in an interview Tuesday. "But what other sites were we at risk from visiting earlier? Were those other certificates for Microsoft or Yahoo or PayPal? How come they're not saying?"

Wisniewski was concerned because of the timeline that DigiNotar laid out.

DigiNotar essentially admitted that it was unaware of the hack for over a week: The Google certificate was issued July 10, according to information posted to Pastebin.com last Saturday, nine days before DigiNotar said it became aware of the attack.

"For nine days they didn't know about it," said Wisniewski. "Then how long did it take them to revoke those they knew about?"

Wisniewski said DigiNotar had revoked multiple certificates on July 19, July 26 and Aug. 16, all dates that were prior to the Dutch firm acknowledging the attack.

"We should be very concerned about this. When this kind of thing happens, the sweeping under the rug is almost an abuse of the entire system of trust," said Wisniewski, referring to the SSL (secure socket layer) certificate model.

Roel Schouwenberg, a senior malware researcher at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, also took DigiNotar to the woodshed.

"According to DigiNotar, they're not able to track which rogue certificates were generated," said Schouwenberg in a Wednesday blog. "So more of these rogue certificates may be out there. How is this possible? Either DigiNotar performs no logging of the certificates they create or their logs got cleaned out during the attack."

Like Wisniewski, Schouwenberg also criticized DigiNotar's response. "It seems that DigiNotar has not realized certificate authorities need to sell trust above anything else," Schouwenberg said.

Schouwenberg repeated his earlier assertion that the DigiNotar hack was most likely the work of a government, either directly or through proxies it hired or supported.

"Assuming these domains [Mozilla's, Yahoo's and the Tor Project's] were indeed targeted, the most plausible explanation is that a specific government is behind this attack," Schouwenberg argued.

In that scenario, a government -- perhaps Iran's -- would use the bogus certificates to deceive users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly intercepted.

On Monday, Google pointed a finger at Iran, saying that attacks using the ill-gotten google.com certificate had primarily targeted Iranian users.

Some browser makers have reacted quickly to block the use of all DigiNotar certificates.

Late Tuesday, Mozilla shipped updates for Firefox 6 and Firefox 3.6 that added DigiNotar's root certificate to those browsers' blacklists. Google has updated Chrome 13 and Chrome 14 -- the latter currently in beta testing -- to do the same.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has nuked all DigiNotar certificates by adding the Dutch company's root to its list of banned certificates in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2.

Users running Windows XP or Server 2003, however, remain at risk: Microsoft said it would address those editions with a "future update" but did not set a timetable.

"There is a whole list of fail here," said Wisniewski about the hack and DigiNotar's response. "A [certificate authority's] obligation is to step up and disclose problems like this, or trust just goes out the window."

Van de Looy hoped that DigiNotar would eventually come clean.

"Currently, investigators of [the] renowned company Fox-IT are investigating the servers of DigiNotar and their report will hopefully reveal additional information on the how, when and what of this significant event," said Van de Looy.

DigiNotar has retained Fox-IT, a Dutch digital forensics firm, to audit its systems and investigate the July hack.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...L_certificates





Pakistan to Ban Encryption Software

Internet service providers will be required to inform authorities if customers use virtual private networks in government crackdown
Josh Halliday and Saeed Shah

Internet users in Pakistan will no longer be able to access the web through virtual private networks following the government ban. Photograph: M. Sajjad/AP

Millions of internet users in Pakistan will be unable to send emails and messages without fear of government snooping after authorities banned the use of encryption software.

A legal notice sent to all internet providers (ISPs) by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, seen by the Guardian, orders the ISPs to inform authorities if any of their customers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to browse the web.

Virtual private networks allow internet users to connect to the web undetected, meaning that they can access banned websites and send emails without fear of government interception.

Pakistan's 20 million internet users have previously been banned from popular social networks, such as Facebook, because of blasphemous material about the prophet Muhammad. All internet traffic in the country travels through the Pakistan Internet Exchange, which can be intercepted by the military and civil intelligence agencies. The move echoes a crackdown against encrypted communications across the border in India and in China.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority legal notice urged ISPs to report customers using "all such mechanisms including EVPNs [encrypted virtual private networks] which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring". Anyone needing to use this technology needs to apply for special permission, the notice said.

Authorities in Islamabad insisted that the ban on VPN access was intended to stem communications by terrorists.

However, banks, call centres and many other businesses use encrypted connections to communicate with their branches and customers, to protect sensitive data such as account numbers and passwords.

