Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 18th, '12

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August 18th, 2012




MPAA / RIAA Want U.S. to Help Quash The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their policy recommendations to Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel. In a joint submission the groups explain that despite the broad availability of legal content, online piracy is still rampant. The groups say that services including The Pirate Bay, Rapidgator, Turbobit, DepositFiles and PutLocker are piracy havens, and they urge the U.S. Government to help them quash these sites.

The U.S. Government is constantly evaluating and updating its copyright enforcement policies. To this end, Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel recently asked “the public” to come up with recommendations for the future strategy.

The call resulted in dozens of submissions from individuals, entrepreneurs, digital rights groups and copyright holders. The RIAA and MPAA did not miss out on the opportunity either – they filed a joint recommendation last Friday.

More has to be done to combat online piracy according to the two groups, and the U.S. Government should play an active role in these efforts.

The Problem

After emphasizing that the public has a wealth of legal media at their fingertips, the MPAA and RIAA identify the biggest threats to the entertainment industry, starting with cyberlockers. They describe these file-hosting sites as “hubs for unauthorized distribution” and the “business model of choice for copyright thieves.”

“Operators encourage users to post infringing material or offer incentives to users whose uploaded content is frequently downloaded by others. In other words, unlike legitimate cloud storage services, these sites are focused, not on ‘storing’ files, but instead on illegitimately distributing professionally produced entertainment products,” they write.

The MPAA and RIAA haven’t shied away from naming several of these “rogue” sites which they equate to the now defunct MegaUpload.

“The efforts by the U.S. government to shut down Megaupload have had an immediate and positive impact on the marketplace. However, significant distribution of illegal content continues through similar websites, such as Rapidgator, Turbobit, DepositFiles, and PutLocker.”

The cyberlockers are immediately followed by P2P sites, of which The Pirate Bay is the prime example. The entertainment industry groups are quick to point out that this “criminal operation” continues to operate despite the fact that the previous owners were convicted.

“While its operators have been criminally adjudicated, The Pirate Bay (TPB) continues to be one of the top sites in the world providing access to unlicensed content. TPB and many other similar operators of p2p networks still enable users to illegally download complete copies of illegally copied movie, television and music content for free, while profiting from advertising, subscriptions or donations.”

In addition to these top threats the MPAA and RIAA also name linking websites (such as TVShack) and Usenet as facilitators of copyright infringement. They further point out that search engines and server farms are not doing enough to stop the above threats from continuing to operate.

The Solution

The MPAA and RIAA argue that the U.S. Government has an important role to play in countering the threats outlined above. One of the key solutions they list is the creation of “best practices” in industries that play a key role in the piracy problem.

The groups suggest that the Government should play a role in convincing advertising companies and search engines to work with copyright holders to decrease online piracy. In the most ideal scenario, advertisers should ban websites that facilitate copyright infringement while search engines should make it harder to find pirated content, or delist rogue sites altogether.

The Government should also encourage domain registrars to cooperate with copyright holders. The MPAA and RIAA want to eliminate fake Whois entries and are arguing for the implementation of strict identification guidelines so new top-level domains will not be used for piracy.

“The proliferation of new generic Top Level Domain registries risks offering new opportunities for pirates to evade detection and to escape the reach of U.S. courts and law enforcement; a strong set of anti-infringement best practices among the major registries and registrars could help to reduce this risk,” they write.

Despite the failed SOPA and PIPA bills the MPAA and RIAA also want the Government to continue their efforts to introduce stronger copyright legislation. Despite public protests, streaming copyrighted movies and music should become a felony, and harsher sentences should be introduced to deter piracy.

“For example, increasing sentencing guidelines for intellectual property offenses committed by organized criminals and repeat intellectual property offenders would help deter gangs and other criminals from incorporating infringement into their portfolios.”

“In addition, it remains important for Congress to clarify that, in appropriate circumstances, infringement by internet streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony,” they write.

Laws aside, the U.S. should continue to work with other countries to crack down on piracy. If the entertainment industries have their way the actions against MegaUpload earlier this year will become the standard.

Judging from previous consultations, the recommendations of the MPAA and RIAA will not go unheard by Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, but whether the proposed solutions will be good enough to quash The Pirate Bay remains to be seen.
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-riaa-w...te-bay-120813/





Private Justice: How Hollywood Money Put a Brit Behind Bars

Industry-funded prosecution leads to 4-year sentence for SurfTheChannel owner.
Timothy B. Lee

Anton Vickerman, 38-year old owner of the once popular link site surfthechannel.com (STC), was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday by a British judge. But the prosecutors sitting across the courtroom from him didn't work for the Crown—they were lawyers for the movie studio trade group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

FACT, not public officials in the UK, was the driving force behind Vickerman's prosecution. Indeed, FACT effectively took on the role of a private law enforcement agency. Private investigators hired by FACT first identified Vickerman as the administrator of STC and built the case against him. His assets were frozen at FACT's request by a government agency—which was itself funded by FACT. And when the UK's public prosecutors decided not to press charges against Vickerman at all, FACT initiated a criminal prosecution on its own dime.

This is a new development for anti-piracy efforts. Organizations like the MPAA, RIAA, IFPA, and FACT have long lobbied law enforcement officials to prosecute "rogue sites" and have provided them with information and logistical support to do so. But public prosecutors generally have the final say on who will be indicted. In the Vickerman case, the public prosecutors concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to merit prosecution. FACT disagreed and invoked what one lawyer told us is an "archaic right" for a private organization to bring criminal prosecutions against other private parties.

Vickerman posted a lengthy testimonial to his site after he was convicted. In it, he describes FACT as a lawless conspiracy to shut down his site for the benefit of competing video sites, and he portrays Judge Evans as an "imbecile" who didn't understand the legal issues in the case. While many of the accusations seem overwrought, Vickerman did include a cache of documents that came out during his trial. From them we can paint a clear picture of just how far one private party was allowed to go in its bid for justice.

FACT confirmed the authenticity of the court documents for us but declined to get into the specifics of Vickerman's account—arguing that his conviction by a jury of his peers speaks for itself.

Getting their man

Surfthechannel.com grew rapidly—so rapidly that it soon came to the attention of Hollywood. The site hosted no videos, but its meticulously organized collection of links made it popular with those seeking infringing content. And plenty of people were interested. At the site's peak in mid-2009, STC attracted hundreds of thousands of users per day, earning Vickerman up to £50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue.

FACT wanted to shutter the site, but first it had to find out who was running the thing. Vickerman had kept a low profile, registering the domain through an anonymizing service and purchasing server space offshore. Undeterred, FACT hired an investigator named Pascal Hetzscholdt to pose as a potential investor who lured Vickerman to a London hotel on July 10, 2008. While the two ate lunch, a surveillance team recorded the encounter from a nearby table. Investigators working for FACT then tracked Vickerman back to his home 250 miles north of London in Gateshead.

The contents of that lunch discussion are disputed. Vickerman insists that he "did not discuss anything whatsoever about movies, illegality, or other such matters." Hetzscholdt has a different recollection. In a report filed after the meeting, he stated that Vickerman discussed plans to "experiment with using the BitTorrent network as the infrastructure to offer popular current films through STC." The whole thing was recorded, so the truth should have been a simple matter to verify—but FACT says that no audio of the meeting exists, making it impossible to check Hetzscholdt's story. Vickerman suspects foul play.

"I am firmly of the belief that such an audio recording did exist but that it was 'disappeared' by FACT Ltd due to it containing nothing controversial," he wrote.

FACT soon discovered that the home Vickerman shared with his wife was for sale. So, two days after the London meeting, another FACT agent posed as a potential buyer in order to access the residence. The agent covertly recorded the home walk-through and filed a detailed report on the operation.

Meanwhile, FACT was busy collecting other information about Vickerman. The group asked the satellite provider BSkyB for information about the couple's satellite TV subscription, for instance. An investigator tailed Vickerman's wife Kelly on a day's errands. The Guardian reports that "other private eyes had already obtained detailed information about his bank accounts, cars, and telephone records." FACT was nothing if not thorough.

On August 18, 2008, Northumbria police raided the Vickermans' home. Vickerman says that FACT agents participated in the raid and that they were "clearly directing the police." A FACT spokesman declined to comment to us on this allegation, but court documents do indicate that FACT was heavily involved in planning the raid. FACT, for instance, hired the forensic investigator used in the case.

In an e-mail sent a week prior to the raid, FACT's Colin Tansley outlined a plan for FACT's investigators to take down STC and replace it with a seizure notice. Vickerman says this plan failed because FACT believed, inaccurately, that the STC servers were located inside Vickerman's house. (The servers were actually located in Sweden, beyond the reach of FACT and the Northumbria police.) When we asked, FACT again refused to comment on Vickerman's allegations.

During the search, Vickerman and his wife were both arrested. Vickerman told both police and FACT investigators that the STC site was, in his view, legal; it acted "as a search engine" and was exempt from liability, he said.

The Vickermans were soon released on bail, but the other shoe was about to drop. Their cash was about to be seized.

Asset freeze

Two weeks later, on September 1, investigator Alan Connolly from the Bedfordshire Trading Standards Financial Investigations Unit showed up at the Vickermans' home. He knocked on the front door and presented them with an "asset restraint order," which the unit had taken out at FACT's request. Vickerman claims that he and his wife were then barred from accessing any of their funds, aside from £125 per week, per person, to cover living expenses. As a result of the order, Vickerman says that he "started to default on my bills and rapidly started spiraling into severe financial problems."

The Bedfordshire Trading Standards Financial Investigations Unit (BTSFIU) has a grandiose name but a strange history—and it's hardly the impartial agent of government justice its name might suggest. A statement on the agency's website explains that, in 2007, the "Bedfordshire Trading Standards Service was approached" by FACT and "offered a unique sponsorship opportunity" to create the Financial Investigation Unit. With FACT's generous support, the BTSFIU was soon able to focus on conducting piracy-related property confiscations.

Indeed, so deep is the partnership that, on the form used to request an asset confiscation, the agency states that "priority will be given to those referrals that involve cinematic piracy." Vickerman says he filed a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed that "BTSFIU had made 23 similar restraint order applications in 2008, all on behalf of FACT."

In a Tuesday interview, FACT spokesman Eddy Leviten brushed off any suggestion that the financial ties between FACT and the BTSFIU created a conflict of interest, however.

"The banking industry in the UK funds the check and credit bureau in the Metropolitan Police," he told us. "It's something that happens in the UK where private industry can fund specific units within law enforcement to take on a specific role. Those units still have to withstand the same scrutiny" as any other law enforcement agency. We e-mailed two BTSFIU agents seeking comment on the relationship but never got a response.

Unable to spend his own funds on legal representation, Vickerman borrowed money from his father to hire an attorney who challenged the asset freeze. According to Vickerman, "It turns out it is unlawful for BTS to act outside of Bedforshire County," so the asset freeze was cancelled about a month after it had been put into place.

And the news got even better for Vickerman. It soon emerged that the government had no interest in charging him with a crime. Indeed, the government wasn't even convinced he had committed one.

"I cannot advise any prosecution"

Vickerman was referred to Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the arm of the UK government responsible for criminal prosecutions. CPS chose not to prosecute him, explaining its decision in a letter dated December 12, 2008.

"I understand that the investigation into the suspects was prompted by FACT and in effect this is an enquiry that has been undertaken almost entirely by FACT although with the assistance of the Northumbria Police," the letter explained. The CPS prosecutor then continued:

I understand from [Northumbria Detective Constable] Watkin that there have been no other successful prosecutions that he is aware of where we could point to this type of website being classified as amounting to "making available... by electronic transmission," the legal standard needed to find Vickerman guilty of copyright infringement. At present it appears uncertain if in fact what the suspect has done does infringe this particular legislation. Certainly on the evidence thus far provided it is impossible for me to determine if this is the case and therefore I cannot advise any prosecution on the evidence presented.

CPS also pointed to additional problems with prosecuting STC. "It is obvious that this suspect does not put copyrighted material on the Internet itself," said the letter. "His 'crime' is to make it easier for others to find what is already there. This begs the rather obvious question of why he is being pursued rather than those who actually breach the copyright by displaying the material."

The agency also wondered whether there are "civil law remedies available perhaps including an injunction to close offending websites down," and if those remedies existed, why they weren't being pursued. (Such civil process has been used in the US to shut down Napster, Grokster, LimeWire, and many others, though such cases have been less successful in the UK.) CPS also noted that "such well established sites as YouTube occasionally fall foul of copyright and that they are not prosecuted in the manner suggested here."

The letter concluded that "the evidence provided is too vague to establish what actual offences are alleged and thus I cannot advise any charge at this stage."

It sounded like the end of the case, and in most cases would have been—but FACT badly wanted Vickerman in jail and was willing to do the work itself if necessary.

Going it alone

In the United States, public prosecutors generally have the power to decide when criminal prosecution is appropriate. Eleanor Lackman, a copyright attorney at the New York firm of Cowan DeBaets, Abrahams, and Sheppard, told Ars that "criminal liability generally is only prosecuted by government entities" such as the Department of Justice. A private party can request a copyright prosecution—as in the Megaupload case—but the final decision rests with the government.

United Kingdom law differs. There, private parties can initiate criminal prosecutions if they're willing to cover the costs out of their own pockets. FACT was, and so it bypassed CPS and brought criminal charges against Vickerman directly. "It is now our intention to run a private prosecution," FACT's Colin Tansley wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues on December 12, 2008.

Litigation dragged on for years. Vickerman charges that FACT withheld key documents from him, including the CPS letter recommending against prosecution, that he says would have bolstered his case. Indeed, he became so concerned with FACT's conduct that he actually petitioned government prosecutors to take over the prosecution. The request was rejected.

"In July 2010, the stress and strain of the nightmare we have endured for nearly two years finally breaks our marriage," Vickerman wrote. "Myself and my wife separate. FACT Ltd's decision to charge my wife as well, despite them knowing she has no involvement in STC, has bore them fruit." But to FACT, and even to the judge in the case, the problems and the prosecution were of Vickerman's making.

"You didn't bother to check with the copyright owners"

The trial finally commenced in May 2012. Vickerman was optimistic because he thought he had a key precedent on his side. In its 2008 letter, CPS noted that "FACT are currently involved in a prosecution of others involved in a similar website known as tvlinks." By the time the STC case reached trial in 2012, another judge had ruled that TV-Links had not infringed copyright.

But a jury found Vickerman guilty of "conspiracy to defraud" (rather than of facilitating copyright infringement) and the judge pronounced sentence. In his Tuesday remarks, Judge Evans made a curious reference to the TV-Links case, saying that Vickerman "pressed on, knowing that TV-Links had been taken down following the intervention of FACT on the basis that what it had been doing was unlawful."

Of course, the courts, not FACT, determine what is and isn't unlawful—and the courts had ultimately found that TV-Links had not violated the law. Judge Evans seems to have believed that FACT's simple accusation of unlawful conduct should have been sufficient basis for Vickerman to shut down his website.

"Your arrest and the interviews that followed did not act as any kind of warning about the criminal activity in which you were engaged or as any sort of barrier to the continued operation of STC," Judge Evans said. "With an arrogance of a kind that you displayed repeatedly during your evidence at the trial you carried on as before and indeed only shut down STC days before this trial began in May."

In March 2009, Judge Evans said, STC had two million links, of which "in excess of 5,500 links" were to infringing movies. "You insisted that you couldn't know if it was infringing copyright, that the studios might have granted right holder licences to the films of which you had no knowledge," Judge Evans said. "That was certainly true and bound to be true if you didn't bother to check with the copyright owners and check you most certainly didn't."

Vickerman places blame for his conviction squarely at the feet of Judge Evans. "We were about to enter a parallel universe in which there were two prosecutors, FACT Ltd and Judge Evans," Vickerman wrote in his Tuesday statement. It was a universe "in which the Judge had no grasp of the Internet or copyright law and in which evidence that would never have normally made it up the courtroom steps due to its dodginess was readily accepted as factual here.... I was surprised to find that I was more upset about the way FACT Ltd had won rather than the actual fact that they had won."

But Evans was having none of it. "You demonstrate a complete absence of remorse," he told Vickerman. "In the trial, you levelled criticism of virtually everyone involved in this investigation. You would not countenance, and it’s evident from your demeanor now that you still do not countenance, the idea that you were doing anything wrong. I’m bound to say that in all the years I’ve worked in this court I have never encountered arrogance of the kind that you displayed during the trial... The vast majority of the material made available through that website infringed copyright."

The privatization of justice

Ars sought comment from David Cook, a solicitor who successfully represented defendants connected to two other websites: OiNK and FileSoup. Those cases were formally handled by CPS rather than private groups, but even so Cook regarded the degree of industry involvement as "an abuse of the Court process as a result of the involvement of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) at all stages of the investigation and subsequent prosecution."

Those cases, he said, were "brought by the CPS, with the trade bodies malevolently lurking in the shadows but with their fingerprints all over the evidence." In the STC case, by contrast, the industry dispensed with the "lurking" and drove the case itself from start to finish. Cook describes the right of private parties to initiate criminal prosecutions as "archaic."

He argues that the ability of private companies to bring criminal charges opens the door to abuses. For example, Cook questions whether it is right for the "police to be able to use the powers that are specifically bestowed to them to seize a person’s property, only to then decide not to do anything themselves and simply pass the material to an 'interested third party'" like FACT. (Cook concedes that this transfer of evidence was ruled legal by a UK appeals court.)

FACT's Leviten disagreed. He told us there's a "rich historical precedent" for private parties bringing criminal prosecutions. He compared FACT to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which brings criminal animal welfare cases. Private criminal prosecutions, he said, are "part of the democratic system in the UK."

But Cook worries that the "enormous financial resources and clout" of organizations like FACT, and the lack of public oversight of their activities, could deprive defendants of a fair trial.

"There is no doubt that copyright holders deserve the full protection of the law," he told me. "But I still think that the manner in which they conduct these prosecutions is offensive."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...t-behind-bars/





Virgin Handed Court Order To Block Newzbin

Virgin becomes last of the major UK ISPs to block access Newzbin

Virgin Media has been told to block access to Newzbin, meaning customers will soon be prevented from using the filesharing site.

In October, the UK’s biggest ISP BT was told to prevent people accessing the site, which became Newzbin2 in 2010 having briefly gone offline. Subsequently, Sky started preventing access, as did TalkTalk when it was handed an order in February.

Virgin believes it is the last major ISP to be handed an order to ban users from visiting Newzbin.

No more Newzbin?

“Virgin Media has received an order from the courts requiring it to prevent access to Newzbin in order to help protect against copyright infringement,” a Virgin spokesperson said.

“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company, but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”

Virgin confirmed in November last year it was asked by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to block access to Newzbin, which offers links to film, television, music, and software downloads.

The saga started in late 2010, when the MPA, which represents Hollywood studios such as Warner Brothers, Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures outside the US, filed an injunction against BT, requiring it to block access to Newzbin.

That injunction failed to stop illegal downloads, as Newzbin put itself into administration and relocated overseas and out of the reach of British courts. The MPA changed tack and went after court orders, which it has now successfully served on major UK ISPs.

Major UK ISPs have also been told to block access to The Pirate Bay. In June, BT became the last of the big players to stop people visiting the site, although a number of proxies have been set up to allow users to go on The Pirate Bay, including one operated by the Pirate Party.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...-newzbin-89208





German ISPs Must Hand Over File Sharer Info to Rights Holders, High Court Rules

ISPs have to provide file sharers personal information to rights holders if files are illegally shared, the court ruled
Loek Essers

German ISPs must hand over to content rights holders the names and address of people connected to an IP address used for sharing material illegally, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled, a court spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

However, the information can only be given to the rights holder if a judge rules that the file sharer indeed infringed on copyright, said Dietlind Weinland, spokeswoman of the German Federal Court. The Federal Court is the highest ordinary court in the German judicial system and its decisions can only be overturned by the constitutional court.

The court ruled in a case between music distribution company Naidoo Records and Deutsche Telekom on Friday. Naidoo Record manages the music portfolio of Xavier Naidoo, and the company noticed in September 2011 that the song "Bitte hör nicht auf zu träumen" (Please don't stop dreaming) was offered for download on a file sharing site, according to the court. The record company noticed that dynamic IP addresses were used to share the song -- addresses that constantly change and cannot be tied to one user, the court said in a news release.

