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Old 14-09-11, 07:16 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 17th, '11

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"This is a dreadful day. Over all, policymakers are schizophrenic, speaking a language of change and innovation, but then respond to lobbying by extending the right, which gave rise to the problem in the first place. This only entrenches a cynical attitude toward copyright law and brings it into further disrepute." – Martin Kretschmer


"Mr Hunt also committed to seeking evidence before making copyright policy. We have today filed an FOI request asking for the evidence he has collected: we are willing to bet that he has not commissioned anything, and yet again, these are unbalanced, lobby-driven proposals." – Jim Killock


"To summarize the staggering chutzpah involved in this case: Stone asked the Court to authorize sending subpoenas to the ISPs. The Court said 'not yet.' Stone sent the subpoenas anyway. The Court rarely has encountered a more textbook example of conduct deserving of sanctions." – Judge Godbey


"Living here allows me to be more of a normal person. I can be outdoors. I don't have to stay hidden in a Faraday Cage." – Diane Schou


"I hate to point out the obvious, but not taking nude photos on your phone is your first line of defense. Remember Polaroids?" – Beth Jones



































September 17th, 2011




German ISP Not Required to Block Piracy Sites
James Delahunty

German ISP not required to block piracy sites German court rules against EMI in case involving Russia-Hosted eD2K website.
The Cologne court heard a case brought against Internet Service Provider (ISP) HeaseNet by the EMI record company. EMI said a HeaseNet customer was using HeaseNet's network to access a Russian-hosted file-sharing website that offered eDonkey links to files.

Since the customer was using HeaseNet's network to access the website, EMI argued that HeaseNet was contributing / aiding the copyright infringing activities taking place. EMI wanted access to the file sharing site blocked by HeaseNet, arguing that failure to comply with the demand made the ISP party to the lawsuit.

The Cologne District Court 28th Civil Division found no legal basis for forcing an ISP to control the data communications of their customers, saying that the, "defendant is not committed to such precautionary measures."

Using litigation to force ISPs to block access to websites that offer pirated content (or link to somewhere else it can be found) is the latest trend for the industry as it battles Internet piracy, and is bringing up serious questions about censorship (and who decides when its necessary) and the privacy rights of Internet users.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/articl...k_piracy_sites





UK Pressing Google to Block P2P Sites
David Jamieson

The culture secretary wants a new front in the war on online copyright infringement with the help of Google

The government is set to press Google to start pulling its weight in the fight against online piracy this week.

The call for more to be done will come in a speech from secretary of state for culture, media and sport Jeremy Hunt in Cambridge tomorrow, reports the Financial Times.

Hunt is expected to tell the Royal Television Society that search engines, advertisers and credit card companies should go further to “make life more difficult” for online pirates.

According to reports, if a court deems a site to be unlawful the government wants search engines to push it down the rankings to stifle traffic and at the same time cut off advertising or payment revenues to make the site economically unviable.

In the absence of an industry-led solution the government is apparently prepared to use the upcoming Communications Bill to legislate on the issue. The government has previously demanded that ISPs cut off pirate sites and users who infringe copyright, but this has been challenged in court by BT and TalkTalk – and ISPs have proposed an independent watchdog with the power to blacklist sites.

Equal rights

Hunt will reportedly say that online businesses deserve the same legal protection and rights as offline, physical ones.

“We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online,” the Financial Times expects him to say.

“The government has no business protecting old models or helping industries that have failed to move with the times. But those new models will never be able to prosper if they have to compete with free alternatives based on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.”

The government has promised to table the new Communications Bill this parliament.

Pressuring search engines rather than ISPs over copyrighted content is a new approach for the government and opens up another front in the war against illegal content.

In July, Hollywood finally won a protracted legal bid to compel BT to block access to file-sharing site Newzbin which linked to copyright content around the Internet.

The ruling prompted fears from digital rights activists over the precedent set for other Internet service providers, potentially paving the way for further website blocking.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Google claims it already deals with requests from copyright holders within four hours.

In the US, the Departmebnt of Justice has fined Google £300 million for displaying adverts from Canadian online pharmacies, for products which it is illegal to sell in the US. Investors have sued the search giant over the incident.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/go...opyright-39495





Hunt: Online File-Sharing is a 'Direct Assault on Freedoms'

'It's privatisation of justice' howls Killock
OUT-LAW.COM

Search engines and internet service providers (ISPs) could be forced to make it harder for users to access copyright infringing content online under new UK communications laws, the Culture Secretary has said.

Jeremy Hunt said that the UK needed to "explore all options" that would make it more difficult for websites that "ignore the law". He called online file-sharing "theft" that was "a direct assault on the freedoms and rights of creators of content to be rewarded fairly".

Hunt told an audience at the Royal Television Festival (RTF) in Cambridge that the UK might ask search engines and ISPs to play more of a part in tackling online copyright infringement.

"We need to explore all options to make life more difficult for sites that ignore the law," Hunt said in his speech.

"I believe these could include a responsibility on search engines and ISPs to take reasonable steps to make it harder to access sites that a court has deemed contain unlawful content or promote unlawful distribution of content," Hunt said.

Hunt also said that a "cross-industry body" could be established and "charged with identifying infringing websites against which action could be taken".

A "streamlined legal process" could also be set up to help courts "act quickly", whilst responsibility could be placed on advertisers and credit card companies to remove adverts and services from copyright infringing sites, Hunt said.

Voluntary agreements could be set up to help provide solutions to online copyright infringement, but if they cannot be established the Government will propose new measures under law, Hunt said.

Earlier this year, Hunt announced that the government would conduct a review of UK communications laws. In May the government opened a consultation on new communications laws and sought feedback from media and communications businesses, including telephone providers, TV, radio and online publishers.

Evidence gathered from the consultation, which has now closed, would be used to inform proposals for a Communications Bill that could lead to a raft of new communications regulations coming into effect in 2015, Hunt said at the time.

In his RTF speech Hunt said that it was "fundamental" that freedoms and the law should "apply equally" online as they do "in the physical world".

"We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products," Hunt said in his speech. "Likewise we should be entitled to make it more difficult to access sites that are dedicated to the infringement of copyright. Sites that are misleading customers and denying creators fair reward for their work."

Free speech lobbyists labeled Hunt's plans "very dangerous".

"Jeremy Hunt is pushing new knee-jerk measures to pressurise private bodies into making decisions about who is breaking the law. That amounts to privatisation of justice, which is very dangerous," Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group said.

"Mr Hunt also committed to seeking evidence before making copyright policy. We have today filed an FOI request asking for the evidence he has collected: we are willing to bet that he has not commissioned anything, and yet again, these are unbalanced, lobby-driven proposals," Killock said.

Under UK copyright laws it is currently possible to force ISPs to block access to copyright-infringing material.

In July the Motion Picture Association (MPA) won a landmark High Court ruling against the UK's biggest internet service provider (ISP) BT in which it successfully argued that BT should block its customers' access to a website that provides links to pirated films.

The High Court made its ruling under section 97A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act. That section gives UK courts the power to grant an injunction against an ISP if it had "actual knowledge" that someone had used its service to infringe copyright.

The Act does not specify what purpose an injunction must serve. Section 97A implements the requirements of the EU Copyright Directive which states that countries must ensure that copyright holders have the right to apply for injunctions against intermediaries, such as ISPs, whose services are used to infringe copyright.

The Court's order was the first to force an ISP to block access to such a site under UK copyright laws.

An option to introduce additional new website blocking regulations under the Digital Economy Act (DEA) were shelved in August, although further regulations under the DEA that could allow copyright owners to obtain the details of illegal file-sharers from ISPs are expected to be introduced shortly.

The Culture Secretary also called for improved measures for tackling offensive online content, and said that the new communications laws could force ISPs to "ensure all their customers make an active choice about parental controls, either at the point of purchase or the point of account activation".

In his speech Hunt also said that the UK needs a new "platform-neutral" framework to protect media plurality.

"In an age when consumers are moving freely from platform to platform we should not be restricting media operators from developing products that can follow their customers from TV to internet to smartphone to tablet," Hunt said.

"But by the same merit we should measure their influence based on a sensible aggregation of consumer contact through those different types of media," he said.

Hunt said he had asked Ofcom, the UK's media regulator, to submit evidence to the Leveson Inquiry on "whether or not it is practical or advisable to set absolute limits on news market share; whether they believe a framework for measuring levels of plurality could or should include websites and if so which ones; and whether or how it should include the BBC".

An Ofcom spokesperson told Out-Law.com earlier this week that it had been asked to submit evidence as part of the ongoing inquiry and that it "welcomes the opportunity to assist" in doing so.

The Leveson Inquiry was announced earlier this summer and primarily focuses on the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The Inquiry team, led by Lord Justice Leveson, is also responsible for making recommendations "for a more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports ... the plurality of the media, and its independence" as well as advise on "how future concerns about ... cross-media ownership should be dealt with".

Hunt said that "independent regulators" should be able to launch investigations into media plurality if, and "propose remedies" to protect it, if its in the public interest even when companies are not in the process of discussing mergers or takeovers.

"A country’s character, the unique bonds that define its society and its democratic institutions are all shaped by its media," Hunt said in his speech. "So we need to take special care to ensure we have vibrant, free – even raucous – debate. We need to ensure that there is the opportunity for multiple voices. And we must take care that power is never over-concentrated in a few hands," he said.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09..._infringement/





Iran Blocks Tor; Tor Releases Same-Day Fix
arma

The short version: Tor relays and bridges should upgrade to Tor 0.2.2.33 or Tor 0.2.3.4-alpha so users in Iran can reach them again.

Yesterday morning (in our timezones — that evening, in Iran), Iran added a filter rule to their border routers that recognized Tor traffic and blocked it. Thanks to help from a variety of friends around the world, we quickly discovered how they were blocking it and released a new version of Tor that isn't blocked. Fortunately, the fix is on the relay side: that means once enough relays and bridges upgrade, the many tens of thousands of Tor users in Iran will resume being able to reach the Tor network, without needing to change their software.

How did the filter work technically? Tor tries to make its traffic look like a web browser talking to an https web server, but if you look carefully enough you can tell some differences. In this case, the characteristic of Tor's SSL handshake they looked at was the expiry time for our SSL session certificates: we rotate the session certificates every two hours, whereas normal SSL certificates you get from a certificate authority typically last a year or more. The fix was to simply write a larger expiration time on the certificates, so our certs have more plausible expiry times.

There are plenty of interesting discussion points from the research angle around how this arms race should be played. We're working on medium term and longer term solutions, but in the short term, there are other ways to filter Tor traffic like the one Iran used. Should we fix them all preemptively, meaning the next time they block us it will be through some more complex mechanism that's harder to figure out? Or should we leave things as they are, knowing there will be more blocking events but also knowing that we can solve them easily? Given that their last blocking attempt was in January 2011, I think it's smartest to collect some more data points first.

It's too early to have cool graphs showing a drop in users and then the users coming back a day or so later. I'll plan to add these graphs once things play out more.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ira...s-same-day-fix





Hotfile Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Fraud and Abuse
Ernesto

The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.

Earlier this year five major Hollywood movie studios sued the popular file-hosting service Hotfile for several copyright-related offenses. The case is ongoing and two weeks ago the MPAA studios scored a victory when Hotfile was ordered to share detailed information on the site’s users and affiliates.

Hotfile, on the other hand, is fighting back hard as expected. Yesterday the company filed a counterclaim accusing movie studio Warner Bros. of fraud and abuse. According to the complaint, Warner systematically misused the anti-piracy takedown tool (SRA) Hotfile had built for them.

Hotfile alleges that Warner has willingly taken down files without holding the copyrights, game demos and even open source software. The false takedowns continued even after the movie studio was repeatedly notified about the false claims.

“Not only has Warner (along with four other major motion picture studios) filed this unfounded and contrived litigation against Hotfile employing overly aggressive tactics, Warner has made repeated, reckless and irresponsible misrepresentations to Hotfile falsely claiming to own copyrights in material from Hotfile.com.”

“Worse, Warner continued to make these misrepresentations even after Hotfile explicitly brought this rampant abuse to Warner’s attention, ruling out any possibility that its wrongful actions were accidental or unknowing,” Hotfile writes in its complaint.

Hotfile explains that Warner’s Special Rightsholder Account (SRA) is assigned to Michael Bentkover, Manager of Anti-Piracy Internet Operations at the movie studio. Hotfile developed this tool to allow rightsholders to remove an unlimited number of files, as long as they hold the rights to them.

“Every time Warner used the SRA tool it expressly certified ‘under penalty of perjury that [it is] the owner or an authorized legal representative of the owner of copyrights’ and it ‘has a good faith belief’ that use of this material is not authorized by the copyright owner,” the complaint explains.

However, Warner also took down files that they didn’t own the rights to, and for many of these they never verified their nature by actually downloading the contents. This, while Warner specifically certified “under penalty of perjury” that it was the rightful owner. In part, these errors seem to originate from an automatic script Warner used to find infringing content.

For example, while claiming to remove files that are copies of the movie The Box, Warner removed several files related to the alternative cancer treatment book “Cancer: Out Of The Box,” by Ty M. Bollinger. Another title deleted by Warner was “The Box that Saved Britain,” a production of the BBC, not Warner.

Hotfile claims that hundreds of files were taken down wrongfully, including open source software.

“The single file deleted by Warner that had been most frequently downloaded by Hotfile users—five times more frequently than any other file—was a freeware software title wrongfully deleted by Warner. The software publisher that uploaded the file used Hotfile.com as a means for distribution of its open source software. Warner was not authorized by the software publisher to delete the file,” the complaint reads.

Hotfile has repeatedly notified Warner about this issues, but instead of improving the takedown system the number of fraudulent takedowns only increased.

Hotfile suspects that the overbroad takedowns were not only an attempt to prevent copyright infringement, but also a scheme to make profits. Warner proposed to Hotfile an affiliate deal where content that was taken down would be replaced with links to movie stores where users could buy Warner movies. More takedowns thus means more potential revenue.

“Warner had an economic motive to make these misrepresentations. As noted above, in early 2010, Warner proposed a business arrangement with Hotfile whereby Warner sought to present ecommerce links to Hotfile users who might purchase a Warner file for Warner’s profit in place of links that Warner had deleted using its SRA.”

“By increasing the number of links it was taking down with Hotfile’s SRA, and indeed falsely inflating these numbers, Warner was increasing the number of times it could present ecommerce links to Hotfile’s users for its own enrichment,” Hotfile argues in the complaint.

Summing up, Hotfile accuses Warner on three counts. Violation of the DMCA, intentional interference with a contractual or business relationship and negligence.

To get to the bottom of the issues Hotfile demands a jury trial, and asks the court to compensate the company for the losses they’ve suffered, including loss of accounts and goodwill. In addition, Hotfile seeks a permanent injunction requiring Warner to individually review all the files they take down.

Definitely a case that will be worth following.
https://torrentfreak.com/hotfile-sue...-abuse-110913/





Sanctioned: P2P Lawyer Fined $10,000 for "Staggering Chutzpah"
Nate Anderson

A federal judge has fined Texas lawyer Evan Stone $10,000 for sending out subpoenas and then settlement letters to people accused of sharing a German porn film called Der Gute Onkel—all without the judge's permission.

In September 2010, Stone brought suit on behalf of Mick Haig Productions against 670 accused file-swappers, and he asked permission to take early discovery. Judge David Godbey said no; instead, Godbey brought in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen to represent the interests of the Does, since none of them had yet been named and therefore had no counsel to speak for them. EFF and Public Citizen lawyers soon began hearing from people who said that Verizon had turned over their information to Stone, information generally obtainable only by subpoena.

The lawyers asked Judge Godbey to find out what was going on, and to sanction Stone if he had in fact issued subpoenas without the court's permission. Turns out that he had—at least four times. Godbey ruled yesterday that Stone "grossly abused his subpoena power," obtained subscriber names he was not entitled to learn, and then, "almost unbelievably, Stone used the information he received to contact an unknown number of potential Does, presumably in the form of demand letters and settlement offers."

This wasn't even the first time Stone had run into subpoena problems. In a separate Texas lawsuit over anime, Stone sent a subpoena more than a month after the judge in that case withdrew permission to do so; even more shockingly, "Stone issued the subpoena on the same day that he voluntarily dismissed the underlying case," according to Godbey.

The judge's anger at Stone burns clearly throughout his order, especially when he sums up the entire situation:

To summarize the staggering chutzpah involved in this case: Stone asked the Court to authorize sending subpoenas to the ISPs. The Court said “not yet.” Stone sent the subpoenas anyway. The Court appointed the Ad Litems [EFF and Public Citizen] to argue whether Stone could send the subpoenas. Stone argued that the Court should allow him to - even though he had already done so - and eventually dismissed the case ostensibly because the Court was taking too long to make a decision. All the while, Stone was receiving identifying information and communicating with some Does, likely about settlement. The Court rarely has encountered a more textbook example of conduct deserving of sanctions.

Judge Godbey fined Stone $10,000, which he hopes will be enough to "deter similar misconduct and adequately reflects the gravity of the circumstances." In addition, Stone has to pay the attorney fees for EFF and Public Citizen, and must tell the court if he has settled with anyone in the Mick Haig case, and if so, for how much.

Finally, Stone has to send a copy of Judge Godbey's order to each judge overseeing any federal or state case in which Stone currently has a hand—whether or not it has to do with file-sharing.

Those are serious penalties, but as Judge Godbey noted, "The adage 'it is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission' has no place in the issuance of subpoenas."

Stone has not yet responded to our request for comment.

Update: Stone tells me by e-mail, "After three rewrites, I finally decided I'm just going to have to let Justin Bieber do my quoting for me: 'Whenever you knock me down I will not stay on the ground.'"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...g-chutzpah.ars





Righthaven Says it Might Have to File for Bankruptcy
Steve Green

Despite its backing by the billionaire Warren Stephens family, Las Vegas copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC warned today it may have to file for bankruptcy because of a series of setbacks in its litigation campaign.

The warning came in an emergency request by Righthaven to a federal judge in Las Vegas that he stay his order that Righthaven pay $34,045 in legal fees to attorneys who successfully defended Kentucky message board poster Wayne Hoehn against a Righthaven lawsuit.

Righthaven has already appealed U.S. District Judge Philip Pro’s fee award to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Righthaven is also appealing the underlying rulings by Pro finding Righthaven lacked standing to sue Hoehn and – even if it had standing – that Hoehn was protected by fair use in posting an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal column on a sports betting website message board.

Righthaven says its lawsuits are necessary to deter rampant online infringement of newspaper content, but attorneys for Hoehn and other defendants claim Righthaven's suits are frivolous and are based on sham copyright assignments and are merely part of a get-rich-quick scheme.

Righthaven’s bankruptcy warning came a day after MediaNews Group, the owner of the Denver Post and other newspapers, revealed it won’t renew its contract with Righthaven for copyright protection services in the form of its controversial no-warning lawsuits.

While the Righthaven bankruptcy warning may sound ominous, a bankruptcy filing wouldn’t prevent Righthaven creditors from asking the bankruptcy court for permission to seize Righthaven’s assets. Such a filing also would require Righthaven to reveal detailed financial information that so far has been secret as it's a private company.

And Righthaven copyright lawsuit defendants considering countersuing Righthaven over what they call sham copyright claims would likely target not just Righthaven, but its deep-pocketed newspaper partners including the owners of the Review-Journal and the Post.

In today’s court filing in the Hoehn case, Righthaven noted its litigation campaign has stalled this summer while judges in Nevada, Colorado and South Carolina determine whether it has standing to sue over R-J and Post material.

Not only is Righthaven paying attorneys to litigate over the stalled and appealed cases, it has held off on filing new copyright infringement lawsuits until judges definitively rule on whether Righthaven has standing to sue under its amended lawsuit contract with the owner of the Review-Journal.

The R-J’s owner is Stephens Media LLC, controlled by billionaire Little Rock, Ark., investment banker Warren Stephens and his family. The Stephens family also owns half of Righthaven.

Righthaven today said the gridlock over its lawsuits has hurt its finances – and expressed concern that attorneys for prevailing defendants like Hoehn may seize its assets and put it out of business.

Those assets consist largely of scores of copyrights Righthaven claims to own to R-J and Post material that are the basis of its 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010.

"While these circumstances have not exhausted Righthaven’s resources, it certainly brings the value of its intangible intellectual property assets to the forefront of any judgment enforcement efforts. Permitting such judgment enforcement efforts to proceed during pendency of Righthaven’s appeal unquestionably exposes the company to the threat of irreparable harm," Righthaven said in its filing.

"Righthaven faces the very real threat of being forced out of business or being forced to seek protection through bankruptcy if the court does not stay the (attorney’s fee) judgment pending resolution of the company’s appeal to the 9th Circuit," Righthaven’s filing today said.

The company expressed concern that seizure and liquidation of its copyrights would compromise litigation in the future, even if Righthaven were to prevail in its appeals to the 9th Circuit.

"Any new holder of an assigned copyright could compromise potential future infringement actions by granting releases from liability to suspected infringers," Righthaven’s filing said.

Righthaven also claims to own software that detects infringements of newspaper material – though anyone can find such infringements with free searches using Google and other search engines.

"If a stay is not granted pending appeal, this valuable software may be seized and liquidated in an attempt to satisfy the judgment. Liquidation may result in the software being sold to a competing organization or entity. Alternatively, the software could be sold to any one of a host of infringers or other supporting organizations that would attempt to reverse engineer the software in order to devise methods for evading detection," Righthaven warned.

Pro has not yet indicated when he’ll rule on Righthaven’s emergency request that he stay his fee order that required Righthaven to pay Randazza Legal Group by Wednesday.

Separately, another copyright expert is commenting on the Denver Post’s decision to part ways with Righthaven.

Eric Johnson is an associate professor of law at the University of North Dakota and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

Here’s his statement:

***

The law has long had a special affection for newspapers. That's reflected in a long line of Supreme Court cases. Given that history, it has been very dispiriting to see newspapers try to game the law in pursuit of a quick-money scheme, especially one that involves suing readers.

The participation of MediaNews Group was especially troubling to me, given that they operate many of the nation's most important and well-respected newspapers. Thus, it is a great relief to see that MediaNews has parted ways with Righthaven.

A newspaper is sometimes described as a community talking to itself. Can a newspaper uphold that vision while partnering with Righthaven? I don't think so. And that's a point that I think most publishers understood as soon as Righthaven pitched them.