"This is like banning cars because suicide bombers use them," said Shakir Husain, chief executive of Creative Chaos, a Karachi-based software company. "You have to find out who these guys [extremists] are. This is a blanket, knee-jerk, response."

There is strict regulation of internet traffic in Pakistan. Last year, the authorities banned the entire Facebook website for months after a user launched a contest to draw a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. Accessing the internet on BlackBerry smartphones is problematic, because of the device's high-security encryption software.

Recently the regulator made it impossible for Pakistanis to access the website of Rolling Stone magazine, after it published an article on the high proportion of the national budget in Pakistan that goes on its military.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...ption-software





Anonymous Roars Back With 3GB Leak of Texas Police Chief Emails: "That stupid bitch got what she deserved"
Sam Biddle

Anonymous, after a relatively large period of doing nothing, are back with a vengeance. Even without their (arrested) de facto leader Topiary, they've punched Texan law enforcement squarely in their gut: a giant email leak, internal documents, addresses. Anon's back.

Anon explains the motives for the attack thusly:

We are doing this in solidarity with the "Anonymous 16" PayPal LOIC defendants, accused LulzSec member Jake Davis "Topiary", protesters arrested during #OpBart actions, Bradley Manning, Stephen Watt, and other hackers and leakers worldwide.

But really, it's Topiary's arrest more than anything. That cut of the hydra counted for more than one head, and they've been hurting (and quiet) ever since. Or at least that's how it's seemed. Now, Anon says they've been spending the time dormant in Texan police servers, preparing for this moment—a huge data dump and a site defacement.

Unsurprisingly, there's some damaging stuff in there—beyond the fact that this was all supposed to be private law enforcement dialogue.

Exhibit A, an email from Robert Wieners Chief of Police, Friendswood, Texas Police Department. Subject line? "Stupid Bitch":

That stupid bitch who started that stolen car chase at Yale and 610 got what she deserved (I'll bet she was fat and black too). Same with that pervert that got shot by the county. Fuck that guy, see ya. That all sounds like good police work to me. Those folks got the criminal cure. It's guaranteed, they will never commit a crime again.

Literally, the first email in the leak is racist.

Exhibit B, this bigoted chain message regarding "Muslim inbreeding." Yeah.

Subject: 1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims
Attachments:
View As Web Page
GUYS,
I DO BELIEVE THAT THIS GUY IS ONTO SOMETHING!!

JESS

Subj: 1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims

Read the article and make up your own mind. JHB
Hi everyone, this very interesting one came in tonight maybe it explains some of why the radical Muslims act so unreasonably brutal. Are the fact true? Don't know but if it is true that they have as a common practice of marrying first cousins, all kinds of problems can erupt. OK, I looked at all my "hoax sites" but couldn't find anything. But, just typing "1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims" on Google results in a large number of articles discussing this topic. Is Bryan Fischer for real? Yep, See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Fischer and other sites about him.
Doc <°)))><

Anyway, here's the article that came in:

I admit that I have not studied the Koran or Quroan or whatever it is, nor do I intend to !! I was subjected to enough of of their total nonsense as only a casual observer in their part of the world :( .... I only forward this for your reading pleasure and to add to our understanding of the Muslim world. Sharing my opinion that they need to stay in their own sandbox instead of trying to inflict their insane beliefs and religion upon civilized people. (Shucks, now they will call me an infidel)
..... JD

Other questionable content includes the use of homophobic language, and this request for the Texan chiefs to investigate an officer's affair with a married woman. Tax dollars at work:

From: Doug Lauersdorf Sent: Thu 9/16/2010 10:06 AM
To: Bob Wieners; Luke Loeser
Cc:
Subject: Complainant
Attachments:
View As Web Page

Chiefs:

I conducted a preliminary inquiry into information received from Detective Price who received a call from Mr. Clements wanting us to know that one of our officers on midnight shift was having an affair with his wife. He also complained that the officer had run his criminal history. I asked KC to contact DPS to research their database to ascertain any person(s) that had ran his information to obtain information from any of the following: CCH, TDL, NCIC, TCIC, SETCIC, etc. The search revealed that the only person with the Friendswood Police Department that had run him was Elaine who had ran the information at KC’s direction at my request. This matter is mute until the time comes when he initiates the complaint process and provides us with the officer’s name.