Naidoo records demanded to know which Deutsche Telekom customers had used the IP addresses at certain points in time to determine which customer was likely using that IP address to share the song, the court said.

By ruling that ISPs have to hand over personal data of file sharers to rights holders, the Federal Court overturned two previous rulings by the regional court and the regional appeals court of Cologne, Weinland said. Those courts both ruled the information did not have to be disclosed because the infringement was not on a commercial scale.

The Federal Court annulled those decisions and ruled that it is also permitted to provide name and address of illegal file sharers in cases not on a commercial scale, if it is possible to know who was using an IP address at the time of the infringement, the court said. Such a request is justified and proportional weighing the rights of the rights holder, the information providers and the users, even when the violation happens on a noncommercial scale, the Federal Court said.
http://www.itworld.com/legal/289659/...gh-court-rules





Demonoid Domains Go Up For Sale
enigmax

While it’s undoubtedly been a turbulent couple of weeks for Demonoid, its loyal users still had hope that one day the site might return. However, today the chances of that happening appear to have been cut from an optimistic 50/50 to much, much less. All key Demonoid domains are now up for sale to the highest bidder, signaling what could be the start of the end of an era

With an army of passionate fans, Demonoid was spoken about fondly by many in the torrent community. Just two weeks ago it was one of the world’s largest and most thriving torrent sites but a DDoS and hacker attack followed by a police raid brought it to its knees.

After days of silence, last Thursday the IFPI took credit for the complaint behind the takedown.

“The operation to close Demonoid was a great example of international cooperation to tackle a service that was facilitating the illegal distribution of music on a vast scale. I would like to thank all those officers involved in this operation to close a business that was built on the abuse of other people’s rights,” said the IFPI’s anti-piracy director Jeremy Banks.

Last week a source at ColoCall, Demonoid’s former webhost, said he believed that the site’s management was based in Mexico. It was later confirmed that a criminal investigation is underway in the country and that a number of arrests and asset seizures had already taken place.

However, in the middle of all the chaos and arrests TorrentFreak maintained contact with the site’s technical admin who still has control of the site’s domains. Due to his presumed position of freedom hope remained that one day the site would return, but today that seems more unlikely than ever.

The three key Demonoid domains – Demonoid.me, Demonoid.com and Demonoid.ph – are now all up for sale on Sedo, a popular domain name and website marketplace.

Selling the domains now while traffic to Demonoid remains high should ensure a good price for the vendor, but it seems unlikely that any buyer would look to relaunch as a torrent site.

Of course, “up for sale” doesn’t mean “sold”, but at this stage hopes that the site might one day return appear to be dwindling faster than ever.

Later today we hope to obtain a comment from Demonoid on this latest development and will update this post accordingly.
https://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-do...r-sale-120812/





uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported to Rake in Millions
Ernesto

With well over 125 million active users a month uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Because of its success the software is also the main source of revenue for San Francisco based parent company BitTorrent Inc. It is estimated that the company currently generates between $15 and $20 million in annual revenue but this figure is expected to rise after it was quietly announced that uTorrent will become ad-supported.

uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application. Today over 125 million users worldwide use the client regularly and this number continues to rise.

After BitTorrent Inc. bought the software in 2006 it evolved heavily. What began as a minimalist and no-nonsense client targeted at a BitTorrent-savvy crowd, is now an application that does far more than downloading alone.

As always, some love the changes and added features while others complain bitterly after every bug fix. However, the announcement that uTorrent will become ad-supported is expected to meet wider resistance among a certain crowd.

The change was quietly made public in a forum post yesterday where it is framed as “a fresh approach to creating a no-nonsense and free torrenting experience.”

After nearly seven years this is the first time that advertisers will be able to reach millions of uTorrent users directly from within the client itself.

Until now nearly all revenue came from the toolbar which users can install optionally when uTorrent is first downloaded. However, BitTorrent Inc. sees the need to experiment with other revenue sources with “sponsored torrents” being added for all users in an upcoming release.

“You are all very familiar with how we have paid the bills so far. These new changes mark our next step towards finding that difficult balance between keeping our lights on and providing a positive user experience,” they explain.

The sponsored torrents will appear in a highly visible spot on top of the list of downloads and will be used to promote content from advertisers. They can’t be “turned off,” but users have the option to click away individual ads.

“This new build will display a featured torrent at the top of your torrent list. This featured torrent space will be used to offer a variety of different types of content. We are working towards bringing you offers that are relevant to you.”

“This means films, games, music, software…basically anything that you will find interesting. We may not get it right on the first try but we will continue to improve our efforts based on your feedback,” BitTorrent Inc. adds.

The company explains that aside from ads the sponsored torrents will also be used to inform users about important updates and to promote artists.

BitTorrent previously informed TorrentFreak that people in different geographical locations will see different content. This means that uTorrent will use your IP-address to lookup where you are. Other than that, the company says that users’ privacy is guaranteed.

For BitTorrent Inc. the main motivation to add sponsored torrents is to generate extra revenue. The company added dozens of employees to its payroll in recent years, and these all have to be compensated.

However, a person close to the company told TorrentFreak that even without the uTorrent ads the company is doing very well. Current annual revenue is estimated at somewhere between $15 and $20 million and the company is backed by millions in venture capital.

With “sponsored torrents” BitTorrent Inc could possibly bring in millions of added revenue and grow even further.

The uTorrent team closed their announcement with a request for feedback, and we would like to do the same. What do you think of uTorrent’s move to add sponsored torrents? Does it put you off or is it no problem in exchange for a free client and service? Let us know in the comment section below.
https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-be...llions-120810/





uTorrent Makes Ads Optional Following User ‘Revolt’
Ernesto

BitTorrent Inc, the parent company of uTorrent, is backpedaling on its decision to force advertisements on users of the popular file-sharing client. While the upcoming uTorrent release will still include “sponsored torrents”, users will have the option to turn these off if they don’t wish to see them. In a statement the company stresses that they will continue to experiment with new revenue models to support the development and innovation of file-sharing software.

Last weekend we broke the news that uTorrent will soon become ad-supported.

The ads will come in the form of sponsored torrents through which advertisers can reach uTorrent’s user base of 125 million active users worldwide.

Along with the announcement BitTorrent Inc. asked users to voice their opinions on the decision, and in the days that followed dozens did just that. While these commenters represent a minuscule fraction of the total number of uTorrent users, their feedback was both negative and fairly unanimous.

“An absolute disgrace. uTorrent used to be an excellent lightweight client with some great features, now its just a bloated and buggy piece of crap which is now going to be bundled with adware,” one user said.

“You were great until a short time ago. Now you are just turning into a bloated mess like all the others. Whoever the genius was to think including ads in your pretty GUI would be a good idea should be gently hung with barbed wire,” another added.

Although these sentiments might not necessarily represent those of the majority, it did motivate BitTorrent Inc. to rethink its decision to force ads onto users.

Today, the company announced that they will give users the ability to opt-out of the sponsored torrents when the initial version is released.

“We’ve long contemplated an opt-out mechanism for the new offers and advertisements we will be experimenting with. Given all that’s been said here, we’ve decided to release the initial version with an opt-out mechanism. Users should have the choice to opt-out, and we will provide them with ways to do so,” said BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker.

According to Klinker it was never their intention to merely cash in on ads. The extra revenue will be used to improve current and future file-sharing technology.

“Opt-in offer experiences also help us bring new levels of investment; not just to the uTorrent client, but also to future iterations of peer-to-peer technology. In other words: experiments like this can help prove to the world that there is a legitimate third way in digital distribution.”

“Experiments like this help us give the distributed technology that we all believe in a fighting chance,” Klinker adds.

BitTorrent Inc has grown explosively in recent years, both in terms of revenue and employees. Current annual revenue is estimated at somewhere between $15 and $20 million and the company is backed by millions in venture capital. By adding sponsored torrents the company will be able to expand even further in the years to come.

This is not the first time that a group of uTorrent users has lashed out against BitTorrent Inc for changes the company made to their flagship software. As is the case for all software, there will always be people who reject change. However, this hasn’t stopped new users from adopting the company’s products.

With its uTorrent and BitTorrent clients the San Francisco company currently has a dominating market share of over 75%, which translates into more than 150 million active users a month. uTorrent has experienced the most spectacular growth by multiplying its active monthly users fivefold to 125 million in less than 4 years.

Update: In a separate forum post BitTorrent responds to accusations that uTorrent has become bloatware. The company is also considering a lighter version of uTorrent, but these plans are not concrete yet.

“We will be removing Apps in a near-future release because they’ve not been a success among our user base worldwide. Similarly, we will evaluate other existing features. We know that not every one of our features is a success, and our goal is to ship a slim base product with only those features users like and use.”

“Beyond this, we hear the calls among many of you for a µ that is smaller and meaner than the current µ. Something like 1.6, 2.0 or similar. Over the past year, we’ve discussed various paths to getting there and are taking this request seriously.”
https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-ma...revolt-120815/





Kim Dotcom Promises that Disruptive New Music Service, Megabox, Will Launch this Year
Jon Russell

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has dropped the biggest hint yet that his disruptive new music project is on schedule to launch before the end of the year, according to a tweet from the German, who US authorities accuse of copyright infringement, fraud and racketeering.

Is Megaupload also relaunching this year? See update below for more.

Dotcom’s new venture, Megabox — a service that allows artists to sell music direct to users — was first unveiled before his arrest and had been presumed to be over since the Megaupload site was taken down by the US Department of Justice in January.

Despite his problems, the New Zealand exile explained that the project was still making progress in June, telling Torrent Freak: “You can expect several Megabox announcements [in 2012] including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models.”

Now, however, there is little doubt that the service itself will launch this year:

I know what you are all waiting for. It’s coming. This year. Promise. Bigger. Better. Faster. 100% Safe & Unstoppable.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 13, 2012

In a guest post for Torrent Freak, Dotcom previously described the aims of Megabox in his own words, while also explaining how the disruptive business model will upset many within the music industry:

UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings.

We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free. Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works. You can expect several Megabox announcements next year including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models.

With many artists already enjoying closer relationships with their fans through social media sites — and Twitter in particular — Dotcom’s new project is a fascinating proposition.

Dotcom says that Megabox will “unchain” consumers from the music industry, and he tweeted a teaser of the developing service in June. This isn’t likely to please US authorities but, going on his latest tweet, it seems likely that Dotcom will tread particularly carefully with this new project.

Dotcom has been released on bail and, with his extradition hearing rescheduled to March 2013 due to issues with the way police have handled the case, that gives him and his team plenty of time to ready their next assault on the music industry.

Update is Megaupload also returning? Dotcom retweeted our post and added a cheeky tweet that suggests that Megaupload is relaunching this year (and that he was referring to that service with his initial tweet). Dotcom could, of course, be referring to (yet) another service. Either way, he confirmed that Megabox will launch this year – we’ll stay posted for more.
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/08/...l-launch-year/





Kim Dotcom Must Be Allowed To See FBI Evidence Against Him, Court Rules
enigmax

The bid to have Kim Dotcom extradited to the United States suffered a significant setback today. US authorities had insisted there was no need for them to reveal the evidence they hold against the Megaupload founder. But today a New Zealand judge upheld an earlier decision and ordered the US to reveal the evidence they are relying on to have Dotcom and his associates shipped to the United States, including details of covert operations and confidential discussions with rights holders.

Responding to a request from Megaupload’s legal team, Judge Harvey at the North Shore District Court ruled in May on whether the United States government should be forced to reveal the evidence it holds on Kim Dotcom and other defendants in the case.

Megaupload said they have a right to see the case being built against them but the United States insisted that no right to disclosure exists. Judge Harvey disagreed with the prosecution and ordered disclosure of all documents relating to the alleged crimes of the so-called Megaupload Conspiracy.

“In my view there must be fairness and the hearing and balance must be struck, otherwise the record of case becomes dominant virtually to the exclusion of everything else and places the extradition process in danger of becoming an administrative one rather than judicial,” the Judge wrote. He later stepped down after allegedly describing the United States as “the enemy”.

Refusing to concede defeat, US authorities pushed back and sought a judicial review of Judge Harvey’s ruling. In a judgment today, the High Court upheld the earlier decision handed down in the North Shore District Court.

Justice Helen Winkelmann dismissed the application for a judicial review, noting that without disclosure of the evidence, Kim Dotcom and his co-accused – Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk – would not be able to mount a full and proper defense in their extradition hearing.

“Without disclosure [Kim Dotcom and associates] will be significantly constrained in [their] ability to participate in the hearing, and the requesting state will have a significant advantage in terms of access to information,” the ruling reads.

The documents to be disclosed are significant in their scope, encompassing all elements of the case from the allegations of infringement, through to information being held on the nature of the Megaupload rewards program. Interestingly, as part of a section marked Criminal Breach of Copyright, the ruling says that US authorities must disclose:

– All records obtained or created in connection with the covert operations undertaken by agents involved in the investigations related to these proceedings in transacting and uploading/downloading data and files on the Megaupload site.

– All records or information and/or material provided to or obtained by the investigation and/or prosecuting agencies by the investigating and/or prosecuting agencies in this case from holders and/or owners of copyright interests evidencing alleged infringement of their copyright and/or complaining of such infringement.

- All records and materials related to communications between relevant copyright holders and Megaupload and/or its employees regarding their copyright interest, the direct delete access provided by Megaupload to any such copyright holders, and any communications between the copyright holders and Megaupload and/or its staff regarding take-down notices.

Today’s ruling marks a significant victory for Kim Dotcom, his associates, and their legal team. Access to the evidence against them has been ruled crucial to the defendants being able to mount a proper defense, something that the US authorities have tried to deny. Last week Dotcom promised more revelations – they are now almost certainly on their way.

The extradition hearing is currently expected sometime early 2013.
https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-...-rules-120816/





Surfthechannel Owner Sentenced After Piracy Conviction
BBC

The owner of Surfthechannel.com - a site that provided links to illegally copied TV shows and films - has been sentenced to four years in jail.

It used to be one of the UK's most popular sources of pirated content.

Anton Vickerman, from Gateshead, had designed the service's pages, hiring others to source material and carry out other back-end functions.

The 38-year-old was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud in June for "facilitating" copyright infringement.

The maximum sentence that could have been given at Newcastle Crown Court would have been 10 years.

Surfthechannel.com had acted as an index of professionally made online videos - both legal and illegal - encouraging its users to send in new links and check that they worked.

However, it did not host the video files itself, but instead pointed visitors to other sites including Megavideo and China's Tudou.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) said that at its height in 2009 the site attracted more than 400,000 visitors a day, generating more than £35,000 in advertising revenue a month.

Private investigator

Mr Vickerman ran the site through a limited company, called Scopelight, which sent earnings to a bank account in Latvia.

He was arrested after Fact and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) hired a private investigator who took photographs of Mr Vickerman's home and computer equipment in July 2008 after pretending to be interested in buying the property.

Police raided the house a month later, arresting Mr Vickerman and his wife.

Kelly Vickerman was found not guilty by the jury.

Despite the arrests Surfthechannel continued to operate and only went offline in May, coinciding with the start of the trial.

Fact welcomed the case's outcome.

"Mr Vickerman knew what he was doing from the outset, having been involved in the pirate community for some time," said the organisation's director general, Kieron Sharp.

"This was not a passive search engine. Surfthechannel was created specifically to make money from criminal activity and it became the biggest site of its kind on the internet within two years.

"The sentencing indicates the severity of the offences committed and the sophistication of his criminal enterprise and should send a very strong message to those running similar sites that they can be found, arrested and end up in prison."

But others have expressed concern that Mr Vickerman was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud rather than being prosecuted for copyright infringement.

The Techdirt blog has described the law as being "vague" and noted that the charge had previously been unsuccessfully levelled against the owners of Oink and tv-links.co.uk - sites which had also offered indexes of links to pirated material.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19253359





Jailbreak Apple TV? Be Prepared to Pay Up
John Paul Titlow

Apple released its latest, third-generation Apple TV in March, yet demand for the earlier version is through the roof. In fact, the second-gen device sells online for $150 more than its original price. Usually, the price of older Apple products falls when Cupertino releases its latest and greatest. What gives? The market is speaking, and this is what it's saying: We want a jailbroken Apple TV.

The newer Apple TV is restricted to the apps that Apple supplies for it. A jailbreak would open it up to third-party software and the Web at large. Apparently a solution is in the works (despite reports published last week claiming that no developers were working on it), but it isn't available yet.

So prospective customers who want access to a wider range of programs than Apple allows have a choice: Pay $99 and wait for a hack to surface, or spend up to $280 for an older, less capable unit that runs software that has been modified - without the manufacturer's authorization - to show pretty much anything available on the Internet.

It may not be a mainstream thing, but for people who want it, jailbreaking is apparently worth a hefty premium.

Why Jailbreak the Apple TV?

What makes a jailbroken Apple TV so compelling? For one thing, Apple TV is substantially more limited than the company's other devices. iPods, iPhones and iPads run an operating system with access to a third-party apps via the App Store, but the Apple TV is limited to a handful of pre-installed apps, a paltry selection compared to those that come with competing streaming boxes from Roku and Boxee. Apple added Hulu Plus only recently, two years after that service launched.

Jailbreaking the Apple TV allows users to browse the Web and install third-party media-center software like XMBC and Plex. It vastly expands the amount of content you can access from your Apple TV without jeopardizing any of the device's existing functionality.
AirPlay + iPad Makes Apple TV Jailbreaks Obsolete

While the Apple TV's content selection has been very limited, the company's AirPlay technology is changing that. AirPlay allows users to mirror their iPads and other iOS devices to the big screen to stream a much broader selection of videos. Essentially, anything that can load on an iPad or iPhone can wind up on your TV screen via Apple TV. If the streaming box has a killer feature, this is it.

And the company may have more compelling solutions in store to the problem of Apple TV's walled garden. Rumors of an Apple-branded HDTV have largely subsided as the launch of the new iPhone nears, but many analysts and Apple experts expect the company to release a TV set in the future.

Apple could push out a major software update to the Apple TV in September, perhaps opening a TV-focused App Store. This is, of course, speculation, but any update to the device's software could change the game.

Meanwhile, if you're itching for an Apple TV that's free of manufacturer-imposed limitations, it's available. Just be prepared to pay up.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...-to-pay-up.php





WIPO's Broadcasting Treaty is Back: a Treaty to End the Public Domain, Fair Use and Creative Commons
Cory Doctorow

The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization's Broadcasting Treaty is back. This is the treaty that EFF and its colleagues killed five years ago, but Big Content won't let it die. Under the treaty, broadcasters would have rights over the material they transmitted, separate from copyright, meaning that if you recorded something from TV, the Internet, cable or satellite, you'd need to get permission from the creator and the broadcaster to re-use it. And unlike copyright, the "broadcast right" doesn't expire, so even video that is in the public domain can't be used without permission from the broadcaster who contributed the immense creativity inherent in, you know, pressing the "play" button. Likewise, broadcast rights will have different fair use/fair dealing rules from copyright -- nations get to choose whether their broadcast rights will have any fair dealing at all. That means that even if you want to reuse video in a way that's protected by fair use (such as parody, quotation, commentary or education), the broadcast right version of fair use might prohibit it.

Worst of all: There's no evidence that this is needed. No serious scholarship of any kind has established that creating another layer of property-like rights will add one cent to any country's GDP. Indeed, given that this would make sites like Vimeo and YouTube legally impossible, it would certainly subtract a great deal from nations' GDP -- as well as stifling untold amounts of speech and creativity, by turning broadcasters into rent-seeking gatekeepers who get to charge tax on videos they didn't create and whose copyright they don't hold.

And since the broadcast right is separate from copyright, permissive copyright licenses like Creative Commons would not apply. That means that if you made a CC-licensed video -- as tens of millions of creators have -- that the web-host, the cablecaster, the satellite company or the broadcaster that made it available to the public could essentially strip off the license you provided and go back to an all-rights-reserved model, with them in the driver's seat.

Thanks, WIPO, for showing us once again what a corrupt, anti-creator, anti-free-speech, economically backwards waste of time and space you are.