MediaNews Group was the only big news organization that put aside the sense of public trust we expect of newspapers to take part in this misadventure. They have shown integrity and good sense by now walking away.
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2011/se...le-bankruptcy/





Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 File Sharing Verdict
David Kravets

A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a whopping $675,000 file sharing verdict that a jury levied against a Boston college student for making 30 tracks of music available on a peer-to-peer network.

The decision by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a federal judge who slashed the award as “unconstitutionally excessive.” U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston reduced the verdict to $67,500, or $2,250 for each of the 30 tracks defendant Joel Tenenbaum unlawfully downloaded and shared on Kazaa, a popular file sharing peer-to-peer service. The Recording Industry Association of America and Tenenbaum both appealed in what has been the nation’s second RIAA file sharing case to ever reach a jury.

The Obama administration argued in support of the original award, and said the judge went too far when addressing the constitutionality of the Copyright Act’s damages provisions. The act allows damages of up to $150,000 a track.

The appeals court agreed with the government, and said the judge should have considered reducing the jury’s verdict under what is known as “remittitur.” That is a little-used power beholden to judges, and they assert it without a constitutional basis.

“The district court should first have considered the non-constitutional issue of remittitur, which may have obviated any constitutional due process issue and attendant issues,” the appeals court wrote Friday. “Had the court ordered remittitur of a particular amount, Sony would have then had a choice. It could have accepted the reduced award. Or, it could have rejected the remittitur, in which case a new trial would have ensued.”

If any of this seems familiar, the same thing happened in the nation’s first jury trial against a file sharer, Jammie Thomas-Rasset. That case has morphed into a Ground Hog Day of sorts for the same reason. After a third trial in that case, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota slashed an award from $1.5 million to $54,000 in a jury verdict for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.

The jury’s award was “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” the judge wrote in July.

In either case, the RIAA maintains that judges do not have the power to reduce damages awards in Copyright Act cases at all.

Friday’s decision did not address the question of how the legal process would ever end if a judge repeatedly reduced the award on remittitur and the plaintiff refused to accept it. That would mean endless trials.

The RIAA had sued thousands of individuals for file sharing. Most defendants have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.

Only two cases have gone to trial, and now in both, monstrous jury verdicts were reduced by the presiding judges for the same reasons.

The significance of Friday’s decision, however, appears to be minimal in the music-sharing context. The RIAA has abandoned its litigation campaign and instead is working with internet service providers to warn file sharers or kick them off the internet if they repeatedly engage in online copyright infringement.

But whether judges ultimately have the authority to reduce Copyright Act verdict fines, which don’t apply solely to music, is another unanswered story.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ct-reinstated/





Canadian Police Issue File-Sharing Scam Letters Fraud Warning
enigmax

Canadian authorities are warning Internet users to be vigilant following the emergence of a file-sharing settlement scam operation. West Vancouver police, who have now issued an official fraud warning, say that seniors have been receiving letters claiming they have been caught downloading a range of porn titles. Unsurprisingly, the letters come with an offer to settle for thousands of dollars.

Just under a week ago we reported that mass-lawsuits targeting BitTorrent users had migrated from the United States to Canada.

Having met resistance on home soil, the makers of The Hurt Locker are now sending out letters to Canadian Internet users saying they have been caught sharing the Oscar-winning movie. Settle now for a few thousand dollars, the letters say, or face an expensive legal battle in court.

While opponents of these settlement schemes label them as a ‘scam’, they largely operate within the law. After all, they’re being run by lawyers. However, where there’s money to be made there’s always the chance of an illegal scam riding on the same wave, as Canadians are just finding out.

According to an official public fraud warning from West Vancouver Police Department, Canadian seniors have been targeted recently in a fake pay-up-or-else style ‘file-sharing’ settlement scheme.

The letters, which claim to be from Artisan International License, Compliance and Investigations, state that the recipient has been caught downloading porn movies. In common with their ‘legal’ counterparts, the scammers offer to make the whole sorry episode go away for a few thousand dollars. If they don’t settle, further legal action is threatened.

“I opened an interesting letter today from ‘Artisan International’. The letter accused me of downloading several pornographic movies via “Bittorrent / P2P,” says a letter recipient who identifies himself as Sandworm.

“The letter demands 3000$ by September 24th. I won’t go into my professional background, but let’s just say I know the law and am no idiot when it comes to internet technology. In fact I regularly publish articles covering filesharing technology,” he continues.

“They are messing with the wrong person. I took the letter straight to the local police. It turns out they have already received hundreds of complaints about these letters already. That is hundreds of complaints in my neighborhood. Their advice: ‘rip it up’.”

The movies listed in the fake settlement letters include Paris Porno (1976), Retired Porn Stars (2010), Real Big Boobs 2, Volume 2 (2006), White-Hot Nurses (2002), Reality Pron Series 1 (1995), Les Affames sont tombles sure la tete (1994) and Rammin’ the Rear Gate 2001 (2001).

Targeting the elderly with any scam is a despicable act, made even worse by the potentially embarrassing payload employed in this case.

“If you or anyone you know has been a recipient of this letter or has personal knowledge of who may be responsible for sending these letters, please contact the West Vancouver Police at 604-925-7300 quoting file number 11-11341 or if you wish to remain anonymous, please call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 ,” the police conclude.

Scams of this nature aren’t new. Criminals in Germany tried the same thing last year.
https://torrentfreak.com/canadian-po...arning-110915/





File-Sharing Site Hit by Hackers
BBC

File-sharing site BitTorrent has warned users that any downloads taken from its site during a two-hour period overnight may contain malware.

It revealed that hackers had injected scareware into its download software.

When installed, the program pops up fake warnings that a virus has been detected and prompts users for payment to remove it.

BitTorrent has become synonymous with illegal downloads but it also has legitimate content.

"This morning at approximately 4.20 am Pacific Time, the uTorrent.com and BitTorrent web services were compromised. Our standard software download was replaced with a type of fake anti-virus 'scareware' program," the company said in its blog.

The scareware is identified as belonging to the Security Shield malware brand.

"Just after 6am Pacific Time we took the affected servers offline to neutralise the threat. Our servers are now back online and functioning normally...We sincerely apologise to any users who were affected," it added.

Later it issued an update, claiming just uTorrent was affected.

Despite clarifications, Sophos security expert Paul Ducklin suggested users needed to be extra careful.

"Since the two sites share the same network infrastructure you might want to ignore that blog update and assume that any downloads from BitTorrent Inc were dodgy and give yourself a thorough anti-malware checkover," he said.

Turning tables

In separate news, the ongoing battle between file-sharing site and the creative industries has taken an unusual turn as digital locker Hotfile counter-sues Warner Bros.

The movie studio had originally taken Hotfile to court in the US, claiming it was hosting pirated films.

But, in a twist, Hotfile claims that the automated software Warner uses to take down content has removed files over which the movie house has no rights.

In one instance, it said, Warner's attempts to remove copies of its movie 'The Box', also took down the audio book 'Cancer: Out of the Box' by Ty M.Bollinger as well as the BBC show 'The Box that saved Britain'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14912616





U. of North Carolina Stops File-Sharing Before It Starts
Alex Campbell

The University of North Carolina has a special message for students who want to access the dorm’s Internet network: “UNC-CHAPEL HILL IS BLOCKING FILE-SHARING THROUGHOUT STUDENT HOUSING.”

That’s at the top of a Web page which pops up on laptops that have file-sharing programs, when they connect to the university’s network. Students aren’t allowed to access the Internet until they’ve uninstalled the offending software or request an exception that the university is calling a “hall pass.”

The pass is an agreement the student signs that says he or she has a file-sharing program but “any copyright violation linked to a device registered under my name will result in an automatic referral to the Dean of Students office.” They also agree to learn what does and does not violate copyright law.

Officials hope the new policy will both prevent students from getting into legal pickles and help the university cut the costs that come with complying with the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which requires institutions to follow up on complaints about copyright infringements on their networks.

The university has already seen a big drop in the number of dorm computers that use file-sharing software, from about 1,000 last year to about 50 this year. Of those 50, about half have opted for the hall pass. The other half remain quarantined and unable to access the network, officials say.

A total of about 11,000 computers are on the dormitory network. The university never learns what is downloaded via the file-sharing programs—just whether or not a computer has those programs.

Until this year, every time a student on the network received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation notice, an information-technology employee would contact the student to explain what had happened, and ask the student to take an online course. “All of that added up to a significant amount of time and effort,” said Stan Waddell, the university’s information-security officer. He estimates North Carolina spends $40,000 a year dealing with copyright infringement, and manpower roughly equal to half of one employee’s week, every week of the year.

North Carolina no longer has the time or the resources. It has laid off more than 50 information-technology staffers in the past three years, because of budget cuts.

Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy at Cornell University, where she also directs the computer-policy and -law program, said she can see why costs would drive a college to consider blocking file-sharing software.

But not every college would want such a wide-ranging prohibition, Ms. Mitrano said. Engineering and science-heavy institutions would have a hard time, for instance, because those fields often require a lot of file-sharing. Cornell, she says, wouldn’t do it because it would violate a student code that emphasizes “freedom with responsibility.”

Regardless of the institution, college students often don’t have solid grasp of copyright laws, don’t know how to properly uninstall programs, “or just have too many other things on their minds to take this issue seriously,” Ms. Mitrano said.

At North Carolina, students who get caught often used to claim ignorance, said Chris Williams, who manages the dorm network, known as ResNET. “Many of them would say that they didn’t know it was illegal,” he said.

Now, ignorance is no longer a defense. “They’re not going to pass go, they’re not going to collect $200,” said Jim Gogan, North Carolina’s director of networking.
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcam...t-starts/33153





Pirate Party Launches ‘Facebook’ For Movies
enigmax

In what will be seen as an escalation of their ‘Linking is Not a Crime’ campaign, the Czech arm of the Pirate Party is backing another file-sharing related startup. The project, described as a ‘Facebook’ for movies, is the fourth sharing site launched by Pirates in less than two months. Along with the launch comes an open invitation, should it ever be needed, for The Pirate Bay to take refuge in the country.

In support of their ‘Linking is Not a Crime’ campaign, in late July the Czech Pirate Party launched not one but two movie download portals. The sites, which offer links but don’t host any infringing material themselves, were launched to protest the plight of a high school student facing a 5 million euro damages claim for linking to copyright works.

The 16-year-old from Liberec was accused by the Czech Anti-Piracy Union of publishing links to copyright infringing material on his website, acts which the Union claim have caused damages of more than 5 million euros.

Now, in another “don’t pick on the kid, pick on us” move, the Pirate Party have thrown down the gaunlet yet again to the Anti-Piracy Union by partnering and launching another download site.

The social network, called Moviehome, is being described by the Party as a ‘Facebook for movies’. Users of the site are encouraged to upload links to reviews, subtitles and of course, movie downloads.

“Sharing of links is a principle without which the Internet would cease to function,” says Pirate Party chairman Ivan Bartoš. “Therefore we’re systematically fighting against the criminalization of linking.”

In common with Piratskefilmy and Tipnafilm, the two file-sharing projects proceeding it, Moviehome has been created by programmers who are too afraid to reveal their identities in case they are hounded by the Anti-Piracy Union. The Pirate Party have no such fears, and say they have are yet to receive any complaints.

“The Czech anti-piracy union does not know what to do,” Party Vice-President Mikuláš Ferjencik told TorrentFreak.

“They’re probably focusing on the court action with the Liberec student, with the hope that they might claim eventually that all our websites are illegal. They also do not want to give us publicity and they do not have much to say about it really as our sites actually are legal.”

Moviehome

Ferjencik says that the Pirate Party will run Moviehome.cz for as long as it remains a non-commercial concern. He says that the Party wants to separate business and politics, so if the site’s creators want to turn Moviehome.cz into a business venture, they’ll simply hand the site back and wish them luck.

“As a party, we do not want to depend on the finances from web advertising that’s why all of our linking sites are strictly non-commercial. On the other hand, I must emphasize that there’s nothing wrong about running commercial linking websites, after all Google and Seznam.cz have been doing this for a long time,” adds Ferjencik.

The launch of the third site in a little over a month does not mark the end of Czech Pirate support for further file-sharing ventures, or perhaps even more spectacular adventures.

“We will back anyone with a similar project who asks for our support,” Ferjencik explains, while extending an open invitation to The Pirate Bay to take up Czech hosting should they encounter further legal difficulties.

“We’ll also consider suing ourselves to get it to court before the Liberec case is over, but my flatmates are not in a mood for a police visit yet, so it will have to wait for a while,” Ferjencik adds.

While the Czech Pirates now have three file-sharing sites in their portfolio, adding Pirate Party Canada’s Travis McCrea’s site, Tormovies.org, means that a total of four Pirate-inspired movie download sites have been created in less than two months.

“We cannot lose this war,” says Ferjencik.

“In the unlikely case that the court ‘says linking is a crime’, the public uproar will get us into parliament. People hate it when they lose rights they already had, especially when they fought hard to obtain them.

“People did not carry out the revolution in 1989 to see students paying millions of Euros for helping others to share information.”
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-part...movies-110911/





US Gov't Continues Indicting People For File Sharing; 5 Indicted For NinjaVideo
Mike Masnick

As lots of people have been submitting, the Justice Department, in coordination with Homeland Security's ICE group, have indicted five people associated with the site NinjaVideo.net, claiming that together they represented a "conspiracy" to commit criminal copyright infringement. I will say this: compared to the laughable Rojadirecta case, in which the government fails to even show any actual criminal copyright infringement, the indictment here seems a lot stronger -- and unless they got something in the indictment totally wrong, I would predict that these five people are going to lose and lose badly in court.

Unlike the Rojadirecta case, the indictment suggests that NinjaVideo hosted content itself. It also suggests that these admins were very much directly involved in seeking out and distributing infringing content, and profiting from it. The fact that the feds are charging admins and uploaders together as "a conspiracy," is an interesting move, and one that is probably intended to get around the huge problem in the Rojadirecta case: which is that they show users sharing content, but not making money from it, and they show the site admins making money, but not uploading content. You have to show both by a single party for criminal copyright infringement to have happened. So, in this case, they're trying to link the five people together as a conspiracy. From the indictment, which is obviously one-sided, they make it appear that the two major uploaders were closely aligned with the admins. Whether or not that's actually true may be a big part of determining whether or not this case works. Also, it's not clear from the indictment how the hosting setup worked, and if NinjaVideo itself really hosted the material, but that also will be a key point in the case. Assuming that what's in the indictment is accurate, and not taken out of context, however, I just don't see NinjaVideo standing much of a chance in court.

One really interesting factoid in the indictment for all the Google-haters, who insist that Google is the major supporter of these kinds of sites: Google pretty quickly killed the AdSense account that the NinjaVideo folks had opened, telling them that it was because the site appeared to be distributing infringing works. Google-haters keep insisting that Google never shuts down such accounts, but this appears to be a case where they spotted the site pretty quickly and shut down the account.

TorrentFreak also points to a video made by Hana Amal Beshara, an admin for NinjaVideo who went by the name Phara. The video suggests that she and the others had some serious problems communicating with their lawyers, but that's really not going to matter much.

She also notes that they wanted to go public with what was happening ever since ICE seized their website in the very first round of Operation In Our Sites, but that all the lawyers kept saying to stay quiet. She says she now regrets that -- especially since she was indicted anyway -- and doesn't plan to stay quiet any more. While I understand the sentiment, the video itself isn't going to do much to help her case, in that she expresses "no regrets" for her involvement in NinjaVideo. The video makes it clear that she means this because the community "saved her life," but you can bet that the Justice Department will use that against her in court -- claiming she has no remorse.

I still think it's a bit silly for the Justice Department and Homeland Security to be doing this -- as it really should be a civil issue. It seems like Neil MacBride -- the former "anti-piracy" VP for the BSA, and now a US Attorney who was heavily involved in the indictment -- is paying back some favors to the copyright industry he came from. But, this way Hollywood gets taxpayers to pay for these kinds of lawsuits, instead of having to cut back on their own excesses. I also still question the legality of the original seizure of the domain name prior to any adversarial hearing. But, on the whole, these actual charges appear to have a lot more meat to them than what we've seen before in some of the other cases. It won't stop people from infringing, of course. And it won't stop similar communities -- though they'll probably drive those groups a bit further underground, making it more difficult for MacBride and his friends to track them down. But I guess as long as they feel they're "making a difference...."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...njavideo.shtml





Anti-Piracy Group Slams PayPal, iDeal
Colin Mann

Dutch anti-Internet piracy group Brein has called on electronic payment companies such as PayPal and iDeal to cease processing payments to websites which facilitate illegal file-sharing.

“These providers are providing payment services to websites and if these websites are breaking the law, they should not provide these services,” spokesman Tim Kuik told Tweakers.net.

Brein also wants the payment companies to help it find out who the owners behind the pirate websites are.
http://www.advanced-television.com/i...-paypal-ideal/





Indie Game Devs Post Pirated Game on The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

A few weeks ago the highly anticipated game No Time To Explain was officially released. Since the beginning of the year the indie game developers worked day and night to complete it, so it must have been quite a shock to see a pirated copy appearing on The Pirate Bay shortly after the release. Or perhaps not? Could it be that this blatant act of piracy is in fact a clever promotional move?

Early 2011 game developers Alex Nichiporchik and Tom Brien announced that their newly founded company tinyBuild was working on the release of No Time To Explain, a flash-based platform game.

Based on the trailers alone the game got raging reviews from prominent game sites. ” It looks amazing,” Kotaku wrote, and Destructoid labeled it a “terrific premise.”

In the months that followed the developers raised $26,068 from supporters through a Kickstarter project, and mid-August the game was finally released to the public. Unfortunately, as with all games, it didn’t take long before a pirated version ended up online.

However, the pirated version of No Time To Explain that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay is rather special. Unlike the regular game it has a clear pirate theme, with all the main characters wearing pirate hats. The game was literally ‘pirated’.

To confirm the suspicion that the pirate themed game was actually released by the makers themselves, we got in touch with developer Alex Nichiporchik. He confirmed that they are indeed responsible for the release. Alex came up with the idea of making a special release for sites like The Pirate Bay a while ago, and his partner Tom Brien’s suggested adding the pirate theme.

“We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats,” Alex told TorrentFreak. “I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.”

“With indie game development, the whole motto is to constantly update the game for free to the userbase. For pirated versions this makes things really confusing with version tracking, so we were more comfortable with making a joke out of it and so that people who appreciate it could buy the game and thus help us do more dumb stuff,” Alex said.

The idea to release a pirated copy themselves comes from the realization that it’s impossible to prevent unauthorized downloads anyway. In fact, it is often argued that for smaller indie releases the promotional value of a ‘free’ release may actually lead to more people buying the game.

“You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh,” Alex told us.

Thus far the idea appears to work out as planned. The response from the public is overwhelmingly positive, and perhaps even more importantly, the pirated copy hasn’t hurt sales a tiny bit. If anything, tinyBuild has sold more games because they uploaded the game to The Pirate Bay.

“We saw very positive WTF REALLY feedback from users, and saw reactions that people bought it simply because they liked the joke. So we don’t see it hurting sales in any way,” Alex said.

Indeed, in some cases piracy is actually a good thing. The above is yet another example of what happens when piracy becomes promotion, something that’s certainly not unique to this particular case (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc).

Those who haven’t played the game yet, you’re encouraged to pirate it on The Pirate Bay. Those who like it are of course welcome to buy the regular release as well, which reportedly is less buggy than the pirate-themed version.
https://torrentfreak.com/indie-game-...te-bay-110909/





Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games
David Kocieniewski

The United States government offers tax incentives to companies pursuing medical breakthroughs, urban redevelopment and alternatives to fossil fuels.

It also provides tax breaks for a company whose hit video game this year was the gory Dead Space 2, which challenges players to advance through an apocalyptic battlefield by killing space zombies.

Those tax incentives — a collection of deductions, write-offs and credits mostly devised for other industries in other eras — now make video game production one of the most highly subsidized businesses in the United States, says Calvin H. Johnson, who has worked at the Treasury Department and is now a tax professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Because video game makers straddle the lines between software development, the entertainment industry and online retailing, they can combine tax breaks in ways that companies like Netflix and Adobe cannot. Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry whose main contribution is to create amusing and sometimes antisocial entertainment.

For example, Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., shipped more than two million copies of Dead Space 2 in the game’s first week on the market this year. It shows a total of $1.2 billion in global profits the last five years using an accounting method that management says captures its operating profits.

But largely because of deferred revenue, deductions for executive stock options and a variety of accounting requirements, the company officially reports a net loss for the period. And the company reports that it paid out $98 million in cash for taxes worldwide in those years.

Neither corporations nor the government make tax returns public, and the information most companies disclose in their regulatory filings is insufficient to determine how much they pay in federal taxes and how that compares to the official United States corporate rate of 35 percent.

All told, the federal government gave $123 billion in tax incentives to corporations in 2010, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, with breaks for groups and people as diverse as Nascar track owners, mohair producers, hedge fund managers, chicken farmers, automakers and oil companies.

Many tax policy analysts say the breaks for the video game industry — whose domestic sales of $15 billion a year now exceed those of the music business — are a vivid example of a tax system that defies common sense. Most times, subsidies begin as a way to nurture a fledgling industry that will not be profitable for years or to encourage a business activity deemed to have a broad benefit to society, like reducing pollution or improving public health.

But it’s a lot easier to create a tax break than to eliminate it. That leaves a generous assortment of tax incentives available to all types of companies, like Electronic Arts, with skilled accounting departments.

Electronic Arts has also lobbied successfully for more tax assistance. The architect of the company’s strategies in recent years was Glen A. Kohl, a tax lawyer colorful enough to publicly compare himself to Bruce Springsteen and to joke in the pages of The Wall Street Journal that his dog, Rubin, shared the name of the Treasury secretary under whom he served (Robert E. Rubin).

After working in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, Mr. Kohl entered the private sector and became head of E.A.’s tax department in 2004, leading the company as it aggressively lobbied for a federal tax break on domestic production and set up a matrix of offshore subsidiaries, many in low-tax countries.

As a result, the company with the defiant sales slogan, “Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2,” in effect gets financial help from moms and other United States taxpayers to reduce its federal tax bill.

Company officials say they have no qualms about taking all the tax breaks legally available to them. To do otherwise would be like a consumer “insisting on paying full price during a store sale,” wrote Jeff Brown, a company spokesman. Even E.A.’s competitors acknowledge that its tax strategies aren’t particularly aggressive compared with others in the industry.