Sergeant Douglas E. Lauersdorf

The dump is enormous, and contains multitudes. And it makes me feel like it's Summer again—Anonymous looks as zesty and unafraid as they were before the cops neutered their leadership. Now it's #chingalamigra and #antisec all over again.
http://gizmodo.com/5836741





Lost iPhone 5 Update: Police 'Assisted' Apple Investigators in Search of SF Man's Home
Peter Jamison

The bizarre saga involving a lost prototype of the iPhone 5 has taken another interesting turn. Contradicting past statements that no records exist of police involvement in the search for the lost prototype, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and Calderón denies that he ever possessed it.

In an interview with SF Weekly last night, Calderón told us that six badge-wearing visitors came to his home in July to inquire about the phone. Calderón said none of them acknowledged being employed by Apple, and one of them offered him $300, and a promise that the owner of the phone would not press charges, if he would return the device.

The visitors also allegedly threatened him and his family, asking questions about their immigration status. "One of the officers is like, 'Is everyone in this house an American citizen?' They said we were all going to get into trouble," Calderón said.

One of the officers left a phone number with him, which SF Weekly traced to Anthony Colon, an investigator employed at Apple, who declined to comment when we reached him.

Reached this afternoon, Calderón confirmed that only two of the six people who came to his home actually entered the house. He said those two did not specifically state they were police officers.

However, he said he was under the impression that they were all police, since they were part of the group outside that identified themselves as SFPD officials. The two who entered the house did not disclose that they were private security officers, according to Calderón.

"When they came to my house, they said they were SFPD," Calderón said. "I thought they were SFPD. That's why I let them in." He said he would not have permitted the search if he had been aware the two people conducting it were not actually police officers.

It remains unclear whether these actions might constitute impersonation of a police officer, which in California is a misdemeanor that can bring up to a year of jail time. Apple has not responded to our requests for comment. "I don't have any indication of that. I'm not going to go there," Dangerfield said, when asked about whether the Apple detectives might have misrepresented themselves.

Dangerfield said he plans to contact Calderón to ask further questions about the incident.

At the least, the incident is sure to raise questions about the propriety of multiple SFPD officers helping private detectives conduct a search -- which was never properly recorded, per standard police operating procedure -- of somebody's home. "Apple came to us saying that they were looking for a lost item, and some plainclothes officers responded out to the house with them," Dangerfield said. "My understanding is that they stood outside." He added, "They just assisted Apple to the address."

Dangerfield said he was not aware of whether it was a San Francisco police officer or one of the Apple security officers who first knocked on Calderón's door. "Anyone has a right to keep people from their homes if they don't want them there, legally," Dangerfield said.

It is also unclear why records of SFPD officers' involvement did not emerge until now. Yesterday SFPD spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said that "we don't have any record of such an investigation going on at this point." The tech-news site CNET first reported on the lost phone prototype earlier this week.
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/...ple_police.php





This USB 3.0 Flash Drive Has 2 TB of Storage
Kevin Parrish

Taiwan's ITRI and Transcend has teamed up to create a USB 3.0 thumb stick featuring 2 TB of storage.

During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information.

So far neither company has released anything official in regards to specs or a simple introduction, nor does the high-capacity USB 3.0 stick appear on Display Taiwan's website. But as seen in the video below, the "Thin Card" thumb drive is even smaller than a thumb, measuring slightly thicker than a penny. It offers a minimum of 16 GB and a maximum of 2 TB.

According to the rep, the USB stick hasn't become available thus far because an international standard for USB 3.0 has yet to be set. That said, ITRI and Transcend won't push the tech onto the market until USB gives the international green light on v3.0.

The ITRI, or Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, is a national research organization with a mission of "conducting technological research, promoting industrial development, creating economic value and improving social welfare for Taiwan." That said, the drive is expected to arrive in Taiwan first, and then other territories shortly thereafter.

So how much will a 2 TB USB 3.0 thumb drive cost?
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ITR...ard,13320.html





At Last, a Label Goes Digital
Ben Sisario

For years Dan Storper would get an occasional phone call from an executive at iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store, asking the same question every time: “Have you changed your mind yet?”

The calls were about Mr. Storper’s record label, Putumayo World Music, which has developed a multimillion-dollar franchise around the idea of making the sounds of distant corners of the planet accessible to everyday Western shoppers. World music releases often end up as a particularly low-selling species of esoterica, but Putumayo’s colorfully decorated, novice-level compilations, like “Acoustic Brazil” and “French Café,” have sold 27 million copies around the world.