During the last hours of the meeting, the WIPO Committee pursued discussions that led to the adoption of a single text titled “Working document for a treaty on the protection of broadcasting organizations” (which has not been published as of today)3. This working document will constitute the basis of further discussions to be undertaken in November in Geneva, which WIPO hopes will conclude with a consensus document to be signed as a treaty early 2013. If WIPO convenes this conference it is because members have reached a decision and a new treaty may be born.

This procedural detail is a really important one — despite there being no international consensus, WIPO is pushing for a treaty to be signed quickly. This is actually a cruel trend in other WIPO negotiations. In the past, it has seemed like the WIPO bureaucracy has pushed for a conclusion of treaties just because they have been in negotiation for a long period of time. For example, another long-running negotiation led to the adoption of a treaty about performance rights that was opposed by many.

We urge country Members to say no to the WIPO Broadcasting treaty—as they have said in the past. We continue to believe the preferable model for addressing these issues is the narrower signal-based approach in the Brussels Satellite Convention.





Fox Sues to Shut Down Aereo Copycat Over TV Streaming
Jeff John Roberts

Broadcasters are in a pitched fight with Aereo over whether the TV-streaming service violates copyright. Now, Fox is suing an Aereo copycat called BarryDriller.com. The cases will help define the laws for how we watch TV in coming years.

Broadcasters have been battling for months to shut down Aereo, a service that uses dime-size antennas to stream TV to Apple devices. Now, the fight has taken a strange new twist. [Note: this post has been updated with BarryDriller comments]

On Friday, Fox Networks filed a new suit against a start-up called BarryDriller.com (a play on the name of TV mogul and Aereo investor Barry Diller). BarryDriller charges $5.95 a month to supply personal antennas that let subscribers “scan the airwaves and tune the antenna to receive whichever broadcast station signal the subscriber chooses.”

Neither Fox nor Aereo is amused. Fox claims that BarryDriller is infringing the copyright of The Simpsons, Raising Hope and Glee and violating its trademark. The broadcaster adds that the start-ups use of personal antennas is not defense:

“It simply does not matter whether BarryDriller uses one big antenna to receive Plaintiffs’ broadcasts and retransmit them to subscribers, or millions of antennas, “so tiny [one] fits on the tips of your finger,” as Defendants claim it does. No amount of technological gimmickry by Defendants changes the fundamental principle of copyright law ….”

The lawsuit mirrors one that Fox and other broadcasters are pursuing against Aereo. That case also turns on a legal loophole based on whether Aereo’s one-antenna-to-one-person transmission system means it is not broadcasting to the public. In a surprise ruling last month, a New York judge awarded round one to Aereo by refusing to grant the broadcasters a preliminary injunction.

There are a handful of differences between Aereo and BarryDriller:

• BarryDriller is targeting the Los Angeles market unlike Aereo which is for now available only in New York

• BarryDriller says it is willing to offer broadcasters a retransmission fee similar to what cable operators pay

• Its website suggests that BarryDriller viewer need an external antenna to receive TV on any device (Aereo transmits directly to Apple products like Safari, the iPad and iPhone)

[Update: BarryDriller founder David Alki wrote to say that his service is actually in four major markets and that it will add three more next week.

Alki is also the founder of FilmON, a TV streaming service that the entertainment industry smacked with an injunction in 2010.]

Aereo’s Barry Diller responded to his rival’s launch last week by telling the Wall Street Journal, “I had hoped that if they steal my name they’d do it for something more provocative.” Aereo executives said they hadn’t heard of the service and added, “It is unfortunate that they appear determined to try to trade on Aereo and its board members’ successes and reputation.”
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/11/fox-sue...-tv-streaming/





Google: Many Popular Sites Will Escape Pirate Penalty, Not Just YouTube
Danny Sullivan

Google says that YouTube isn’t going to somehow solely escape its new “pirate penalty.” Any popular site may be OK, as the penalty works off of more than pure copyright infringement reports. Nuances in calculating the penalty should save popular user-generated content sites, the company said.

The Pirate Penalty

Initially, it sounded as if sites with many copyright infringement complaints filed against them with Google — such as those listed here in the Google Transparency Report — would be at risk under the new pirate penalty Google will begin imposing next week.

If that were the case, Google’s own YouTube site would have a unique advantage in that copyright infringement notices filed against it are largely handled through a separate system and wouldn’t count against it in the way other sites would be hit, under the forthcoming penalty.

YouTube & Copyright Infringement Notices

Our article from Friday, How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate Penalty, documents that situation in detail. But speaking with Google today, the company provided more details it hadn’t shared before.

In particular, Google said that notices filed against YouTube through the separate YouTube copyright infringement reporting system will be combined with those filed against YouTube through the Google Search reporting system.

So how many infringements in total will YouTube face, beyond the tiny 650 URLs removal requests filed through the Google Search system over the past year-and-a-half? Google still refuses to give a specific number, telling me only that it’s “magnitudes” beyond those with Google Search.

Google: YouTube & Others Not Likely To Be Hit

There’s an excellent chance that YouTube may have more copyright infringement notices filed against it (and upheld by Google) than any of the sites likely to be targeted through what can now be considered the Google Search takedown list. Despite this, Google repeated its earlier statement that it didn’t expect YouTube to be hit. That previous statement:

We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites.

How can this be? How can YouTube escape a penalty that seemed specifically designed to impact sites with a lot of copyright infringement notices (that Google has deemed valid) filed against them? That’s where those nuances I mentioned come in.

On Friday, when Google announced the forthcoming penalty, it suggested that sheer number of notices against a site were what was involved. From its post:

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.

More Than Number Of Notices Counted

Today, Google told me today that the new penalty will look beyond just the number of notices. It will also take into account other factors, specifics that Google won’t reveal, but with the end result that YouTube — as well as other popular sites beyond YouTube — aren’t expected to be hit.

What other sites? Examples Google gave me include Facebook, IMDB, Tumblr and Twitter. But it’s not that there’s some type of “whitelist” of sites. Rather, Google says the algorithm automatically assesses various factors or signals to decide if a site with a high number of copyright infringement notices against it should also face a penalty.

Without clarification from Google, we can only make assumptions on how this will work. My guess is that Google will be looking at factors to somehow determine if a site seems legitimate. Does it have many reputable links to it? Can Google detect if there’s a lot of sharing of content from those sites? Are there factors that already give the site a good “reputation” in Google’s algorithms for other types of searches.

By “legitimate,” I’m making a further assumption that Google’s trying not to harm sites that seem to be making a good-faith effort through internal systems to remove infringing content. Just as YouTube has its own takedown system, other sites that are actively working to remove content after copyright holder complaints might be effectively given a pass in how the new penalty works.

In fact, Google even argues that YouTube is likely being assessed more severely under the new system. It knows how many complaints have been filed with YouTube directly, through YouTube’s own system, and those count against YouTube under the pirate penalty. In contrast, takedown notices that are filed directly with other sites, and acted upon by those sites’ internal mechanisms, are not counted.

Of course, other sites might have massively fewer requests filed against them, compared to YouTube. But the bigger issue is that the penalty has been designed with a recipe that still gives YouTube, along with other popular sites, a likely escape.

It might not be a YouTube-specific escape clause, but YouTube will escape along with other sites — and it’s not something that was made clear in the company’s initial announcement, which suggested the penalty was purely tied to number of notices acted upon.
http://searchengineland.com/google-m...penalty-130289





The Pirate Bay: 'Google Rankings Change is Good for Us'
Tom Pakinkis

The Pirate Bay has said that Google’s algorithm change, which will see illegal file-sharing websites automatically placed further down its search rankings, will actually result in more direct traffic for the site.

Last week Google agreed to aid entertainment industries by altering its algorithm to reflect the amount of copyright removal notices it receives.

The changes are now beginning to come into effect, with torrent websites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt appearing lower down in the search engine, while legal websites such as iTunes and Spotify have been elevated.

In a blog post, The Pirate Bay said it is not too concerned by its impact and even goes as far as suggesting that it could be beneficial for the pirate site.

“Google putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us,” said a statement from TPB. “We’ll get more direct traffic when people don’t get the expected search result when using Google, since they will go correctly to TPB.”

However, the site did admit that it is disappointed in the Google decision, claiming the entertainment industries to be ‘corrupt’ and comparing them to a dictatorship.

“It's really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so....”

IsoHunt’s response to Google’s punishment is similar to The Pirate Bay’s, also stating that it will have little effect on incoming traffic. Owner Gary Fung believes the main concern is that Google will be downranking perfectly legitimate search results.

He said: “With millions of links subject to notices, we never bothered countering any DMCA notices on Google. That does not mean all links under isohunt.com which Google has filtered by notices are valid, just because we haven’t countered them.”

Fung has also suggested that Google’s YouTube is likely to be excluded from downranking, even though it is one of the highest receivers of takedown requests.

IsoHunt claims to be keeping a close eye on the impact of the algorithm change to see how it impacts access to legal content. Fung is calling for protest against the search engine’s censorship.

The Pirate Bay’s full response to the Google algorithm change is below:

“Google just sent out a press release saying that they will lower file sharing systems rankings in their search engine and instead favour our competitors (the old corrupt media industry that is). Since we're getting lots of e-mails from interested journalists about this, we'll just post our thoughts about this here instead.

First you need to know that a very low amount of our traffic actually comes from search engines such as google. If you think about it, you'll understand why - we're competitors. TPB is a search engine just as Google. We only specialize in different methods and links.

That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We'll get more direct traffic when people don't get the expected search result when using Google since they will go directly to TPB.

The thing we don't like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They're dictating terms. It's really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so...."
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/t...-for-us/051427





Google Music: iTunes Rival Nears After Filesharing Search Changes

Google's downgrade of search results hosting unlicensed material expected to hasten expansion of music service
Josh Halliday

Google is expected to accelerate the launch of its ambitious music service outside the US after the company announced last Friday that it will downgrade illicit filesharing sites in its search results.

Websites that host unlicensed copies of songs and films will be relegated in Google search results from Monday, in what is being seen as a major olive branch to the entertainment industry.

The change is expected to hasten the expansion of Google Music, the search engine's rival to Apple iTunes, which was announced in November 2011 but has been unable to expand outside the US because of licensing difficulties.

The music and film industries have complained for years about Google directing people to unlicensed material online. The prominence in search results of alleged illicit filesharing websites such as Pirate Bay and MegaUpload has become a major sticking point in Google's negotiations with the music industry as it attempts to strike licensing deals to launch its own service.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI), which represents the four major music groups in the UK, described the announcement as a breakthrough and said it would be helpful to Google's plans to launch its digital music service in the UK.

"This has the potential to be really significant, but it all depends how it is reflected in the results people see," Taylor said.

"It makes us feel that Google is a little bit more on our side. It's helpful background music to these [Google Music] discussions, certainly."

The BPI also wants Google to give internet users more information about licensed content in search results, so that queries for an Adele or Justin Bieber song would be more likely to return recommendations for Spotify or Last.fm.

Eddie Leviten, the head of communications at the Federation Against Copyright Theft, welcomed the announcement but said the devil was in the detail.

He said that some in the entertainment industry will be less than pleased with Google's plans to downgrade only the websites that have received the highest number of takedown requests from music and film groups. Under Google's new algorithm, if an infringing website is not subject to a copyright removal notice then it will not be relegated in search results; and every allegedly infringing URL has to be entered in a Google form, making the submission process slow and cumbersome.

Google also submits such requests to the Chilling Effects website, intended to show where freedom of speech is being restricted – but also in this case pointing to sites with infringing content.

Google says YouTube and other user-generated websites will not be negatively affected by the change. Music industry insiders say that was not anyway a significant issue because the video-sharing website offers a great marketing platform for emerging artists and already offers piracy protections, such as its Content ID technology, which identifies users who have uploaded unlawfully copied media.

"It's definitely a positive step but we need to see a little more about how it works," said Leviten.

Industry experts said the move was strategically linked to Google's plans to take on iTunes outside the US.

"This is a great political step forward for Google, said Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst. "There is no doubt that what Google is doing is strategically linked to what they want to do with their own music service."

Mulligan said that forcing Google to demote pirate websites had been a top priority of the entertainment industry for the past 12 months, but the search giant had not previously shown signs of making any concessions.

"Google has a quite strident negotiation position," he said, adding that the move will smooth the way for Google to launch the most innovative next-generation music service in the market.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-music-service





Nielsen: More Teens Now Listen To Music Through YouTube Than Any Other Source
Frederic Lardinois

According to Nielsen’s latest “Music 360” report, 48% of consumers in the U.S. still see radio as the dominant way to discover new music. For almost two-thirds of U.S. teenagers, however, Google’s YouTube is now a more important source of music than radio (54%), iTunes (53%) and CDs (50%).

Despite the growing popularity of Internet music services among teens, about a third of them still bought a CD in the last year and among all respondents, 55% said physical CDs are still a very or fairly good value.

““While younger listeners opt for technologically advanced methods , traditional methods of discovery like radio and word-of-mouth continue to be strong drivers,” said Nielsen SVP David Bakula in a canned statement today. “With so many ways to purchase, consume and discover great new music, it’s no wonder that the consumer continues to access and enjoy music in greater numbers.”

The survey also found that 54% of U.S. consumers now have music player apps on their smartphones, Given that virtually every smartphone now has a built-in music player, we can only assume that this number reflects third-party apps. Just under half of them have radio apps installed on their phones and 26% have music store apps.

Newer music services like Spotify and Pandora didn’t really register in Nielsen’s survey. Indeed, as the WSJ reports, cassette tapes (remember those?) are still more popular among adult than most online music services. Almost a tenth of U.S. adults apparently still listens to cassettes and 7% listen to Spotify.

Here are a few more data points from the survey:

More teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source

• 64% of teens listen to music through YouTube
• 56% of teens listen to music on the radio
• 53% of teens listen to music through iTunes
• 50% of teens listen to music on CD

Positive recommendations from a friend are most likely to influence purchase decisions

• 54% are more likely to make a purchase based off a positive recommendation from a friend
• 25% are more likely to make a purchase based off a music blog/chat rooms
• 12% are more likely to make a purchase based off an endorsement from a brand
• 8% of all respondents share music on social networking sites, while 6% upload music.

Digital music is seen as a slightly better value than a physical CD

• 63% of purchasers identified digital albums as a very or fairly good value
• 61% identified digital tracks as a very or fairly good value
• 55% identified physical CDs as a very or fairly good value

Younger consumers who do buy digital tracks, are more likely to purchase new music immediately after its release

• 33% of teens purchased a digital track within one week of release
• 21% of persons 18+ purchased a digital track within one week of release

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/youtube-is-for-music/





The Power of Music, Tapped in a Cubicle
Amisha Padnani

THE guy in the next cubicle is yammering away on the phone. Across the room, someone begins cursing loudly at a jammed copy machine.

The headphones on the other end of your desk suddenly look very appealing. Would anyone mind if you tapped into your iTunes playlist for a while?

Some workers like to listen to music when they find themselves losing focus. They may also plug in their earbuds to escape an environment that’s too noisy — or too quiet — or to make a repetitive job feel more lively.

In biological terms, melodious sounds help encourage the release of dopamine in the reward area of the brain, as would eating a delicacy, looking at something appealing or smelling a pleasant aroma, said Dr. Amit Sood, a physician of integrative medicine with the Mayo Clinic.

People’s minds tend to wander, “and we know that a wandering mind is unhappy,” Dr. Sood said. “Most of that time, we are focusing on the imperfections of life.” Music can bring us back to the present moment.

“It breaks you out of just thinking one way,” said Teresa Lesiuk, an assistant professor in the music therapy program at the University of Miami.

Dr. Lesiuk’s research focuses on how music affects workplace performance. In one study involving information technology specialists, she found that those who listened to music completed their tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn’t, because the music improved their mood.

“When you’re stressed, you might make a decision more hastily; you have a very narrow focus of attention,” she said. “When you’re in a positive mood, you’re able to take in more options.”

Dr. Lesiuk found that personal choice in music was very important. She allowed participants in her study to select whatever music they liked and to listen as long as they wanted. Those who were moderately skilled at their jobs benefited the most, while experts saw little or no effect. And some novices regarded the music as distracting.

Dr. Lesiuk has also found that the older people are, the less time they spend listening to music at work.

Few companies have policies about music listening, said Paul Flaharty, a regional vice president at Robert Half Technology, the staffing agency. But it is still a good idea to check with your manager, even if you see others wearing headphones in the office.

He said some supervisors might think that workers wearing headphones weren’t fully engaged and were blocking out important interactions “because they are going into their own world.”

“If someone’s not doing a good job,” he said, “then you can have a hiring manager say that all they do is listen to music all day and that it’s hampering productivity.”

For those who choose to listen to music, it’s best to set limits, because wearing headphones for an entire shift can be perceived as rude by those nearby.

Dr. Sood, at the Mayo Clinic, said it takes just 15 minutes to a half-hour of listening time to regain concentration. Music without lyrics usually works best, he said.

Daniel Rubin, a columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, said he has listened to jazz and piano concertos for most of his 33-year newspaper career — but only when writing on deadline. He started off using a Sony Walkman, but now makes use of 76 days’ worth of music on his iTunes playlist.

“The person clicking their nails three desks away and the person humming next to me all sound equally loud and it’s hard for me to block them out,” he said.

As a columnist, he works mostly alone, and people in the office seldom need to approach him. But when he was a budding reporter, he noticed that colleagues would become irritated when trying to get his attention. “It was really annoying because suddenly you would hear ‘Dan ... DAN ... DAN RUBIN! People were screaming at you because they needed you.”

ANDREW ENDERS, 28, a lawyer and insurance broker in Linglestown, Pa., said he and an officemate bonded over a local radio station when they worked at the Dauphin County District Attorney’s office. They switched off the radio only when speaking with a client, and they lowered the volume when their boss was around.

“I do these very serious things, reviewing insurance policies and evaluating risk and liability exposure,” Mr. Enders said. “A big part of my personality is the artistic side, and music helps me balance who I am as an individual with what I’m doing at work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/j...rkstation.html





Universal Music Uses Bogus DMCA Claim To Take Down Negative Review Of Drake's Album
Mike Masnick

We keep talking about how the DMCA takedown process, all too frequently, is used to stifle speech, and defenders of the system claim that it's ridiculous to bring up the First Amendment in a discussion on copyright. But here's yet another (in a very long list) of examples. Henry Adaso wrote a short, but marginally negative review of Drake's album Take Care. The review was posted to About.com last November. The entire review reads:

Drake - 'Take Care'

A briefly entertaining, occasionally ponderous, sometimes lazy, sometimes brilliant, slow-rolling, rap-singy, bulls-eye missing, kitten-friendly, runway-ready, mega corny, lip-smacking, self-conscious, self-correcting, self-indulging, finely tuned, Houston infatuated, crowd pleasing, delightfully weird, emotionally raw, limp, wet, innocuous, cute, plush, brooding, musical, whimsical, exotic, pensive, V-necked, quasi-American, strutting, doting, cloying, safe alternative to sleeping pills.

Best Song: "Lord Knows"

Release Date: November 15, 2011

Not particularly positive, but not particularly scathing either. He also posted another post on About.com that merely pointed to that review, but included no additional content other than that he wrote a 50-word review.

Either way, both of those links are gone from Google's search. Why? Because just as someone filed a bogus DMCA to take down one of our key SOPA posts, Universal Music, via the BPI (British RIAA) filed a DMCA notice with Google claiming that both of those pages were infringing. That's clearly a false takedown, and pretty clearly designed to stifle a negative review.

Adaso discusses all of this in his own blog post, in which he suggests that perhaps Universal and BMI are purposely trying to take down negative reviews, though it's equally likely that they're just incredibly incompetent. Still, whether incompetence or malice, it's clear that the DMCA is being used to censor and stifle speech, and in this case it just so happens to be speech in the form of a negative review of a Universal Music Artist (a Universal Music artist who has also expressed displeasure with how Universal has used copyright law against his own best interests).

But, no, there's no free speech concerns around the DMCA, right?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...es-album.shtml





Piracy Witch Hunt Downs Legit E-Book Lending Web Site
Violet Blue

On August 1, a vitriolic, hysterical mob of authors mistook e-book lending Web site Lendink for a piracy clearinghouse, rallying a terribly mistaken call to action.

The site remains offline today as details emerge revealing just how wrong these authors were -- and how unrepentant some of them still are.