Furthermore, Electronic Arts officials say that in recent years the company has paid a substantial portion of its profits in taxes, but declined to discuss details of its financial reports.

Several tax experts noted that one of the company’s biggest tax advantages is a tool available to all companies, a deduction related to the stock gains on options exercised by its executives. (Tax practitioners also said that the company’s losses, under generally accepted accounting principles, provided the most meaningful picture and reflected the standard approach used by other companies.)

Industry advocates say that without these incentives the United States would forfeit its technological edge — and the 32,000 direct jobs in the gaming industry — to countries like Canada, which offers video game developers even greater tax subsidies.

“Software and high-tech industries are the brain trust of the U.S.,” said Shane T. Frank, chief operating officer of Alliantgroup, a consulting firm that helps video game companies and other businesses take advantage of the tax credit for research and development. “We can’t afford to lose that knowledge and those high-paying jobs to India or anywhere else.”

Trying to Lure Jobs

One reason Electronic Arts and other video game companies have a bounty of tax incentives that other industries envy is that elected officials from across the political spectrum find it hard to resist offering incentives to encourage technological research — and jobs.

When the tax code was rewritten in 1954 — nearly 20 years before the first commercially successful video game was released — Congress included a new break allowing companies to deduct all laboratory-based research and experimentation costs immediately. Part of the intention was to simplify the tax code. But with the cold war and nuclear arms race making Americans fearful that the country’s technological edge was eroding, Daniel Reed, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, also promised the tax break would indirectly bolster national security by stimulating “the search for new products and new inventions upon which the future economic and military strength of our nation depends.”

In 1969, the I.R.S. expanded that tax break to allow companies to deduct the cost of software development, which was a small part of a business that was then dominated by bulky mainframe computers. When the video game industry sprouted in the early 1970s, game developers reaped substantial tax savings because most of their costs were for software development.

Electronic Arts, founded in 1982, has since become one of the world’s dominant video game companies — producing popular titles like SimCity, FIFA soccer, Harry Potter and Madden NFL — and has benefited mightily from that tax incentive.

The company’s software development costs — including salaries for the designers — have totaled nearly $6 billion over the last five years, and the company says it deducted all but a small amount of those expenses immediately. Companies that produce movies or compact discs, by contrast, face tighter restrictions which often require them to spread out the deduction on most production costs over a number of years. While video game makers have often compared themselves to movie companies when seeking tax incentives, the game developers’ ability to write off the vast majority of their development costs immediately gives them a substantial financial advantage over other entertainment companies in taxes and cash flow.

Video game companies also get other research-related breaks. In 1981, as Americans worried that Japan’s growing dominance in the auto business would be followed by a decline of the high-tech industry in the United States, Congress added another research and development credit, this time specifically for companies that increased their R.& D. spending from the previous year. The hope was that by encouraging companies to invest more in research, the private sector might create the next Bell Laboratories and inspire the kind of technological breakthroughs that benefit society as a whole.

Within a few years, the credit was being claimed by businesses with little technological background — fast-food restaurants, hair stylists and fashion designers. So Congress tried to restrict what research would qualify. The credit was denied for social science research and marketing. The narrowest definition, proposed by the Clinton administration, was to allow the credit only for research that produced an actual innovation, but that measure met determined opposition from business lobbyists. By the time the Treasury Department ruled in 2002, an appointee of President George W. Bush decided to drop it.

“It seemed as though it would be impossible to enforce,” said Pamela F. Olson, then the assistant secretary for tax policy, and now a tax lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “Because you couldn’t be certain that someone wouldn’t come back later and challenge things, by saying that what seemed like an innovation at the time had actually been discovered before.”

The failed attempts to restrict the R.& D. credit to basic research have been a boon for video game companies. Even when companies are merely creating new versions of existing games — conducting research that would have little value to anyone but themselves — their development processes usually involve enough experimental uncertainty to qualify for the tax break.

During the last five years, Electronic Arts has claimed tens of millions in tax savings from research and development credits for its various games, according to the company’s regulatory filings. (Company officials declined to specify how much of that total came from the federal government.)

At the same time, the I.R.S. and the United States Tax Court have denied the credit for some projects that would have benefited the community as well as the companies receiving it. In 2009, for instance, the federal tax court denied Union Carbide’s attempt to claim a research and development credit for its project to reduce the pollutants released from the smokestacks of a refinery in Louisiana. Union Carbide failed to meet the experimental threshold for the credit, though video game makers often seem to have little trouble meeting the requirement.

Video game industry officials say that by improving technology, they are indirectly helping society at large.

Dean Zerbe, national managing director at Alliantgroup, said that the military had used some video game technology to train soldiers and pilots. Electronic Arts said it donated some games to the military, schools and charities.

Even those who support subsidies for technological research complain that the current research and development credit is woefully designed — favoring big companies over start-ups and often subsidizing businesses for research they would have done anyway.

Michael D. Rashkin, author of “Practical Guide to Research and Development Tax Incentives,” said that the video game industry had failed to name a technological breakthrough that had helped anyone beyond its shareholders, employees or customers.

“The research credit benefits the wrong companies and encourages the wrong kind of research,” said Mr. Rashkin, a tax expert and executive at Marvell Technology, a company based in Santa Clara, Calif. “By diverting funding and attention from where it could be most useful, the credit is hobbling American innovation.”

Yet, given the sharp decline in American manufacturing jobs over the last half century, subsidies for research and development still have wide support. The Obama administration has proposed making the research and development tax credit permanent (it has been renewed every two years since 1981), and expanding it, at a cost of more than $100 billion over the next decade.

Looking for More

Electronic Arts has not been content to merely collect the many benefits from existing tax breaks. Mr. Kohl, who had an extensive background in mergers and acquisitions law, arrived at the company in 2004, the same year Congress passed a domestic production deduction that was intended to cut taxes on companies that export. When President George W. Bush signed the law in October, it listed an assortment of industries eligible for the break, including sound recordings and computer software, but did not specify video games.

Electronic Arts paid $60,000 early the next year to hire a prominent Washington tax lobbying firm. Soon after the law was signed, its lobbyist, Jonathan Talisman of Capitol Tax Partners, was granted a meeting with the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary of tax policy — the same office Mr. Kohl once held — to ask that the deduction be extended to video game companies and the revenues they earned from online subscriptions. When the I.R.S. issued its final regulations, video games and their online revenues were specifically cited as qualifying for the deduction. That deduction last year equaled 9 percent of its production costs, offering E.A. significant tax savings.

Company officials point out that the deduction is available to a wide range of industries. “The credit is not specific to video games,” said Mr. Brown, the spokesman. “It’s designed to encourage any domestic manufacturing in the United States — from soft drinks to steel, to movies, music and newspapers.” During Mr. Kohl’s seven years at the company, Electronic Arts also became more aggressive about assigning its intellectual property offshore, a move that often reduces a company’s tax bill. Mr. Kohl, who declined to be interviewed, is now running the tax department at Amazon, which is leading the legal battle by Internet retailers who want to avoid collecting state sales taxes from customers.

In 2003, before joining Electronic Arts, Mr. Kohl co-authored a widely-cited proposal urging the federal government to crack down on corporate tax avoidance, warning that “the tax shelter problem is simply too detrimental to the tax system not to act.” As head of tax at Electronic Arts, he became a noted expert in using foreign subsidiaries to legally, and sharply, cut a corporation’s United States tax bill. As a co-chairman of the Silicon Valley Tax Directors Group, he also moderated a seminar in 2010 that showed technology companies how to use offshore subsidiaries to reassign the licensing of their intellectual property and, in some cases, reduce their effective federal tax rate substantially from 35 percent.

Electronic Arts has more than 50 overseas subsidiaries, according to its recent regulatory filings, many in low-tax countries like Bermuda, Singapore and Mauritius. The company has also accumulated more than $1.3 billion in profits offshore, where it will not be taxed by the United States unless it is brought back into the country.

Company officials say its overseas activities are not an attempt to avoid United States taxes and instead reflect how much of its business takes place in other countries. “E.A. is a global company with a majority of our customers and roughly 50 percent of our revenue generated outside of the United States,” Mr. Brown said. “Naturally we hire, build facilities, copyright our trademarks, invest and pay taxes in countries outside of the U.S.”

Jockeying for Developers

As Congress and the Obama administration wrestle with the next round of budget cuts this fall, and a possible overhaul of the tax code, they will determine whether the types of subsidies offered to E.A. and other corporations are worth the billions in forgone revenue annually to the Treasury. While Britain and some nations in the European Union have been paring back their tax subsidies for game developers, Canada has been trying to lure them and their jobs from below the border. In 2008, Ontario paid one game company a subsidy of more than $321,000 for each job to relocate from the United States. More recently, Montreal persuaded the game company THQ to relocate 800 production jobs there, closing studios in New York and Phoenix, with a rich package of incentives.

E.A. has 750 employees in Montreal, where all video game companies receive a tax credit equal to 37.5 percent of their payroll, and has announced plans to hire more there. Over all, 4,500 of Electronic Arts’ 7,600 employees are in the United States.

There are signs that more tax breaks may be in store for game manufacturers. States have been offering an escalating collection of incentives to try to attract the companies — more than 20 states now offer video game developers tax breaks to cover their wages, development and manufacturing costs.

Several recent studies have raised doubts about the effectiveness of subsidies offered by state and local governments, and Michigan this year reduced its breaks for game developers. But Texas officials say its tax breaks for game developers are more beneficial than those given other businesses, in part because the average salaries in the industry exceed $80,000 a year.

Game developers are pushing for more. John S. Riccitiello, the chief executive of Electronic Arts, was among the business leaders who successfully lobbied the City of San Francisco to drop its payroll tax last year to help retain social media companies like Zynga, maker of FarmVille and other games. The video game industry’s trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, this year recruited 39 members of Congress to form the E-caucus, which will advocate for legislation to benefit game developers. Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from Texas who sits on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, said that the caucus has not asked for tax breaks.

But industry officials say they eventually hope to persuade Congress to make video game companies eligible for the federal tax breaks now available to film and television producers. Michael D. Gallagher, chief executive of the software group, said that the industry would not push for the breaks now, given the nation’s budget problems, but might do so later.

“It certainly is a worthwhile policy goal,” Mr. Gallagher said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/t...me-makers.html





Game That Critiques Apple Vanishes From App Store
Jenna Wortham

Is Apple back on the banning bandwagon?

On Tuesday, a group called Molleindustria released a 99-cent game for the iPhone that, in a cartoony way, critiqued the cost, both to the environment and to humanity, of producing mobile devices like the iPhone. It was not available for very long.

The game, called Phone Story, followed the life cycle of a smartphone, from the mining of metals in Africa that are needed for the chips in the phones, to factories in China, where the devices are manufactured. BLN, a business blog, posted screenshots from the app, one of which indicates that in part of the game the objective was to catch factory workers who are attempting to commit suicide.

The description on the group’s Web site said that “Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe.”

The Web site also said that all of the revenues from the game would be donated to organizations dedicated to protecting labor rights and other groups that “are working to stop the horrors represented in the game.”

The application was released into iTunes on Tuesday and almost immediately removed from the store’s virtual shelves, say its creators.

Earlier this morning, the group posted a celebratory tweet about the release of the application that read: “Announcing Phone Story: the anti-iPhone game for iPhone.” Roughly three hours later, the company posted another message that said the app had been removed from the App Store.

Indeed, the iTunes link to download the application does not appear to work. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Molleindustria said on its site that Apple had cited stipulations in the App Store guidelines that any apps that depict crude and objectionable content, or the abuse of children, will be rejected.

If Apple has indeed pulled the app, it wouldn’t be the first time it has cracked down on apps that it deems offensive. Last February, the company began pulling racy applications that featured women in swimsuits and lingerie. Apple said it was responding to complaints from customers who were upset by the sexually suggestive material. The company has also removed apps with political content.

The developers of Phone Story say on their site that they are considering releasing their application for Android-powered devices.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...rom-app-store/





Europe Extends Copyright on Music
Larry Rohter

In a victory for the financially troubled recording industry, the European Union on Monday extended the term of copyright on sound recordings to 70 years from 50, while declining to include provisions that would allow artists in Britain and elsewhere in Europe to recoup ownership of their music easily. Had the Council of the European Union not acted, many of the most famous and popular recordings of the British Invasion of the 1960s, including albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Yardbirds, would have fallen into the public domain in the coming years. For example, the Beatles’ first hit record, “Love Me Do,” which was released in 1962, could have been treated next year in much the same way as works by classical composers whose exclusive ownership of their music has expired. With multiple versions available at cheaper prices, the four major record labels would be deprived of one of their biggest sources of income.

“This important decision comes not a moment too soon,” said Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, a trade group that represents the major labels. “An exceptional period of British musical genius was about to lose its protection. As a matter of principle, it is right that our musicians should benefit from their creativity during their lifetimes, and that they should not be disadvantaged compared to musicians in other countries.”

Musicians, however, were not as enthusiastic. “This is extremely good news for record companies and collection agencies, but bad news for artists,” said the singer Sandie Shaw, who along with Nick Mason of Pink Floyd and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead is one of the leaders of the Featured Artists Coalition, a British group that advocates for musicians’ rights. “It means they have 20 more years in servitude to contracts that are no longer appropriate to a digital age.”

For the record labels, whose sales have dropped by more than half over the last decade, the decision is a marked contrast to coming copyright challenges in the United States. The copyright law approved by Congress in 1976 includes a provision, known as “termination rights,” that allows recording artists and songwriters to reclaim ownership of their work after 35 years.

Many American musicians who made recordings in the 1970s, including Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Loretta Lynn, are now filing such claims. The four major labels — Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner — are strenuously resisting, arguing that the performers were employees doing “work for hire,” and thus not entitled to claim copyright.

The Council of the European Union said in a statement issued after the vote — which was 17 to 8, with two abstentions — that the main reason for approving the copyright extension was to benefit performers and songwriters. The existing system “often does not protect their performances for their entire lifetime,” and “therefore some performers face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes,” the statement said. But in many cases the artists who made the original recordings back in the 1960s are not the actual owners. In recent years there has been an outpouring of biographies of, and autobiographies by, musicians from that era, including members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in which the artists say that they were duped as youngsters into signing contracts with low royalty rates and relinquishing ownership of their own music to record or management companies.

As a result, 72 percent of the financial benefits from the new directive will accrue to record labels, according to calculations done by the Center for Intellectual Property Policy and Management at Bournemouth University in England. Of the 28 percent that will go to artists, the calculations say, most of the money will go to superstar acts, with only 4 percent benefiting musicians like those mentioned in the European Union statement.

“A term extension is not an appropriate measure to improve the situation of the performing artists,” Belgium argued in its written dissent to the action. “It seems that the measure will mainly benefit record producers and not performing artists, will only have a very limited effect for most of the performing artists” and “will have a negative impact on the accessibility of cultural material” for consumers.

In contrast to copyright law in the United States, copyright law in Europe does not include a “termination rights” clause, nor was one inserted into the new regulations approved on Monday. Instead, the new directive, which the 27 member states are obliged to put into effect within two years, contains a vague assurance that “foresees measures” to guarantee that musicians “actually benefit from the term extension and may recuperate their rights subject to certain conditions.”

The directive does include a “use it or lose it” clause that allows artists to reclaim ownership rights to recordings, but only after 50 years and only if a recording is no longer available commercially. It also sets up a new fund for payments to session musicians and a “clean slate” provision that is supposed to wipe out musicians’ debts to their labels. But Ms. Shaw said the artists’ group wanted “the 35-year thing, because record company ownership in perpetuity is immoral.”

The recording industry lobbied heavily for the new copyright directive, which had been blocked in the past by a coalition of smaller European countries that see the extension as harmful to innovation. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, the British government commissioned a study that also recommended against the extension, but Prime Minister David Cameron came out in favor of the measure, one of whose chief beneficiaries will be the beleaguered British label EMI, whose assets include records by the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

“This is a dreadful day” for musicians and consumers, said Martin Kretschmer, director of the Bournemouth University institute. “Over all, policymakers are schizophrenic, speaking a language of change and innovation, but then respond to lobbying by extending the right, which gave rise to the problem in the first place. This only entrenches a cynical attitude toward copyright law and brings it into further disrepute.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/a...ecordings.html





Reasonable Anger In Europe Over Ridiculous Copyright Extension
Mike Masnick

One of our most popular stories last week was about how Europe was retroactively extending copyright yet again. It's been interesting to see the reaction to the story among Europeans, where I've seen nothing but very palpable anger about this. Pretty much everyone who isn't a record label seems to think that this is a complete joke, and nothing more than an attempt to grant subsidies to big record label companies. It's even coming through in the more mainstream press in the UK, where Shane Richmond has cynically blasted the plan in The Telegraph (and reminded us that the main person driving this worked for the record labels just a few months ago). Is it that cynical when the regulatory capture by a single group of companies is so obvious?

I’ve written at length about this before so I won’t go over the arguments again here but study after study has shown that longer copyright terms do not protect creativity; they harm it. And yet copyright terms keep growing, in the face of the evidence.

This is part of an ongoing pattern - a more cynical person might even call it a campaign - in which copyright will be extended until it never expires. In 15 years or so, you can expect a renewed campaign to extend the copyright on sound recordings to 95 years, matching the term in the US. After that, we’ll see pressure to extend terms further, so that recording artists receive the same protection - life plus 70 years - as composers and lyricists.


The thing that amazes me about all of this is how the supporters of this law don't realize how much harm they're doing to their own cause. When stories like this come out, there's so much anger directed at the system, the politicians and the law that it makes people respect copyright law a hell of a lot less. If the industry still believes that they just need to "educate" people, the education people are getting is that copyright law is a joke that serves no purpose other than to protect the interests of a few big companies.

Richmond, nicely, contrasts the laughably false claims by the IFPI that copyright extension benefits artists, by pointing to the upcoming termination rights battle in the US, to show that the major labels and their trade groups (RIAA/IFPI) clearly do not have the artists' best interests in mind, and it's ridiculous for them to pretend they do:

It’s expected, according to Rolling Stone, that the record labels will argue that these artists were “work for hire” and therefore not entitled to their rights back. Labels like to talk about the rights of artists until the artists’ interests conflict with their own. How will the IFPI spin this argument? We’ll see soon enough.


The real shame is that the EU politicians, who approved this, will never actually have to answer for their seizure of the public domain, and for the fact that they reneged on a deal which the public made with content creators with no compensation. Those who voted for copyright extension -- in the face of widespread evidence that it does nothing to help artists and plenty to hold back culture -- should be seriously ashamed. They've sold out the public, who they're supposed to represent.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...xtension.shtml





HP Should Reconsider Dumping TouchPad: Research Firm

Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) should reconsider its decision to dump its TouchPad tablet since the device could double the value of the PC division HP plans to spin off, technology research firm Canalys said in a note to clients.

HP stunned markets in August by saying it may shed its PC business -- the world's largest after the $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002 -- while at the same time killing webOS-based phones and the TouchPad tablet which was launched only six weeks earlier.

HP slashed the price of its tablet to $99 the weekend after announcing the TouchPad's demise, igniting an online frenzy and prompting long lines to form at retailers as bargain-hunters chased down a gadget that had hitherto failed to excite consumers.

"The TouchPad was overpriced at launch and did not sell. This led HP to draw a premature conclusion that the product category had failed," Canalys analysts said in a research note.

Canalys said the price cut had helped make TouchPad the hottest brand in HP's entire portfolio, gathering more interest than anything from HP in more than 10 years.

"The TouchPad has become the 'must-have' technology product of 2011. Perhaps no other technology vendor, apart from Apple, has ever created such hype for a technology product," the research note said.

Apple Inc created the tablet or pad market with its iPad only last year and still dominates the segment. It has sold some 30 million of the devices, which are priced from about $500.

"HP has established a lead in the race to be the number two behind Apple in the pad business but the window of opportunity will begin to close if delays occur," Canalys said.

Helped by aggressive pricing and hype around the TouchPad, HP could achieve and maintain 10 percent share of the global market for media tablets, the research group said.

Canalys said a 10 percent market share of tablets could double or triple the PC unit's estimated value of between $8 billion and $10 billion.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78E1SJ20110915





Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS
Adam Liptak

The precedent is novel. More precisely, the precedent is a novel.

In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described.

In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that surveillance using global positioning system devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.” In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”

Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion” and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”

The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?

Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.

The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.

“The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.

The case is an appeal from a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said last year that the government was simply seeking too much information.

“Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course of a month,” wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg.

He added: “A person who knows all of another’s travel can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Federal appeals courts in Chicago and San Francisco, on the other hand, have allowed the police to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant. The police are already allowed to tail cars and observe their movements without warrants, those courts said, and the devices merely allow them to do so more efficiently.

Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in the Chicago case, did caution that institutionalized mass surveillance might present a different issue.

Some judges say that world is fast approaching.

“Technology has progressed to the point where a person who wishes to partake in the social, cultural and political affairs of our society has no realistic choice but to expose to others, if not to the public as a whole, a broad range of conduct and communications that would previously have been deemed unquestionably private,” Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn wrote last year.

The case to be heard by the Supreme Court arose from the investigation of the owner of a Washington nightclub, Antoine Jones, who was suspected of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. Apparently out of caution, given the unsettled state of the law, prosecutors obtained a warrant allowing the police to place a tracking device on Mr. Jones’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The warrant required them to do so within 10 days and within the District of Columbia. The police did not install the device until 11 days later, and they did it in Maryland. Now contending that no warrant was required, the authorities tracked Mr. Jones’s travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The main Supreme Court precedent in the area, United States v. Knotts, is almost 30 years old. It allowed the use of a much more primitive technology, a beeper that sent a signal that grew stronger as the police drew closer and so helped them follow a car over a single 100-mile trip from Minnesota to Wisconsin.

The Supreme Court ruled that no warrant was required but warned that “twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of the country” using “dragnet-type law enforcement practices” may violate the Fourth Amendment.

Much of the argument in the Jones case concerns what that passage meant. Did it indicate discomfort with intense and extended scrutiny of a single suspect’s every move? Or did it apply only to mass surveillance?

In the Jones case, the government argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that the Knotts case disapproved of only “widespread searches or seizures that are conducted without individualized suspicion.”

The brief added: “Law enforcement has not abused GPS technology. No evidence exists of widespread, suspicionless GPS monitoring.” On the other hand, the brief said, requiring a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car “would seriously impede the government’s ability to investigate leads and tips on drug trafficking, terrorism and other crimes.”