The label’s CDs are sold in record stores, as well as through a network of thousands of clothing boutiques, museum gift shops and Whole Foods markets. Until now, however, Putumayo has been behind the commercial curve in one important aspect: as one of the last holdouts on digital music, it has made none of its albums available as downloads. That will finally change on Tuesday, when the label releases its first two digital albums, “African Beat” and “Latin Beat.”

The digital revolution has been a struggle for plenty of record companies, but for Mr. Storper, Putumayo’s co-founder and chief executive, deciding to take that plunge was as much a personal matter as a professional one.

“I’ve built a business focused on creating compelling physical packages that combine music, culture and travel, that make great gifts and that sound very good,” he said. “I’m 60 years old. I still don’t own an iPod or iPad. I like reading physical books, magazines and newspapers, and buying CDs that have interesting liner notes. I’m certainly not an early adopter.”

The physicality of Putumayo’s products has been central to its success. Each album has a cover designed in the same folk-art-inspired style, along with detailed yet non-egghead liner notes sometimes spiced with local recipes. The label supplies retail stores with branded display cases for its CDs, which are drawn from material released by record companies around the world. And while world-music purists have never quite accepted Putumayo, its albums have proved reliable impulse buys for millions of curious shoppers.

“The world of music is an ocean,” said Mr. Storper, who has a shaggy tuft of white hair and no shortage of stories about traversing the globe for music and crafts. “Part of what we do is curate, and try to find songs that are universal.”

Putumayo had its beginnings in 1975, when Mr. Storper, a freshly minted Latin American studies graduate, opened a handicrafts shop in Manhattan that grew into a clothing line supplying hundreds of boutiques. (The store became so popular that it was even featured in a “Seinfeld” episode.) In 1993 he started the label, teaming up with Rhino Records for its first releases. Rhino distributed the albums to record stores, and Mr. Storper worked his specialty shop connections, eventually building that side of his business into an alternative distribution network that is the envy of the music industry, said Richard Foos, a founder of Rhino who is now with the reissue label Shout! Factory.

“Our feeling at Rhino was that we could sell 10 times the amount of product if we could really get in front of the consumer at record stores,” Mr. Foos said. “Dan did the exact opposite in that he found everywhere to sell his product.”

By the mid-2000s, Mr. Storper’s employees were urging him to go digital, but he resisted. He had a good thing going at brick-and-mortar retail and had never been at the forefront of technology anyway. (“I was one of the last people to get out of cassettes,” he said.) In recent years, though, as thousands of record stores have shut down, and retailers of all kinds have been hit by the recession, a transition to digital sales has seemed inevitable.

There was a hurdle: licensing. Most record companies, afraid of cannibalizing their own sales, have been willing to license songs for Putumayo’s digital compilations only if they were sold as part of a complete album, not as individual tracks; meanwhile, Mr. Storper said, iTunes usually requires that at least 85 percent of the tracks on an album be available for individual download. Lately some labels have become more lenient about licensing, Mr. Storper added, but it still took months to clear the tracks for “African Beat” and “Latin Beat.”

Putumayo still faces challenges of its own in going digital. How will a label used to browser-friendly physical packages at retail shops adapt to a market of ones and zeroes, where there are fewer opportunities for the last-minute impulse buy at the register? Scott Ambrose Reilly, a former Amazon executive now with the X5 Music Group, which has sold some 150 million tracks through digital compilations, said that many of the traditional marketing rules for compilations do not apply online. A cover, for example, must immediately convey the concept behind an album, and in a block of pixels no bigger than a postage stamp.

“You don’t have the luxury of people picking it up and looking at it for even 15 seconds,” Mr. Reilly said. “You have 2 or 3.”

If “African Beat” and “Latin Beat” are any indication, Putumayo has already learned that lesson. Unlike the covers on older albums, which usually feature multiple human figures and an appropriate location, these simply show stylized close-ups of instruments. The digital versions of these and future albums will contain only the songs; for the full liner notes and other goodies, a customer will have to buy the CD versions.

The list of artists and labels still holding out on digital is getting shorter all the time. Putumayo did not make it online before the Beatles, whose music went on sale at iTunes late last year. But it did beat Aerosmith, whose classic 1970s and ’80s albums will be available on iTunes for the first time next week.

“I think it will be written on my tombstone,” Mr. Storper said. “Better late than never.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/a...al-albums.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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