Lendink was a hobby site put together by disabled army vet Dale Porter, who created a person-to-person e-mail request system where e-book fans could find out about lend-enabled books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and contact each other to arrange loans on titles they wanted to read.

Borrowing lend-enabled Kindle and Nook e-books is perfectly legitimate, as spelled out on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble Web sites; book e-tailers have a series of permissions in place where publishers can allow a 14-day lend of a purchased book between customers. (Amazon notes that "not all books are lendable -- it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending.")

But to a few virulently righteous individuals, this was not a new model for library science, but a hotbed of peer-to-peer piracy that had to be stopped at any cost.

The whole ugly scene is reminiscent of when an angry mob in Britain vandalized a pediatrician's office when they thought the word on the doctor's office sign meant "pedophile."

An ugly, clumsy mob

It started when one person took a cursory look at Lendink and thought the site was giving books away for free -- and told as many authors as possible that it was a piracy site, and everyone's work was listed on it.

Via Twitter and Amazon's KindleBoards forums, the groupthink fed on itself. The mob conducted a campaign that essentially took the site offline for the foreseeable future, and enacted some scary DMCA and C&D abuse:

I noticed my work there and sent the site a Cease and Desist Notice, giving them 48 hours to remove my work or face prosecution.

They were in breech of copyright and deserved to be shut down. Am I proud they have been shut down? Am I proud to have stood up for my legal rights as author? You betcha!

What's worse is that when blogs such as Techdirt began to reveal the truth, the most vocal witch hunt proponents admitted no mistake and made no apologies.

Many have stood by their actions, in at least one instance claiming they meant to go after "Lendlnk" (lowercase L) and not "LendInk" (uppercase i) -- when no such site with the alternate spelling exists.

So far, one of the angry authors has admitted the mistake and apologized.

But as Lendink has been reduced to vapor for the time being, its Facebook Page remains -- along with a growing backlash against the authors behind its shutdown.

Dale Porter explained that the site -- originally purchased in hopes of passive income from Amazon's Affiliate program -- had actually been running on autopilot for a year as Porter battled health issues.

Porter told blog The Digital Media Machine:

At this time, the host company is only advising that they have received hundreds of threats regarding possible lawsuits if they did not take Lendink.com down immediately.

(...) The hosting company has offered to reinstate Lendink.com on the condition that I personally respond to all of the complaints individually. I have to say, I really do not know if it is worth the effort at this point.

The entire episode is an object lesson in IP and copyright among writers who don't understand the tools and technologies they use -- and whose sense of self-entitlement (or greed) runs roughshod over the social and cultural principles of their own medium: books.

It's OK to shoot the burglar?

The ugliness of Lendink's story underscores the malfeasance behind file-sharing hysteria.

Content creators perceive an untenable ownership; no one was sued for making cassette mix tapes, and libraries are not hotbeds of loan-theft.

It is obvious that the authors involved have limited technical understanding of digital goods.

It's also clear that many of the people unrepentant about the harm done to Lendink feel as though they themselves are harmed in some way by what they perceive Lendink to have done -- facilitated the loan of their books at the very least, or at worst, the copying of digital files.

It seems to me that these authors and indie publishers don't quite understand that computers are made to copy files.

This is a feature, not a bug.

As an indie author and digital self-publisher, I've seen much success by allowing my books to be loaned -- among other sharing methods, this has helped my business enormously.

Even still, we've learned that some authors apparently would never want their books in libraries, or to participate in the wider cultural good of library principles, such as the open exchange of information.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...ding-web-site/





Wanted, Dead or Alive: Used Books
John Williams

Larry McMurtry, the famed author of “Lonesome Dove” and dozens of other books, was walking slowly along State Highway 79 on Friday morning toward this town’s only intersection. Down the block, more than 150 collectors and dealers were queuing up to bid on 300,000 used books — about two-thirds of the stock of Booked Up, the four-building literary mecca that Mr. McMurtry started here in 1988.

“I’ve never seen that many people lined up in Archer City,” he said. “And I’m sure I never will again.”

Now 76, Mr. McMurtry, the country’s highest-profile book dealer, recently decided to whittle his enterprise down to one building, which will remain open with an inventory of about 150,000 books. He said he expected the single store to be maintained by his heirs.

“One store is manageable,” he said. “Four stores would be a burden.”

This prairie town of fewer than 2,000 people, 150 miles northwest of Dallas, bakes like a piece of flatbread at this time of year. The high temperature on Thursday was 110 degrees, with not a patch of shade in sight. It was the setting for “The Last Picture Show,” the McMurtry novel and its film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich, and the weekend’s auction was called the Last Book Sale. A playful name on its surface, it had a serious, even grim undertone given the book industry’s anxiety about the future of its printed product.

But Mr. McMurtry insisted that he felt optimistic for younger people entering the business, despite the continuing rise of e-books. “I think a good bookstore will not suffer,” he said. “All the controversies about the Kindle don’t have much impact on the rare book business.”

Eric Stuart, 30, and his wife, Caitlin, 23, came to the auction from Magnolia, Ark., with a 24-foot trailer and 900 broken-down boxes. They’re starting a store called the Full Nelson, named after their infant son. After the first two hours of bidding on Friday, the Stuarts had purchased 17 lots of books. Mr. Stuart estimated their outlay at 60 cents a book.

Erin Hahn, 22, and Zachary Stacy, 24, a couple from Austin, hope to start a store in Fort Worth. Asked where any books from Archer City might rest until they secure a retail space, Ms. Hahn said, “In my parents’ garage, probably.”

Several older hands expressed frustration at the tedium entailed by transferring the bulk of their business online. Marshall Hamilton, who runs Blue Awning Books in Austin, said: “I thought I was going to be a bookseller. Turns out, I’m a database expert.”

Maggie McKeown said she was inspired to open McKeown’s Books and Difficult Music in New Orleans eight years ago by “the old Joseph Campbell” philosophy: “Follow your bliss.”

“But he should have added something to that,” Ms. McKeown said. “Maybe, ‘Follow your bliss, if you’re independently wealthy.’ ”

At a barbecue dinner on Thursday night, listening to the plans of younger bidders like the Stuarts, her expression alternated between affection and despair for them. A used bookstore, she said, is “an albatross — a cute one, a literary one.”

Eric Papenfuse and his wife, Catherine Lawrence, who run Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pa., hoped to go home with about 30,000 books. Citing Harrisburg’s profound financial troubles and its potential to become a “ghost town,” Mr. Papenfuse called Mr. McMurtry an inspiration.

“Archer City is the story of trying to revitalize a town,” he said. “We’re looking to take Larry’s model and bring it to Pennsylvania.”

Others at the sale were less concerned with civic dreams than with transportation logistics. Joe Lozano, a collector from Culver City, Calif., said he sold one or two books online for every 100 he bought. He drove to Archer City in a Toyota Corolla with the back seats ripped out, hoping he would buy enough books so that the extra storage space would come in handy. “My wife’s not here to stop me, so we’ll see what happens,” he said.

Asked if he had a truck to transport his loot, Mark Finn, of nearby Vernon, said he had only his Pontiac Vibe. “And I’m willing to make trips,” he said.

For the most part the store’s shelves were organized by subject. But for someone interested in opening a more eclectic store, there were lots like No. 959, which included a collection of humor pieces by S. J. Perelman, a guide to Australian opera singers and “Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity.” Looking at lot No. 418, it was difficult to imagine who might be interested in two copies of “Patton’s 1991 Fantasy Baseball Price Guide.”

It was easy to find the complication of stereotypes over the weekend, fitting for a dusty Texas town from where a Pulitzer Prize-winning author has contributed to Harper’s Magazine and The New York Review of Books and has written about his home state with both pride and cynicism.

Mr. Stacy expressed strong feelings against the market effects of Amazon, and he was wearing the oval, black-rimmed glasses favored by French existentialists. But gesturing toward Ms. Hahn, he said, “This is the first auction either of us has been to that wasn’t a livestock auction.”

Michael Addison of Addison & Sarova, the Macon, Ga., auction house that ran the event, said people in his business did not normally jump at the chance to run “shelf sales” because they’re costly to operate and the calling of lots can be soul-crushingly repetitious. He was aiming to achieve an exhausting pace of a lot every 30 seconds over the course of two nine-hour bidding sessions, with breaks for lunch. But he said the chance to work with Mr. McMurtry — “a national treasure” — was too much to pass up.

Mr. Addison had fun with one respite from the parade of shelf numbers: 100 individual books that Mr. McMurtry selected for the auction block. Mr. Addison elicited laughs just by reading the title of “Studies in Sublime Failure,” which was won for $40.

A far more expensive item was 1,139 pages of bound typescripts of erotica commissioned by an oilman in Ardmore, Okla., in the 1930s and ’40s.

“I defy anyone to know who wrote those novelettes,” Mr. McMurtry said. “It doesn’t suggest Henry Miller. It may have been just local opportunists.”

Tom Congalton, who runs Between the Covers, the New Jersey-based online bookseller, bought the book for $2,750. He plans to resell it. Mr. McMurtry said he would have pegged the book at $3,000 if he were pricing it to sell, but “it’s not my book anymore.”
“Leaving a million or so in Archer City is as good a legacy as I can think of for that region and indeed for the West,” Mr. McMurtry wrote in “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” his essayistic memoir. Presented with that quote on Friday, he said he didn’t remember having had the thought. “A million books is a lot of books,” he said.

Neil Williamson, of Tampa, Fla., has been collecting for 25 years and estimated his personal library at 6,000 volumes. “Even if I walked away with nothing, I wanted to be here,” he said, echoing several others.

Or as Mr. McMurtry put it, “It’s become an event that’s transcended its literal purpose.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/b...-in-texas.html





A Tor of the Dark Web
Dan Schultz

Tell me if you’ve been in this situation: you’re chatting about online anonymity with your wife and the other Knight-Mozilla Fellows over a pizza in Florence. A quiet-spoken stranger who had been sitting across the room walks up to your table and says “are you all here for the Tor hackathon?” You respond “why yes, yes we are!”

He goes on to explain that he is a journalist writing about Tor. He also tells us that he bets that the CIA and the Italian Secret Service are going to have moles there. What he obviously meant to say was “I work for the CIA and I’ve been watching you now for quite some time.”

It’s possible that he didn’t actually work for the CIA. His name and photo checked out under the website he claimed to write for. It was probably just a one-time job. Even if this isn’t true, even if a network of government spies didn’t track my position across Europe just to meet us in a restaurant, his comment set the tone for my weekend in Florence.

Tor is serious business.

What the hell is Tor?

Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.

Is that too abstract? Here are some illustrative statements. *Taps the microphone*

• A Tor user walks into a bar, the bartender says “who are you?”
• How many Tor users does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only a few, but you’ll never know who did it.
• I used Tor last night and now my wife says that she doesn’t even know who I am any more.

I’ll be here all night.

If you use Tor you become Spartacus. Tor takes everything you do, makes it look exactly like what everyone else is doing, and gets random computers on their network to do the talking for you. Ta-da! Now it is practically impossible to pin an action on you.

The Original Need

I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that this idea was invented by The U.S. Navy. You would have? Oh.

Put on your paper sailor hat and I’ll explain. Imagine you are the king of the Navy and you’re going to war with your fleet of a thousand brand new Navy cars (I don’t really know how the Navy works). Being king, you are in the most important car of all because you’re calling the shots. You don’t want the enemy to know which vehicle is yours. You also don’t want them to know who is receiving orders because that could give away your tactics.

“I know,” you say, “I’ll encrypt everything so that they can’t see the content. Then they won’t be able to tell that my broadcasts are more important than others.”

Unfortunately for you, the enemy has fancy technology. They can’t decrypt messages but they are able to track where everything comes from and where it is going. They can’t tell what you’re saying, but they have all they need.

After about 5 minutes you think you’re doing well. Half of the enemy cars are already on fire! Yours explodes. “How did they do that?” you say in the afterlife. “Easy,” responds god, “they were able to see that your car was sending out the most messages. They knew exactly where you were.” Then he slaps you with a piece of linguini and drifts away.

To prevent this from ever happening again the Navy decided to invent the concept of an “Onion Network” (not to be confused with The Onion Network). Now instead of having packets go directly from point A to point B, each one randomly hops around the fleet first. Because of encryption, the enemy can’t tell the difference between a new message and a “hop” message — they all look the same. It’s like running an invisible sprinkler in a thunderstorm.

Suddenly nobody but the sender and the recipient can figure out the end points of a message chain. Even the middle men (the ones doing the hops) don’t know the path. Each piece of the hop — each “layer” of the message — is encrypted with a different key, so the only thing a relay knows is who gave them the package and where it should go next.

Onions have layers too, that’s why this setup is called an Onion Network. Get it? It’s like Shrek!

What’s it Good For?

Tor has applications in the real world. You can buy drugs and guns, share illegal pictures, and hire assassins. Oh wait, I’m just describing Tor’s reputation (more on that later). Seriously, there are a lot of important situations where people have moral and compelling reasons to want anonymity.

Here are a few:

• Protecting witnesses and victims of domestic abuse. Anyone who wants to be able to access the internet without being discovered by a third party can use Tor to defend against their stalkers.
• If you don’t like being tracked by your government, Internet Service Providers, or search engines.
• Providing truly anonymous tips. There are times when people need or want to share information against the wishes of powerful and potentially dangerous forces (e.g. mafias, governments, or corporations).
• Safely bypassing censorship. If you live in Syria, China, or The United States of RIAA/MPAA, you might use Tor to access content from the outside world more safely.

These kinds of reasons explain why organizations with very good reputations, like the Knight Foundation, are devoting resources to Tor.
The Dark Web

What I’ve just described is a spin on the way people access normal information online. If you point Tor Browser to Google you will see the same old Google, it’s just that now Google doesn’t know who you are. That’s powerful enough, but there’s more: Tor also lets you see hidden content on the Internet.

Using Tor is like entering a cheat code into real life and playing the lost levels. It is the digital equivalent of platform 9 and 3/4. This secret section of the Internet is possible because Tor users can serve content anonymously too.

If you don’t know much about how the Internet works, believe me when I say that if a web site’s location is hidden it becomes essentially impossible to access. It would be like trying to visit someone’s house without knowing anything about where they live — not even the country. Tor gives you a blindfold and leads you there. You still don’t know where the house is, but at least you can visit.

Anonymous sites are accessed through something called an “onion address,” which is made up of a series of random letters and numbers. For instance, this is a “clean” version of Tor’s wikipedia: 3suaolltfj2xjksb.onion. Feel free to try clicking the link, it won’t work (Unless, of course, you are using the Tor browser).

Note: even if that link worked you wouldn’t see any terrible images. However, you need to use your brain before you start actually clicking around if you don’t want to get really upset.

That random looking string is used to find the server within the Tor network. Because the addresses don’t point to a real address on the Internet, there is no way to fully access this content without Tor. There are services you can use to get there without using Tor, but you lose all benefits of anonymity and content is often censored.

Onion addresses are the most fascinating part of Tor, albeit the most potentially disturbing. Rest assured that they don’t all lead to child porn, guns, and drugs. For example there is a secret version of Twitter, a bunch of blogs, a search engine, and an email service. There is even a secret version of 4chan (called Torchan), which I won’t link to because that one does lead to child porn and drugs.

These types of content networks—ones that are served on top of the normal web so that you need special programs to reach them—are known as the Dark Web. Not necessarily because the content is darker (it is), but because it is hidden from view and can’t really be searched and scraped as reliably.
Implications of The Dark Web

Most uses for Tor become more potent with onion addresses. Anonymous servers are just as protected from higher powers as anonymous users. If Amazon suddenly started selling illegal drugs they would get in trouble. If a Tor marketplace started selling illegal drugs, the law would have to figure out a way to find them first.

This power applies to legitimate uses as well. If a government official wanted to contact The Boston Globe with a corruption leak, he or she could use Tor to create a gmail account anonymously. The government could then subpoena Google, and Google might be willing to give away the information they have. They won’t know much, but now things like account access patterns and full email logs would be fair game.

If the official had used Tormail then even Google wouldn’t know what happened. The government would have no course of action because there would be no service provider to ask. Every journalist in the world should be able to agree that there is no good reason for a watchdog to trust the organizations they are watching. Why should you trust in corporations and governments to keep sources safe?

Tor has a reputation because it has a lot of criminal content, but the social good that it supports is just so important (criminals will always be criminals). I’m working on a game called Torwolf to simulate a few situations where Tor would be effective (if you have played Werewolf or Mafia, you can start to imagine what the game will be like). In the mean time, read up on Tor if you’re curious. Better yet, go try it out.
http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/





Advances in Data Storage Have Implications for Government Surveillance
Scott Shane

A wave of worry about a software program called TrapWire, designed to detect terrorists casing possible targets, appears to be unjustified, as I wrote in Tuesday’s Times.

Based on stolen corporate e-mails posted by WikiLeaks, some reports hugely exaggerated the program’s sweep and capabilities; the New York Police Department, for instance, says that contrary to claims on the Web, it has never used TrapWire.

But the bogus flap over one particular surveillance product should not eclipse the very real issues lurking behind it. Government at every level is experimenting with sophisticated surveillance equipment whose capabilities are improving as rapidly as every other kind of electronic technology.

The Police Department itself, for example, just last week unveiled a new “domain awareness” system, developed with Microsoft, that links 3,000 cameras, 2,600 radiation detectors and dozens of license plate readers in six locations and mounted on cars. If officers spot a suspicious package in range of a video camera, for example, they will be able to quickly track who put it there. If a terrorist suspect’s tag number is known, the network will scan passing cars to find it.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that under its privacy policy, the department will discard images after 30 days unless the images are part of an active investigation. But certainly the technology to capture and store such data is no longer a limiting factor.

Not so long ago, even the most aggressive government surveillance had to be selective: the cost of data storage was too high and the capacity too low to keep everything.

Not anymore. John Villasenor, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the plummeting cost of computer data storage and reached an astonishing conclusion: It will soon be technically feasible and affordable to record and store everything that can be recorded about what everyone in a country says or does.

And there is plenty of data to store. The average person today leaves an electronic trail unimaginable 20 years ago — visiting Web sites, sending e-mails and text messages, using credit cards, passing before a proliferating network of public and private video cameras and carrying a cellphone that reports a person’s location every minute of the day.

Mr. Villasenor, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, estimates that to store the audio from telephone calls made by an average person in the course of a year would require about 3.3 gigabytes and cost just 17 cents to store, a price that is expected to fall to 2 cents by 2015. Tracking a person’s movements for a year, collected from their cellphone, would take so little space as to carry a trivial cost. Storing video takes far more space, but the price is dropping so steadily that storing millions of hours of material will not be a problem soon.

“It’s so cheap that you can afford to throw away 99.9 percent without looking at it,” says Mr. Villasenor, who explores the possibilities in a Brookings paper, “Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments.”

And a government sleuth would, of course, be able to efficiently find anything of interest in the data because of the parallel revolution in search technology.

It is hard to exaggerate how dramatic the change has been. In the 1960s, the National Security Agency used rail cars to store magnetic tapes containing audio recordings and other material that the agency had collected but had never managed to examine, said James Bamford, an author of three books on the agency.

In those days, the agency used the I.B.M. 350 disk storage unit, bigger than a full-size refrigerator but with a capacity of 4.4 megabytes of data. Today, some flash drives that are small enough to put on a keychain hold a terabyte of data, about 227,000 times as much.

That kind of convenience and economy is hard to resist, whether you are a parent storing photos of your children — or a government trying to keep an eye out for threats.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...-surveillance/





Harvard Cracks DNA Storage, Crams 700 Terabytes of Data Into a Single Gram
Sebastian Anthony

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Encoding and decoding DNA data storage

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.

Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!)

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...-a-single-gram





How Big Data Became So Big
Steve Lohr

First, here are a few, well, data points: Big Data was a featured topic this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled “Big Data, Big Impact.” In March, the federal government announced $200 million in research programs for Big Data computing.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, has a new project in the works, called “The Human Face of Big Data.” The New York Times has adopted the term in headlines like “The Age of Big Data” and “Big Data on Campus.” And a sure sign that Big Data has arrived came just last month, when it became grist for satire in the “Dilbert” comic strip by Scott Adams. “It comes from everywhere. It knows all,” one frame reads, and the next concludes that “its name is Big Data.”