A decade ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the police needed a warrant to use thermal imaging technology to measure heat emanating from a home. The sanctity of the home is at the core of what the Fourth Amendment protects, Justice Antonin Scalia explained, and the technology was not in widespread use.

In general, though, Justice Scalia observed, “it would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the advance of technology.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11gps.html





N.Y. Worker Accuses State of Illegal GPS Spying
Kim Zetter

A New York state worker has accused government officials of violating the state constitution after they installed a GPS tracker on his private car and recorded its whereabouts for a month.

The state Department of Labor placed the device secretly on the worker’s car without a warrant and tracked the vehicle 24 hours a day, including on weekends and during a weeklong family vacation, in order to find evidence of time-sheet violations.

But Michael Cunningham, in a petition filed last year that was heard this week in court, said officials went too far in their surveillance of him and his family and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Cunningham learned of the surveillance only a year after it was conducted when the state charged him with misconduct, citing evidence from the GPS tracking to show that he had claimed pay for hours he hadn’t worked. He was fired from his management job last year.

The New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on his behalf last December, asking the state Supreme Court of Albany County to invalidate the use of such surveillance and order a new labor hearing for Cunningham without the data.
The organization cited a May 2009 New York State Court of Appeals ruling that police must obtain a warrant before using a GPS device to track criminal suspects. The federal Supreme Court is set to weigh in on law enforcement’s use of the devices in its upcoming term.

“Your boss can’t sit in the backseat of your car and watch you, your wife and your children 24 hours a day, but that’s exactly what the Department of Labor did to Mr. Cunningham,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said at the time of Cunningham’s filing. “The courts have already prohibited police from using GPS devices to track people without a warrant. We’re confident they will hold the government agencies to the same standard. The only thing scarier than having a police officer secretly track you is having your boss secretly track you.”

Cunningham, 60, was Director of the Staff and Organizational Development for the state Department of Labor, where he worked for 30 years, when he was fired last year. He asserts that the state agency had long had it out for him after he blew the whistle on supervisors in 2004 for trying to pressure employees into attending a prayer breakfast that was sponsored by then-Gov. George Pataki.

Cunningham had reported Mary L. Hines, deputy commissioner for administration and public affairs, to the inspector general’s office after she sent an e-mail to other officials attempting to increase worker attendance at the breakfast. Cunningham said he was subsequently subjected to various punishments from his supervisors in retaliation for his action.

It was the Inspector General’s office that placed the GPS device on his BMW in 2008 after his supervisors at the Department of Labor requested it. According to court documents, investigators placed the device on his car on June 3, 2008, while it was parked in a state parking lot, in order to determine in part if Cunningham was properly reporting his absences from work.

On June 11, investigators downloaded data from the device and replaced it with a new tracker. They did the same on June 20. Unknown to Cunningham and his family, the device tracked their car movements at night, on the weekend and during a vacation they took to Massachusetts between June 30 and July 3. The device stopped tracking the family’s movements on July 3, but remained on the car another five days before it was removed on July 8.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later in March 2009 that the Department of Labor issued a notice of discipline against Cunningham, citing 13 charges of misconduct. More than half the charges accuse Cunningham of saying he was at a certain location at a certain time when he wasn’t — for example, saying he was at a conference one time, when he was at home instead.

Some time prior to a January 2010 hearing on the charges, Cunningham learned of the surveillance when the department revealed it planned to introduce GPS evidence as the basis for the majority of the misconduct charges against him. Despite attempts to disqualify the surveillance data, Cunningham was fired in August 2010.

Shortly after the NYCLU filed its petition last year, the state’s attorney general moved to have the case removed to the appeals court. At a hearing this week before the Appellate Division Third Judicial Department, Kate Nepveu, an assistant solicitor general, acknowledged that the GPS tracking was intrusive, but said that Cunningham had a pattern of misconduct and that the round-the-clock surveillance was justified because he claimed he worked odd hours at his job.

But the NYCLU disagreed.

Lead attorney on the case, NYCLU Senior Staff Attorney Corey Stoughton, told Threat Level that they weren’t disputing that the Department of Labor had cause to investigate Cunningham’s whereabouts, just the tactic officials used to do it.

“They can have all the cause they want, there can be a slam-dunk case in theory, but nonetheless the government simply doesn’t have the power to track the movement of people and their families in their private cars 24 hours a day just to uncover more evidence of workplace misconduct,” she said.

The case is now awaiting a ruling from the appeals court, which sets no timetable for its opinions.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/ny-gps-spying/





How 9/11 Completely Changed Surveillance in U.S.
Ryan Singel

Mark Klein took this picture of the entrance to Room 641A in AT&T's building on Folsom Street in San Francisco. The room housed internet spying equipment Klein says was installed by the NSA.

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

‘I didn’t expect the terrorists would be so successful ultimately into getting us to abandon our core principles.’

Klein’s story encapsulates the state of civil liberties 10 years after the shattering attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. After a decade, the country is left with a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure whose scope and inner workings remain secret with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that obsequiously bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power or who is watching out for abuses.

“As someone who was in the Financial District of Manhattan on 9/11, that was a horrifying morning for everyone,” says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who’s still fighting to reinstate the lawsuits his organization filed against the government and the telecoms. “Yet I didn’t expect the terrorists would be so successful ultimately into getting us to abandon our core principles, and I think the founders would, in many ways, be ashamed of our response to the attack.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) in August put a hold on Obama’s push to renew the surveillance powers until the administration investigates how many people in the U.S. have had their communications “reviewed” by the feds. The director of national intelligence responded that “it is not reasonably possible” to determine that number.

In the post-9/11 bureaucratic frenzy to never let a similar attack happen again, the Congress rushed to pass the Patriot Act, a domestic-surveillance wish list full of investigatory powers long sought by the FBI. And the government created the Department of Homeland Security, an unwieldy amalgamation of agencies united under a moniker straight out of a bad science-fiction novel.

Those who thought that the election of Obama would “re-change” everything were mistaken. Instead, the administration has carried on the Bush-era policy of using high-level classification and the “state secrets privilege” to block court challenges to the unsavory aspects of the “War on Terror.”

So endemic is the secrecy, that Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, says he can’t answer the question about what the state of surveillance and civil liberties is in the U.S. a decade after 9/11.

“The best answer is, I don’t know,” Harper said. “We have had a real breakdown in government and public oversight of government. We have a real secrecy problem in this country.”

But Harper does think that the next decade we’ll begin to see some questioning of the money being spent on Homeland Security programs and that the courts will start to stand up more to the executive branch.

Well-known examples of secrecy are the No-Fly and Secondary Screening lists. The government initially refused to admit the lists existed, and struggled for years to deal with a system that has never caught a terrorist, but has inadvertently caught soldiers, politicians, children and even a prominent nun.

Most recently, the Obama administration was caught using the No-Fly list as a way to keep American citizens from flying back to the States, in order to interrogate them overseas.

There’s no way to confirm if you are on either of these lists, and no way to challenge them or see the evidence against you.

Harper says that’s plainly unconstitutional.

“It’s pretty black-and-white,” Harper said. “It’s just entirely unconstitutional to have a direct executive branch punishment without the intermediary of a judge.”

As for the Patriot Act, government watchers point to National Security Letters as the prime example of abuse of the government’s expanded powers under the “War on Terror.” So-called NSLs are self-issued subpoenas that FBI agents can use to get phone and other transaction records. The FBI began using tens of thousands of such letters every year after the NSLs’ reach was expanded by the Patriot Act.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has issued a series of scathing reports, including one that found that FBI agents used fake emergency requests to gather data on Washington Post and New York Times reporters, and that AT&T and Verizon were paid to open offices inside the FBI, where employees for the telecoms let FBI agents search phone records without doing any paperwork — in blatant violation of federal law. The violations were then effectively legalized retroactively by a ruling from the Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Now, the Administration is telling the American people that al-Qaida is on the ropes. But it seems unlikely that Americans will witness, or even demand, the withering away of the Homeland Security industrial complex.

While there are many reasons for that, perhaps the most important one is the imperative that started just post 9/11, when President Bush turned to Attorney General John Ashcroft and said, “Don’t let this happen again.”

It’s those words, and that sentiment, that have kept electronic surveillance powers in effect — even though they’ve largely proved to be a source of dead ends for those battling al-Qaida.

“There is no evidence that the ability to conduct broad electronic surveillance with less judicial supervision has been key to the intelligence successes we have seen since 9/11, and the absence of those powers were not an important factor before 9/11,” says Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

And Sanchez notes that the number of U.S. persons who had records siphoned up by the FBI in 2010 reached over 14,000 — a new record. “We have become so accustomed to talking about the balance between civil liberties and security that we begin to assume that the more our liberties are invaded, the more secure we are, when there is very little evidence that is the case,” Sanchez said.

Both Harper and Bankston see reasons for hope that the court system may have lost its post-9/11 habit of deferring to the federal government anytime it invoked the words secrecy and national security.

Bankston cited a recent court win for the ACLU, where the government is being forced to reveal information about the number of people who have been tracked through their cellphones without investigators getting a warrant.

“There are always signs of hope that keep us going where we can occasionally get a window in the what the government is doing, and we will keep looking for those windows,” Bankston said.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-surveillance/





Judge Worries Recording Police Will Lead to Excessive "Snooping Around"
Timothy B. Lee

Judge Richard A. Posner isn't known for his genteel treatment of parties whose arguments he doesn't agree with. When an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union began to make his opening statement at a Tuesday oral argument, Posner cut him off after 14 words. "Yeah, I know," he said dismissively. "But I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police."

The topic was the constitutionality of the unusually strict Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it illegal to record someone without his consent even if the recording is done openly and in a public place. The ACLU was asking a panel of three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to strike down the law on First Amendment grounds.

But Judge Posner wasn't having it. "Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers," he said.

He was particularly worried that allowing recording would impact police work. "I'm always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business," he said. He speculated that gangs would love the ACLU's argument because recordings would make it easier to discover and retaliate against informants.

Posner may find himself on the losing side of the argument. Both of Posner's fellow Seventh Circuit judges seemed more receptive to the ACLU's argument. They reserved most of their fire for the government's attorney. "The statute criminalizes any audiotaping without regard to expectations of privacy, even if those events that are being audiotaped occur in the open, in public, for anyone to see and hear and otherwise observe," one of the judges said. "It's extremely broad."

The government lawyer gamely argued that limiting recording actually protected speakers' First Amendment rights by allowing them to control who heard their speech. But he may be swimming against the tide.

Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down a unanimous ruling in the Simon Glik case. That case held that Glik had a "clearly-established" First Amendment right to record the actions of the police on the Boston Common, and that police officers should have known this when they arrested him. Civil libertarians are hoping a second ruling in Illinois will help cement the principle that audio recording is an activity protected by the First Amendment.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ing-around.ars





Hacker Rattles Internet Security Circles
Somini Sengupta

He claims to be 21 years old, a student of software engineering in Tehran who reveres Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and despises dissidents in his country.

He sneaked into the computer systems of a security firm on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He created fake credentials that could allow someone to snoop on Internet connections that appeared to be secure. He then shared that bounty with people he declines to name.

The fruits of his labor are believed to have been used to tap into the online communications of as many as 300,000 unsuspecting Iranians this summer. What’s more, he punched a hole in an online security mechanism that is trusted by millions of Internet users all over the world.

Comodohacker, as he calls himself, insists he acted on his own and is unperturbed by the notion that his work may have been used to spy on antigovernment compatriots.

“I’m totally independent,” he said in an e-mail exchange with The New York Times. “I just share my findings with some people in Iran. They are free to do anything they want with my findings and things I share with them, but I’m not responsible.”

In the annals of Internet attacks, this is likely to go down as a moment of reckoning. For activists, it shows the downside of using online tools to organize: an opponent with enough determination and resources just might find a way to track their every move.

It also calls into question the reliability of a basic system of trust that global Internet brands like Google and Facebook, along with their users, rely upon. The system is intended to verify the authenticity of a particular Web site — to ensure, in effect, that Gmail is Gmail, and that the connection to the site is encrypted and difficult for an outsider to monitor.

Hundreds of companies and government authorities around the world, including in the United States and China, have the power to issue the digital certificates that the system relies upon to verify a site’s identity. The same hacker is believed to be responsible for attacks on three such companies.

In March, he claimed credit for a breach of Comodo, in Italy. In late August came the attack on the Dutch company DigiNotar. On Friday evening, a company called GlobalSign said it had detected an intrusion into its Web site, but not into more confidential systems.

Armed with certificates stolen from companies like these, someone with control over an Internet service provider, like the Iranian authorities, could trick Internet users into thinking they were safely connected to a familiar site, while eavesdropping on their online activity.

Fearing the prospect of other breaches similar to those carried out by this hacker, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, last week issued a warning to certificate authority companies to audit their security systems or risk being booted off Firefox.

“It is a real example of a weakness in security infrastructure that many people assumed was trustworthy,” said Richard Bejtlich, the chief security officer of Mandiant Security in Alexandria, Va. “It’s a reminder that it is only as trustworthy as the companies that make up the system. There are bound to be some that can’t protect their infrastructure, and you have results like this.”

Comodohacker said via e-mail that he began his explorations by scrolling through a list of certificate authority companies. DigiNotar sparked his interest because it was Dutch. He said he was motivated by the failure of Dutch peacekeepers to prevent the massacres of Muslims in Srebenica in 1995. He also said he chose the Dutch company because of a Dutch legislator, Geert Wilders, who has built a political career out of criticizing Muslims in his country.

DigiNotar, which is owned by an Illinois company called Vasco Data Security International, did not make the attack particularly difficult, according to a report by Fox-IT, a security company that was commissioned by the Dutch government to investigate. The company’s critical servers contained malicious software that should have been spotted by antivirus tools, the report said, and the servers related to certificates were all protected by just one weak password. DigiNotar did not respond to requests for comment last week.

There was fallout in the Netherlands as well. The government there said last week that it was widening its investigation into the breach in an effort to learn whether the private data of Dutch citizens, many of whom file income tax returns online, had been compromised.

Comodohacker apparently began poking around DigiNotar’s systems in early June, the Fox-IT report said. He gained control of the server in about 10 days and generated 531 fake certificates, including some for well-known sites like Google, Skype and Facebook, along with a few foreign intelligence sites. He shared them with a person or organization believed to have had control over dozens of Internet service providers and university networks in Iran — perhaps the government itself.

Fox-IT concluded that over the course of a month, 300,000 people were served up fake certificates produced by Comodohacker. E-mails, chats, user names and passwords could have been monitored, revealing who they were talking to and what they were planning.
Google on Thursday issued an unusual warning to its users in Iran, calling on them to change passwords and check if their e-mails were being forwarded to unfamiliar or suspicious addresses.

Word of the Google warning caught the attention of Jubeen Sharbaf, an Iranian in Toronto. He is not ignorant of the Iranian government’s attempts to spy on its people, he said via e-mail. “This was alarming though because Google is perceived to be very secure, and beside Skype it has been used for the line of communication within and outside Iran,” he said.

Comodohacker was plainspoken about his motivations.

“My country should have control over Google, Skype, Yahoo, etc.,” he said by e-mail. “I’m breaking all encryption algorithms and giving power to my country to control all of them.”

In the days since his attack was discovered, Comodohacker posted lengthy explanations on Pastebin, a sort of Internet bulletin board, of how he had penetrated the system of the Dutch firm and why, along with his e-mail address.

He has also boasted of his own skills, calling his work the “most sophisticated hack of all time,” and at one point exclaiming: “I’m really sharp, powerful, dangerous and smart!”

Mikko Hypponen, a security researcher with Helsinki-based F-Secure Labs, said the hacker was “somebody who has skills, and he also has the old-school hacker mentality where he likes to boast.” Mr. Hypponen added: “If he were an intelligence analyst for the secret police he wouldn’t be doing this.”

Asked whether he was paid for his services, the hacker replied in broken English: “I don’t fight for my belief for award in this world.”

The e-mail he sent appears to have come from a computer in Russia, according to an independent security analyst who reviewed it. Comodohacker has either remotely taken control of someone’s computer in Russia, or he may not be an Iranian software engineer at all.

Artin Afkhami and Kevin J. O’Brien contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/t...y-circles.html





British Hacking Inquiry to Recall James Murdoch
Alan Cowell and John F. Burns

A parliamentary panel investigating the phone hacking scandal in the British outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire said on Tuesday that it would recall his son, James Murdoch, to answer more questions about his knowledge of the affair.

John Whittingdale, the committee chairman, told Sky News that Mr. Murdoch would be recalled after the House of Commons select committee investigating the scandal heard testimony from Les Hinton, a former top executive at the Murdoch family’s News Corporation.

Mr. Hinton was the most senior News Corporation executive to quit as the hacking scandal unfolded.

While Mr. Whittingdale said he expected James Murdoch to appear at the inquiry for a second hearing.

“My understanding is that he is willing to cooperate with all of the various inquiries which are under way,” Mr. Whittingdale said, referring to James Murdoch. “It may be that he just says he disagrees, but it would be helpful to hear that directly from him.”

Mr. Whittingdale said there were “a lot of loose ends.”

A spokesman for News Corporation said Mr. Murdoch was “happy to appear” to answers any questions the committee might have.

The scandal over unlawful intercepts of voice mail has been rumbling for several years but it sharpened with reports earlier this year that The News of the World tabloid ordered the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, an abducted teenager who was later found murdered.

The revelation ignited huge public revulsion — a sentiment likely to be rekindled with a legal case brought by the mother of a victim of the London bombings of July 7, 2005.

The mother, Sheila Henry, said she had been told by police that a private investigator working for the tabloid had tried to hack her son’s voice mail after the attacks, in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people. A high court judge ruled on Tuesday that he would hear her allegation as one of five major cases among civil suits being brought against the newspaper over phone hacking.

Tom Watson, a member of the parliamentary panel investigating the hacking scandal said that, if the allegation proved to true, the memories of victims of the bombings had been “insulted in a callous and inhuman way,” British news reports said.

The Guardian newspaper said it was believed that Ms. Henry left voice messages for her son, Christian Small, when she was trying to discover her son’s whereabouts after the bombing.

The parliamentary panel questioned both Rupert and James Murdoch in mid-July and resumed with fresh intensity a week ago when two former senior employees spoke about a meeting that parliamentary investigators have identified as a critical milestone in attempts by News Corporation executives to contain the scandal.

The two former executives said at a parliamentary hearing that they had informed James Murdoch, chief of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, at a 15-minute meeting in London in 2008 that the hacking of voice mail as a reporting tool went beyond the work by a lone “rogue” reporter and a private investigator that the company had acknowledged at the time.

The men said they had conveyed that message as part of a plan to win Mr. Murdoch’s backing for a record $1.4 million settlement that bound a hacking victim to silence about his case.

The former executives — Tom Crone, former legal manager for the Murdoch-owned newspapers in Britain, and Colin Myler, former editor of the defunct News of the World — said the settlement had been intended to avoid millions in legal costs, but several members of Parliament suggested that it was part of a cover-up intended to buy the hacking victim’s silence and prevent the scandal from spreading.

Committee members have said that, in recalling James Murdoch, they will focus on determining whether he testified truthfully in July when he said that there was no indication at the 2008 meeting of a pattern of wrongdoing at The News of the World, which was closed as a result of the scandal.

James Murdoch has denied that he was told that the hacking involved more than a single case that resulted in two men — reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire — going to jail in 2007.

In a statement, he rejected the assertions by Mr. Crone and Mr. Myler that they had told him of an internal e-mail from the tabloid’s archive — one showing that the phone hacking had been more widespread and posed a far more serious threat financially and legally — that justified a payout that would serve to contain the damage.

Mr. Whittingdale, the committee chairman, said there were “questions arising from the time when payments were made to Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire.”

“We’re also interested in hearing a bit more from the solicitors on some conflicting accounts,” he said, referring to lawyers involved in the case.

“And I think we will have some more questions based upon what we have heard that we want to put to James Murdoch.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/wo...14hacking.html





Pressure Mounts on Murdoch Family in Hacking Probe
Kate Holton

Britain's parliament on Tuesday said it would recall Rupert Murdoch's son James to answer more questions in its probe into News Corp's hacking scandal and U.S. shareholders raised the stakes in a legal battle with the company.

The two moves reignited a long-running controversy that has already damaged the British establishment and threatened the media magnate's once untouchable political influence.

British politicians said they would call James Murdoch for further questioning, probably in November, after employees appeared to contradict his statements that he had only limited knowledge of the widespread hacking at a News Corp newspaper.

James Murdoch, chairman of News Corp's British newspaper arm, spent almost three, uncomfortable hours in front of a parliamentary committee with his father in July, answering questions over what they had done to unravel the scandal at the now-defunct News of the World.

His insistence that he did not know the problem stretched beyond a single "rogue reporter" until earlier this year has since been undermined by two senior employees who say they made him aware of a wider problem in 2008.

The spotlight on James Murdoch's handling of the scandal has damaged his reputation and raised questions over whether he can succeed his father at the top of the company.

It has also raised concerns about the level of corporate governance at News Corp.

In America, shareholders widened a legal complaint against the company, while Australia looked set to hold a wide-ranging inquiry into its media in the wake of the scandal.

A revised lawsuit alleged News Corp's board knew more than 10 years ago that the company's U.S. subsidiaries were illegally hacking competitors' computers

"The board has not lifted a finger to engage in any oversight of (Rupert) Murdoch's rule, even when it was provided with clear and unmistakable warnings that News Corp's business practices were not only unethical, but also illegal," said the complaint, filed in Delaware Chancery Court.

Tom Watson, the most dogged member of the British parliamentary committee, told Reuters members wanted to speak to Les Hinton, the most senior News Corp executive to stand down over the scandal, and several lawyers as well as James Murdoch.

"We're inviting him back," he said. "We feel we should hear from Les Hinton and a couple of the lawyers before James Murdoch, so realistically we are talking about November."

The parliamentarians have interviewed a host of senior executives, lawyers and former editors. Members have appeared incredulous at times as witnesses denied all knowledge of the hacking and said they could not remember who said or did what when.

Former News Corp lawyer Tom Crone and editor Colin Myler repeatedly said the committee would "have to ask Les Hinton about that," when the committee asked them questions a week ago.

Never-Ending Questions

News Corp has been engulfed by the scandal since July when it was revealed that people employed by the paper had hacked into the phones of murder victims, including schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and British war dead, as well as celebrities and politicians.

The crisis has already wiped billions of dollars off News Corp's market value, cost it two senior executives, forced it to drop a prized $12 billion bid for BSkyB and shut down the 168-year-old News of the World tabloid.

It has humiliated the 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch, who has for years had a strong influence over British politicians, and also to a lesser degree, those in Australia and the United States.

It has also embarrassed British Prime Minister David Cameron, who hired former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his spokesman.

News Corp said James Murdoch would be happy to appear in front of the committee again to answer any further questions.

"When James Murdoch testifies before parliament, it will be good theater," Richard Levick, the head of Levick Strategic Communications which advises on crisis management, told Reuters.

"It will create news interest yet again and re-emerge as a story. The legal moves and the inquiry in Australia are taking it global."

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Additional reporting by Tom Hals in Delaware; Editing by Mark Potter and Andrew Heavens)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78C3XY20110913





Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansson Victims of Nude Photos Leak

Mila Kunis appears to be the latest victim of a cell phone hacker ring thought to be responsible for stealing nude photos and videos from at least 50 female celebrities, according to website TMZ.

Earlier today TMZ reported that Scarlett Johansson has asked the FBI to investigate how nude photos, which she appears to have taken of herself, were leaked on a website today.

Johansson’s reps didn’t respond to a request for comment. Nor did the FBI.

Mila Kunis’ rep did not give an immediate response to a request for comment.

According to TMZ, the person or persons behind Kunis’ cell phone hack have leaked four pictures to a website. Two show Justin Timberlake looking seductive. In one picture, he’s lying shirtless in bed. In another, he jokingly wears a pair of pink panties on his head.

There’s another photo of Mila in the bathtub, showing only her head. And one photo shows an unidentified nude man.

The hacker has also posted some texts which he claims are exchanges between Timberlake and Kunis.

Kunis and Johansson are not the first celebrities to have their phones hacked. Others include: Jessica Alba, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Christina Aguilera, Vanessa Hudgens, Ali Larter, and Miley Cyrus.

TMZ reported earlier this year that the FBI was closing in on the ring believed to have broken into the accounts of stars’ cell phones and other computerized devices to obtain the compromising photos and videos.

If indeed, these photos of Johansson, Kunis and Timberlake are legit, one question remains: why are they taking nude or nearly nude photos on a cell phone?

Beth Jones, a senior threat researcher at the Internet security company Sophos, offered a suggestion to stars worried about becoming the victims of hackers.

“I hate to point out the obvious, but not taking nude photos on your phone is your first line of defense. Remember Polaroids?” Jones told ABCNews.com.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertai...e-photos-leak/





People Who Get Malware Also Get Mugged More Than Usual

Our Lifehacker AU comrades point out this interesting fact from Norton's latest Cybercrime report: People who fall victim to malware are statistically more likely to be mugged in real life too. Interesting. The obvious caveat is that correlation doesn't imply causation, but it is a bit telling to see that these two statistics are linked. Could it be that people who aren't careful online - because honestly, that's what falling victim to malware is - aren't careful in meatspace either?

Norton's internet safety advocate agrees, and says "Clearly these people aren't taking enough care in their real-world interactions and it carries over in their online world." Just think about people you know and how careful they are in their everyday dealings with other people. The more guarded or suspicious you are, the less likely you are to hand over your personal information to a shady site or click a link or open an attachment you're not sure about.
http://lifehacker.com/5838381/people...ore-than-usual





Sean Duffy Case Highlights Murky World of Trolling
BBC

A man has been jailed for 18 weeks for sending abusive messages on social networking sites.

Sean Duffy, from Reading, Berkshire, posted hurtful remarks on pages set up in remembrance of girls who had died.

His victims were the bereaved relatives of people he did not know, and included the family of Worcester teenager Natasha MacBryde who killed herself after being bullied.

Duffy pleaded guilty to two counts of sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature.

The charges related to Facebook and YouTube posts about Miss MacBryde, 15, who Duffy had never met.

But exactly what constitutes trolling, who does it, and who does it affect?

Trolling is described by Oxford Dictionaries Online as an "informal term".

It means to send or submit a provocative email or posting with the intention of inciting an angry response.

Fevzi Turkalp, a technology expert from gadgetdetective.com says trolling is often used in chatrooms and online forums, especially in the technology world.

"Someone will go onto an Apple website and say something derogatory about Apple, knowing full well people on there will be fans of Apple, in order to provoke a response," he said.

However, there is a darker side to trolling, in which people take advantage of anonymity to make hurtful and offensive remarks.

Cyberbullying

"People feel protected by anonymity and the true nature of people comes to the fore," said Mr Turkalp.

It is at this point that trolling can also descend into cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is defined by Mr Turkalp as "a repetitious and malicious activity by one person or a group of people against another individual".

In the case of Miss MacBryde, her bereaved family and friends were targeted by Duffy's trolling.

Duffy posted messages on a remembrance page set up by Miss MacBryde's friends.

In one of the posts he called the teenager a slut.

He also posted a video on YouTube, entitled Tasha the Tank Engine, showing the children's character Thomas the Tank Engine with Miss MacBryde's face.

Miss MacBryde had thrown herself under a train after being cyber-bullied in a separate incident.

In another cyberbullying case, Carney Bonner, 17, told BBC Berkshire in March how he almost "slit his wrists" due to being bullied on Facebook as a 14-year-old.

And, although it is commonly believed that teenagers are the main victims of cyberbullying, teaching unions also report a rise in incidences against staff.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers' union, said pupils had started to use "sophisticated tools" against teachers.

"Misuse of internet sites can destroy teachers' confidence and professional reputation and provide yet another vehicle for false allegations against staff.

"New cases of abuse, harassment and humiliation are emerging all the time."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-14897948





Exclusive: Ziff Davis Offering Money To Sites To Secretly Track Users

Technology publisher Ziff Davis is offering money to tech sites to secretly track their users, Medacity has learned exclusively.

The publisher is pitching the “Ziff Davis Tech Co-Op” as “a closed door invitation only club of some of the best tech sites (publishers, etailers, affiliates) on the web that share audience information anonymously within the Co-Op” (emphasis is ours.)

There are three parts to club membership: the offer of publishing rights to Ziff Davis content, some limited advertising opportunities, and the core of the club: data sharing.

The Tech Co-Op club offers participating sites $1 CPM for “Active U.S based cookies/ Users each month” which will be tracked by placement of a Javascript tag placed on participating sites. They note in their pitch :

“NOTE: We are not an ad network and we are not paying for your ad inventory nor interested in your TAL (traffic assignment letter). This partnership offers incremental revenue for you. e.g. if your site gets 1M Unique Visitors each month, we cut you a check for $2,000 each month.

Every Quarter we will send you a report on how your site is trending vis a vis other members and any specific movements in the industry as it pertains to your site. These are key insights that is not available anywhere.

We will pay you at the agreed upon CPM rate for ALL the MAU collected for that month.”


In our research we’ve found no mention of the “Ziff Davis Tech Co-Op” on the web, suggesting that any sites that may be participating so far are keeping very quiet about the deal.

From a publishers perspective, the offer is not without appeal, however paying to secretly obtain user data on third party sites is at best morally dubious, and at worst could potentially breach privacy laws.

The secrecy of the “club” is the give away: this isn’t something Ziff Davis wants people knowing about, which given what they are paying for isn’t surprising.
http://www.medacity.com/1269/exclusi...y-track-users/





Update Urged on Children’s Online Privacy
Somini Sengupta

Aiming to catch up with fast-churning technology that touches children’s lives every day, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday proposed long-awaited changes to regulations covering online privacy for children.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa, was enacted over a decade ago, long before the advent of social media and smartphones. It requires companies to obtain parental consent before collecting any personal information about a child under the age of 13.

The proposed revisions expand the definition of “personal information” to include a child’s location, along with any personal data collected through the use of cookies for the purposes of targeted advertising. It also covers facial recognition technology. Web sites that collect a child’s information would be required to ensure that they can protect it, hold onto it “for only as long as is reasonably necessary,” and then delete the information safely.

The F.T.C. also suggested that parental consent should no longer be obtained through a two-step e-mail and authorization process, but through alternate methods, like getting scanned versions of signed consent forms and videoconferencing.

The commission said revisions to the law were required in light of “an explosion in children’s use of mobile devices, the proliferation of online social networking and interactive gaming.” Its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, described children as “tech-savvy, but judgment-poor.”

The collecting of information on children is an emotional issue that often attracts political attention. The F.T.C. has called for comments on its proposals and is expected to finalize them next year. It can put them into effect without Congressional approval.

Coppa represents one of the most explicit protections regarding online privacy in American law. The F.T.C. is expected to release its final recommendations for broader online privacy regulations in the coming months.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington and a privacy advocate who helped draft the original law, said he was especially heartened that the rules addressed new technology that allows for location-tracking and facial recognition. “It’s a forward-looking effort to update Internet privacy law,” he said.

Common Sense Media, an advocacy group based in San Francisco, lauded the proposed changes, saying parents “should absolutely remain the gatekeepers when it comes to their children’s online privacy.”

Whether the changes will affect the way Internet companies do business is not clear. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that because of the existing law, many firms, especially start-ups, avoid dealing with children under 13 anyway. “The requirements of complying with Coppa are onerous and expensive, and the payoffs from having under-13 kids on the site are rarely worth the financial investment,” he said. “The revisions do nothing to change the basic economics of complying with the statute.”

Enforcement is another issue. Facebook says its policy is to not allow children under 13 to use its site, but that it is fraught with difficulty because children lie about their age. Research by Consumer Reports this year found that 7.5 million American children under the age of 13 were using the site. The Pew Research Center in 2009 found that 38 percent of American 12-year-olds were using social networks.

A Facebook official who is not authorized to speak to the media because of the sensitivity of the subject called on parents to advise their children about being safe online. “We believe it is time to focus on how to keep kids safe online and on Facebook, rather than on how to keep them off,” he said. Company officials said they are reviewing the F.T.C.’s proposals.

The F.T.C. this year imposed a $50,000 fine on W3 Innovations, a company that produces mobile phone apps, for collecting personal information on children without proper parental consent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/t...e-privacy.html





Analysis: China Seeks to Tether the Microblog Tiger
Chris Buckley

Mao Zedong famously said a single spark could start a revolutionary prairie fire. That fear is now driving his Communist Party successors to grapple with how to tame China's expanding legions of microbloggers.

A stream of warnings in state media has exposed how nervous Beijing is about the booming microblogs and their potential to tear at the seams of party censorship and controls.

Chinese microblogs, especially Sina Corp's dominant service, carry plenty of celebrity gossip and harmless fare. But they also offer raucous forums for lambasting officials and reporting unrest or official abuses. It is their potential to stoke popular discontent, even protest, that worries Beijing.

"The government feels it's on the back foot about this," said Li Yonggang, a professor at Nanjing University who studies Internet policy, adding researchers and think-tanks had been mobilized to study how to strengthen microblog management.

"There's a feeling that additional regulation, formal or informal, is on the way."

The number of Chinese users registered on domestic microblog sites reached 195 million by the end of June, an increase of 209 percent on the number at the end of 2010, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Most use Sina's "Weibo" service, launched in August 2009, or rival Tencent Holding's "QQ" service.

Officials, however, have not been singing the same tune about how far the government should go to rein in microblogs. Dozens of rival agencies claim a stake in regulating China's Internet and "there are certainly different stances," said Li.

Some officials have decried "Weibo" (pronounced "way-baw") as a tool for reckless rumors and subversion; others have defended it as a challenging, but much-needed, window into the public soul.

Despite the jitters, Beijing is extremely unlikely to close microblogs, a step that experts said could unleash its own prairie fire of public anger and distrust that would give even China's thick-skinned leaders pause.

"There's this Chinese proverb, 'qi hu, nan xia' (once riding a tiger, it's hard to dismount), and that's the problem the government has -- that it got onto this thing, allowed it to start, and now to shut it down, that would be a nuclear option," said Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based investor and adviser on China's Internet sector who runs the DigiCha.com blog.

"It would be surprising if they kill it or completely neuter it, but I think a likely outcome is a set of incremental tweaks and controls," Bishop said of Beijing's approach.

"You've got to remember that this is basically a real-time stream of what Chinese people are thinking, and that's not just incredibly valuable to people who care about public opinion, but also for those monitoring security problems," he said.

Stricter controls could include time delays so comments are more finely filtered before spreading online, and demanding at least some classes of users register with their real names, which many do not do now, said several industry analysts.

Beijing also could impose new license conditions on microblog operators, slimming down the number of players to a more manageable and compliant number, some analysts also said.

"Microblog regulation will be a game of cat and mouse," said Wang Junxiu, a Beijing-based Internet investor and commentator who follows debates on China's microblogs.

"There's clearly a trend toward stricter controls, but the costs of outright shutting them down would be too high."

A Megaphone For Every Citizen

Ever since the Internet arrived in China, the Communist Party has been figuring out ways to monitor and restrict online information and images, and its controls are among the most sophisticated and pervasive in the world. China also blocks popular foreign sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

But the explosion of microblog use has pushed China's contest over information into unfamiliar terrain, where censors have lagged like pot-bellied and puffing hunters left flatfooted behind hordes of fleeing rabbits.

Microblogs allow users to issue bursts of opinion -- a maximum of 140 Chinese characters -- that can cascade through chains of followers who instantly receive those messages, challenging censors who have a hard time monitoring the tens of millions of messages sent every day. Inventive users adopt alternative words to get around censorship filters.

"We have no other venue for speaking out, because the public's voice can't appear on television or news or newspapers, and so microblogs have become the most effective way for instantly expressing the heartfelt feelings of the public," said Liu Zicheng, a 20-year-old student trawling through his microblog on a web-connected cell phone in a Beijing cafe.

"If my microblog was shut down, it would be like I'd lost a habitual part of life, like putting on socks every day before you step out the door," said Liu.

Beijing's worries go beyond the embarrassing exposes of officials' misdeeds and mistresses now common on microblogs. It worries that the torrents of messages could overwhelm censorship and trigger unrest -- a fear reinforced by the role of social media in Arab anti-government uprisings and riots in London.

"Weibo can be like a megaphone in the hands of every user," said Li, the Nanjing University professor.

"If you shout fast enough and loud enough you can attract widespread attention and there can be a snowball effect so everyone joins in and feels bolder about speaking out."

China felt that force in July when microblogs became a forum for lashing the government over a deadly high-speed rail crash. Images of a peaceful protest against a north China chemical plant in August also spread on microblogs.

Earlier this year, searches and message forwarding on Sina's "Weibo" site were briefly suspended during government alarm over online calls for protests inspired by the Arab uprisings.

"At present, microblogging is still tolerable to the government, but there is a fear of a potential crisis such as the London riots," said Wang Wen, a newspaper commentator in Beijing who has advocated tighter management of microblogs.

"If there's a collective incident related to microblogs, the government will step up management of it."

No Shut Down

But China's leaders would consider shutting microblogs only in extreme circumstances, such as nationwide protests or panic, said Yu Guoming, a professor of journalism at Renmin University in Beijing and co-author of a recent study of microblogging.

Instead, Beijing is exploring ways to tame the microblog so it remains a useful forum for monitoring opinion, but stays within the ultimate grip of authorities. The government is "still at the stage of collecting ideas" about how to better manage microblogs, said Yu.

Ways of putting microblogs on a tighter leash that have been floated include a time-delay so operators can monitor messages more thoroughly before they go out, and demanding that users who forward messages use their real names, which could deter many of them from challenging censorship.

Even relatively limited steps could draw an outcry from microblog users, said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based company that advises investors about China's Internet and telecommunications sectors.

Tighter controls could also come tied to new license demands, which could be used to reduce the number of Chinese microblog operators and keep only those seen as reliable enforcers of government demands. For now, Chinese microblog sites are formally operating on a "trial" basis.

Sina has a reputation as a trusted partner of regulators, and might even welcome tougher licensing conditions that deter upstarts, said Li, the professor.

"Sina might be happy to guide its microblog space more in the direction of entertainment so the government has fewer jitters," he said.

(Additional reporting by Maxim Duncan in Beijing and Melanie Lee in Shanghai, editing by Brian Rhoads and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78F04D20110916





Pledge Asks Chinese Hackers to Reject Cybertheft

Two Chinese hackers are asking their peers to pledge to a code on hacking standards
Michael Kan

Two prominent Chinese hackers have released a convention calling for the rejection of cybertheft and are asking their peers to support it, as China is increasingly seen as the source of international hacking attacks.

The two hackers, Gong Wei and Wan Tao, released their "Hackers' Self-Discipline Convention" to the Chinese media and posted its contents on the Internet. The hackers declined to offer further comment, but the document presents itself as a moral code that outlines appropriate hacking activities.

The document states that hackers will not obtain money through stealing from the public. Hacking groups will also not spread knowledge or tools that are meant to take income. "The public's privacy, especially that of children and minors, will be protected," the document says. Any activity to buy or sell people's private information is considered inappropriate.

The pact also defines hackers as people who promote the development of the Internet and computing by studying security vulnerabilities. "What hackers do is not malicious damage," the document notes. "Hackers are not used for politics."

A draft of the convention will be presented to a hackers' conference in Shanghai, being held next week, that 400 to 500 people are expected to attend. A vote will then be cast on whether to approve the convention.

Both Gong and Wan currently work in the IT security industry, but gained prominence as two of China's earliest hackers. Gong is the founder of the Green Army Corps, one of the country's first hacker groups, while Wan founded the hacking group China Eagle Union. Both groups are believed to have been involved in attacking and defacing foreign websites.

Gong and Wan first told the Chinese media about their plans to write a convention after the Chinese supreme court ruled in August that hackers could be subject to penalties based on existing laws. Gong said China lacked a healthy hacking culture, and newcomers with an interest in technology could easily fall down the wrong path.

Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied that the government supports hacking. But the country has come under suspicion of state-sponsored cyber attacks. One recent large-scale attack involved a hacking group that targeted 72 companies and organizations across 14 countries, according to security vendor McAfee. Analysts have pointed fingers at China because of the targets selected.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/.../?fp=16&fpid=1





Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a Felony?

Congress contemplates draconian punishment for Internet lies.
Orin S. Kerr

Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet. So you could be jailed for lying about your age or weight on an Internet dating site. Or you could be sent to federal prison if your boss told you to work but you used the company's computer to check sports scores online. Imagine that Eric Holder's Justice Department urged Congress to raise penalties for violations, making them felonies allowing three years in jail for each broken promise. Fanciful, right?

Think again. Congress is now poised to grant the Obama administration's wishes in the name of "cybersecurity."

The little-known law at issue is called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was enacted in 1986 to punish computer hacking. But Congress has broadened the law every few years, and today it extends far beyond hacking. The law now criminalizes computer use that "exceeds authorized access" to any computer. Today that violation is a misdemeanor, but the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to meet this morning to vote on making it a felony.

The problem is that a lot of routine computer use can exceed "authorized access." Courts are still struggling to interpret this language. But the Justice Department believes that it applies incredibly broadly to include "terms of use" violations and breaches of workplace computer-use policies.

Breaching an agreement or ignoring your boss might be bad. But should it be a federal crime just because it involves a computer? If interpreted this way, the law gives computer owners the power to criminalize any computer use they don't like. Imagine the Democratic Party setting up a public website and announcing that no Republicans can visit. Every Republican who checked out the site could be a criminal for exceeding authorized access.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider a few recent cases. In 2009, the Justice Department prosecuted a woman for violating the "terms of service" of the social networking site MySpace.com. The woman had been part of a group that set up a MySpace profile using a fake picture. The feds charged her with conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Prosecutors say the woman exceeded authorized access because MySpace required all profile information to be truthful. But people routinely misstate the truth in online profiles, about everything from their age to their name. What happens when each instance is a felony?

In 2010, the Justice Department charged a defendant with unauthorized access for using a computer to buy tickets from Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster's website lets anyone visit. But its "terms of use" only permitted non-automated purchases, and the defendant used a computer script to make the purchases.

In another case, Justice has charged a defendant with violating workplace policies that limited use to legitimate company business. Prosecutors claimed that using the company's computers for other reasons exceeded authorized access. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently agreed.

The law even goes beyond criminal law. It allows civil suits filed by private parties. As a result, federal courts have been flooded with silly disputes. In one recent case, an employer sued a former employee for excessive Internet usage from work. The alleged offense: visiting Facebook and sending personal emails. In another case, a company posted "terms of use" on its website declaring that no competitors could visit—and then promptly sued a competitor that did.

Remarkably, the law doesn't even require devices to be connected to the Internet. Since 2008, it applies to pretty much everything with a microchip. So if you're visiting a friend and you use his coffeemaker without permission, watch out: You may have committed a federal crime.

Until now, the critical limit on the government's power has been that federal prosecutors rarely charge misdemeanors. They prefer to bring more serious felony charges. That's why the administration's proposal is so dangerous. If exceeding authorized access becomes a felony, prosecutors will become eager to charge it. Abuses are inevitable.

Real threats to cybersecurity must be prosecuted. Penalties should be stiff. But Congress must narrow the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act before enhancing its penalties. There's no reason to make breaching a promise a federal case, and certainly not a felony crime.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...116160896.html





No, Faking Your Name On Facebook Will Not Be A Felony
Kashmir Hill

In order to step up the prosecution of hackers and scary cybercriminals, the feds are changing a law to make unauthorized access to a computer system a felony rather than just a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor. That means making a change to something called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Currently, that law includes criminal penalties for “exceeding authorized access” on a computer. The Justice Department has interpreted that to mean violating a website’s “terms of use” or breaking your work’s rules about how you use your computer. Yes, that law meant that checking your fantasy football scores at lunch or using a fake name on Facebook equaled criminal activity (the latter was one of the charges prosecutors levied at Lori Drew in the MySpace-suicide case).

Legal scholar Orin Kerr wrote an alarming op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, warning people that “faking your name on Facebook could be a felony” when the law is changed. But a lot changed since yesterday morning. An amendment was added to the bill during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday morning, so that people who violate website’s terms of service are not considered felons.

Senators Al Franken and Chuck Grassley proposed new language for the bill (thanks in part to Kerr’s urging) to exempt those guilty only of TOS violations. Franken, in urging his fellow senators to adopt the amendment, said that without it, the following people would be felons: “A father who uses his son’s Facebook password to log into his Facebook account to check his messages and photos” (ed. note: Creepy and invasive but not criminal); “a 17 year-old who claims she is 18 in order to sell her knitted scarves on Etsy,” and “a struggling businessowner who secretly creates a Yelp account to give his restaurants favorable reviews” (ed. note: Again, uncool and deceptive, but not felony behavior).