The Big Data story is the making of a meme. And two vital ingredients seem to be at work here. The first is that the term itself is not too technical, yet is catchy and vaguely evocative. The second is that behind the term is an evolving set of technologies with great promise, and some pitfalls.

Big Data is a shorthand label that typically means applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases. The new data sources include Web-browsing data trails, social network communications, sensor data and surveillance data.

The combination of the data deluge and clever software algorithms opens the door to new business opportunities. Google and Facebook, for example, are Big Data companies. The Watson computer from I.B.M. that beat human “Jeopardy” champions last year was a triumph of Big Data computing. In theory, Big Data could improve decision-making in fields from business to medicine, allowing decisions to be based increasingly on data and analysis rather than intuition and experience.

“The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,” says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.”

Rising piles of data have long been a challenge. In the late 19th century, census takers struggled with how to count and categorize the rapidly growing United States population. An innovative breakthrough came in time for the 1890 census, when the population reached 63 million. The data-taming tool proved to be machine-readable punched cards, invented by Herman Hollerith; these cards were the bedrock technology of the company that became I.B.M.

SO the term Big Data is a rhetorical nod to the reality that “big” is a fast-moving target when it comes to data. The year 2008, according to several computer scientists and industry executives, was when the term “Big Data” began gaining currency in tech circles. Wired magazine published an article that cogently presented the opportunities and implications of the modern data deluge.

This new style of computing, Wired declared, was the beginning of the Petabyte Age. It was an excellent magazine piece, but the “petabyte” label was too technical to be a mainstream hit — and inevitably, petabytes of data will give way to even bigger bytes: exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes.

Many scientists and engineers at first sneered that Big Data was a marketing term. But good marketing is distilled and effective communication, a valuable skill in any field. For example, the mathematician John McCarthy made up the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, when writing a pitch for a Rockefeller Foundation grant. His deft turn of phrase was a masterstroke of aspirational marketing.

In late 2008, Big Data was embraced by a group of the nation’s leading computer science researchers, the Computing Community Consortium, a collaboration of the government’s National Science Foundation and the Computing Research Association, which represents academic and corporate researchers. The computing consortium published an influential white paper, “Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science and Society.”

Its authors were three prominent computer scientists, Randal E. Bryant of Carnegie Mellon University, Randy H. Katz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Edward D. Lazowska of the University of Washington.

Their endorsement lent intellectual credibility to Big Data. Rod A. Smith, an I.B.M. technical fellow and vice president for emerging Internet technologies, says he likes the term because it nudges people’s thinking up from the machinery of data-handling or precise measures of the volume of data.

“Big Data is really about new uses and new insights, not so much the data itself,” Mr. Smith says.

I.B.M. adopted Big Data in its marketing, especially after it resonated with customers. In 2008, Mr. Smith’s team put up a Web site to explain the Big Data theme, and the site has since been greatly expanded. In 2011, the company introduced a Twitter hashtag, #IBMbigdata. I.B.M. has a Big Data newsletter, and in January it published an e-book, “Understanding Big Data.”

Since its founding in 1976, SAS Institute Inc., the largest privately held software company in the world, has made software that sifts through databases, looking for nuggets of value. SAS, based in Cary, N.C., has seen many a marketing term in its field, including “data mining,” “business intelligence” and “data analytics.”

At first, Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS, viewed Big Data as part of another cycle of industry phrasemaking.

“I scoffed at it initially,” Mr. Davis recalls, noting that SAS’s big corporate customers, like banks and insurance companies, had been mining huge amounts of data for decades.

But Big Data seeks to tap all that Web data outside corporate databases as well. And as SAS’s technology has moved to exploit these Internet-era data assets, its marketing has changed, too. Last year, SAS started adopting Big Data and “Big Data analytics,” along with a term it has been using for years, “high-performance analytics.” In May, the company appointed a vice president for Big Data, Paul Kent.

“We had to hop on the bandwagon,” Mr. Davis says.

IT may seem marketing gold, but Big Data also carries a darker connotation, as a linguistic cousin to the likes of Big Brother, Big Oil and Big Government.

“If only inadvertently, it does have a sinister flavor to it,” says Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

Big Data’s enthusiasts say the rewards far outweigh the risks. Still, smart technologies that promise to observe, record and make inferences about human behavior as never before should prompt some second thoughts — both from the people building those technologies and from the people using them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/b...g-unboxed.html





Germany: Facebook Must Destroy Facial Recognition Database

Says opt-out mechanism violates European Union law.
Jon Brodkin

German data protection officials today accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology, the New York Times reported.

Facebook says that it uses face recognition software to match users’ photos to others and suggest friends to tag in those photos. A user can prevent friends from seeing tag suggestions when they upload photos that look like that user. But this requires opting out through Facebook privacy settings, which Germany notes is a violation of European law.

“The social networking company’s decision to use analytic software to compile photographic archives of human faces, based on photos uploaded by Facebook’s users, has been controversial in Europe, where data protection laws require users to give their explicit consent to the practice,” the Times wrote. “Instead of using such an opt-in system, Facebook assumes users will want to use facial recognition and requires them to opt out instead.”

Germany started investigating Facebook over the practice in June 2011, suspending the investigation in June of this year after failing to convince Facebook to change its practices. But the German data protection commission reopened the investigation today, demanding that Facebook “destroy its photographic database of faces collected in Germany and revise its Web site to obtain the explicit consent of users before it creates a digital file based on the biometric data of their faces,” the article states.

Facebook claims it doesn’t have to do that, in part because the data collection is legal in Ireland, where Facebook’s European operations are based. “We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” Facebook said in a statement issued to the Times. “During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about Photo Tag Suggest.”

Germany could issue a fine, or try to get a court order compelling Facebook to change its practices, but it will be difficult because of the company being headquartered in the US. While Facebook isn’t backing down, it has made one small concession by agreeing to suspend the tagging feature for Europeans who joined Facebook on or after July 1.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...tion-database/





‘Friends’ Can Share Your Facebook Profile with the Government, Court Rules
Jeff John Roberts

Federal investigators viewed the Facebook profile of an alleged gangster in the Bronx by asking his informant “friend” to show it to them. A judge ruled this was not unconstitutional because Facebook users can’t control what other people do with the information they post.
Informant

A federal judge has ruled that investigators can go through your Facebook profile if one of your friends gives them permission to do so. The decision, which is part of a New York City racketeering trial, comes as courts struggle to define privacy and civil liberties in the age of social media.

In an order issued on Friday, US District Judge William Pauley III ruled that accused gangster Melvin Colon can’t rely on the Fourth Amendment to suppress Facebook evidence that led to his indictment. Colon had argued that federal investigators violated his privacy by tapping into his profile through an informant who was one of this Facebook friends.

The informant’s Facebook friendship served to open an online window onto Colon’s alleged gangster life, revealing messages he posted about violent acts and threats to rival gang members. The government used this information to obtain a search warrant for the rest of Colon’s Facebook account. The Colon information is part of a larger investigation into crack-dealing and murder in the Bronx.

Judge Pauley III’s ruling is significant because it is the latest in a series of cases that defines how and when police can search social media.

In the Bronx case, the judge found that Colon couldn’t stop his Facebook friends doing what they liked with the information he revealed:

Colon’s legitimate expectation of privacy ended when he disseminated posts to his “friends” because those “friends” were free to use the information however they wanted-including sharing it with the Government.

To support this position, Judge Pauley III cited a case that confirmed the government can listen in on phone calls without a warrant provided that one of the people on the call gives it permission to do so.

Ironically, Colon’s current account suggests that the government’s ability to peruse Facebook profiles may have become even easier since the introduction of the Facebook Timeline. The feature can in some cases reveal past events and status updates to the public unless a user changes his or her privacy settings.

What appears to be Colon’s account (cited in the court case as “Mellymella Balla” in the Bronx) can now be seen by the public. Here is a screenshot from his profile:

The case may also raise the question of whether social media companies are providing an adequate explanation of their privacy settings to all Americans. You can read the ruling itself here:
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/15/friends...t-court-rules/





ACLU Sues FBI to Get GPS-Tracking Memos
Kim Zetter

FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann (right) holds up a memo the ACLU is seeking, which the Bureau distributed to agents earlier this year, providing them with guidance on how to use GPS tracking.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year striking down the use of a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car without a warrant, the FBI issued two memos to agents with new guidelines for the use of the surveillance technology.

But the agency has been withholding those memos from the public and failed to respond to a records request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union in July to obtain the documents.

On Tuesday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the FBI, seeking the immediate release of the documents on the grounds that the public has a strong interest in knowing how the FBI is complying with the ruling.

“How the FBI implements the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones will shape not only the conduct of its own agents but also the policies, practices and procedures of other law enforcement agencies – and, consequently, the privacy rights of Americans,” the ACLU writes in its complaint.

Wired contacted the FBI Tuesday morning seeking the memos, but FBI spokesman Chris Allen said the general counsel’s office has determined that the memos will not be released because they are privileged information, as part of the attorney-client relationship, and that they would reveal FBI methods and procedures.

The FBI, however, has released similar documents in the past and given congressional testimony that provide information on methods and procedures performed by their public officers in the line of public duty.

The existence of the memos was disclosed last February, when FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann, speaking at the University of San Francisco Law School (see picture above, and video below), asserted that the FBI was in the process of issuing two documents to provide agents with guidance on the use of GPS tracking, in light of the Jones decision.

One of the memos, Weissmann said, covered questions such as whether the Supreme Court decision also applies to other forms of transportation like airplanes and boats, and whether it applies at international borders.

The other memo, he said, discussed how the Supreme Court decision applies to other types of surveillance techniques “beyond GPS.”

Last January, the Supreme Court held that attaching a GPS device to an individual’s vehicle and tracking his movements equated to a search under the Fourth Amendment. Left unresolved by the justices, however, was whether law enforcement agents should always be required to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to conduct such tracking. The decision also did not address other types of GPS tracking, such as tracking done through the GPS location data gathered from mobile phones.

Weissmann told the audience that at the time of the Supreme Court decision, the FBI alone had about 3,000 GPS devices being used in the field. The week the decision came down, the department issued a memo to agents telling them to immediately “turn off all your GPS [devices],” and also provided guidance about how to retrieve their GPS devices from the field if they had not obtained a warrant in the first place to use them.

“[i]t wasn’t obvious that you could turn it back on to locate it because now you need probable cause or reasonable suspicion to do that, so we had to come up with guidance on how you could locate them without violating the law,” he said.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ver-gps-memos/





Federal Court Rules Cops Can Warrantlessly Track Suspects Via Cellphone

Geo-data received based on "reasonable grounds" phone was connected to a crime.
Cyrus Farivar

In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that law enforcement has the right to warrantlessly obtain location data from a cellphone in order to track a suspect. The case involves a man named Melvin Skinner, a newly-convicted drug trafficker, who was part of a cross-country, large-scale drug operation organized by another man, James Michael West.

Skinner had appealed his many convictions: conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute over 1,000 kilograms of marijuana, conspiracy to commit money laundering, aiding and abetting the attempt to distribute in excess of 100 kilograms of marijuana. His attorneys argued that the government’s use of his GPS location information from his phone, which led to his arrest, constituted a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

"There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone," wrote Judge John Rogers, in the majority opinion. "If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal."

The Stored Communications Act strikes again

In January 2006, Christopher S. Shearer, another participant in the West marijuana operation, was stopped with $362,000 in cash. Shearer was on his way to deliver money on behalf of West, to his marijuana supplier, Philip Apodaca, in Tucson, Arizona. Under questioning, DEA agents learned from Shearer how the West group conducted the drug trafficking operation. The agents found out that Apodaca would purchase prepaid cellphones under fictitious names and used pre-programmed contact information to orchestrate drug trafficking. Those phones were then discarded after a period of time.

However, by May and June 2006, law enforcement agents received authorization to intercept the communications of two phones established in West’s name. In an order written by a Tennessee federal magistrate judge, the prosecuting United States attorney received authorization to install a pen register, a trap and trace device, and to receive location data from the call’s origination and termination points, in addition to GPS and ping data from those phones.

Among other rationales, the judge cited the Stored Communications Act (also known as a 2703(d) order) as grounds to provide this order. Under that federal statute, authorities can’t receive the contents of electronic communication (what was said), but can find out where and to whom it was said. In contemporary cases within the last decade, law enforcement and judges have increasingly used this reasoning to obtain extensive location data that can effectively turn the phone into a tracking device. Such information previously would have required a much higher legal threshold—a probable cause-driven warrant.

Thanks to the intercepted calls between Shearer and West, law enforcement learned of the existence of a truck driver courier, known by the codename "Big Foot," who turned out to be Melvin Skinner. Based on the location data acquired from both phones, law enforcement agents were able to learn of Skinner’s location en route during his drug delivery from Arizona to Tennessee. Not surprisingly, he was promptly arrested at a rest stop near Abilene, Texas while driving a "motorhome filled with over 1,100 pounds of marijuana."

Different than Jones

In the court’s majority opinion, Judge Rogers specifically referred to the Jones case, which was decided by the United States Supreme Court in January 2012. In that unanimous decision, the Supreme Court found that law enforcement does not have the authority to warrantlessly place a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle.

However, in this case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found that "no such physical intrusion occurred."

"Here, the monitoring of the location of the contraband-carrying vehicle as it crossed the country is no more of a comprehensively invasive search than if instead the car was identified in Arizona and then tracked visually and the search handed off from one local authority to another as the vehicles progressed," Judge Rogers added in the decision.

"That the officers were able to use less expensive and more efficient means to track the vehicles is only to their credit."

In the wake of the Skinner decision, some privacy law experts disputed the court’s reasoning.

"In fact, the government's use of a pen register and a trap trace device (called a "hybrid order) to obtain the info is something that has been extensively litigated and disputed," wrote Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an e-mail sent to Ars.

"This ‘hybrid’ theory has been challenged both as a matter of statutory interpretation (i.e., the government's statutory analysis is wrong; you can't use the statutes in that way) and as a matter of constitutional law (i.e., even if you could use a d-order to get this info, 2703(d) is unconstitutional because this information requires a search warrant). The fact the Sixth Circuit didn't mention that or go through any of the legal analysis or even note that this is a hotly contested legal issue is simply (to borrow a term I saw on Twitter) ‘lazy.’"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...via-cellphone/





Korea Policing the Net. Twist? It’s South Korea.
Choe Sang-Hun

A government critic who called the president a curse word on his Twitter account found it blocked. An activist whose Twitter posting likened officials to pirates for approving a controversial naval base was accused by the navy of criminal defamation. And a judge who wrote that the president (“His Highness”) was out to “screw” Internet users who challenged his authority was fired in what was widely seen as retaliation.

Such a crackdown on Internet freedom would be notable, but perhaps not surprising, in China, with its army of vigilant online censors. But the avid policing of social media in these cases took place in South Korea, a thriving democracy and one of the world’s most wired societies.

The seeming disconnect is at least partly rooted in South Korea’s struggle to manage the contradictions in eagerly embracing the Web as one way to catch up with the world’s top economies, while clinging to a patriarchal and somewhat puritanical past. In a nation so threatened by Lady Gaga that it barred fans under age 18 from attending a concert, the thought of unlimited opportunities for Internet users to swear in “public,” view illegal pornography and challenge authority has proved profoundly unsettling.
“Not so long ago, the role of the government and the role of the establishment, including the press, was sort of the benevolent parent of the masses,” said Michael Breen, author of “The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies.” “The government always knew best and the people were kind of stupid. I think still a bit of that is lingering on.”

Critics of President Lee Myung-bak’s government agree that its conservative streak is a driver behind the Internet crackdown. But they argue that prohibitions on profanity and other online activities have also become a convenient excuse to silence critics. It is not the first time that the government has been accused of being overzealous; two former presidential aides and other officials are on trial on charges of conducting illegal surveillance of citizens.

The whittling away of hard-won freedoms is especially troubling, activists say, because the social media have become the newest outlets for rebellion, replacing the street battles of the 1980s that forced the end of decades of dictatorship.

“New media and social networking services like Twitter have emerged as new political tools for antigovernment and left-wing people,” said Chang Yeo-kyung, a free-speech activist. “The government wants to create a chilling effect to prevent the spread of critical views.”

That accusation has been echoed by some international observers. The United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression was alarmed enough last year to lecture officials on the necessity for public scrutiny in a democracy.

And this year, Reporters Without Borders listed South Korea as a country “under surveillance” in a report titled “Enemies of the Internet,” putting it in the company of Russia, Egypt and other nations known for their intolerance of dissent.

The group said South Korea had intensified its longstanding campaign on material that appears to support North Korea. But the report said “censorship is also focused on political opinions expressed online — a critical topic in this election year.”

The government denies trying to stifle criticism and says it opens most cases after being alerted by citizens, including those who have deputized themselves as “cybersheriffs.”

In a statement defending its stance, the government said it acted because “character assassinations and suicides caused by excessive insults, the spreading of false rumors and defamation have all become social issues.”

But the Rev. Choi Byoung-sung, a critic of the government’s environmental policy, argues that free speech is being undermined.

“They are burning down an entire house under the pretext of killing a few fleas,” said Mr. Choi, who fought the removal of his blog postings warning of potential health risks from cement containing industrial waste. (He won.)

South Korea’s government-supported love affair with the Internet has paid off: the country has some of the world’s fastest download speeds. And it is a point of pride that Seoul’s subway riders can surf the Internet with their smartphones.

But with such obvious advantages for business came the unexpected: an onslaught of challenges to social mores. The aversion to challenging superiors had been so deeply ingrained that when South Korean airlines suffered an unusual number of crashes in the 1990s, investigators often partly blamed the hesitance of co-pilots to second-guess pilots even if an error might have been obvious.

The distance and anonymity of Internet communication wiped away many such fears. Suddenly, people who could not imagine using anything but polite honorifics to address those above them in the social pecking order let loose, criticizing leaders in ribald language normally confined to conversations with friends. The humiliation of those so boldly criticized, analysts say, is hard to overestimate.

“A tremendous emphasis is placed on the importance of upholding the public face,” Ms. Chang said.

Park Kyung-sin — one of the few members of the government’s Internet regulatory board appointed by opposition parties, and an ardent critic of its policies — says members of the political elite feel especially threatened because they see themselves as “fatherlike figures.”

One of the first decisions the board made after Mr. Lee came to power was to “purify the language” used against Mr. Lee because, as one commissioner later said, he should be treated like the father of the state, “an extended form of a family.”

Such socially conservative arguments had won less traction under Mr. Lee’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, who was more accepting of criticism on the Web, in part because he was determined to abolish what political analysts called an “imperial presidency” and considered Web commentary generally friendlier than that in the conservative mainstream media.

Under Mr. Lee’s appointees, regulators more than tripled the number of Internet posts removed or blocked, to over 53,000 last year from 15,000 in 2008, for infractions that include posting pornography, using profanity or supporting North Korea.

Government critics said the heightened surveillance began early in Mr. Lee’s term, after his government accused political enemies of using the Web to organize mass demonstrations in 2008 against a decision to import American beef.

Prosecutors were accused of reaching back to a dictatorship-era law when they indicted several of those held responsible for spreading “false rumors.” Among those charged: a teenager who sent text messages suggesting that students nationwide cut classes to join the protests. (He was acquitted.)

That law was ultimately ruled unconstitutional. But activists say the government has plenty of legal tools to fall back on, most notably a defamation law they say stretches the definition of the crime well beyond what would be accepted in other countries.
“Many criminal defamation suits are filed for statements that are true and are in the public interest,” said Frank La Rue, the United Nations’ special rapporteur, in his report last year.

For Mr. Park, the censorship board dissident, one of the worst problems is that his commission can act with impunity, often deleting content without notifying the author.

The board says it is working to become more transparent. But Song Jin-yong, whose account was blocked because he used a pseudonym that translated to “Lee Myung-bak bastard,” said the board was missing the bigger point about democratic rights.

“The government says I cannot even choose my own Twitter ID,” Mr. Song said recently. “Isn’t it part of my right to bad-mouth the president when I am unhappy with him?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/w...ensorship.html





Internet Blackout in Malaysia: Netizens Protest Evidence Act Amendment S114A
Dave Smith

Malaysian netizens, opposition politicians, well-known bloggers and non-governmental organizations staged an Internet blackout Tuesday to protest and raise awareness about legislation that could threaten free expression on the Web.