The Committee then added an amendment to the bill that specifies that felony-level unauthorized access not “include access in violation of a contractual obligation or agreement, such as an acceptable use policy or terms of service agreement, with an Internet service provider, Internet website, or non-government employer, if such violation constitutes the sole basis for determining that access to a protected computer is unauthorized.” The bill will now move forward to be considered by the Senate.

So, no, you’re not in the Twilight Zone. You can fake your name on Facebook or your age on OkCupid without being charged with a felony.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...t-be-a-felony/





Amazon Reportedly in Talks to Launch a Netflix for Books

In February, Amazon.com launched its long-awaited subscription video-streaming service as part of Amazon Prime, setting itself up to be a serious rival to Netflix. If we’re honest, it has yet to take off but let’s not be too harsh on a service that is essentially a bolt-on to its existing Amazon Prime annual subscription that offers free two day shipping with no minimum purchase amount for $79/year.

Today however we’re hearing reports via the WSJ that Amazon may soon launch a book equivalent of the service, charging a fixed monthly fee for access to a library of books. Amazon will reportedly offer book publishers a substantial fee for their involvement in the program.

The idea isn’t entirely new with services like ‘the library’, booksfree.com and bookswim existing for some time but both are currently primarily for offline paperbacks and hardbacks. There’s also 24symbols which recently launched a near identical offering, but currently only features titles that are public domain rather than premium bestsellers. With Amazon’s Kindle platform and intimate relationships with every premium publisher on the planet, this is a unique new space only the likes of Amazon and Apple are likely to be able to cater to.

Assuming this is true, my bet is on Amazon to dominate thanks to its first mover advantage and a name synonymous with books. Let’s face it, iBooks hasn’t had quite the impact we would have expected to see from a digital giant like Apple. I’d argue this is because of its lacking selection of books, poor access across multiple mobile platforms and its fewer features such as desktop reading, community highlighting, etc.

As with most subscription based online streaming or rental services these days you can expect this to only be available in the US.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/0...lix-for-books/





Swedes Pioneer New 'Spotify for E-Books'

Following in the footsteps of Swedish streaming music service Spotify, a group of tech entrepreneurs believe they've found a similar solution that could revolutionise the book market, The Local's Geoff Mortimore discovers.

The rise of tablet computing continues unabated.

Over 1 million units of the Ipad 2 were sold on the first weekend of release earlier this year, while the rush to join the market grows by the week.

With the hardware infrastructure in place, publishers from both the digital and traditional media have been accused of reacting too slowly for the demand for content, not least in the form of e-books.

With this in mind Johanna and Pascal Denize, a pair of venture capitalists with a long history of start ups in the world of book publishing, founded Platify, a digital reading solution that they hope will transform the book market in the same way that Spotify has managed in the music industry.

”Book publishers have been slow in changing their work practices and business models to suit the new environment,” says Pascal Denize.

”We figured that by using what we have learned in our many years in the business, with the best software solution there is a chance of cornering a market.”

The pair hooked up with software developer Henrik Hussfelt and Platify was born.

Put simply, Platify’s role is to sit between the publishers and the tablets, and manage the purchase and subscription services of books online.

”We are not the first to realise the potential of this, but you have to have the best technological solution. Ours differs from others in several ways, most notably that you can bookmark pages, so if you are in the middle of a book it is easy to go back to the last point you were reading," Denize explains.

"The advantage we have over the giant publishers is that the more creative individuals and authors are not always the ones who can make a success out of a business."

According to Denize, the business sensibilities of Platify's founders also give it a leg up on traditional publishers.

"Publishing is still seen by a large majority of people in it as an art form rather than a business, and profit making is not the first priority. This suits people like us and makes it a ripe area for our kind venture," he explains.

A potential downfall of any new venture in this business is the lack of a proven business model. Denize is aware of this but feels that someone will get it right sooner or later.

For the moment Platify has started with academic books in the United States, where one third of the global book market is based.

”The choice of market is an obvious one, because you have a homogeneous population of over 300 million, all speaking the same language. This makes our launch market choice easy, but as we grow we will branch out,” says Denize.

The trio tested tested the platform live last month on their own free service Litfy.

The site, which is primarily aimed at students, contains about 2,000 titles for which the copyright has expired.

Once they can test the success of the project, they can branch out and offer publishers as well as both published and new, unpublished authors a sales platform for their work.

So far, the books on Litfy only be read via the web, but in this month they plan to launch the service as an app on Iphone and Android.

Standing out in what promises to be a crowded market will be vital, according to Denize.

”First and foremost, we decided we had to develop a solution that is simple and quick," he explains.

"You can make margin notes and add your own bookmarks, but you can also share lists and notes with other users and users can also discuss topics and texts with each other on forums."

Revenue will come from a combination of advertising and subscriptions, just like Spotify, says Denize.

They expect to be able to offer the platform on a ”white label” basis as well as under their own brand.

”What makes it so exciting is that we are in an industry going through change on an almost daily basis and nobody can really predict with great certainty where it will go next," says Denize.

"We want to see this project through and show that if it is done the right way, it can be successful."
http://www.thelocal.se/36152/20110915/





Authors' Guild Sues Universities Over Book Digitization Project
John Timmer

With the planned settlement between Google and book publishers still on indefinite hold, a legal battle by proxy has started. Google partnered with many libraries at US universities in order to gain access to the works it wants to digitize. Now, several groups that represent book authors have filed suit against those universities, attempting to block both digital lending and an orphaned works project.

The suit is being brought by the Authors' Guild, its equivalents in Australia, Quebec, and the UK, and a large group of individual authors. Its target: some major US universities, including Michigan, the University of California system, and Cornell. These libraries partnered with Google to get their book digitization efforts off the ground and, in return, Google has provided them with digital copies of the works. These and many other universities have also become involved with the HathiTrust, an organization set up to help them archive and distribute digital works; the HathiTrust is also named as a defendant.

The suit seeks to block two separate efforts. In the first, the universities have created a pooled digital archive of the contents of their libraries, maintained by the Hathitrust. No one contests that these works remain in copyright, or that the universities have rights to the nondigital forms of these works. What the authors object to is the fact that the digital works are derived from an unauthorized scan, and will be stored in a single archive that is no longer under the control of the university from which the scan was derived. The suit suggests that the security of this archive is also suspect, and may allow the mass release of copyrighted work.

A separate issue in the suit is an orphaned works project started by the Hathitrust that focuses on some of the works within this archive. The group is attempting to identify out-of-copyright books, and those where the ownership of copyright cannot be established. If attempts to locate and contact any copyright holders fail, and the work is no longer commercially available, the Hathitrust will start providing digital copies to students without restrictions. This has not gone over well. The executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, Angelo Loukakis, stated, "This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books."

The authors' coalition would like to see everything grind to a halt—Google and the libraries kept from any further scanning, the HathiTrust's orphaned works project shuttered, and the digital copies on its servers impounded. The digital works wouldn't be deleted, but it wants to see "any computer system storing the digital copies powered down and disconnected from any network, pending an appropriate act of Congress." (Note that they want them shut down and unplugged, just to be sure.)

The Authors Guild was actually a party to the Google book settlement, so it's not like it objects to the effort per se. However, the university libraries had not been a party to it, so this may be the Guild's attempt to tie up loose ends when it comes to nailing down digital rights. Alternately, they may simply be sending a message that, until the settlement is approved, none of Google's efforts should be reaching even a limited segment of the public. In either case, this suit could go a long way towards establishing how many digital rights are granted with the ownership of a book.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...on-project.ars





Michael Hart, a Pioneer of E-Books, Dies at 64
William Grimes

Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July 4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64.

His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.

Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois, where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer at the school’s Materials Research Lab.

Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100 million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did.

After attending a July 4 fireworks display, he stopped in at a grocery store and received, with his purchase, a copy of the Declaration of Independence printed on parchment. He typed the text, intending to send it as an e-mail to the users of Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, but was dissuaded by a colleague who warned that the message would crash the system. Instead, he posted a notice that the text could be downloaded, and Project Gutenberg was born.

Its goal, formulated by Mr. Hart, was “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-books” and, by making books available to computer users at no cost, “to help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”

Over the next decade, working alone, Mr. Hart typed the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the King James Bible and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” into the project database, the first tentative steps in a revolution that would usher in what he liked to call the fifth information age, a world of e-books, hand-held electronic devices like the Nook and Kindle, and unprecedented individual access to texts on a vast array of Internet archives.

Today, Project Gutenberg lists more than 30,000 books in 60 languages, with the emphasis on titles of interest to the general reader in three categories: “light literature,” “heavy literature” and reference works. In a 2006 e-mail to the technology writer Glyn Moody, he predicted that there would be a billion e-books in 2021, Project Gutenberg’s 50th anniversary, and that, thanks to advances in memory chips, “you will be able to carry all billion e-books in one hand.”

Nearly all the books are in the public domain, although a relatively small number of copyrighted books are reproduced with the permission of the copyright owner. The library includes two books by Mr. Hart: “A Brief History of the Internet” and “Poems and Tales from Romania.”

“It’s a paradigm shift,” he told Searcher magazine in 2002. “It’s the power of one person, alone in their basement, being able to type in their favorite books and give it to millions or billions of people. It just wasn’t even remotely possible before; not even the Gideons can say they have given away a billion Bibles in the past year.”

Michael Stern Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Wash. His father was an accountant; his mother, a cryptanalyst during World War II, was the business manager for a high-end women’s store. The couple retrained to become university teachers and in 1958 found posts at the University of Illinois, in Urbana, where his father taught Shakespeare and his mother taught mathematics.

Michael began attending lectures at the university before entering high school and, following a course of individual study on human-machine interfaces, earned a bachelor of science degree in 1973.

Work on Project Gutenberg proceeded slowly at first. Adding perhaps a book a month, Mr. Hart had created only 313 e-books by 1997. “I was just waiting for the world to realize I’d knocked it over,” he told Searcher. “You’ve heard of ‘cow-tipping’? The cow had been tipped over, but it took it 17 years for it to wake up and say, ‘Moo.’ ”

The pace picked up when he and Mark Zinzow, a programmer at the University of Illinois, recruited volunteers through the school’s PC User Group and set up mirror sites to provide multiple sources for the project.

Shrewdly, Mr. Hart included books like “Zen and the Art of the Internet” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet” to expand the audience for the project’s books.

Today, relying on the work of volunteers who scan and proofread without pay, the project adds to its list at the rate of hundreds of books each month.

Even in the project’s early stages, Mr. Hart envisioned it in revolutionary terms. Borrowing a term from “Star Trek,” he referred to e-books as just one form of replicator technology that would, in the future, allow for the infinite reproduction of things as well as words, overturning all established power structures and ushering in an age of universal abundance.

One hurdle on the road to the diffusion of knowledge was the Copyright Term Extension Act, passed in 1998. The act, sponsored by the California congressman and former pop singer Sonny Bono, removed a million e-books from the public domain by extending the copyright by 20 years. Under United States law, the average copyright now lasts for 95.5 years.

Lawrence Lessig, then a law professor at Stanford University (and now at Harvard), approached Mr. Hart to see if he would be interested in taking part in a constitutional challenge to the law.

He met Mr. Hart in a pizza parlor in Urbana, where, Mr. Lessig recalled in a telephone conversation on Thursday, Mr. Hart added a thick layer of sugar to his pizza while explaining that he saw the case as much more than a test of copyright law. It offered, as he saw it, a way to challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.

Mr. Lessig, looking for a somewhat less visionary lead plaintiff, eventually enlisted Eric Eldred, the owner of Eldritch Press, a Web site that reprints work in the public domain. In 2003, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the copyright extension act.

Mr. Hart is survived by his mother, Alice, of Fort Belvoir, Va., and a brother, Bennett, of Manassas, Va.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/b...ies-at-64.html





In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
Steve Lohr

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost tool for publications to expand and enrich coverage when editorial budgets are under pressure. The company, founded last year, has 20 customers so far. Several are still experimenting with the technology, and Stuart Frankel, the chief executive of Narrative Science, wouldn’t name them. They include newspaper chains seeking to offer automated summary articles for more extensive coverage of local youth sports and to generate articles about the quarterly financial results of local public companies.

“Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,” Mr. Frankel says.

The Narrative Science customers that are willing to talk do fit that model. The Big Ten Network, a joint venture of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Networks, began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.)

As the spring sports season progressed, the computer-generated articles improved, helped by suggestions from editors on the network’s staff, says Michael Calderon, vice president for digital and interactive media at the Big Ten Network.

The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.”

“Composition is the key concept,” Mr. Hammond says. “This is not just taking data and spilling it over into text.”

Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.

Hanley Wood, a trade publisher for the construction industry, began using the program in August to provide monthly reports on more than 350 local housing markets, posted on its site, builderonline.com. The company had long collected the data, but hiring people to write trend articles would have been too costly, says Andrew Reid, president of Hanley Wood’s digital media and market intelligence unit.

Mr. Reid says Hanley Wood worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software for construction. A former executive at Thomson Reuters, he says he was struck by the high quality of the articles.

“They got over a big linguistic hurdle,” he observes. “The stories are not duplicates by any means.”

He was also impressed by the cost. Hanley Wood pays Narrative Science less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media.

NARRATIVE SCIENCE’S ambitions include moving further up the ladder of quality. Both Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Hammond are professors of journalism as well as computer science. The company itself is an outgrowth of collaboration between the two schools.

“This kind of technology can deepen journalism,” says John Lavine, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern.

Mr. Hammond says the combination of advances in its writing engine and data mining can open new horizons for computer journalism, exploring “correlations that you did not expect” — conceptually similar to “Freakonomics,” by two humans, the economist Steven D. Levitt and the author Stephen J. Dubner.

Mr. Hammond cited a media maven’s prediction that a computer program might win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 20 years — and he begged to differ.

“In five years,” he says, “a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology.”

Should it happen, the prize, of course, would not be awarded to abstract code, but to its human creators.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/b...-traction.html





How Google Translate Works

The web giant's translation service might serve up the odd batch of nonsense, but it's still one of the smartest communication tools of all time, as David Bellos explains

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

Much of the time, it works. It's quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for "fully automated high-quality machine translation".

Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.

Google's own promotional video doesn't dwell on this at all. At present it offers two-way translation between 58 languages, that is 3,306 separate translation services, more than have ever existed in all human history to date.

Most of these translation relations – Icelandic to Farsi, Yiddish to Vietnamese, and dozens more – are the newborn offspring of Google Translate: there is no history of translation between them, and therefore no paired texts, on the web or anywhere else. Google's presentation of its service points out that given the huge variations between languages in the amount of material its program can scan to find solutions, translation quality varies according to the language pair involved.

What it does not highlight is that GT is as much the prisoner of global flows in translation as we all are. Its admirably smart probabilistic computational system can only offer 3,306 translation directions by using the same device as has always assisted intercultural communication: pivots, or intermediary languages.

It's not because Google is based in California that English is the main pivot. If you use statistical methods to compute the most likely match between languages that have never been matched directly before, you must use the pivot that can provide matches with both target and source.

A good number of English-language detective novels, for example, have probably been translated into both Icelandic and Farsi. They thus provide ample material for finding matches between sentences in the two foreign languages; whereas Persian classics translated into Icelandic are surely far fewer, even including those works that have themselves made the journey by way of a pivot such as French or German. This means that John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT's Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will. And the real wizardry of Harry Potter may well lie in his hidden power to support translation from Hebrew into Chinese. GT-generated translations themselves go up on the web and become part of the corpus that GT scans, producing a feedback loop that reinforces the probability that the original GT translation was acceptable. But it also feeds on human translators, since it always asks users to suggest a better translation than the one it provides – a loop pulling in the opposite direction, towards greater refinement. It's an extraordinarily clever device. I've used it myself to check I had understood a Swedish sentence more or less correctly, for example, and it is used automatically as a webpage translator whenever you use a search engine.

Of course, it may also produce nonsense. However, the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)

Human translators, on the other hand, produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can't tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source – in which case you don't need the translation at all.

If you remain attached to the idea that a language really does consist of words and rules and that meaning has a computable relationship to them (a fantasy that many philosophers still cling to), then GT is not a translation device. It's just a trick performed by an electronic bulldozer allowed to steal other people's work. But if you have a more open mind, GT suggests something else.

Conference interpreters can often guess ahead of what a speaker is saying because speakers at international conferences repeatedly use the same formulaic expressions. Similarly, an experienced translator working in a familiar domain knows without thinking that certain chunks of text have standard translations that he or she can slot in.

Translators don't reinvent hot water every day. They behave more like GT – scanning their own memories in double-quick time for the most probable solution to the issue at hand. GT's basic mode of operation is much more like professional translation than is the slow descent into the "great basement" of pure meaning that early mechanical translation developers imagined.

GT is also a splendidly cheeky response to one of the great myths of modern language studies. It was claimed, and for decades it was barely disputed, that what was so special about a natural language was that its underlying structure allowed an infinite number of different sentences to be generated by a finite set of words and rules.

A few wits pointed out that this was no different from a British motor car plant, capable of producing an infinite number of vehicles each one of which had something different wrong with it – but the objection didn't make much impact outside Oxford.

GT deals with translation on the basis not that every sentence is different, but that anything submitted to it has probably been said before. Whatever a language may be in principle, in practice it is used most commonly to say the same things over and over again. There is a good reason for that. In the great basement that is the foundation of all human activities, including language behaviour, we find not anything as abstract as "pure meaning", but common human needs and desires.

All languages serve those same needs, and serve them equally well. If we do say the same things over and over again, it is because we encounter the same needs, feel the same fears, desires and sensations at every turn. The skills of translators and the basic design of GT are, in their different ways, parallel reflections of our common humanity.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...s-2353594.html





Why all HDMI Cables are the Same
Geoffrey Morrison

There's lots of money in cables. Your money.

Dozens of reputable and disreputable companies market HDMI cables, and many outright lie to consumers about the "advantages" of their product.

Worse, the profit potential of cables is so great, every retailer pushes high-end HDMI cables in the hopes of duping the buyer into spending tens, if not hundreds, of dollars more than necessary.

Here's the deal: expensive HDMI cables offer no difference in picture quality over cheap HDMI cables. CNET has mentioned this before, but here's the science of why.

The signal

The first thing to understand is what's transmitted over the cable in the first place. HDMI uses Transition Minimized Differential Signaling, or TMDS.

TMDS has two basic aspects. The first is that the 1s and 0s at the source (a Blu-ray player or HD cable/satellite box) are not exactly the 1s and 0s your TV uses to create a picture--at least, not in exactly the same order. Before sending the signal out via the HDMI output, the 1s and 0s are rearranged to minimize how many transitions there are. So instead of 10101010, the transmission may look like 11110000. If you really like math, how it does this is cool, but it's not really important to understanding the concept as a whole.

Even though this conversion is weird, it makes it much more likely the data transmitted can be rebuilt on the other end (as in, at the display).

The second part of TMDS (the DS part) is the HDMI cable itself. Each HDMI cable is actually multiple, small copper wires. Two versions of the data are sent over different wires. One of these is out of phase with the "real" signal. The TV receives all the data, puts the out-of-phase signal back in phase, then compares it to the "real" signal. Any noise picked up along the way will now be out of phase, and as such it is effectively negated and ignored.

If you're an audio person, this is similar to how balanced (XLR) cables work.

TMDS works really well, allowing for short cables and fairly long cables to carry what is a pretty intense amount of data. It also means you can have inexpensive cables that work just as well as expensive ones.

More important to our discussion, it means that when something goes wrong, it goes really wrong. It's often said that with an HDMI signal, you either get everything and it's perfect, or it isn't perfect and you get nothing. In fact, I've said this. If you're getting an image that looks correct, and there are no dropouts in the audio or video, then you're getting everything that's being sent. If the cable is faulty, or it's a really long run with an under-built cable, most of the time you'll just get nothing. No picture at all.

The question I've often gotten is what if you're right on that digital precipice? That teetering space between "everything's good" and "I got nothin.'"

I'm glad you asked.

Video

As you've read, the 1s and 0s of an HD image trot happily along, more or less, from your source to your TV. Over short runs, there really isn't anything other than a faulty cable (which itself isn't that likely) that would cause any issue. Over long runs, it's possible that interference of some kind, or a poorly made cable (more on this later), can reduce the "quality" of the signal to the point where the TV can't make heads or tails of it. Heads or tails, that's a digital joke.

At this point, you're on the edge of the digital precipice. The most likely outcome is sparkles.

It looks a lot like snow, or static. The data received by the TV wasn't enough to figure out what those failed pixels are supposed to be. Your TV likes you, though, and it really wants to show you an image. So it builds the rest of the video, minus the failed pixels.

It's important to note that this artifact is pretty unlikely, even over long runs. You are way more likely to just not get anything at all.

If it's so unlikely, why do I bring it up? Because it's important to understand that it is impossible for the pixel to be different. It's either exactly what it's supposed to be, or it fails and looks like one of the images above. In order for one HDMI cable to have "better picture quality" than another, it would imply that the final result between the source and display could somehow be different. It's not possible. It's either everything that was sent, or full of very visible errors (sparkles). The image cannot have more noise, or less resolution, worse color, or any other picture quality difference. The pixels can't change. They can either be there (perfect, yay!) or not (nothing, errors, boo!).

All the claims about differences in picture quality are remnants of the analog days, which were barely valid then and not at all valid now. There is no way for different cables to create a different color temperature, change the contrast ratio, or anything else picture quality-wise.

At this point some of you are saying "but sparkles are noise." No, I consider sparkles an example of a signal failure and as such requires a new HDMI cable. If you see sparkles, you need a different cable.

Another potential "fail" is a failure of the HDCP copy protection, which shows up as a total snowy image, a blinking image, or something else hard to miss. This is actually even less likely, as the TMDS is more likely to fail than the channel HDCP requires for its handshake. I have seen this in my testing, though, so it's worth mentioning.

Audio

Several companies claim their HDMI cables sound better than other HDMI cables. One in particular claims this is because there is no error correction on the audio and their cables are more likely to transmit all the data.

First of all, this is untrue. Audio over HDMI actually has more error correction than the video signal. But even if this weren't the case, it's still utter nonsense. Dolby has extensive error correction built into its codecs. In other words, if you are sending the Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD or whatever bitstream over HDMI from your Blu-ray player, the data going into the DAC in your receiver is bit-for-bit the same as what's on the disc. DTS presumably works in the same way, though they ignored my repeated requests for info. Cheap or expensive, the cable is irrelevant when it comes to transmitting Dolby or DTS.