Citizens of Malaysia are protesting the second of two amendments to the Malaysian Evidence Act of 1950, also known as Section S114A, which covers "Presumption of Fact in Publication."

"S114A, entitled 'Presumption of Fact in Publication,' holds (1) those who own, administrate, or edit websites open to public contributors, such as online forums or blogs; (2) those who provide web-hosting services or Internet access; and (3) those own the computer or mobile device used to publish content online, accountable for content published through their services, on their sites, or 'in their name.'"

According to Malaysia's Centre for Independent Journalism, Section 114A "enables law enforcement officials to swiftly hold someone accountable for publishing seditious, defamatory, or libelous content online." In addition, those accused of posting this kind of content will be "assumed to be guilty until proven innocent," which completely stands in the face of the typical logic of the judicial process, which is "innocent until proven guilty."

The Centre for Independent Journalism warns that "if allegedly defamatory content is traced back to your username, electronic device, and/or Wi-Fi network, Section 114A presumes you are guilty of publishing illicit content on the Internet."

The amendment was introduced in the lower house of Parliament, the Dewan Rakyat, April 18 by Mohamed Nazri Abdul Aziz, the law minister of the ruling coalition Barisan Nasional. It passed the Dewan Negara, the Malaysian Senate, on May 9 and took effect July 31.

Criticism of Section 114A

Critics of the Evidence Act amendment say that neither ordinary users, nor web hosts, nor Wi-Fi providers, should be found liable for harmful or defamatory Web content published via their systems. Activists in Malaysia believe the bill is a device to maintain the government's hold on power after more than five decades of rule. Prime Minister Najib Razak will face elections next year against an opponent that will likely rely on the Internet to disseminate the party's message, since the ruling party controls most traditional media outlets.

Opposition of the amendment was relatively fractured until the Centre for Independent Journalism decided to spearhead opposition against the law. Since then, the group has created and disseminated an online petition to Malaysian citizens, which has been signed by more than 3,300 people, and also coordinated Tuesday's Internet blackout campaign.

Malaysia's blackout campaign follows similar Internet blackouts organized in recent years, including protests in New Zealand and France in 2009, as well as January's global blackout on Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and others against the SOPA/PIPA bills.

The extremely popular Malaysian auto blog Paultan.org decided to black out its screen with a message that read, "This is what the Web could look like."

Jac Sm Kee, director of the Centre for Independent Journalism, spoke out about how the amendment could harm Malaysian society.

"What can an ordinary Internet user do to prove it wasn't them who published something online when the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) itself sometimes says it doesn't have the technical resources to find the real culprits?" Kee asked. "If a kopitiam [coffee shop] owner is liable for all the traffic that goes through its Wi-Fi, it places a lot of burden on them, in terms of monetary and human resources, to either conduct surveillance or stop providing Wi-Fi altogether."

The 24-hour blackout will last until midnight Tuesday.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/3736...s114a-114a.htm





Vietnam’s War on the Blogosphere
Bridget O’Flaherty

On July 30 Dang Thi Kim Lieng set herself on fire outside the Bac Lieu People’s Committee building in southern Vietnam. She died of her injuries en route to hospital. Lieng, who was 64, was protesting the detention of her daughter Ta Phong Tan, who was arrested September 30 last year and was due to go to trial August 7. At the time of publication, the hearing has been postponed indefinitely.

Tan, along with Phan Thanh Hai and Nguyen Van Hai, better known as “Dieu Cay,” was a member of the Free Journalists Club, an unsanctioned group pushing freedom of speech in Vietnam. Without the relevant government permission needed to form their group it was deemed illegal.

The three bloggers are scheduled be tried under section 88 of the criminal code, which relates to propaganda against the state. A maximum sentence could carry with it 20 years in prison, though most bloggers tried receive lower sentences.

It’s the latest in a string of arrests of bloggers and other dissidents. According to Human Rights Watch ten activists have been sentenced this year.

Both the United States and the United Nations have expressed concern and the United States has called on Vietnam to free the three bloggers. Reporters Without Borders called Lieng’s act an “act of despair."

This year, as in previous ones, much has been said about human rights in Vietnam. Generally the cases that draw the most attention are those of dissidents expressing opinions about the government. Sometimes cases of repression based on creed or ethnicity also make headlines.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Hanoi in July she mentioned human rights, saying, "There are some who argue that developing economies need to put economic growth first and worry about political reform and democracy later. But that is a short-sighted bargain. Political reform and economic growth are linked.”

The U.S. has a strong and organized Vietnamese community – many of whose older members fled the communists. They hold enough political clout that representatives, such as Rep. Loretta Sanchez in California, regularly pushes for Vietnam to make human rights a priority.

On July 25, Stanford law school’s Alan Weiner tabled a petition to the United Nations about the arbitrary detention of 17 activists from the Catholic Redemptionist Church in Vietnam.

However no matter the amount of pressure applied and the number of statements issued, the situation in Vietnam has not improved. Weiner calls it “a growing pattern of human rights abuses” in a press release sent to media.

In fact, the decline dates back to 2008 when press freedom was curtailed after two reporters were arrested for their reporting on the well-known PMU18 case, when, in 2006, some Party officials were found to be gambling vast sums of Japanese and World Bank aid money on football matches.

That was the same year a new blog law came into force officially banning bloggers from touching anything political.

Some are now raising the question of whether the United States has done as much as it can when it comes to addressing human rights in Vietnam.

Carlyle Thayer, a Vietnam expert and Professor Emeritus at the Australian Defense Force Academy, has said, “The U.S. has influence to the extent that the Vietnamese really want something from the United States. Vietnam wants its president to be received at the White House, they want a strategic partnership with the U.S., and they want the U.S. to lift restrictions on arms sales. U.S. officials have made it clear none of this will happen unless human rights (including internet freedom) is improved. Despite U.S. pressures things have gotten worse.”

Reporters during a State Department background meeting last month were told that even hardliners within the Vietnamese government are beginning to see the value in establishing better relations with the United States. Nonetheless, the conditions set by the U.S. remain unfulfilled.

“What we’re trying to do,” the senior State Department official explained, “is… make clear to them that if they want a better relationship with us they’re going to have to take the necessary steps on the economic side and they’re going to have to improve their human rights record, which in fact in some cases has digressed rather than improved.”

The United States may be the most vocal but is by no means the only nation working on human rights in Vietnam.

A UN statement issued in response to the self-immolation of Lieng reads, “A number of arrests and harsh convictions in recent years suggest a disturbing trend of curbing freedom of expression, opinion and association of bloggers, journalists and human rights activists who question Government policies in a peaceful manner.”

Back at Stanford, Allen Weiner told The Diplomat, “We hope that the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention will confirm what we believe: that the Vietnam government's arrest of these activists violates Vietnam's international human rights obligations.”

“We hope that a finding by a respected and authoritative body like the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that Vietnam has violated the human rights of these activists will encourage Vietnam to comply with its obligations.”

Freedom of speech is in fact enshrined in the constitution in Vietnam. Article 69 states, “The citizen shall enjoy freedom of opinion and speech, . . . the right to assemble, form associations and hold demonstrations in accordance with the provisions of the law.”

Those last eight words are key however. Other parts of law, such as Section 88 restricting “propaganda,” can take precedent over Article 69, as it apparently might when the three bloggers are tried.

But why so much effort for so little progress? Partly it could come down to U.S.-Vietnamese relations versus Sino-Vietnamese relations.

Workings in the Party, Politburo, or government are often opaque and many posit that those hostile to America or greater involvement with the United States might try to initiate harsher crackdowns to slow growing relations with the U.S.

Professor Carlyle Thayer says, “Vietnamese party conservatives are only too willing to play on the human rights issue to impede the development of closer defense relations with the United States.”

This is not the whole picture as internal security concerns and fear of a “peaceful evolution” are also rife. With one of the fastest growing Internet user populations in the region and over 30 percent of the population (75 percent of which still lives outside the cities) already online, there are fears of large groups organizing online.

Whether closer ties with the U.S. will eventually trump what some members of the government see as domestic security concerns remains to be seen. However it is likely more bloggers will be arrested despite international protestations.
http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/14/vi...e-blogosphere/





Court Demands TSA Explain Why It Is Defying Nude Body Scanner Order
David Kravets

A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered the Transportation Security Administration to explain why it hasn’t complied with the court’s year-old decision demanding the agency hold public hearings concerning the rules and regulations pertaining to the so-called nude body scanners installed in U.S. airport security checkpoints.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s brief order came in response to the third request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center for the court to enforce its order.

A year ago, the circuit court, in a lawsuit brought by EPIC, set aside a constitutional challenge trying to stop the government from using intrusive body scanners across U.S. airports. But the decision on July 15, 2011 also ordered TSA “to act promptly” and hold public hearings and publicly adopt rules and regulations about the scanners’ use, which it has not done.

The public comments and the agency’s answers to them are reviewable by a court — which opens up a new avenue for a legal challenge to the 2009 agency decision to deploy the scanners. Critics maintain the scanners, which use radiation to peer through clothes, are threats to Americans’ privacy and health, which the TSA denies.

The three-judge appellate court, which is one stop from the Supreme Court, said that the Transportation Security Administration breached federal law in 2009 when it formally adopted the Advanced Imaging Technology scanners as the “primary” method of screening. The judges — while allowing the scanners to be used — said the TSA violated the Administrative Procedures Act for failing to have a 90-day public comment period, and ordered the agency to undertake one.

The appellate court has twice denied motions from EPIC to order the TSA to get going.

But on Wednesday, the three-judge circuit court panel ordered the TSA to respond by August 30. Last month, TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers told Wired that hearings — and the agency’s response to those hearings — aren’t expected until “next year.”

Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s executive director, said in an e-mail the “court’s order indicates that we have meritorious arguments.”

Under the Administrative Procedures Act, agency decisions like the TSA’s move toward body scanners must go through what is often termed a “notice and comment” period if their new rules would substantially affect the rights of the public — in this case, air passengers. The Environmental Protection Agency often undertakes “notice and comment” periods for proposed pollution regulations.

But the court did not penalize the TSA for its shortcomings. The TSA argued to the court that a public comment period would thwart the government’s ability to respond to “ever-evolving threats.”

Day’s after the court’s decision last year, however, the TSA began moving toward displaying to screener technicians broad, generic outlines of passengers instead of taking virtual nude shots.

Concerns about the machines include the graphicness of the images, the potential health risks and the scanners’ effectiveness.

Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, has started a White House petition to force the TSA to promptly follow the law. By government policy, if the petition gets 25,000 signatures, the President Barack Obama administration is obligated to publicly respond. The petition needs another 9,000 signatures as of publication.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...scanner-order/





Improved Technology Makes 'Up-Skirt' Photography Easier

'Pervs' using tiny cameras to take sneak pictures
Jesse Leavenworth

They're scanning for targets on escalators and train platforms, in grocery stores and shopping malls.

Trying to appear cool or otherwise occupied, they're cradling smartphone cameras in shopping bags, maneuvering notebooks with attached pen cameras and stepping close with tiny lenses tucked in their shoelaces.

A recent string of arrests in the state for so-called "up-skirt" photography, along with the firing of a state prosecutor accused of secretly videotaping women in the courthouse, seems to be further proof that personal boundaries will continue to erode as technology gets cheaper, easier to use and more accessible, experts say.

"There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the 21st century," technology commentator and consultant Shelly Palmer said.

Palmer, Fox 5 New York's on-air tech expert and host of "Shelly Palmer Digital Living," also said there's a lot more sneak photography going on than people realize. The up-skirt lensmen who get caught, he said, "are just the little pervs. That's not the pros. The pros will get this done."

Judging by the number of up-skirt pictures on the Internet, the market for such shots is vast. Stealthy shooters even trade tips on ways to achieve the best results without getting arrested by police or beaten up by a vigilant boyfriend or husband.

A poster at one of the sites, for instance, wrote about the care necessary to blend in at a public place.

"Clip the pen [camera] onto one of those canvas shopping bags w/ long handles you see all over now," the poster wrote. "At the farmer's market everybody is carrying one of those bags. In a crowd, waiting to get some corn or a sample of something, hehehe… Granted the quality isn't as good as some, especially in some indoor lighting situations. I'm happy with what I get & love the adrenaline rush."

But police say several alleged up-skirt photographers who were arrested recently were not so stealthy. West Hartford police charged two men in separate incidents on Aug. 2 and 3. Witnesses said they saw Rodolfo Tamaniz-Cruz, 25, of South Quaker Lane, place a smartphone on his backpack, then set it so the camera shot video up the skirts of women at the Stop & Shop on Farmington Avenue, police said. Police say they found images and video of 32 women stored in the phone.

The day before, employees at Whole Foods on Raymond Drive called police after witnessing a man using his cellphone to film underneath women's skirts, police said. Officers arrested Giovanni Geronilla, 34, of 24 Park Place, Hartford.

Both men were charged with voyeurism, a felony that carries a prison term of one to five years. State law says a person is guilty of voyeurism when, "with malice" or "intent to arouse or satisfy the sexual desire of such person or any other person," the accused records images without the subject's knowledge under circumstances in which the subject has "a reasonable expectation of privacy."

Women wearing skirts, West Hartford police Lt. Jeff Rose said, have a reasonable expectation that private areas of their bodies will not be filmed. Victims of such clandestine recording, Rose said, "feel violated and embarrassed, as anyone would."

Adult women are not the only targets. On July 28, Manchester police were called to the Barnes & Noble at Buckland Hills mall after employees complained that a man was following children in the store and possibly trying to film them.

Officers confronted Robert Works, 36, of New Haven, who admitted taking videos of young girls without their knowledge, police said. On Works' cellphone and laptop computer, officers found images showing the legs and private area of a girl between the ages of 10 and 14 from under her skirt, police said. Works said he had taken that video several days before, but police could not identify the girl, Lt. Christopher Davis said.

Works told officers that he knew taking surreptitious videos of young girls was wrong and apologized for his actions, Davis said. Works was charged with breach of peace, but Davis said the investigation is continuing.

A second form of secret filming takes place in changing rooms and restrooms. On Aug. 2, Darien police said they arrested a Subway restaurant worker who had planted a camera in the restaurant's unisex bathroom.

The men charged with such crimes span the socioeconomic spectrum. New York City police recently arrested a physician and assistant professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center — Dr. Adam Levinson, 39 — who was allegedly using a pen camera clipped to a newspaper to take up-skirt photos at the Union Square subway station.

Then there's the case of a veteran Danbury prosecutor David M. Holzbach, who was fired recently after an investigation found he had secretly recorded women, viewed pornography on his work computer during work hours and collected in his office "voluminous pictures of women, some pornographic in nature," according to documents.

Holzbach had used a Brookstone Video Spy Pen to record women in the courtroom, focusing on their legs and ankles, authorities reported. Holzbach also had a hollow box with a one-way mirror in his office intended to be used to hide another camera, investigators reported.

So-called "spy gear" is widely available. There are cameras that can peek from what looks like a sweater button, hat cameras, cameras hidden in glasses and soda cans.

BrickHouse Security markets a "pinhole spy camera" that is easily concealed on the body and pairs with any portable DVR "for true on-the-go surveillance."

Company CEO Todd Morris acknowledged that some people will use such products "for nefarious purposes." And Morris echoed Palmer's comments about the crumbling wall of personal privacy.

"Everyone's coming to grips now with the fact that there is no privacy," Morris said. "If you pick your nose on the street, there's going to be a picture of it."

Both Morris and Palmer said privacy is eroding at the same pace at which technology becomes less expensive and easier to use. In the past, when a pen camera cost $500, most were sold to law enforcement and private investigators who needed them for their jobs, Morris said. BrickHouse sells pen cameras for $59.95 to $79.95.

"As our success has grown, prices have come down," he said.

Also, he said, the misuse of such products should not obscure the good they do. Federal agents have used BrickHouse hidden cameras to capture alcohol and cigarette sales to underage buyers, and secretaries have used the tiny cameras to videotape sexual harassment, Morris said.

"The technology, most of the time, is used for good, not evil," he said.
http://www.courant.com/news/breaking...0,176994.story





Hulu Faces Privacy Test in Court
Somini Sengupta

Can a privacy law passed in the era of videotape rentals be applied in the era of Internet streaming?

Hulu, the online video content provider, is about to face the test. A lawsuit filed in a federal court in California says Hulu violated its users’ privacy by sharing their viewing history with companies that could in turn offer them tailored advertisements.

The case rests on a 1988 law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, intended to protect the privacy of video rental records. It was passed by Congress after a newspaper obtained records of what movies the conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had rented, and published an article based on them.

Hulu, which is owned by News Corporation, NBCUniversal, Providence Equity Partners and the Walt Disney Company, sought to have the case dismissed, noting that it is not a video rental business.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler concluded Friday that the law did not preclude application to “new technologies for prerecorded video content” and allowed the case to go ahead. Next comes the discovery of evidence and arguments. The judge has not yet ruled on the merits of the case.

The plaintiffs will seek to prove in court that Hulu violated their privacy by letting third-party companies track their movements across the Internet without their consent. To do so, Hulu allowed an analytics company, KISSmetrics, to place a “cookie” or code on their computers that included names, location preferences and programs watched. That information was in turn conveyed to other companies, from advertising networks to analytics companies to Facebook. “As to Facebook, Hulu included their Facebook IDs, connecting the video content information to Facebook’s personally identifiable user registration information,” the judge wrote.

Hulu has since discontinued using KISSmetrics, after two separate academic studies reported on the practice last year.

Hulu declined to comment on whether or how it continued to share video consumption records with third parties for advertising or other purposes.

The case could have repercussions for other video streaming services. For instance, Netflix, which allows users to stream movies online, wants to team up with Facebook to allow its users to share what movies they watch with their Facebook friends. Both companies have acknowledged that the Video Privacy Protection Act presents a hurdle. Both are lobbying to overturn the law.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...-in-court/?hpw





Swiss Algorithm 'Can Source Viruses'

Scientists in Switzerland say they have devised software that can swiftly trace terror suspects, computer viruses, rumour-mongering and even infectious diseases back to their source.

"Using our method, we can find the source of all kinds of things circulating in a network just by 'listening' to a limited number of members of that network," said researcher Pedro Pinto of Lausanne's Federal Polytechnic (EPFL)on Friday.

The program, known as an algorithm, works by fast-tracking the route taken by the information to arrive back at its original source.

A key factor is using the time at which the data is passed from sender to recipient, to help investigators follow the path as directly as possible and eliminate false trails.

Publishing in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Pinto's team tested the algorithm on a known data maze to see if the tool could pinpoint the individuals behind the September 11 attacks on the United States.

"By reconstructing the message exchange inside the 9/11 terrorist network extracted from publicly released news, our system spit out the names of three potential suspects -- one of whom was found to be the mastermind of the attacks, according to the official enquiry," he said.

Taking social networking sites as another example, Pinto said individuals could use the algorithm to find out who had started a rumour posted to 500 contacts by looking at posts received by just 15 to 20 of them.

The same algorithm could be used to identify the origin of unwanted online messages (spam) or a computer virus, said Pinto, post-doctorate researcher at EPFL's Laboratory for Audiovisual Communications.

The innovation can also be used to help epidemiologists, he said.

Pinto traced the source of a cholera outbreak in South Africa after applying the formula to water and transport networks.

The maths could also be harnessed by advertisers specialising in so-called viral online marketing campaigns, while also making it easier to spot them in advance, Pinto said.
http://www.skynews.com.au/tech/article.aspx?id=782232





WikiLeaks: Our Site's Been Hit By Weeklong Denial-Of-Service Attack
AP

The secret-busting organization WikiLeaks says it's been the victim of a sustained denial-of-service attack which has left its website sluggish or inaccessible for more than a week.

In a statement released late Saturday the group said the assault intensified around the beginning of August and has since expanded to include attacks against affiliated sites.

Denial-of-service attacks work by overwhelming websites with requests for information. WikiLeaks has said it's been flooded with 10 gigabits per second of bogus traffic from thousands of different Internet addresses.

Josh Corman, with online content delivery company Akamai, characterized that as "a bit larger" than attacks commonly seen in the past few years.