If the cable is faulty or if there is some cataclysm causing data to be lost between the player and the receiver, the decoders are designed to mute instead of blasting out compromised data. There is no such thing as an audio version of "sparkles." Instead, you just get a total dropout of the audio. So if you're getting audio dropouts, it's possible it's the HDMI cable. But if you're not getting video issues as well, the problem is likely elsewhere. If the audio isn't muting, then as long as you're outputting an audio codec, you're getting exactly what's on the disc.

The exception though, at least theoretically, is with PCM. If you're playing a CD on a Blu-ray player, the output is PCM to the receiver. It's possible that this "naked" data could be influenced by the different amounts of jitter inherent in all different cables. I'm working on an extensive test for this; look for it soon. The fact is, though, most people aren't using PCM for anything, so it's not worth worrying about.

Likely transmission

The big "if" that I've been repeating is "if the signal gets there." Over short runs--a few meters, say--it is incredibly unlikely that even the cheapest HDMI cable won't work perfectly. Over longer runs, the answer is less clear cut. The variables of the transmitter and receiver combo in the source and display, plus any repeaters you have in the mix (like a receiver), mean that not every long HDMI cable can handle all the data. By long, I mean 50 feet or more.

If you need to run long HDMI cables, it's a safe bet you're going to run it through a wall. If so, it is vital you test the cable with all your equipment before you install it. Plus, as tempting as it is to get the cheapest cable that will work in this case, just because a cable works with all your current gear, doesn't necessarily mean it will work with your future gear.

If you need a long HDMI cable, check out the tests I did over at HDGuru.com. I tried out several brands of 50-foot-plus HDMI cables including Monoprice, Monster, and Straight Wire, and got some interesting results.

The cable lies

In the home, there are only four types of HDMI cables: High Speed (also called Category 2) with or without Ethernet, and Standard Speed (Category 1) with or without Ethernet. That's it. Standard Speed cables are rated to carry up to 1080i, while High Speed cables are rated for well over 1080p. The reality is, many Standard Speed cables can probably handle 1080p, they're just not rated for it. Honestly, though, if you're buying the right kind of cables (i.e. as cheap as possible), there won't be enough of a price difference not to just buy a High Speed cable.

When cable manufacturers claim their cables are "Made for 240 Hz" they are lying to you. The conversion to 120 or 240 Hz is done inside the TV. There is no such thing as a 120 Hz or 240 Hz signal. Blu-ray's 1080p/60 is the highest-bandwidth, non-computer source you can have, and even that is only 60 Hz.

You might not need a new HDMI cable for 3D either. Check out my article on how 3D content works for more info on that.

More expensive cables can be more rugged, with thicker casings, a beefy connector, and higher potential durability. If and how much more this is worth is up to you. Personally I find the bulky plugs of many "high-end" HDMI cables to be a nuisance, either falling out, or pulling on the connector in such a way that could potentially pose problems in the long run.

Last but not least

Most of you reading this only need a few feet of HDMI cabling to run from your Blu-ray player and cable/satellite box to your TV. Over these short distances, even the cheapest HDMI cables are going to work. And if they work, as you've read, it means you're getting perfect image and sound. Even over long runs, most cheap cables can do the job just fine.

So when the salesman tries to up-sell you on $300 HDMI cables that are the "only way to make your new 240 Hz TV work," politely tell him he is incorrect and to move on with the sale.

Or let me put it another way, if you're paying more than $5 for a two-meter HDMI cable, you're overpaying.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-...-are-the-same/





The $300m Cable That Will Save Traders Milliseconds

In the high-speed world of automated financial trading, milliseconds matter. So much so, in fact, that a saving of just six milliseconds in transmission time is all that is required to justify the laying of the first transatlantic communications cable for 10 years at a cost of more than $300m.
Christopher Williams

Seabed survey work for the Hibernian Express, as the 6,021km (3,741 mile) fibre-optic link will be known, is already under way off the east coast of America.

The last cables laid under the Atlantic were funded by the dotcom boom in the 1990s when telecoms infrastructure firms rushed to criss-cross the ocean.

The laying of the new transatlantic communications cable is a viable proposition because Hibernia Atlantic, the company behind it, is planning to sell a special superfast bandwidth that will have hyper-competitive trading firms and banks in the City of London and New York queuing to use it. In fact it is predicted they will pay about 50 times as much to link up via the Hibernian Express than they do via existing transatlantic cables.

The current leader, Global Crossing's AC-1 cable, offers transatlantic connection in 65 milliseconds. The Hibernian Express will shave six milliseconds off that time.

Of course, verifiable figures are elusive and estimates vary wildly, but it is claimed that a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100m (£63m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund.

Some City experts have criticised the growth in vast volumes of electronic trading, where computers automatically buy and sell stocks with no human input.

The British firm laying the cable, Global Marine Systems, is plotting a new route that is shorter than any previously taken by a transatlantic cable. As closely as possible, it will follow "the great circle" flight path followed by London-to-New York flights.

"We spent 18 months planning the route," says Mike Saunders, Hibernia Atlantic's vice-president of business development. "If it ever gets beaten for speed we end up giving our customers their money back, basically, so my boss would kill me if we got it wrong."

And, he says, customers from hedge funds, currency dealers and exotic proprietary trading firms are queuing up for the switch-on in 2013.

"That's the way these guys think," Mr Saunders says.

"If one of them is on a faster route, they all have to get on it."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...liseconds.html





The Elephant in the Gigabit Network Room
Stacey Higginbotham

Getting to gigabit networks isn’t a cheap proposition, and once they are deployed, they generally cost more than the average person can afford. For example, a gigabit connection in Chattanooga, Tenn. one of several towns offering such a service costs more than $300 a month. Even if one can’t get a gig, even a 100 Mbps connection or so can cost about $120 or so. Which means that for most broadband supporters, even ardent ones such as myself, the elephant in the room is: Why spend that much, when for today’s applications, a cable modem offering 12-14 Mbps down will do just fine?

It’s a question that analysts posed of Verizon, when they pressed the company that deployed the nation’s largest fiber-to-home network, about take-up rates and boosting subscribers for FiOS. It’s a question Google seeks to answer with its own plans to build out a gigabit network in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Miss. And it’s also a question we need to focus more on even as the siren song of mobile connectivity and apps tempts developers to think smaller.

“It’s ironic that the app that is having the most effect and making a big difference is Twitter, which is the most narrow band application imaginable,” says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.Net. “Something similar has to occur in broadband as it gets faster and faster and it gets more ubiquitous.”

Jasper’s ISP is overlaying fiber to the home in Sebastopol, Calif. where it already deployed an ADSL2 network. Subscribers can pay $40 a month for wireline voice and 100 Mbps FTTH broadband, or they can pay $70 for two lines and get a gigabit. Those seem more like the economics that Google is looking for when it sells its network, but until later this year when it should announce pricing, we’re still unsure what it plans to offer.

But tests from Jasper’s initial deployment speak to some problems the industry will need to overcome if we want gigabit networks to become the norm. For starters, there’s the equipment. Computers today aren’t geared up to support gigabit connections and current Wi-Fi networks couldn’t offer those speeds either. Jasper says the first trial of the gigabit network was a speed test on a generic laptop that showed off 420 Mbps down; the laptop couldn’t handle a full gig.

That’s fine, because there aren’t that many applications that need those speeds. Perhaps the most compelling use case I can think if right now is if you wanted to subscribe to a new online backup service and upload your images, music and movies all at once. A gigabit could help you complete the task in minutes as opposed to hours or days. But that’s a one-time kind of benefit — consumers will need everyday benefits if they are going to upgrade their broadband. Yet, network operators have a hard time justifying an investment in a network that will get few subscribers and application developers have little incentive to develop programs for the few on gigabit networks.

So we’re stuck at a point where a gigabit — or even 100 Mbps – sounds awesome, but it’s not exactly worth the prices most companies want (or need to charge). This is why Google’s and Sonic.Net’s plans to expand moderately priced 100 Mbps and gigabit networks will be so important.

“If every consumer has 100 Mbps, we’d have some better applications,” Jasper said. ” At 100 Mbps, high-def video conferencing becomes a reality and you don’t need local storage anymore. You don’t even need local computing.” He pointed me to this awesome video as an example of what might happen, ya’ know, just in case anybody wants to build those next-generation applications.
http://gigaom.com/broadband/the-elep...-network-room/





CRTC Tells Rogers to Stop Slowing Down the Speed of Online Games
Sarah Schmidt

Canada's telecommunications regulator on Friday gave Rogers Communications Inc., mere days to come up with a plan to solve a problem that could be unfairly slowing down the speed of online games.

In a letter to the telecom giant, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission said the company's own traffic management policy states that online games, such as World of Warcraft, should not be throttled or slowed down, and would only be affected if Rogers misclassifies the games and other peer-to-peer applications were running at the same time.

Rogers now has until Sept. 27 to present a plan to the regulator to deal with the issue.

"Commission staff considers that Rogers should address and resolve this misclassification problem," the correspondence, dated Sept. 16, states.

In a statement issued Friday, Rogers downplayed any problems, saying the company already has corrected the issue with World of Warcraft and is "not aware of any problems with any other online games."

That's why the company "will table the process that we already have in place to deal with these issues," Rogers said.

The issue of traffic shaping has heated up in recent years as more consumers flock to the web to play games and to watch TV shows and movies, which require more bandwidth.

While Internet service providers have said they need to manage online traffic to deal with network congestion during peak hours, the CRTC has instituted a policy stipulating that the noticeable degradation of time-sensitive Internet traffic requires prior commission approval under Canada's Telecommunications Act.

The CRTC cites this policy in its letter to Rogers.

"Commission staff also requests that Rogers provide a detailed report to the commission once the problem is resolved, demonstrating that the problem has been fixed," the letter states.

The Canadian Gamers Organization filed a complaint against Rogers last month, alleging the speed of Internet connections was being unfairly affected by the company's traffic-throttling measures.

On Friday, the head of the group said he's pleased with the commission's response to the complaint. But Jason Koblovsky suspects the problem goes beyond Rogers, so he will ask the CRTC to broaden its probe.

"We are currently getting reports from our members that Shaw customers are also affected by misclassification. The CRTC has also been aware for quite some time that Bell Sympatico members have also experienced similar problems," said Koblovsky.

"We will be asking for the CRTC to broaden its investigation to ensure that solutions presented by Rogers in this case are implemented on those ISPs, as well."

For its part, Rogers said that "gamers are some of our best customers," and encouraged them to contact the company if they're having issues.

The commissioner's traffic-management framework requires companies to be transparent with their customers about their practices.

The CRTC's framework also says traffic shaping only should be used as a last resort to deal with network congestion and encourages companies to use "economic measures," such as data caps, to manage demand.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/CR...963/story.html





For Idaho and the Internet, Life in the Slow Lane
Katharine Q. Seelye

Barry Ramsay, who owns a small manufacturing company here between two mountains, remembers the day his Internet connection crashed for several hours. Work crews had to ride up in snowmobiles to discover the problem.

“They said that bears had been rubbing against the towers,” Mr. Ramsay said. In this mountainous state, where some connections depend on line of sight, even snow and fog can disrupt the signals. “These are the kind of problems you probably don’t have in an urban area,” he said.

And, according to a new study, they are among the problems that have earned Idaho an unfortunate distinction: it had the slowest Internet speeds in the country earlier this year for residential customers who were downloading things like games — a “dismal” average of 318 kilobytes per second.

Translation: In Idaho, it would take you 9.42 seconds to download a standard music file compared with 3.36 seconds in Rhode Island, the state with the fastest average speeds, at 894 kilobytes per second.

The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: In Pocatello, it would take nearly 12 seconds to download that music file, according to the study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Mass., a Boston suburb, it would take just over one second.

Such speed distinctions might seem insignificant. But with larger files, downloading delays of just a few seconds can stretch into crucial minutes or hours and over time result in losses across many aspects of life, some experts say, beyond entertainment and games, affecting fields such as public safety, education and economic growth. It is not clear how many households throughout this state still have no Internet, but nationally, the figure is 28 percent — most of them in rural areas.

The United States as a whole lags in speed, coming in 25th behind South Korea, which has the fastest speeds in the world. Even Romania clocks in ahead.

“This is about our overall competitiveness,” said Jonathan Adelstein, the administrator of the federal government’s Rural Utilities Service and a major advocate of broadband. “Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy.”

More than 11 federally funded projects are under way in Idaho, at a cost of $25 million, to establish high-speed broadband.

Yet this sparsely populated, mountainous state still lags in residential speeds, and the Pando study is only the most recent indicator. The federal government’s National Broadband Map put Idaho at 47th for download speeds of three megabits or greater. But the Pando study stung the collective psyche of officials here.

“The last thing I need is a report that says we don’t have the capacity and speed, when I know it exists,” said Gynii A. Gilliam, executive director for the Bannock Development Corporation, a nonprofit group working for economic growth in the Pocatello area. She noted that Allstate Insurance was opening a $22 million call center in Pocatello and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a service center there. “We have not lost any business because of Internet speeds,” she said.

Indeed, speeds for Idaho’s businesses can be as fast as those anywhere, if customers pay for it. The federal government says Idaho is among the states with the greatest disparity in speeds available in urban areas versus rural areas.

Even Ms. Gilliam acknowledged that her home service was sluggish.

“It feels like it’s moving in slow motion,” she said. “A lot of times I’ll start downloads and not complete them.” She said she was happy as long as she could get e-mail.

But others are concerned.

“We have not been participating in the telecommunications revolution,” lamented State Representative John Rusche, a retired pediatrician, a former health insurance executive and the Democratic leader in the State House. As someone concerned about electronic medical records, he has been pushing for better Internet service for years.

The Pando study examined 4 million actual download speeds of Pando-supported products — games, antivirus software and television shows — by residential customers across the country from January to June.

The study found the fastest residential Internet speeds in New England and the mid-Atlantic states and the slowest in the mountain west.

Idaho encapsulates some of the challenges for mountain states. Home to the Bitterroot Range of the Rockies, the state is crisscrossed by a series of peaks, ridges, forests, high plateaus and river valleys, making it expensive to lay cable or build towers.
“We have a guy here who was dropped into remote, isolated areas of Iraq to set up their telecommunications systems,” said Christine L. Frei, director of the Clearwater Economic Development Association in Lewiston. “He told me, ‘We had better communications in Iraq than you have in central Idaho.’ ”

Idaho is also sparsely populated, with an average of 19 people per square mile. (Rhode Island, by comparison, has more than 1,018 people per square mile.) Providers have little financial incentive to build a whole infrastructure across rugged terrain just to reach one or two homes.

“We’re in business to make a profit,” said Jim Schmit, vice president and general manager in Idaho for CenturyLink, formerly Qwest and now the state’s largest Internet service provider. Still, Mr. Schmit said that 92 percent of CenturyLink customers here had “access” to broadband, though he declined to say how many of those who could subscribe actually did so.

Bibiana Nertney, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Commerce, said residential customers often could not afford broadband.

“It’s not the lack of availability,” she said. “It’s the lack of demand and what people are willing to pay. It goes to Idaho’s philosophy and mentality that we don’t spend more than we need.”

While grants and loans are available to build out the Internet infrastructure, Kerrie Hurd, the broadband liaison for the federal Department of Agriculture Office of Rural Development in Idaho, said the grant requirements could be onerous.

“Not a lot of communities are willing to put in the application and find the broadband provider, especially when taxpayers want money to spend on an essential service, like fixing the streets and updating the sewer system,” she said.

A bright spot is the Idaho Education Network, which provides high-speed broadband to all high schools in the state and allows residents and business owners to use the service at the schools. Unfortunately, because of cuts to school funding, some schools are open fewer hours.

To address the cost issue, Mr. Schmit of CenturyLink said that starting next month, the company would offer broadband services at a discount to low-income customers.

But some say more needs to be done.

“I don’t think enough people understand just how bad the situation is,” said Susan Crawford, who focused on broadband issues for President Obama early in his administration. “It really is time for this country to invest in getting its citizens online where we don’t have Internet access, especially in rural areas, so we stop sending jobs to India that we could be sending to Idaho.”

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/u...udy-finds.html





Obama Jobs Bill Includes Spectrum Auctions

The proposal uses incentive auctions to finance a nationwide public safety network
Grant Gross

New legislation pushed by U.S. President Barack Obama and intended to stimulate job growth includes proposals for mobile spectrum auctions and for a nationwide mobile broadband network for emergency responders.

Obama's American Jobs Act, released late Monday, would allow the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to conduct so-called incentive auctions, in which the agency would share the proceeds of a spectrum auction with television stations that voluntarily give up their spectrum.

The legislation would use some of the money from incentive auctions, $6.5 billion, to fund a nationwide voice and data network for police, fire departments and other emergency responders. Lawmakers and other groups have called for a nationwide public safety network since emergency responders had trouble communicating with each other during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks on the U.S.

Obama's plan would allocate the so-called D block, a 10MHz band of spectrum in the 700MHz band, to a public safety organization created by the legislation. Congress originally designated the D block for a shared public safety and commercial network, but the spectrum failed to sell during an FCC auction in early 2008.

Incentive auctions and a public safety network were also part of an Obama mobile broadband plan released in February.

The American Jobs Act includes several other provisions not related to broadband. The bill includes a tax cut for small businesses, funds for states to hire teachers, funds for repairing bridges, roads and schools and an extension of unemployment benefits. Obama would pay for the bill through the elimination of some corporate tax exemptions and an increase in taxes for high-income U.S. residents.

"To create jobs, I am submitting the American Jobs Act of 2011 -- nearly all of which is made up of the kinds of proposals supported by both Republicans and Democrats, and that the Congress should pass right away to get the economy moving now," he said in a letter to Congress. "The purpose of the American Jobs Act of 2011 is simple: put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans."

The Obama proposal would require the FCC to collect new spectrum user fees of $200 million in 2012, rising to $550 million in 2015. The bill would also establish a $1 billion spectrum auction relocation fund for federal agencies that move operations from mobile spectrum targeted to be auctioned for mobile broadband uses.

Some Republicans in Congress sounded skeptical about parts of the Obama plan. Representative Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican and House majority leader, has compared the proposal to the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which didn't cut the U.S. unemployment rate as much as the Obama administration had hoped.

"Way back when the stimulus debate began in January 2009, we all opposed the stimulus program because we felt that spending borrowed money was not going to be the answer," Cantor said last week. "Instead, we thought we should make it easier for the private sector to grow. Well, here we are again having the same discussion, after we've seen the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill fail in terms of reaching the results that were promised."

Congressional Republicans may be open to parts of Obama's proposal, including tax cuts for small businesses, Cantor said.

House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said he will send Obama's bill to the Congressional Budget Office to check its cost. Obama has said the expenses in the bill would be offset by tax increases.

"The record of the economic proposals enacted during the last Congress necessitates careful examination of the president's latest plan as well as consideration of alternative measures that may more effectively support private-sector job creation," Boehner said Monday. "It is my hope that we will be able to work together to put in place the best ideas of both parties and help put Americans back to work."
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...ctrum_auctions





IDC: More Mobile Internet Users Than Wireline Users in the U.S. by 2015
Press release

By 2015, more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices. As smartphones begin to outsell simpler feature phones, and as media tablet sales explode, the number of mobile Internet users will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6% between 2010 and 2015. The newest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide New Media Market Model (NMMM) forecasts that the impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline. Western Europe and Japan will not be far behind the U.S. in following this trend.

The New Media Market Model also finds:

• Worldwide, the total number of Internet user will grow from 2 billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, when 40% of the world's population will have access to its vast resources.

• Global B2C ecommerce spending will grow from $708 billion in 2010 to $1,285 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 12.7%.

• Worldwide online advertising will increase from $70 billion in 2010 to $138 billion in 2015, with its share of total advertising across all media growing from 11.9% to 17.8%.

"Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet," said Karsten Weide, research vice president, Media and Entertainment. "Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it's going to make the Internet a very different place."

IDC's Worldwide New Media Market Model, 1H11 (Doc #230024) is the only model that provides blanket data for the most important consumer Internet metrics for more than 40 countries, the regions, and the world, based on one consistent model. Its more than 150,000 data points cover basic socioeconomic data, user numbers, access device numbers, home broadband Internet access penetration, time spent online, online activities, B2B and B2B ecommerce spending, online advertising, and consumer spending on content. This model also breaks out all numbers between the wireline and mobile segments. The New Media Market Model is delivered as a semi-annual Excel database and contains current market-sizing and a five-year forecast.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23028711





As of Yesterday Verizon Started Throttling its Top 5% Data Hogs, Doesn’t Affect 4G LTE or Tiered Data Customers
Kellex

Back in February, there were reports of Verizon’s plans to start throttling (data speeds reduced) or using “Network Optimization Practices” on their top data hogs (5%). Policies like this clearly are not taken well by customers, however, until today we had heard very little about them. In our inbox, we just received word from Big Red on this new practice with every little detail you could imagine. I’ll just say up front that the policy sounds like the end of the world, but from our understanding, it will only affect 3G customers on unlimited data plans.

Here is the main note we received showing that this new practice went live as of yesterday:

Beginning 9/15, we will start identifying customers who meet these criteria and will expand to others in the base after customer communications are completed. Network Optimization Practices only goes into effect when an Internet or Smartphone device with an unlimited plan/feature falls into the top 5% of data usage and is on a congested cell site.

Here is how the throttling process will work:

Verizon Wireless is always looking for ways to give customers the superior experience they expect from our network – an amazing resource that – shared by tens of millions of customers. To achieve this, customers within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users, may have their data speeds periodically reduced. This reduction will last for the remainder of the current billing cycle as well as the one immediately following. This is to make sure all users enjoy high quality network performance even when on a congested cell site.

Who could potentially fall under this new practice? Customers who meet all of the following:

• Have a 3G internet or 3G smartphone
• Have an unlimited or feature data plan
• Are among the top 5% of data users
• Are on a congested cell site

Reps are being told to offer these as solutions to customers who want to avoid throttling:

• Upgrade to a 4G LTE smartphone
• Migrate to a usage-based (tiered) data plan
• Use WiFi more often

Verizon also wants everyone to know that they are not “throttling” like AT&T and T-Mobile are:

The difference between our network optimization practice and throttling is about network intelligence. With throttling, your wireless connection is slowed down for your entire cycle, 100% of the time, no matter where you are. Network Optimization balances the best possible experience on the network and for the customer. Network Optimization Practices is more precise and requires more management than throttling, however it provides the greatest balance for everyone. So, if you’re in the top 5% of data users, your connection is slowed only when you are in a congested cell site.