WikiLeaks, which has angered officials in Washington with its spectacular releases of classified U.S. documents, remained inaccessible Sunday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1769580.html





WikiLeaks Stirs Global Fears on Antiterrorist Software
Scott Shane

A new release of stolen corporate e-mails by WikiLeaks has set off a flurry of concern and speculation around the world about a counterterrorist software program called TrapWire, which analyzes images from surveillance cameras and other data to try to identify terrorists planning attacks.

“U.S. government is secretly spying on EVERYONE using civilian security cameras, say WikiLeaks,” read a headline on Monday at the British newspaper Web site Mail Online. The article included a photograph from the movie “The Bourne Identity.” PC Magazine described TrapWire as “a secret, comprehensive U.S. surveillance effort.”

Though TrapWire Inc., the Virginia company that sells the software, would not comment on Monday, the reports appear to be wildly exaggerated. TrapWire was tried out on 15 surveillance cameras in Washington and Seattle by the Homeland Security Department, but officials said it ended the trial last year because it did not seem promising.

A claim in the leaked e-mails that 500 cameras in the New York subway were linked to TrapWire is false, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. “We don’t use TrapWire.”

TrapWire is discussed in dozens of e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private security firm in Austin, Tex., that were posted online last week by WikiLeaks. The e-mails were part of a large cache captured late last year and early this year by hackers associated with the loose-knit international collective called Anonymous, which gave the e-mails to WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks Web site has been shut down by unidentified hackers in recent days, leading to speculation that it might be retaliation for the e-mail leaks.

TrapWire was originally developed in 2004 by the Abraxas Corporation, which was founded by several former C.I.A. employees. It later spun off TrapWire, but the C.I.A. connection, along with the company’s vague but impressive descriptions of the program’s capabilities, appears to have fueled the furor on the Web that it was a sort of automated Big Brother.

TrapWire’s marketing materials say it uses video cameras and observations by security guards to develop a 10-point description of people near a potential terrorist target and an eight-point description of vehicles. It also records “potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signaling,” combining in a TrapWire database “this human-entered data with information collected by sensors.”

If the same person or car is picked up in multiple locations engaging in suspicious behavior, the software is supposed to make the connection. But a privacy statement on the TrapWire Web site says the software does not capture “personal information.”

Jay Stanley, who studies threats to privacy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said many companies had tried to use technology “to find terrorist plots in an ocean of information about everyday activities.”

“But it’s extremely difficult, and probably impossible, to distinguish the one-in-a-billion terrorist from innocent people doing ordinary things like taking pictures,” Mr. Stanley said, adding that the current fears demonstrate why the government should publicly address concerns about surveillance before adopting new technologies.

“We live in a democracy,” he said, “and that’s what security agencies are here to protect.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/u...web-furor.html





US Intends to Chase Assange, Cables Show
Philip Dorling

AUSTRALIAN diplomats have no doubt the United States is intent on pursuing Julian Assange, Foreign Affairs and Trade Department documents obtained by the Herald show.

This is at odds with comments by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, who has dismissed suggestions the US plans to eventually extradite Assange on charges arising from WikiLeaks obtaining leaked US military and diplomatic documents.

The Australian embassy in Washington has been tracking a US espionage investigation targeting the WikiLeaks publisher for more than 18 months.

The declassified diplomatic cables, released under freedom of information legislation, show Australia's ambassador, the former Labor leader Kim Beazley, has made high level representations to the US government asking for advance warning of any moves to prosecute Assange.

Briefings for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and Senator Carr also suggest the Australian government has no in-principle objection to extradition.

On Thursday, Ecuador granted Assange political asylum at its London embassy on the grounds that, if extradited to Sweden to be questioned about sexual assault allegations, he would be at risk of further extradition to the US to face espionage or conspiracy charges.

Assange sought refuge at the embassy two months ago following the dismissal of his final legal appeal against extradition to Sweden.

Senator Carr has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that the US has any interest in prosecuting and extraditing Assange. In June, Senator Carr also told the ABC Insiders program: “I've received no hint that they've got a plan to extradite him . . . I would expect that the US would not want to touch this."

However, the Australian embassy in Washington reported in February that “the US investigation into possible criminal conduct by Mr Assange has been ongoing for more than a year”.

The embassy identified a wide range of criminal charges the US could bring against Assange, including espionage, conspiracy, unlawful access to classified information and computer fraud.

Australian diplomats expect that any charges against Assange would be carefully and narrowly drawn in an effort to avoid conflict with the First Amendment free speech provisions of the US Constitution.

The released diplomatic cables also show that the Australian government considers the prospect of extradition sufficiently likely that, on direction from Canberra, Mr Beazley sought high level US advice on “the direction and likely outcome of the investigation” and “reiterated our request for early advice of any decision to indict or seek extradition of Mr Assange”.

The question of advance warning of any prosecution or extradition moves was previously raised by Australian diplomats in December 2010 when they first confirmed that Assange was the target of what US Justice Department officials described as an "unprecedented'' investigation.

The Australians on that occasion explained that the advance warning would be appreciated ''so that ministers could respond appropriately''.

American responses to the embassy's representations have been withheld from release on the grounds that disclosure could "cause damage to the international relations of the Commonwealth".

Large sections of the released cables have been redacted on national security grounds, including parts of reports on the open pre-court martial proceedings of US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have leaked a vast quantity of classified information to WikiLeaks.

Australian diplomats have highlighted the US military prosecution's reference to "several connections between [Private] Manning and WikiLeaks which would form the basis of a conspiracy charge" and evidence that the Justice Department's investigation has targeted the ''founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks'' for espionage.

However, the embassy was unable to confirm a claim in a leaked email from the US intelligence firm Stratfor that "[we] have a sealed indictment against Assange''. "There is no way to confirm the veracity of the information through official sources," the embassy reported to Canberra in February.

Briefings for both Senator Carr and Ms Gillard suggest that the Australian government has no in-principle objection to Assange's extradition to the US.

In response to any question on whether the government will guarantee that if Assange were able to return to Australia he would not be extradited to the US, the ministers were to simply say that it is "not appropriate" to comment in advance of "a formal determination on the merits of the case".

Senator Carr's office yesterday continued to insist Ecuador's asylum decision and Assange's circumstances remained a matter for Britain, Ecuador and Sweden.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/us-in...817-24e1l.html





Julian Assange Will Be Granted Asylum, Says Official

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has agreed to give the WikiLeaks founder asylum, according to an official in Quito
Irene Caselli

Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has agreed to give Julian Assange asylum, officials within Ecuador's government have said.

The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at Ecuador's London embassy since 19 June, when he officially requested political asylum.

"Ecuador will grant asylum to Julian Assange," said an official in the Ecuadorean capital Quito, who is familiar with the government discussions.

On Monday, Correa told state-run ECTV that he would decide this week whether to grant asylum to Assange. Correa said a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible informed decision.

Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patiño indicated that the president would reveal his answer once the Olympic Games were over. But it remains unclear if giving Assange asylum will allow him to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces the prospect of arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy for breaching his bail conditions.

"For Mr Assange to leave England, he should have a safe pass from the British [government]. Will that be possible? That's an issue we have to take into account," Patino told Reuters on Tuesday.

Government sources in Quito confirmed that despite the outstanding legal issues Correa would grant Assange asylum – a move which would annoy Britain, the US and Sweden. They added that the offer was made to Assange several months ago, well before he sought refuge in the embassy, and following confidential negotiations with senior London embassy staff.

The official with knowledge of the discussions said the embassy had discussed Assange's asylum request. The British government, however, "discouraged the idea," the offical said. The Swedish government was also "not very collaborative", the official said.

The official added: "We see Assange's request as a humanitarian issue. The contact between the Ecuadorean government and WikiLeaks goes back to May 2011, when we became the first country to see the leaked US embassy cables completely declassified ... It is clear that when Julian entered the embassy there was already some sort of deal. We see in his work a parallel with our struggle for national sovereignty and the democratisation of international relations."

Assange took refuge in Ecuador's embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct. He is said to be living in one room of the diplomatic building, where he has a high-speed internet connection.

Ecuadorean diplomats believe Assange is at risk of being extradited from Sweden to the US, where he could face the death penalty. Assange's supporters claim the US has already secretly indicted him following WikiLeaks' release in 2010 of US diplomatic cables, as well as classified Afghan and Iraq war logs.

Correa and Patiño have both said that Ecuador will take a sovereign decision regarding Assange. They say they view his case as a humanitarian act, and are seeking to protect Assange's right to life and freedom. On Monday the state-run newspaper El Telégrafo confirmed a decision had been made, although the paper did not specify what that decision was. It said that senior officials had been meeting in the past few days to iron out the last legal details.

Two weeks ago Assange's mother Christine Assange paid Ecuador an official visit, following an invitation by Ecuador's foreign affairs ministry. She met with Correa and Patiño, as well as with other top politicians, including Fernando Cordero, head of Ecuador's legislature. Both Patiño and Ms Assange appeared visibly touched during a press conference, which had to be briefly suspended when Ms Assange started crying.

Ms Assange also held several public meetings in government buildings, and in one case she was accompanied by the head of Assange's defence team, Baltasar Garzón, the former Spanish judge who ordered the London arrest of Chile's General Pinochet.

Other top political figures in Ecuador have been vocal about the government's support of Assange's bid. "Our comrade the president, who leads our international policy, will grant Julian Assange asylum," said María Augusta Calle, a congresswoman of the president's party, and former head of the Sovereignty, Foreign Affairs and Latin American Integration Commission during the 2008 Constitutional Assembly, during a meeting with Ms Assange.

Over the past year and a half, Assange has remained in touch with Ecuador's embassy in London. In April, he interviewed President Correa for his TV show on Russia Today, the English-language channel funded by the Russian government. The interview, which lasted 75 minutes, included a pally exchange in which Assange and Correa bonded over freedom of speech and the negative role of the US in Latin America. At one point Correa joked: "Are you having a lot of fun with the interview, Julian?" Assange replied: "I'm enjoying your jokes a great deal, yes."

Correa has made international headlines this year for what critics have called a government crackdown on private media. Analysts say that granting the WikiLeaks founder asylum could be a way for him to depict himself as a champion of freedom of speech ahead of the February 2013 presidential elections, in which he is expected to run again.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...ador-wikileaks





For Jennifer Sultan, a Dot-Com Bust
Russ Buettner

OF the five members of a purported crime ring who appeared in court last month, Jennifer Sultan could not help but stand out. She seemed to have little in common with those said to be her accomplices: among them, a police officer charged with stealing his colleagues’ guns to support a painkiller habit and two unemployed young men from Brooklyn and Queens charged with selling guns and drugs.

The prosecutor, who opposed bail for most of the defendants, pointed out to the judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan why each one might be a risk for flight. When it came to Ms. Sultan, 38, every head in the courtroom swiveled at the main point: she had once been a dot-com millionaire.

The finer details were not mentioned that day: at the high-water mark, she and her boyfriend were co-founders of a small Internet company that sold for $70 million. They rented a summer house in the Hamptons for $400,000. They bought a 6,000-square-foot loft on East 17th Street just off Fifth Avenue.

Now, a little more than a decade later, Ms. Sultan is bankrupt and sitting in a jail cell, unable to pull together $85,000 for bail. If convicted, she faces 15 years to life in prison on charges of selling prescription painkillers to an undercover police officer and of trying to sell a .357 Magnum to the man accused of being the ringleader.

Her life has in some ways followed the arc of her times, with even more extreme swings.

She rode the euphoria of the late-1990s technology stock boom to apparent riches at age 25, saw those fortunes collapse with the stock market in the early 2000s and was unable to stage a comeback in the more sober recession era.

To some who have known Ms. Sultan, her overwhelming ambition and dalliances with wilder crowds as a young adult in Manhattan made her fall less surprising. But to others, including her close family, the collapse has been bewildering.

“We are treading on water that we have never treaded on before,” said her mother, Brenda Sultan. “She is such a sweet, thoughtful person.”

She grew up as the middle child between two brothers in West Long Branch, N.J., five miles north of Asbury Park. Her father, David Sultan, owned a dry-cleaning business. Her mother had grown up in Brooklyn and dreamed of an idyllic suburban life for her children. They lived that life in a modest colonial-style house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac.

Her mother recalls the terror of watching Jennifer, at just 2 years old, perched at the end of a diving board over the deep end of a swimming pool.

“Everybody, look at me!” she shouted as she leapt.

That physical confidence evolved into athletic prowess when she was a student at Shore Regional High School. Jennifer excelled in five sports: soccer, field hockey, softball, swimming and diving.

“She was tough,” Mrs. Sultan recalled. “She is, in fact, a girlie girl, but she’s also very athletic.”

Young Jennifer filled stacks of journals with her thoughts and dreamed of writing children’s books. In her senior year of high school, she smiled confidently in her yearbook above a long passage she had written.

“Like a small child I climb up the stairway of life. Have I come to the end or have I only just begun?” the text began. “My collected visions have enabled me to keep dreaming. I must go now, my life awaits.”

FOR Ms. Sultan, the city that her mother had left behind held great allure. She was accepted to New York University, her first choice, where she studied literature.

“She just fell in love with the city, and N.Y.U. was a fabulous opportunity for her,” her mother said. “She did extremely well. She blossomed in college.”

She became interested in photography and while still in college parlayed that into freelance work taking pictures of rock stars, including David Bowie and the members of Aerosmith, in posed settings and during concerts, according to her mother and a business associate.

Ms. Sultan rented a duplex apartment on East 13th Street near Fifth Avenue, and to help with expenses, she sublet the downstairs unit. She found the tenant, Adam Cohen, through mutual friends. They became business partners and were eventually engaged.

Several people who knew Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan professionally said they could seem like an unlikely pair. They are close in age but different in disposition. Whereas he bordered on reclusive, she basked in the club life of Lower Manhattan and was regularly out all night.

“Jen was always going out,” said one associate from the 1990s, who like several others would speak only anonymously because of the seriousness of the crimes Ms. Sultan was charged with. “She knew people from all these different scenes. Adam wasn’t into any of that.”

Mr. Cohen was working for a company called Styleworks Interactive that put together designer-fashion shows at the Hotel InterContinental, the former associate said. Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan, who graduated from N.Y.U. in 1996, have said they came up with the idea to stream the fashion shows on the Internet, then a new concept. Ms. Sultan also mentioned to work associates a desire to live-stream the music events she photographed.

The owner of the company, Debra LaChance, spun off Styleworks, later renamed Live Online. The company, with fewer than two dozen employees, including Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan, quickly gained a foothold in the new world of live streaming, handling events for MTV, Arista Records and other entertainment companies.

In January 2000, two months before the dot-com bubble reached its high point, Digital Island, a company that had gone public the year before, bought Live Online in a deal valued at $70 million.

It was an occasion for celebration and fleeting excess.

That summer, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan rented an 11-bedroom house in the Hamptons for $400,000, The New York Observer reported at the time.

“There are people who just don’t know what to do” with their money, the real estate agent who rented the property told The Observer.

A few months later, the couple bought the loft on East 17th Street for $3.1 million. It was one of six floor-through apartments in an eight-story building.

Mrs. Sultan recalls that there was “a lot of excitement” after the sale of Live Online.

“But it was not long lived,” she said.

THOUGH it was valued at $70 million, the Live Online deal involved only $5.25 million in cash. The rest of the price was paid in Digital Island stock, nearly 800,000 shares, valued at about $81 a share.

The Live Online crew never saw that much money. Technology stocks peaked in March 2000. By the time their shares were offered for sale, the value had been cut by more than half. A year after that, Digital Island was bought by Cable and Wireless, a British telecom company, for $3.40 a share, so stock that had once been worth $65.9 million was worth just $2.7 million.

And Ms. Sultan’s share of the deal was relatively small. She received 5 percent of those Digital Island shares, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Cohen received 37 percent. Ms. LaChance, who declined to comment for this article, and her husband, Victor Starsia, a lawyer, received 48 percent of the shares. People with knowledge of the deal said Ms. LaChance, who had put up the money to found Live Online, received most of the cash from the sale.

Charles Picasso, who was the chief operating officer for Digital Island, said Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan were involved with the new company for a few months after the merger. But they were phased out, Mr. Picasso said, as Digital Island took more control.

In 2002, they started another business of their own, Global Media Services.

“We are the inventors of all things streaming!!!” Ms. Sultan says of the company on her personal Facebook page.

In 2003, Global Media was taken over by Newsplayer Group, a British company that had the journalist and comedian David Frost on its board and marketed videos of his interviews. The merger does not appear to have gone well. In 2005, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan bought the company back for $100 and a promise to pay 15 percent in royalties to the British company, by then called Catalyst Media Group, according to court records.

Their personal finances were already strained. They had stopped paying property taxes on their loft, according to court records, and had taken out a total of $4 million in mortgages on the loft that required $27,000 in monthly payments.

Ms. Sultan began pursuing a new interest: acupuncture and holistic medicine. She took classes at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine a few blocks north of the loft, while remaining involved in Global Media with Mr. Cohen.

“Always a pioneer, Sultan plans to integrate her knowledge of technology with the holistic medical field to help bring alternative and complementary healing to the forefront of Western culture,” her biography on the Global Media Services Web site said at the time, according to an archive of Web pages at archive.org.

Her mother saw the change as part of a progression.

“She’s a natural healer; all she wanted to do was help people,” Mrs. Sultan said. “She was no longer interested in technology, but it was still her bread and butter.”

But Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen’s actions, as described by former associates and court records, appeared to grow increasingly erratic. Ms. Sultan’s lawyer in the criminal case, Frank Rothman, said she had developed an addiction to pain medication prescribed to treat back pain from the sports she played as a child and a fall she took in her apartment.

In April 2009, Global Media merged again, this time with GridNetworks, a Seattle-based company founded to deliver content over the Internet. In an odd coincidence, GridNetworks’ investors brought in Mr. Picasso, the former chief operating officer of Digital Island, to head the new company.

“On behalf of the whole team, I wanted to express how excited I am to be working closely with you again!” Mr. Cohen wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Picasso in May 2009. “I am looking forward to making Global Media Services a big success.”

But the deal quickly collapsed. The staff of 11 in Seattle sued six months later, saying the employees had not been paid before being laid off in July. In court papers, Mr. Picasso accused Mr. Cohen of draining $700,000 from the company on the day of the merger. Mr. Picasso dropped his lawsuit and the accusation was not resolved.

Mr. Picasso said he quit in July 2009, on the day he learned that a contract with MTV that Mr. Cohen had said should still be generating revenue had actually been canceled months earlier. Now retired in Northern California, the French-born Mr. Picasso, 71, said that both Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan “behaved very strangely,” though he declined to elaborate.

“For me it was a very, very bad time and a lot of stress,” he said. “I always not only follow the rules, but I have some ethics and values. That was the first time I was confronted with someone who was completely different.”

Mr. Cohen did not respond to phone messages and e-mails seeking comment. But in court papers he has denied wrongdoing in his business matters, and generally blamed others for the difficulties his businesses have faced.

In October 2009, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan stopped making the mortgage payments on their loft. Two months later, their company was evicted from its office space for failure to pay rent. In June 2010, Bank of America started foreclosure proceedings on their home; six months later, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan filed for personal bankruptcy as a married couple, even though they have never married.

Last year, they told the judge presiding over the bankruptcy case, Shelley C. Chapman, that they were still best friends but were no longer engaged. Still, Mr. Cohen continued to call Ms. Sultan his fiancée.

“We were engaged for 10 years,” Mr. Cohen told the judge. “And I still use the term, but this relationship has broken up a long time ago.”

They have been selling a line of designer biker jewelry called Chrome Hearts on eBay and are trying to start new businesses. But they claim to have no income.

“We are living like animals, without any ability to provide for ourselves,” Mr. Cohen told the judge last October.

“You’re living it like animals in a 10 million-dollar apartment,” Judge Chapman retorted. “I’m really not going to listen to this. I’m really not.”

In January, they told the judge that Ms. Sultan was about to open an acupuncture business in the Union Square area. Mr. Cohen praised her creativity in getting the business started.

“She’s a little bit delayed with getting the final permits from the state to practice, so this is being done under another practitioner’s license,” Mr. Cohen said to the judge. “But I just want to say that I’m personally in awe of what she’s accomplished here. It’s creative and substantial commercially.”