AT&T recently announced that they will be throttling 5% of their top data users beginning in October.

In addition, TMobile will be throttling customers who use more than 5GB of data each month.


And that’s pretty much that. As of yesterday, Big Red will start to slow down its top 5% data users for essentially two billing cycles. We are only talking 3G unlimited data customers here though, so 4G LTE peeps can relax. For now.
http://www.droid-life.com/2011/09/16...ata-customers/





The Data Buffet Is Open (Grazing Welcome)
Randall Stross

ALL the data you need on a smartphone, at full speed, for a single price — Sprint Nextel is the only major wireless carrier in the United States that still offers this with new cellphones.

Brave little Sprint, with about a 15 percent market share, is our best hope for keeping a piece of the mobile Internet free of meters. But if data gluttons are the only ones who partake of Sprint’s feast, unmetered service will be unsustainable.

“The simplicity and peace of mind from unlimited services at one consistent price must attract mainstream users, not just outliers,” says Will Souder, Sprint’s vice president for pricing.

Mr. Souder compares Sprint’s business to that of a pizzeria that offers an all-you-can-eat lunch. “If I come in and eat eight pieces, that needs to be balanced by my sister coming and eating at the salad bar,” he says.

Three years ago, Sprint introduced its “Simply Everything” plan for $99.99 — covering, within the United States, unlimited voice calls, data and text messages. “When we launched, we had a lot of trepidation,” Mr. Souder says, “but we were pleasantly surprised with the number of relatively light users who were willing to pay more for this plan.”

If Sprint Nextel’s financial results were showing a nicely profitable business, humming in the shadows of its much bigger rivals, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, customers who hate meters could rejoice.

Unfortunately, the company has not posted annual net profits since 2006. Mr. Souder says the unlimited plans have not contributed to the losses, saying Sprint has had four consecutive quarters of growth in average revenue per user and has reversed a trend of losing customers.

Sprint has been monitoring use patterns and costs, and in January it increased the price of “Everything” plans for newly activated smartphones by $10 a month. The move has helped the company keep its business on a healthy, sustainable foundation, Mr. Souder says.

Sprint is behaving more like some carriers across the Atlantic. Smaller operators in Europe “tend to be more aggressive in pricing strategies” and are using unlimited data plans to differentiate their offerings from larger rivals, says Thomas Tschentscher, a partner at the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer who specializes in telecommunications.

In the United States, T-Mobile sells “unlimited” plans, too, but it throttles back the download speeds when data use passes a certain threshold each month.

Mr. Tschentscher says that in Europe, data throttling is all but absent. “Because of the interoperability of the handsets, customers in Europe can easily switch carriers,” he says. “So it would be a competitive disadvantage for a carrier to impose throttling down if the others don’t.”

Sprint says its network hasn’t been swamped by too many users wanting to watch movies or television shows on Android phones. “Long-form video on the handset today is still in its infancy,” Mr. Souder says. Of course, tablets are a different matter — and that’s why Sprint has never extended unlimited data plans to them.

Asked what happens when smartphone screens become larger and some tablet computers become smaller, blurring the boundaries between the two, Mr. Souder said Sprint would “constantly evaluate our pricing strategy.”

Sprint’s network has accommodated the arrival of Android phones. The iPhone may come to Sprint next month, if rumors on tech blogs prove accurate. Mr. Souder declined to respond to questions about how his network could absorb a sharp spike in data use if Sprint — speaking only hypothetically, of course — were to add an unnamed, but very, very popular smartphone.

Some independent analysts see nothing but difficulties ahead for Sprint. Craig E. Moffett, a vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, says scale is essential to this business and is the reason that the only profitable major carriers are AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Mr. Moffett notes that Sprint has $4 billion in debt that will soon mature. It is also the majority owner of Clearwire, whose half-built 4G network covers only half the United States population. To have 4G cover the next 40 percent of the population, spread across a much wider area, it will have to build eight times as much infrastructure as required for the first phase, he says, adding: “It can’t afford to abandon Clearwire but it can’t afford to finish it either.”

If Sprint doesn’t complete the next-generation network, it won’t be able to keep unlimited data plans for long, Mr. Moffett says, because “the burden on the 3G network will be too great.”

There are no signs that Sprint will pull back from unlimited data, at least for now. In fact, the company seems to be staking its identity on the appeal of all-you-can-eat pricing. It may even expand the concept further.

Speaking at the Dive Into Mobile conference last December, Daniel R. Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s C.E.O., talked about the logical next step: including the phone, tablet, PC, e-reader and whatever in a single plan. The idea was mentioned merely as a possibility, and it was not clear whether it would be feasible to have unlimited data for multiple devices on one plan — the ultimate in simplicity.

Sprint’s unmetered wireless business needs more customers to reach scale. Salad eaters who like one worry-free, all-you-can-eat price are especially welcome at the table.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/t...ges-ahead.html





'Wi-Fi Refugees' Shelter in West Virginia Mountains
Jane O'Brien & Matt Danzico

Dozens of Americans who claim to have been made ill by wi-fi and mobile phones have flocked to the town of Green Bank, West Virginia

There are five billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide and advances in wireless technology make it increasingly difficult to escape the influence of mobile devices. But while most Americans seem to embrace continuous connectivity, some believe it's making them physically ill.

Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication.

"It's a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner," she says. "You become a technological leper because you can't be around people.

"It's not that you would be contagious to them - it's what they're carrying that is harmful to you."

Ms Schou is one of an estimated 5% of Americans who believe they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), which they say is caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields typically created by mobile phones, wi-fi and other electronic equipment.

Hiding in a cage

Symptoms range from acute headaches, skin burning, muscle twitching and chronic pain.
Diane Schou in West Virginia Diane Schou says she was forced to live in a shielded cage in Iowa, prior to moving to West Virginia

"My face turns red, I get a headache, my vision changes, and it hurts to think. Last time [I was exposed] I started getting chest pains - and to me that's becoming life-threatening," Ms Schou says.

To alleviate the pain, her husband built an insulated living space known as a Faraday Cage.

He covered a wooden frame with two layers of wire mesh and a door that could be sealed shut to prevent radio waves from entering.

Diane spent much of her time inside it, sleeping on a twin mattress on a plywood base.

"At least I could see my husband on the outside, I could talk to him," she says.

Diane believes her illness was triggered by emissions from a mobile phone mast.

Her symptoms were so severe that she abandoned her family farm in the state of Iowa and moved to Green Bank, West Virginia - a tiny village of 143 residents in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains.

Outlawed wireless technology

Green Bank is part of the US Radio Quiet Zone, where wireless is banned across 13,000 sq miles (33,000 sq km) to prevent transmissions interfering with a number of radio telescopes in the area.

The largest is owned by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and enables scientists to listen to low-level signals from different places in the universe.

Others are operated by the US military and are a critical part of the government's spy network.

As a result of the radio blackout, the Quiet Zone has become a haven for people like Diane, desperate to get away from wireless technology.
The radio telescope in Green Bank The world's largest, fully steerable radio telescope is operated in the town of Green Bank

"Living here allows me to be more of a normal person. I can be outdoors. I don't have to stay hidden in a Faraday Cage," she says.

"I can see the sunrise, I can see the stars at night, and I can be in the rain.

"Here in Green Bank allows me to be with people. People here do not carry cell phones so I can socialise.

"I can go to church, I can attend some celebrations, I can be with people. I couldn't do that when I had to remain in the Faraday Cage."

But EHS is not medically recognised in the US.

Debated 'condition'

The wireless association, CTIA, says that scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that wireless devices, with the limits established by government regulators, do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects.

And the World Health Organization, while acknowledging that the symptoms are genuine and can be severe, says: "EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF (electromagnetic field) exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem."

However, new research by scientists at Louisiana State University and published by the International Journal of Neuroscience, claims to show that EHS can be caused by low frequency electromagnetic fields found in the environment.

"The study provides direct evidence that linking human symptoms with environmental factors, in this case EMF," says Dr Andrew Marino, a neurology professor who led the study.

"It's a watershed in that regard. There have been no previous studies that scientifically assess whether electromagnetic fields in the environment could produce human symptoms.

"And the symptoms matter because they are the first steps that show how EMFs produce human disease."

Scientists conducted a number of tests on a 35-year-old physician who had diagnosed herself with EHS.

She was seated on a wooden chair while voltage was applied to metal plates for pulses of 90 seconds to create a series of magnetic fields. The woman was asked to describe her symptoms after each exposure and after random sham exposures when, unknown to her, there was no voltage.

She reported headaches, pain and muscle twitching during the genuine exposures and no symptoms for the majority of the sham exposures.

The scientists concluded that such consistency could not be attributed to chance.

But other experts still disagree that a link exists.

Technological 'ignorance'

Bob Park is a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

He says that the radiation emitted by wi-fi is simply too weak to cause the type of changes in the body's chemistry that could make people sick.
Nikki Fox's House Nichols Fox lives alone in a home powered primarily by gas just outside the Quiet Zone

"The bigger problem that we face is that in our society, driven by technological change, people have very little education," he says.

"There are lots of things people need to learn and they're not learning it. The thing that's going to kill them is ignorance."

Seventy-year-old Nichols Fox says she understands such scepticism - it took several years before she became convinced that her debilitating pain and fatigue were caused by electromagnetic radiation emitted by her computer.

"Towards the end of my normal life when I still could watch television I could actually cut my pain off and on with the remote control device," she says. "It was such an enormously clear association there was just no denying it."

Her symptoms are so severe that she has isolated herself almost entirely, living in a remote house surrounded by fields and woods just outside the Quiet Zone. She says even the low-level electromagnetic fields generated there affect her health.

She uses hardly any electricity - her refrigerator operates on gas, light comes from kerosene lamps and a wood-burning stove provides most of her heat.

A thermostat is set to switch on electric heaters if the temperature drops to a level where she is in danger of hypothermia.

"It's so important that people understand that this is a very serious disability, it's a life-changing disability. It leads to an earlier death - I have absolutely no doubt about that and I think it's just unfortunate that this is not recognised," she says.

But even in this secluded part of America, the incursion of wireless technology is relentless. Planning permission has been granted for a cell tower a few miles from her home, and Nichols says she'll have to move.

"I'm getting older and I really don't know where I'm going to go or what I'm going to do," she says. "It's really quite frightening."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14887428





How Much of the Internet is Actually for Porn
Julie Ruvolo

Starting today, .XXX domains are for sale. (That is, if you own a porn site or a trademark to protect – the rest of us have to wait till December 6 and hope nobody scoops our name first).

It’s like the internet is growing up a bit. There’s certainly enough porn to justify .XXX, if .biz gets its own extension.

But the arrival of .XXX begs the question:

How much of the internet is actually for porn?

Plug the question into Google and you reach an abandoned corner of the net: an article from 2005, a mess of answers from 37-80% and the Avenue Q Wikipedia page.

Surely there must be a better way.

So I asked Ogi Ogas, one of the amazingly nerdy neuroscientists behind A Billion Wicked Thoughts, who says he and co-author Sai Gaddam are sitting on what they think is “the most comprehensive collection of porn-use stats on the web.”

(At least, till they stopped counting last July. Now they’re busy with their book tour.)



So Ogi: How much of the Internet is actually for porn?

There are a couple ways of thinking about the proportion of the Internet that is porn:

● In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.

● From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.

Both of these are from our research in Billion Wicked Thoughts. We consider our data the best available. It’s an impossible task to say exactly what % of *ALL* websites are pornographic or anything else, because the web is both so enormous and so dynamic; looking at the million most popular sites is a very reasonable sample.

You could also look at the number of “adult sites” that are blocked by various parental filtering software programs–for example, CYBERsitter claims to block 2.5 million adult Web sites–though it’s not clear how they’re deciding a site is an adult site; the sites may not necessarily be sexual sites, and they may be exaggerating their numbers.

Only 4% of the top million websites? That feels… underwhelming. I was thinking at least half.

There have been a bunch of false and ultimately mythic stats floating around for years that say half the Internet is porn or one third of the Internet is porn, though this has never been remotely true.

In the early days of the Web, when the vast majority of users were guys, there was a much greater proportion of searches for porn–I think in 1999 that 4 or 5 of the top 10 searches on the Web were for porn–though the % of websites that were porn may actually have been lower than today.

Web filtering companies used to always release competing figures on the number of porn sites they blocked, but these numbers were almost certainly boosted to get sensationalist headlines and to seem competitive with other filtering companies that filtered “less” adult sites. For example, N2H2 claimed there were 260 million porn sites–haha, one for every American citizen! :) Conservative groups are always coming up with porn figures that are crazy high, too, especially with regard to children’s exposure to porn.

You and Sai Gaddam are sitting on arguably the largest collection of porn data in the history of mankind. Was this the first burning question on your minds?

This was one of the first questions we tackled while working on Billion Wicked Thoughts. We did our best to locate every previous measure and quickly realized that most available stats were completely fabricated or bogus.

The only systematic scientific attempt to determine how much of the Web was porn was Berkeley professor of statistics Philip Stark’s 2006 study carried out at the behest of the US Department of Justice under Bush.

Stark found that about 6% of searches were for sexual content – he must have used crazy stringent definitions of “sexual content” because all the numbers we found in our own data sets was higher. Stark also found that about 1.5% of all web sites were porn sites. We took issue with his method of random sampling sites; we looked at the million most popular websites in the world, since we figured that would give a more realistic indication of a random person’s experience on the Internet.

So how do you go about measuring how much of the internet is for porn?

I think the two best metrics for analyzing the level of human interest in sex on the Internet is: (1) how often do people freely search for it and (2) what amount of web traffic goes to porn sites.

The best way to evaluate (1) is by counting porn searches on Internet search engines; the numbers are usually from 10-15% these days (higher as you go back in time to more men and less women online).

The best way to evaluate (2) is by looking at the number of sites out of the million most highly trafficked websites and seeing how many are porn sites (about 4% according to us, higher than Philip Stark’s random-sample 1.5%).

You could even count the monthly traffic to all of these porn sites, which I admit we didn’t do, though it would be pretty straightforward. In our book we have a table of porn traffic to the five most popular porn sites, varying from about 7 million to 16 million visitors a month.

What about porn downloads? Isn’t that a lot to account for?

The only reliable source I know of that can measure “porn downloads” is Nielsen, but I’m not sure how they measure this. We actually spent some time trying to get Nielsen to share data with us, but they never did, so I have to be skeptical of their calculations. I’m sure they’re not considering torrents or other P2P sources of downloads.

I also don’t know how they’re categorizing porn. Also, now that video streaming is so widespread, I’m sure the percentage of downloads that are porn is lower.

.XXX domains go on sale today. Will the number sold tell us how much of the internet is for porn?

Probably not. All the online porn webmasters I know don’t like the .XXX domain, since they think it will be too easy for ISPs and other network administrators to block them. On the other hand, I suspect many porn operators might simply use two (or many more) domain names, including a .com and a .XXX. But there’s also tons of erotic sites run by amateurs, not for profit, and they probably won’t feel any compulsion to switch to .XXX.

But they could establish some sort of minimum?

Yes, the number of .XXX sites will certainly place a lower limit on the number of porn sites on the Web. I bet we’ll see many articles about online porn start with something like, “There are over 200,000 .XXX sites on the Web,” giving an artificially low sense of the total amount of porn because of the ease of calculating that statistic.

So what’s the most popular porn site on the planet?

The single most popular adult site in the world is LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site which gets around 32 million visitors a month, or almost 2.5% of all Internet users!

You’re telling me a webcam site is more popular than PornHub?

LiveJasmin is the most popular adult site on the Web by a huge margin.

Basically, it’s interesting that what men prefer the most is watching women strip on a webcam and being able to talk to them while they do, telling the women what they want to see. Once this became available (through high-quality broadband streaming of webcam video) it just shot to the top of popularity; it’s even more popular than the tube sites like PornHub and RedTube.

The fact that 2.5% of the billion people on the Internet are using LiveJasmin each month is pretty extraordinary.

A global phenomenon! Where do the webcam women come from?

Almost all of the webcam girls are from eastern Europe or southeast Asia. At $8-$15/hour with no benefits, it doesn’t pay enough for American women… except teenage girls and college students.

Most of the foreign women do it without the knowledge of their friends and family and only do it for Americans so that acquaintances in their homeland won’t hear about it.

Porn tourism, interesting. How about search queries? Is this a broader trend?

In our search data from English-speaking searchers (mainly Americans, Canadians, and British), Blacks are the most popular ethnicity, followed by Asians, with no other ethnicity in the top 100 most popular sexual searches. I say “blacks” rather than African-American because “black” is the term people always use in their searches. Blacks and Asians also have the most porn sites devoted to them, though Latino sites are also well-represented.

We also looked at searches on PornHub, where the most popular ethnic searches are quite different: PornHub features an international audience, including non-English speakers. The most searched for ethnicities, in decreasing popularity, are: (1) Indian, (2) German, (3) French, (4) Japanese, (5) Russian, (6) Black, (7) Italian, (8) Arab.

It’s hard to draw conclusions from this since we don’t know the geographic regions of the audience who are searching for each of these ethnicities, though a good guess is that Indian men are searching for Indian women.

But it’s worth observing that PornHub offers three specific ethnic porn categories: Asian, Ebony, Latina. This suggests that PornHub believes these are the most popular ethnicities across all of their Western audiences–Western because PornHub doesn’t generate much revenue from their non-Western audiences so don’t try to cater to their tastes.

Any idea how big the porn industry is in dollars?

There’s no knowing how much money goes into the porn industry. You should treat any such statistic about how much money is spent on online porn as bogus and completely unreliable. We spent effort on this in the early going, but you quickly see that the vast majority of porn operators are small (1-10 employees) who hide or cook their books.

The big companies report earnings, but talking with industry professionals suggests there’s all kinds of financial shenanigans going on even with the big ones. (Maybe not Playboy or Penthouse…) There’s no clearinghouse of information on adult companies, so any estimate of the online porn market is going to contain wild extrapolations.

A $3 billion online porn industry in the USA? I don’t think so. PornHub, the most popular online porn video site, has 16 million viewers a month, but they’re still no DreamWorks. Where’s all the millionaires?

Last question. Does anyone still pay for porn?

Utah may have the highest per-capita porn subscribing rate. I’ve heard from different adult operators that the Republican states have higher per-capita subscription rates. Meaning, they’re more likely to pay money—they don’t know about free porn viewing.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruv...ally-for-porn/





Release Day Economics
Uniform Motion

Our new record was ‘officially’ released today. This means that you’ll find the digital version on various different Digital music stores like iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic, and you’ll be able to stream the music from services such as Spotify and Deezer.

The physical versions (CD and Vinyl) are only available from our Bandcamp site and at gigs.

Unfortunately, you will not find our record in any record stores. The reason for this is because we do not have a record label, which means we have no access to distribution. Without a distributor, you cannot sell your CD’s in record stores. If you work for a distributor and you’re interested in carrying our CD or Vinyl, or both, feel free to contact us!

If you choose to purchase our music or use one of the ‘legal’ streaming services, here’s an overview of where the pennies go.

SPOTIFY:

With Spotify, we’ll get 0.003 EUR/play.

If you listen to the album all the way through, we’ll get 0.029 EUR.

If you listen to the album 10 times on Spotify, we’ll get 0.29 EUR

If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 2.94 EUR

If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get 29.47 EUR!

If you use the free version of Spotify, it won’t cost you anything. Spotify will make money from ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money. They only disclose this information to the Major record labels…

DEEZER:

Deezer seems to pay a little more.

We’ve been getting 0.006 EUR/play from them. That’s 0.052 EUR/album play. If you listen to the album 10 times on Deezer, we’ll get 0.52 EUR. If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 5.2 EUR. If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get a whopping 52 EUR!

If you use the free version of Deezer, it won’t cost you anything and Deezer will make money from the ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money either.

eMUSIC:

eMusic is a subscription service. The cost of the album will depend on the plan you have. We get roughly $0.29/song or $2.60/album (9 songs).

AMAZON MP3:

You’ll pay 7.11 EUR to download the MP3’s. We will get 4.97 EUR of that. That’s a 70-30 split.

iTUNES:

The album will cost you 8.91 EUR to buy from Apple.

There’s a 70-30% split there too, so we will keep 6.28 EUR/album.

That being said, it costs us 35 EUR/year to keep an album on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon (105 EUR per year for all 3 of our albums!) so we don’t make any money until 24 people have bought a digital copy of the album on iTunes, or 150 single songs, or if we get tens of thousands of listens on Spotify! In most cases, it’s actually more economically viable not to sell the music at all.

But what about if you buy the Digital version directly from us?

DIGITAL:

We allow people to pay what they want for the digital version. If you choose to pay 5 EUR, Paypal takes 0.37 EUR, Bandcamp takes 0.75 EUR. Uniform Motion keeps 3.88 EUR. it doesn’t cost us anything to have a page on bandcamp.

If you decide to pay nothing, well, we get nothing, but at least you didn’t give money indirectly to major record labels, which seems to be the case with Spotify!!

CD:

If you buy a CD, directly from us for 10 EUR, Paypal takes 0.515 EUR, Bandcamp takes 1.5 EUR. So there’s slightly less than 8 EUR left for us. But hold on a second, it costs a fair bit to make the CD.

The CD itself costs 1.2 EUR, the booklet costs about 50 cents, the CD packaging is 1.8 EUR and the sticker on the front costs 35 cents.

That’s a total of 3.65 EUR

So in reality, there’s 4.34 EUR left for us.

VINYL:

If you buy a 12” Vinyl from us at 15 EUR, Bandcamp takes 2.25 EUR, Paypal takes 0.646 EUR so there’s 12.10 left. The cost of the Vinyl itself is 3.06 EUR

The labels cost 1.3 EUR. For a total of 4.36 EUR

So there’s 7.75 EUR left for us.

However, we had to press 250 of these (because that’s the minimum order), so it’s very unlikely we’ll make any money on them.

We need to sell 72 copies before we break even on the vinyl edition. We’ve sold about 30 so far.

If we break even, we’ll lower the price a little bit. :)
http://uniformmotion.tumblr.com/post...-day-economics



















Until next week,

- js.



















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