Ms. Sultan, who has typically let Mr. Cohen do the talking in court, said to the judge that the business had not yet opened but was already “kind of blowing the doors open.”

“So it’s been a very exciting adventure,” she said. “I’m obviously a very good business person, and have, and have the ability to bring on many other practitioners. So I have a plan to basically multiply revenue pretty quickly.”

BUT law enforcement authorities say she generated revenue in other ways.

In February, a city narcotics detective found an advertisement Ms. Sultan had placed on Craigslist offering prescription pain pills for sale, and arranged a meeting with her, according to the Manhattan Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor. Five times from February through June, she sold pills to an undercover officer, according to her indictment. One sale took place at the Starbucks on Union Square near the loft. In another, she sold 183 oxycodone tablets to the officer for $4,400 at a Starbucks a block from her acupuncture school.

A separate investigation into the ring that sold stolen guns and pain medication picked up Ms. Sultan sending a text message to the man accused of being the ringleader, Ivan Chavez, saying she wanted to sell him a .357 Magnum handgun for $850, according to a separate indictment by the Manhattan district attorney.

The police burst through the doors of the loft on July 12 and arrested Ms. Sultan. As she was led through the halls of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to be arraigned, she contorted her neck and torso to hide her face from news cameras, trying to avoid the attention she had commanded for most of her life.

No charges have been filed against Mr. Cohen. The two former entrepreneurs are facing a contempt charge in the bankruptcy case. Two lawyers have stopped representing them, with one telling the court that Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen had lied to him; the pair are now representing themselves in court. The judge and the trustee have accused them of trying to delay the sale of the apartment, which they have said is their only asset. The trustee listed the apartment for $6.25 million, which would leave them nothing after paying off debts.

Mr. Cohen has interfered with showings and frightened at least one real estate broker, according to court records.

“At a broker open house on July 2, 2012, I noticed that Cohen was carrying a handgun in the back of his pants,” a broker with the Corcoran Group said in a sworn affidavit. “The gun was clearly visible through his white shirt. Seeing this terrified me.”

Since the arrest, Ms. Sultan has remained on Rikers Island without the resources to make bail.

Ms. Sultan’s mother, who moved to Florida 15 years ago, says she hopes for redemption for her daughter, of the sort described by a younger Jennifer Sultan in that high school yearbook 20 years ago. “Falling down along the way, I must pick myself up and proceed with my journey,” she wrote.

Colin Moynihan and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/n...-com-bust.html





Nokia’s Masquerade
Tero Kuittinen

One reason for Nokia’s (NOK) surprisingly strong share price rebound over the past two weeks is the success of its new Asha feature phones in Asia. According to our sources in Delhi, the Asha 305 sold out in several stores soon after its debut… even before the marketing campaign kicked in. Is it a coincidence that major Asian newspapers like The Philippine Star and Singapore’s The Sun Daily describe Nokia’s new Asha models as “smartphones”? No. Nokia has done its very best to dress up its cheap new feature phones as something far more aspirational — to the extent that devices like Asha 305 are now widely depicted as smartphones across Asia and Africa. This is a critically important maneuver.

Nokia managed to sell 4 million Lumia phones in the second quarter this year, but it is widely expected that low-end Windows Phone models won’t be out until the second half of 2013. For the next year, Nokia must mask its feature phones as smartphones and hope that consumers in cities from Capetown to Bangalore will play along.

Android phone prices are coming down rapidly, but the sub-7,000 rupee category in India still belongs to feature phones. And it is in this niche where Nokia has launched its chameleon project.

The company’s latest Asha phones still use the ancient S40 feature phone software platform and are quite far from actually qualifying as smartphones, but Nokia has managed to slather the devices with a sheen of smartphoniness. Devices come out of the box with as many as 40 free Electronic Arts games (including strong franchises like Bejewelled, Need for Speed and Sim City), Facebook and Twitter apps, Google Talk, an improved browser, a fairly advanced email system, and more. Swipe gestures and a notification bar at the top of the display are more deliberate moves to trick the consumers into believing they are using a smartphone.

This improved software suite is made possible by slotting a 1GHz processor into budget models. That in turn was made possible by the rapid price erosion of powerful single-core processors that occurred recently as the smartphone industry pivoted towards multi-core chips. To keep the BOM at a rock bottom level, the Asha 305 features a 2-megapixel camera and a 3-inch screen with 240 x 320-pixel resolution. These are Jurassic-era specs for Western smartphone fans, but a big leap for many feature phone owners in emerging markets.

The Asha 305 debuted in India in July at 4,600 rupees — a fraction of the price of true smartphones like the Samsung (005930) Galaxy S III at 39,000 rupees.

The previous wave of Asha models enabled Nokia to deliver a surprise sequential feature phone volume increase in the second quarter. The feature phone market is now shrinking globally, so Nokia’s only chance to maintain stable volumes is to claw market share gains from white label rivals… and low-end Android phone vendors.

The Asha 305 gives us a sense of how Nokia’s phony smartphone strategy is supposed to work. Let’s compare it to the “Stellar Craze,” the cheapest new Android phone from Spice debuting nearly simultaneously in India to see how the gambit works. Spice is one of the new crop of Nokia’s lethal rivals in Asia, a nimble Indian upstart vendor that blindsided Nokia with its broad selection of dual-SIM phones in 2011 when Nokia still relied on a single-SIM product range.

Stellar Craze Asha 305

Weight 120g 98g
Thickness 13mm 13mm
3G support Yes No
Camera 5 Mp 2 Mp
Display size 3.5″ 3″
Pixel count 480×800 240×400
Pixel density 266 155
Screen type Capacitive Resistant
Dual-SIM Yes Yes
Price in India Rs 6,600 Rs 4,600

Nokia’s Asha 305 is in most ways far cruder device than the Stellar Craze. But it weighs less, looks sleek and has a snappy new UI. And in most parts of India, the lack of 3G support is not a problem.

Over the next four quarters, Nokia’s battle for survival is going to be waged in the streets of Rio De Janeiro and Mumbai, where blue-collar consumers will compare the Asha 305 to devices like Stellar Craze. Will they accept a sleek feature phone with a 3-inch screen and a low price that represents a big improvement in display and software quality over the previous budget phones? Or will they spend 40% more to reach for an Android device like the Stellar Craze, with four times the pixel count, 3.5G support and a fancy 5-megapixel camera?

Nokia’s new Asha models are a big leap over the previous generation of feature phones, with touted 2.4-inch, non-touch displays. But they are also a big step below the new wave of budget Android models. It’s that 40% price gap that Nokia must turn to its advantage if it wants to avoid a feature phone volume collapse next winter.

This is going to be a heck of a turf war.
http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/13/nokia-...ness-analysis/





Dish Network Said to Plan Nationwide Satellite Broadband
Alex Sherman

Dish Network Corp. is preparing to introduce a nationwide broadband-Internet service using a satellite from sister company EchoStar Corp. (SATS), according to three people familiar with the situation.

The EchoStar 17 satellite, launched into orbit July 5, can support download speeds of 15 megabits per second, although introductory nationwide packages will probably offer rates of 5 megabits so the system can take on more capacity, said one of the people, who declined to be named because the plans are private. Dish and EchoStar can handle about 2 million new Internet customers with the service, the person said.

The move is the result of technological advances for the U.S. satellite industry, which can now use higher-frequency bands to offer faster broadband to more people. The capacity for these kinds of services has climbed “by an order of magnitude,” said Deepak Dutt, vice president of investor relations at EchoStar, who declined to comment on the Dish deal.

Dish expects to formally offer the service in late September or early October, mainly to subscribers in rural areas who may not have access to cable broadband, two of the people said. Bob Toevs, a spokesman for Englewood, Colorado-based Dish, declined to comment.

EchoStar and Dish became separate companies in January 2008, with Charlie Ergen remaining the chairman of both. The details of how they will split revenue and how much the service will cost consumers are still being discussed, one of the people said.

Dish shares rose 1.4 percent to $31.05 yesterday. The stock has climbed 9 percent so far in 2012. EchoStar, up 36 percent this year, fell 1.1 percent to $28.40.

ViaSat Deal

Dish already offers satellite broadband through a partnership with Carlsbad, California-based ViaSat Inc. (VSAT), though that only covers certain parts of the U.S., including areas east of the Mississippi River and the West Coast. It gives some customers speeds of as much as 12 megabits per second. The new offering will augment that product and give Dish nationwide coverage, the people said.

By packaging satellite broadband with its current video service, Dish can offer customers a bundled option. That means it will compete more directly with cable companies, as well as satellite rival DirecTV (DTV), AT&T Inc. (T)’s U-verse and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)’s FiOS.

Future Expansion?

Dish may need to add more satellites to expand the service beyond 2 million people while maintaining the same speeds. The company, which has a total of about 14 million customers, hasn’t disclosed how many users are served by the ViaSat agreement.

Dish is waiting for Federal Communications Commission approval to use its wireless spectrum to offer mobile Internet and phone service, which the company could bundle with satellite TV and broadband. That would give users a so-called quad play.

The EchoStar service is meant for customers who can’t get the faster speeds provided by cable and phone companies in more urban areas. Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), the largest U.S. cable provider, offers as much as 305 megabits per second. Verizon FiOS, meanwhile, goes as high as 300 megabits.

Most home Internet users typically don’t notice a difference in speed beyond 25 to 50 megabits, according to Jonathan Atkin, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets in New York.

Dish Chief Executive Officer Joseph Clayton said in January that the market potential for satellite broadband service is “substantial, given the nearly 8 million to 10 million mostly rural American households that are unserved.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...d-service.html





Traffic Throttling: Bell, Rogers May Still Be Slowing File-Sharing Downloads, Data Shows
Daniel Tencer

Traffic throttling may be on its way out in Canada, but Internet users who are into file-sharing may have to put up with the controversial practice for some time yet.

According to data from an Internet lab, Canada’s largest Internet providers were still slowing down file-sharing traffic in the first quarter of this year, despite commitments to stop the controversial practice.

Tests run at the Google-backed Measurement Lab showed that Bell and Rogers continued to throttle the vast majority of traffic from customers running the popular bittorrent file-sharing application; Bell throttled 77 per cent of file-sharing traffic on its network, while Rogers throttled 80 per cent

Both companies had previously said they were planning to stop slowing down file-sharing traffic. Bell announced late last year that it would stop the practice as of March 1 of this year. Rogers followed suit, promising to stop throttling by the end of this year.

A spokesperson for Bell Canada told The Huffington Post the company stopped throttling traffic on schedule as of March 1 of this year. The Measurement Lab data -- which covers the period from January to the end of March of this year -- could still reflect the traffic throttling Bell engaged in prior to March 1.

However, the data shows a significant spike in the use of traffic throttling by Bell in the first quarter. In the first three months of 2011, Bell was found to be throttling only 56 per cent of its file-sharing traffic, compared to 77 per cent this year.

Rogers’ numbers were largely unchanged from the previous year. A spokesperson for the company said Rogers is in the process of phasing out its use of traffic throttling, and has already done so for 50 per cent of its customers.

Other Internet providers were also found to slow down file-sharing traffic, though far less frequently than Bell and Rogers. Indie provider TekSavvy was found to throttle 36 per cent of file-sharing traffic, while Distributel apparently slowed traffic down 38 per cent of the time.

Among the major ISPs, Telus did the least traffic throttling in the first quarter of this year, slowing down file-sharers only two per cent of the time, according to the data. Bell Aliant and Cogeco did no throttling at all.

The test results can be found at Syracuse University’s website.

Internet traffic throttling has become a major issue for consumer advocates in Canada, who point to evidence that slowing down certain kinds of Internet traffic is a particularly acute problem here.

Federal regulations allow internet service providers to throttle file-sharing traffic, but they are forbidden from slowing traffic on time-sensitive traffic such as web chats or multiplayer online games.

Earlier this year, the regulator found Rogers to be in violation of those rules, at least with respect to online video game traffic. But it later said it was confident Rogers had stopped slowing down video game traffic.

Here’s how traffic throttling among Canadian ISPs breaks down:

Internet Provider, and percentage of tests showing throttling
Rogers -- 80%
Bell Canada -- 77%
Distributel -- 38%
TekSavvy -- 36%
Shaw -- 22%
SaskTel -- 9%
EastLink -- 7%
Videotron -- 7%
Telus -- 2%
Bell Aliant -- 0%
Cogeco -- 0%

Source: Measurement Lab via Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/08...anada-business





New DRM-Free Label
dpic

Awareness has been spreading among individuals, businesses and other organizations that DRM is a completely unnecessary restriction of freedom, and it drives people away. As that awareness spreads, going "DRM-Free" becomes more and more valuable for patrons. To really build upon that image and to provide a resource for people to learn about why being DRM-Free matters, we've created this logo for suppliers to to proudly advertise that their files all come unencumbered by restrictive technologies.

A more unified marker for DRM-free files that also educates downloaders about DRM is a powerful way to increase the value of being DRM-free. People looking for ebooks in places like Amazon often have trouble figuring out which ebooks have DRM and which don't because Amazon does not advertise that information. This label is a step toward solving that problem, making it easy for people who oppose DRM to find like-minded artists, authors, and publishers to support.

We are excited to already have a list of several first adopters using our DRM-free label. ClearBits, a BitTorrent distributor of various digital media, much of which is under free culture licenses, is displaying the logo in the footer of each page, and Go Faster Stripe, a distributor of DRM-free DVD's, has the logo on their about page. Music sharing sites ccMixter and TuneTrack display the label on each track's download page while independent record label, Magnatune, uses it on an about page.

As with our recent updates to the Guide to DRM-free Living, we have seen many more DRM-free ebook distributors. The self-publishing and ebook distribution platform, Foboko has the DRM-free logo embedded in the footer of each page, and Momentum Books, the digital-only publisher of Macmillan following Tor/Forge dropping DRM, shows the label on their about page. Girlebooks, a wonderful resource for classic and contemporary books written by women also has a DRM-free section on their about page.

Other first adopters include Weightless Books, a long-time opponent of DRM; O'Reilly Media, a publisher of technology books that has dropped DRM; The Pragmatic Bookshelf, a publisher of practical books for and by programmers that has been DRM-free from the start; Obooko, a distributor of free-of-charge and DRM-free ebooks; the ebooks library of the University of Adelaide, providing many books for free and all without DRM; Project Gutenberg Australia, a collection of books in Australia's public domain; and Project Runeberg, a similar project for Nordic literature.

We hope that you will support our first adopters and begin to look for the DRM-free label elsewhere. If you know of DRM-free file providers, please contact them about adopting the label for themselves. It is free to use for anyone who does not require DRM or other proprietary technologies to access their files, and doing so doesn't indicate or require endorsement by Defective by Design. If you would like to display the label on your site, please go to our DRM-free page. If you would just like to display that you are against DRM, we also have web graphics available to embed for that.

If you use the label, please drop us a line to let us know, and we may give you a shout out on our Blog or StatusNet µBlog: dbd@identi.ca. If you need help deciding whether you can appropriately use the label or if you need help going DRM-free, please email us at info@defectivebydesign.org and we will be happy to work with you.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/2243





Putting An End To The Biggest Lie On The Internet
Klint Finley

It’s long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them. Also, as I wrote in a gloomy post last weekend, users have no choice but either agree to the terms offered by a web app or simply not use the service at all.

But a new project called TOS;DR wants to change that. The site aims to give more power to users by summarizing terms of service, flagging potential issues and rating apps on a scale from A (the best) to E (the worst).

So far the only company with an E, the worst possible rating, is TwitPic, which reserves the rights to sell users’ photos to news agency without giving the photographer a cut.

Project lead Hugo Roy tells me that he considers Wikipedia to be an exemplary service, though it hasn’t been rated by TOS;DR. He says both Wikipedia’s short, clear summary of its TOS and its practice of soliciting feedback from users before a change in terms should be widely adopted as best practices for the web.

The project hatched about a year ago at the annual Chaos Communication Camp event in Berlin as an outgrowth of the Unhosted project, which is a system for building web apps that leave users in control of their data. Roy says the team was inspired in part by Creative Commons, which provides plain English summaries of each license it offers, as an influence on TOS;DR. The sites’ goals are to highlight issues in particular TOS, educate users about the importance the agreements they enter into with web companies and, eventually, to track and influence changes to TOS.

The ratings, which Roy explains are based on German energy efficiency ratings for appliances, still feel rough to me. For example, GitHub gets a C but the seemingly much worse Delicious gets a D. Still, it’s a good start. I like the idea of projects like Unhosted, which I’ve written about elsewhere, but activist users have had more success in pressuring companies like Dropbox and Facebook to change their TOS than getting users to defect to privacy centric systems like Diaspora.

Roy says the site wasn’t actually ready for launch but it started getting media attention in Germany and has now hit Hacker News a couple times, so the team isn’t keeping it a secret anymore. The plan is to officially launch at Campus Party 2012 later this month.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/13/put...-the-internet/





How Plagiarism Made America
Todd Andrlik

It seems every year a new plagiarism scandal strikes the media. Today, the stigma of lifting passages can haunt media professionals forever, but 250 years ago stealing another reporter's work without credit was an acceptable form of journalism. In fact, it was a practice that helped unite the colonies and win the Revolutionary War.

By the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, 18 newspapers were being published on American soil to meet a growing demand for domestic journalism that skyrocketed during the late conflict. The craving for local journalism was sustained in the years ahead as the American Revolution unfolded.

Without professional writing staffs of journalists or correspondents, eighteenth-century newspaper printers relied heavily on an intercolonial newspaper exchange system to fill their pages. Printers often copied entire paragraphs or columns directly from other newspapers and frequently without attribution. As a result, identical news reports often appeared in multiple papers throughout America. This news-swapping technique, and resulting plagiarism, helped spread the ideas of liberty and uphold the colonists' resistance to British Parliament.

For example, throughout the winter of 1765-66, the Sons of Liberty -- many being printers and therefore among the hardest hit by the new stamp tax on paper -- were successful in opening correspondence channels and aligning colonial interests by re-purposing patriotic newspaper reports from other colonies. An article about the Sons of Liberty meeting at Machenry's tavern in Savannah originally appeared in the Georgia Gazette on November 7, 1765, and was reprinted verbatim in other newspapers, including the January 27, 1766, Supplement to the Boston Gazette. Benjamin Edes and John Gill, printers of the Boston Gazette, published the Georgia news without any credit line other than a Savannah dateline.

Similarly, a famous eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party by "An Impartial Observer" was first authored for the December 20, 1773, Boston Gazette, but was soon reprinted without edit or attribution in other New England newspapers. The popular account, frequently used in history books today, helped spread the Patriot version of events. It revealed that 340 chests of tea were destroyed, and one or two participants tried pocketing some tea, but were promptly "stripped of their acquisitions and very roughly handled." It also highlighted the mob's efforts to go blameless for the destruction of anything but tea, exposing details about a padlock belonging to one of the ships' captains that was accidentally broken, but replaced.

News of the Boston Massacre, Battle of Lexington and Concord, the treason of Benedict Arnold and practically every major event of the American Revolution circulated among the colonies much the same way. Thanks in no small part to this plagiarism, newspaper printers fanned the flames of rebellion and helped colonists realize the conflict was closer to home than perhaps they wanted to believe. "By keeping people informed about the war's progress, newspapers made winning independence possible," wrote media historian Carol Sue Humphrey as one of 37 historian contributors in the forthcoming book Reporting the Revolutionary War: Before It Was History, It Was News (Sourcebooks, November 2012). "Newspapers were essential in the fight to win independence and thus were essential in the creation of the United States."

Since there are no photographs of the American Revolution, newspapers provide the most vivid descriptions of both ordinary colonial life and life-altering events. Before the ink on the peace treaty could dry, historians and authors turned to newspapers as the basis for their own analysis and interpretations of the war. The endnotes of practically every history book about the Revolution are loaded with references to the up-close-and-personal perspectives found in early newspapers. In fact, the first two histories of the American Revolution, authored in 1788 by William Gordon and 1789 by David Ramsay, both plagiarized the popular Annual Register, a political and literary record published in London that heavily relied on newspapers and magazines from the previous year for its content. Ramsay, who twice served as a delegate in the Continental Congress, wrote that "in establishing American independence, the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-a...b_1772782.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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